New Books in Critical Theory

How can feminist theory help address the climate crisis? In Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable (Springer Verlag, 2019), Tina Sikka, a lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Newcastle, considers the limitations of our current approach to climate change, and the means through which we can respond in more open, and thus more effective, ways. The book uses the example of geoengineering as a case study in responses to climate change, highlighting the closed nature of the discussions and decision making processes associated with the methods, modelling, and policy for this approach. Drawing on Longino’s Feminist Contextual Empiricist theory, the book offers both a critique of current practice and points to ways in which this could be reorientated towards a wider and more inclusive range of human needs and capabilities. Given the nature of the climate crisis the book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the species survives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Today we are joined by Natalie Koch, Associate Professor of Geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and editor of Critical Geographies of Sport: Space, Power, and Sport in Global Perspective (Routledge, 2017). In our conversation, we discuss the growing field of critical sports geography, the role of sports in authoritarian regimes, and the neo-liberalization of sports. In Critical geographies, Koch joins other scholars to address a wide range of sports issues, including the demolition of South Korea’s Dongdaemun baseball stadium, professional wrestling in the territorial era in the United States, and the identity politics of the Gaelic Athletic Association. An emphasis on space and the ways that space embodies power and power relations, underpins the volume’s diverse offerings and draws them into fruitful conversation with each other. The collected essays fall into two categories: the first half of the book examines sports, geopolitics, and the state. Here Koch offers her own fascinating analysis of authoritarian leaders – including Mao Zedong, Vladimir Putin, and Sheikh Zayed – and their use of sports to promote the legitimacy of their regime and their own cult of personality. Koch is especially careful to differentiate between the distinct masculine discourses at work in China, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates and the way those discourses made use of the divergent topographies of their countries: tundra, desert and massive river delta. The second half of the book deals with sports, community, and urban space. Here authors address the opportunities and limitations offered by sports as a tool of social assimilation and integration; the role stadium projects play in the neo-liberalization of public spaces; and the problematic politics of megaevents. In a coda, Koch and David Jansson provoke further questions by gesturing towards the role social justice can play in critical sports geography. Each one of these essays in this volume offers enticing insights into the ways that power and space intersect in the sports sphere. Geographers interested in the field of critical sports geography should read this book but scholars generally interested in questions of sports, power, and space are also encouraged to check out this compelling work. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The crisis of global warming overwhelms the imagination with its urgency, yet more than ever we need patient, clear-sighted. and careful assessments of the possibilities for transforming the global political economy. Carbon(Polity, 2018) is an excellent addition to our evolving efforts to understand clearly where we are and where we need to go. Here, Kate Ervine provides an accessible and trenchant introduction to the severity of our situation and the international climate politics of the past 30 years. With critical insight and deep experience in the field, she describes how and why politics as usual has so far failed to prevent disaster as oil, gas, and coal interests continue to win the better ears of political leaders. Ervine delves deep into the technological fixes that will and must be part of the human response to climate change, but argues that ultimately preventing full-scale disaster will require more fundamental changes to global politics and economy. In this way, we can aspire not only to meet this challenge, also to achieve greater environmental justice and stronger democratic practices. Kate Ervine is Associate Professor of International Development Studies and Faculty Associate of the School of the Environment at Saint Mary’s University. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What are the characteristics of the 21st Century arts leader? In From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century (Dahlia Publishing, 2019), Farhana Shaikh, a writer, publisher, and journalist, details lessons from key arts thinkers. The book covers issues including funding, networking, audience development, the challenge of digital, and diversity in the arts. Crucially the book confronts the struggles and failures, as well as the successes, associated with developing an arts career and becoming an arts leader. The book draws on a wealth of interview data and the experience of the Curve Cultural Leadership Programme, as well as Farhana's own reflections on imposter syndrome, motherhood, and arts leadership. These insights are now the basis for an arts mentoring programme aimed at Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic writers, and the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular (Zero Books, 2018) is an “exploration of what goes missing when one looks for meaning” (p. 1). The book is both an experimental ethnography and a theoretical treatise on how we can understand and represent absence of meaning. Its author, Martin Demant Frederiksen, approaches the meaningless seriously as an ethnographic and experiential fact, refusing to explain what its ultimate meaning could be. Martin Demant Frederiksen is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Aarhus University and has conducted ethnographic fieldworks in the Republic of Georgia since 2006, and more recently in Bulgaria and Croatia. His work focuses on subcultures (such as youth criminals and declared nihilists), urban development, temporality and socio-political change. He is author of the monographs Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia (2013), Georgian Portraits - Essays on the Afterlives of a Revolution (2017, with Katrine Gotfredsen) and An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular (2018). Aside from research and teaching, he is co-founder and co-editor of the independent art-zine "a...issue". Carna Brkovic is a lecturer at the University of Goettingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How can insights from psychoanalysis help us understand digital culture? in Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data (Routledge, 2018), Jacob Johanssen, a senior lecturer in the University of Westminster's School of Media and Communication, draws on the work of Freud and Anzieu to explore both traditional and new forms of media. The book uses research projects on the Embarrassing Bodies television show, and on digital labour, to show how psychoanalysis can inform research methods and explain how people engage with TV, use Twitter, and present themselves online. Moreover, the book grapples with the rise of big data, offering new perspectives on content providers such as Netflix. Packed with rich analysis and a wealth of examples, the book will be essential reading across cultural and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In her book Suspect Citizens: Women, Virtue, and Vice in Backlash Politics (Temple University Press, 2012), Jocelyn M. Boryczka explores the fraught position that women find themselves in as citizens of the United States. She examines this complex position within the parameters of virtue and vice, the dichotomy through which women, their behavior, and their role in the republic are usually situated and interpreted. Explaining that women are often given the moral responsibility for the care and perpetuation of the country, Boryczka concentrates on demands that women hew to a standard of virtue, and if they deviate from that standard, they are often blamed for the failings or problems that afflict the entire country. This precarious position is where these suspect citizens, women, find themselves and have often found themselves across the history of the country itself. The book delves into the historical positioning of women within this dichotomous frame and traces distinct political moments when different groups of women engaged in aspects of citizenship and, often, how those acts of political engagement then generated a backlash to female political involvement. Boryczka puts these historical flashpoints into non-linear engagement with each other, often seeing parallel outcomes or political approaches from distinct events and situations. For anyone interested in the question and complexity of citizenship, this is yet another important analysis, especially in considering the more precarious position of some citizens within the republic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a new understanding on Israeli literature and literary history. Using Marxist theorization of the relation between literary form and social form, Oded Nir goes beyond the dominant interpretive horizon of Israeli literary criticism, that focuses on the relation of literature to national ideology. Instead, Nir demonstrates how the engagement with national ideology in Israeli literature probes the social and economic contradictions internal to Israeli society and its social order. Focusing on moments of transformation, Nir argues that the demise of realism in the late 1950s was the result of the failure, rather than the success, of the emancipatory project of Zionist pioneers. Next, Nir shows how the postmodern turn in the 1980s expressed a crisis of social and historical imagination that began with the proletarianization of Palestinians by Israeli capitalism after the 1967 war. Finally, Nir demonstrates how contemporary Israeli fiction responds to the postmodern crisis by staging a creative search for time itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Catherine Baker’s fascinating new book poses a deceptively simple question: what does race have to do with the Yugoslav region? Eastern European studies has often framed the region as unimplicated in global formations of race, while still remarking on the conditional positioning of Eastern Europeans as the “Other” of Europe, “white but not quite.” Baker traces a cultural history of Yugoslavia that purposefully foregrounds race, and embraces the many new questions that such a shifting of frameworks enables. From the non-aligned movement, to the rhetoric of “returning” to Europe, to highly racialized 1990’s dance music, Baker’s new book forces us to reconsider how it was ever possible to claim that race has nothing to do with the Yugoslav region. Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Back on the podcast for the second time in two years is Alex Hertel-Fernandez. You might recall his last book Politics at Work which examined the way employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy. Alex is back with his latest, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States--and the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. In State Capture, Hertel-Fernandez focuses on the development and political power of three inter-locking interest groups: the Koch Brothers-run Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the State Policy Network (SPN). Drawing from an array of sources of data, Hertel-Fernandez shows how, since the 1970s, conservative policy entrepreneurs, large financial contributors, and major corporations built a right-wing "troika" of overlapping and influential lobbying group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The law does things, writes David Ray Papke, and it says things, and if we are talking about poor Americans, especially those living in big cities, what it does and says combine to function as powerfully oppressive forces that can much more likely be counted on to do harm than good. Join us as we discuss Papke's book Containment and Condemnation: Law and the Oppression of the Urban Poor (Michigan State University Press, 2019) and learn about how law functions in the lives of poor people in the U.S. today. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand (Verso, 2016) and with an Introduction ‘The Doctor and the Saint’ by Arundhati Roy, is based on a speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedakar who took up the anti-caste struggles for the Untouchables in India. S. Anand’s work with thoroughly researched annotations alongside the speech and introduction by Arundhati Roy makes this a must-read book for anyone who wants to understand India, its society, politics and the caste system. This landmark speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedakar is the pinnacle of his scholarly work and cements his legacy alongside Mahatma Gandhi in Indian politics. In this speech, Dr. B.R. Ambedakar makes arguments against Hinduism, how reforming the Hinduism will not solve the issues of centuries of oppression of Untouchables - the depressed and oppressed castes in India. He argues that Indian society and culture that preaches the spirituality to the world cannot provide liberty, equality, and fraternity until she completely annihilates the caste by eradicating the Vedas, Shastras and their teachings. In this engaging conversation between an Untouchable - Mahendra Kutare and a Brahmin - S. Anand on April 11th, 2018, eighty-two years after this audacious speech was written, they walk through the historical context of the speech, the politics of the pre-independence India, how the caste system works as a social network, and how the caste system is now completely compatible with parliamentary democracy in India. They discuss the fierce arguments and debates between Dr. B.R. Ambedakar and the best-known face of Indian freedom struggle Mahatma Gandhi and the current state of caste consciousness in India. Anand is the publisher of Navayana. He is the co-author of Bhimayana and has annotated the critical editions of B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste and Riddles in Hinduism. He collaborated with Venkat Raman Singh Shyam on Finding My Way. Anand lives in New Delhi. Mahendra Kutare is the founder of Kaavya Connections - World Poetry, Literature and Music organization in San Francisco and Bay Area. Mahendra came to the United States for his graduate studies (Ph.D. in Computer Science) in Aug 2007. He graduated with a Masters in Computer Science (Left Ph.D. program) in May 2011. He works at a tech startup and lives in San Francisco. Mahendra is passionate about building communities and making healing accessible with poetry, literary, music, sound, and technology. More details about his work can be found at https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/. He can be reached at [email protected] and tweets @imaxxs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach to understand both the conceptual and actual issue of borders as spaces that separate and distinguish states and nations, and individuals and citizens. The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is not simply about the border because, as the book makes clear, borders are in no way simple, and what Longo has pursued in his work is the complexity that encompasses the theoretical idea of the border but also how and why borders are more diverse in understanding than we often ascribe to them. Longo interrogates what a border actually is, noting that the space itself is not quite the thin line between states that we often assume it to be, but a physical area that is co-administered by bordering nations, often collaboratively, thus blurring the line or space of sovereignty. Threaded throughout the book is the ongoing question of what constitutes citizenship, since borders and citizenship are braided together though the structures of the state, and the considerations of who is and is not permitted membership within a state. Longo has also included a substantial exploration of the role of technology and data in the actual understanding of how border security works in practice. This section of the analysis is particularly important to consider because, according to Longo, the focus on the individual and their data profile, shifts the understanding of state sovereignty and the responsibility for definitions of citizenship. This book is incredibly topical in a variety of areas, not least in the way that it contributes to our thinking about the border itself as a space and as a concept, the role of the state, and the growing domain of data and technology and how they are shaping ideas of citizenship. This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

There’s lot of talk these days, at least in some circles on the left, of a Universal Basic Income. There’s also talk in many of the same circles of a jobs guarantee. Join us as we speak with Steven Attewell, author of People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). He tells us the history of direct job creation by government in the U.S. and the lessons to be learned from the successes and failures of such efforts throughout the 20th century. It's a fascinating, surprising, and essential history. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Who gets in to top professions? In The Class Ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged (Policy Press, 2019), Drs Sam Friedman, an associate professor of sociology at LSE, and Daniel Laurison, an assistant professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, explore the dominance of social elites in top professions. The book draws on theories of social mobility and the work of Pierre Bourdieu to explain how top professions are highly exclusive, with under representations of women, ethnic minorities, and those from working class backgrounds. Moreover, even when individuals from these demographics do enter top jobs such as law, medicine, and accountancy, along with media occupations and acting, they suffer gaps in pay because of their class, race, and gender. The intersection of these demographics is crucial to the analysis, and the book uses detailed qualitative research to explain this 'class ceiling', showing how economic, cultural, and social capital play out to account for how inequality is replicated in the workplace and beyond. The book is essential reading for everyone interested in contemporary social inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The production and removal of garbage, as a key element of the daily infrastructure of urban life, is deeply embedded in social, moral, and political contexts. In her book Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018) Dr. Rosalind Fredericks illuminates the history of state-citizen relations and economic and political restructuring in Dakar by focusing on the city’s complex history of garbage collection in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, from activist clean-up movements to NGO-led development projects to massive sanitation worker strikes. She pays particular attention to the themes of generation, gender, and religion in her analysis of the ways in which people become integrated into the infrastructural life of the city; in so doing, she invites us to expand our understanding of what constitutes infrastructure. This fascinating book will be useful not only for anthropologists, cultural geographers, and scholars of West Africa, but also for anyone interested in the emerging interdisciplinary fields of new materialism and discard studies. Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist currently working as a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

With prison reform a topic of international conversation and debate, Marica Morgan’s Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race offers an in-depth and unique analysis of a population largely lost in these debates and discussions: black women. By centering their experiences, Morgan offers and intersectional and psychodynamic examination of the prison worker and the organizational nature of the prison. This book offers added insight into not only the prison system as a place of employment, but also for any white-male-dominated organization. Taking the reader through the experiences of black women prison employees, Morgan highlights the importance of intersectional qualitative methodology when investigating institutional or organizational culture. Black Women Prison Employees is a necessary and timely read for policymakers and researchers interested in organizational structures and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How has the council estate been represented on stage? In Social Housing In Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage (Methuen Drama, 2018), Dr. Katie Beswick, a lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter, explores this question using a mixture of dramatic and social theory, along with examples from a variety of theatre performances and forms. The book sets out the history of social housing and the council estate, along with a reading of the (mis)representations of the estate across contemporary media. The book shows the longstanding and complex relationship between theatre, class, and the estate, using examples including high profile state pieces, as well as site specific theatre. The book will be essential reading for theatre and performance scholars, along with anyone interested in issues of class and culture, as well as housing, space and place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Since the late 1990s Thai cinema has come to global attention with movies like the famous ghost film, Nang Nak, and more recently the evocative films of director Aphichatpong Weerasethakul, who won a Palme D’Or award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. A perennially popular theme in Thai cinema is that of haunting by a female ghost. In this unique, unusual book, Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016), Arnika Fuhrmann hones in on this ghostly theme in contemporary Thai cinema to explore the subjects of female desire and queer sexuality. In doing so she raises questions about a central concept in Queer Theory: the nature of desire. Fuhrmann identifies a tension between Western liberal and everyday Thai Buddhist understandings of desire. Arguably, Buddhist teaching about desire is one factor that has contributed to Thailand’s reputation for being a “queer-friendly” country. Indeed, it is even marketed as a “gay paradise”. But the reality is not quite so simple, especially for women in same-sex relationships. Fuhrmann’s Ghostly Desires also addresses the issue of the subtle regulation of heteronormative sexuality, “Thai-style”. Listeners to this episode might also enjoy listening to: Justin Thomas McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand (Columbia University Press, 2011)Martin Joseph Ponce, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (NYU Press, 2012)Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In his most new book Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (NYU Press, 2018), Clarence Taylor, dean of the history of the civil rights movement in New York, looks at black resistance to police brutality in the city, and institutional efforts to hold the NYPD accountable, since the late 1930s and '40s. ​“Many people think that police brutality is a recent phenomenon,” says Taylor, professor emeritus at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of City University of New York. But, in fact, it has a long, sordid history, going back even further than the years covered in this new book. And long before the era of cellphones, black newspapers did their own investigations when men, women, and children were beaten or killed by the police. (Louis Lomax, the first African-American journalist to appear regularly on television news, commented in the early 1960s that, if not for police brutality, the black press would have "considerable blank space.") Taylor also looks at the history of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, first proposed after the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943. La Guardia and the mayors who followed refused to challenge the NYPD’s power, which is why it took nearly fifty years to establish an independent public agency to investigate allegations of abuse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What might Levi-Strauss and structuralism have to offer to psychoanalysis beyond the incest prohibition and the Oedipus complex? What happens if we understand Lacan’s notion of the symbolic as creative, rather than prohibitory? And what’s the difference between the psychoanalyst and the shaman? Shanna de la Torre’s Sex for Structuralists: The Non-Oedipal Logics of Femininity and Psychosis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) performs a careful reading of Freudian, Lacanian and structuralist texts in order to offer a new way of conceiving of the objects and aims of psychoanalysis today. Alongside it she introduces us to an alternative perspective on Lacan emerging from analysts associated with GIFRIC, a Lacanian school based in Quebec. Listen in as we work our way through some of the book’s major concerns and their implications for theory and practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How can detective fiction explain the social world? In Detecting the Social: Order and Disorder in Post-1970s Detective Fiction(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Mary Evans and Hazel Johnstone, both from the London School of Economics' Department of Gender Studies, and Sarah Moore, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bath's Department of Social and Policy Sciences, set out a radical agenda for contemporary social theory grounded in an analysis of detective fiction since the 1970s. The book uses a range of examples from the genre, as well as comparative discussions with previous eras of detective fiction. In doing so, the book demonstrates how questions of modernity, globalisation, trust in institutions, blame and responsibility, gender and gender relations, along with the rise of neoliberalism and the transformation of the social state since the 1970s can be understood through key works such as Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. By showing an alternative to 'unpeopled' social theories, the book will be key reading across the social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Robin Marie Averbeck is a writer, activist and teacher at California State University, Chico. Liberalism is not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought (The University of North Carolina Press, 2018) is a historical examination of postwar liberalism that powerfully shows how racist capitalism is at the heart of liberal thought. Through ideological laden invocation of pluralism, the “culture of poverty,” and faith in the workings of democratic institutions, liberals shared with conservatives support for an individualistic and racist social order. Demonstrating concern for poverty embodied in the vision of the Great Society, liberals attempted to effectively deny the issue of race for African Americans. Attention to poverty turned to finding an explanation in the pathological makeup of poor blacks and in the overarching “culture of poverty” that became identified with urban environments. After supporting Civil Rights legislation and Community Action Programs funded by the federal government, liberal thinkers were able to deny structural racism and capitalist inequality setting fire to radical resistance. The liberal ideology of white supremacy continues to manifest itself in mass incarceration of African Americans and the weakening of the welfare state. Averbeck demonstrates how the failure to confront the political and social structures that produce inequality stand in the way of true liberation for all Americans. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2008). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Almost a decade in the making, Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland(Cambridge University Press, 2018) draws on collaboratively collected oral histories of two social movements in western Madhya Pradesh, the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS) and the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan (AMS). This longue-durée approach allows Alf Gunvald Nilsen to unravel the Indian state's everyday tyranny against its adivasi citizens. The deep tentacles of caste and class power embodied as the state reach into the Bhil everyday, not tethered to single issues of "development" induced displacement or the disappearing commons, but as an all-encompassing structural violence manifested in the realities of malnutrition, agricultural debt and seasonal migration. Alf Gunvald Nilsen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria. Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

If you want to read just one book to properly understand capitalism, let it be Tania Li’s award-winning 2014 book Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014). This might seem like a strange choice: how can a study of a faraway and possibly exotic indigenous place shed light on “our” own global realities of jobless growth and rising inequality? But it can, and it does. The book is a masterpiece of social scientific scholarship and critical political praxis. Through a longitudinal ethnography conducted over twenty years, the book follows the consequences of Indonesian highlanders’ fateful decision to plant the booming cash crop of the 1990s, cacao. That decision, Li shows, was the reason that capitalism took root and developed apace in the highlands over the coming decades. All the telltale signs of capitalist relations emerged: land was privatized, commons eroded, classes differentiated, and wealth and poverty co-created. Instead of coming as an imposition from the outside, from the state or transnational corporations, capitalism grew within the highlands, in the intimate spaces between kin and neighbors who had all planted cacao hoping it would lead them to a better life and many of whom instead ran into a dead end -- land’s end. The dilemmas and challenges that land’s end brought are explored with care, compassion, and a critical eye in Li’s astonishingly lucid prose. The book is a challenge both to development discourse that insists that only capitalism can improve the lives of the rural poor, and to social movements which insist that indigenous people must be protected from capitalism’s unwanted encroachment. Neither of these two sides of the debate can account for the situation that many Lauje highlanders find themselves in - landless, jobless, dependent on the market for survival, desirous of joining the march for progress, and yet facing a grim future. Tania Li has once again brought to light the most critical and pressing issues of our time in a book that is a must-read for everyone who cares about poverty and inequality. Anthropologists, historians, economists, activists, policy-makers, and development professionals will all find a great deal of value in this remarkable work. I had the pleasure of speaking with Professor Li earlier today. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how managing surplus populations and tapping into fortunes at the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” are twin-logics that undergird poverty alleviation projects in rural Rajasthan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Today I spoke with Flavia di Mario, a young scholar of political economy and industrial relations. She coauthored a very provocative book with Andrea Micocci, The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2017). Flavia is doctoral student at London Middlesex University, Andrea Micocci was professor of Economics at Link University, Rome, Italy. In their words, they claim that capitalism is based on a false logic in which all facts and ideas are reduced to a consideration of their ‘feasibility’ within the capitalist system. Thus, all mainstream economic and political theories, including those such as Marxism which are supposed to offer an alternative vision, have been stunted and utopian ideas are completely side-lined. "In order to constantly work out the feasible, you have to hang on to pseudo-factual concepts: nationalism; a constant drive for efficiency; the idea of nation/state; corporatism; managed markets; business ethics; governance etc. Capitalism is reduced to the management of the economy by states that fight each other and marvel at the independence of finance. All this, the book argues, is akin, intellectually, economically, politically, and unfortunately individually, to fascism." We started our conversation with a 1925 quote from Benito Mussolini. In his inaugural speech as prime minister, he argues for the importance of finance and budget stability. A good starting point to discuss the relationship between fascism and capitalism. We then moved on to neoliberalism. The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism offers a brief, provocative analysis of this issue with special reference to the most visible executioners of its will: the managerial class. "This group simply happens to hold power, and hence visibility, but they do what everybody else does, and would do, all the time. This is because capitalism is an intellectual outlook that thoroughly directs individual actions through fascist and non-fascist repression." The book argues that the only way to escape capitalism is to recover individual intellectual and sentimental emancipation from capitalism itself in order to produce radical solutions. A very interesting book that many might find worth reading: those who study and are interested in political economy, economic theory and philosophy, as well as fascism and neoliberalism. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How has European culture changed since the 1960s? In Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010 (Routledge, 2018), Dr. Irmak Karademir Hazir and her co-authors, explore this important question by looking at newspaper coverage of culture across Europe over the last 50 years. The book has an incredibly rich and detailed dataset of newspaper articles from Spain, UK, France, Turkey, Sweden and Finland, and covers a range of cultural forms. The book grapples with the classic tensions in the study of culture, between aesthetics and commercialisation, hierarchies, and globalisation, along with changes in the format, style, and production conditions for cultural journalism. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in culture in Europe, and you can find out more about the project and read some of the papers here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How does cultural taste regulate our lives? In Girls Like This, Boys Like That: Understanding the (Re)Production of Gender in Contemporary Youth Cultures (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Dr. Victoria Cann, a lecturer in humanities at the University of East Anglia, explores the regulatory role of taste in the reproduction of gender. The book draws on detailed fieldwork with schools in Norfolk, England, using a range of methods including digital approaches to understand young people's experiences of taste and gender. The rich and detailed narratives of the young people are placed into dialogue with broader social and media theories, with crucial contributions to how we understand youth, gender, and taste. By showing how particular forms of cultural consumption and knowledge are valued, how others are given subordinate status, and the difficulty of transgressing boundaries, the book will be of interest to both social science and humanities readers, as well as anyone interested in the role of culture in contemporary society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

None of the climate news that we’re getting is good right now, especially now that a number of governments are reversing or failing to meet commitments they made as part of the Paris Climate Accord. One of the challenges facing human societies and the planet is the issue of aridification. As freshwater is depleted and unsustainable agricultural practices place more stress on soil than can be supported, an increasing amount of land is being lost to erosion, a process that will only become worsen as the planet heats up in the coming decades. Despite plentiful information and awareness, most of the solutions that have been offered up have failed to meaningfully stop the damage being done to the planet. In Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2018), Hannah Holleman looks at the Dust Bowl as one of the first manmade global environmental catastrophes. She begins by noting its manmade dimensions and the underlying forces that helped to create it as well as similar catastrophes across the globe. The underlying forces of imperialism and white supremacy fed the seizure of land from indigenous populations everywhere. White policymakers were aware of the environmental damage that was being wrought, but were unwilling to revise their behavior in a way that would undermine property or profit, which shaped both the New Deal and contemporary responses to climate change such as the Paris Climate Accord. To avoid further catastrophe, people all over the world must seek more radical solutions. "The Dust Bowl continues to haunt, inspire, and teach us — but as this book shows, we have missed its most profound and far-reaching implications. Unearthing a wealth of new sources, and pulling together disparate analytical threads, Holleman tells a story of global ecological crisis — then and now — rooted in global systems of domination and extraction. A tour de force of engaged scholarship from an exhilarating new voice."—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What is the relationship between popular misogyny and popular feminism? In Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny(Duke University Press, 2018), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Professor of Media and Communications and Head of Department at the LSE's Department of Media and Communications, explores these two interrelated ideas in order to analyse a range of examples including the body positivity movement, confidence, #gamergate, seduction communities, and women in tech. These examples, along with extensive discussion of media examples including advertising, and a theorisation of the 'economy of visibility', demonstrate the important work of popular feminism, its limits, and the misogynist backlash aimed at arresting feminism's progress. The book engages and explains our current politics, with important lessons for both sides of the Atlantic, as well as a media analysis with global implications. As a result the book is an important read across the social sciences, politics, and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How should we value culture? In What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture (Monash University Press, 2018), Professors Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian and Tully Barnett, from Flinders University's Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture project, explore the troublesome question at the core of much contemporary cultural policy. The book charts the struggles over cultural data collection, both in the Australian setting and with implications for many more global debates. It draws on a wealth of examples from across humanities and literature, as well as cultural events. Setting out the importance of narratives, critiquing both the rise of digital platforms and the reductiveness of economic approaches, the book offers a radical alternative for those seeking to defend the value of culture in contemporary politics and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Few who have visited India in the past two decades will have failed to noticed the sudden and spectacular urban transformation that has taken place in many of its cities. Gated residential complexes with tennis courts and indoor gyms, glitzy office buildings, gleaming five-star hotels, and of course air-conditioned malls have become ubiquitous as the new face of a “new” India, often understood as symbols of a long-awaited global modernity. Getting behind the glittery facade, Llerena Searle’s new book Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India (University of Chicago Press, 2015) shows that these buildings are not built to service consumer India; they are built for real estate developers and international investors for whom Indian real estate has become a profitable speculative gamble. Indian land and buildings are no longer local resources for production or use; they are turning, or more accurately being turned, into internationally tradeable financial assets. How this happens, by whose effort, and against what frictions is the story that the book tells. Searle shows that it is through the narrative of a rising Indian middle class that investments are solicited and a real estate boom created. Through ethnographic attention to the practices and labors of real estate producers, Searle offers an innovative, sophisticated and refreshingly human story of the making of neoliberal India, a story has ultimately shows that the new landscapes that are cropping up all over India are landscapes first and foremost of accumulation. This book will be of interest to readers in urban studies, economics, anthropology, and of course South Asian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In her book Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices (Duke University Press, 2018), Catherine Russell defines "archiveology" as “the reuse, recycling, appropriation and borrowing of archival sounds and images by filmmakers”. In her book, she reviews specific film examples. She also discusses the related work of German philosopher Walter Benjamin and how his ideas coincide with the examples she presents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Can every aspect of society be 'creative'? In Against Creativity (Verso, 2018), Oli Mould, a lecturer in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, explains the need to resist and recast the ideology of enforced creativity sweeping through societies all over the world. The book offers a wide range of critical engagements, from the idea of creative work, through the reform of public services, to engagements with space and place, with numerous examples of alternatives to the current 'creative' settlement, and how they reflect bodies, organisations, practices, and places. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary social world. You can also read more on Oli's TaCity blog. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Today we are joined by Grant Farred, Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. Farred is the author of The Burden of Over-Representation: Race, Sport, and Philosophy(Temple University Press, 2018), which explores three sporting ‘events’: an uncharacteristic outburst from Jackie Robinson’s at a spring training game in New Orleans, Francois Pienaar and Nelson Mandela’s celebration after the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and the ethereal presence of Derrida in the stands of the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa. He concentrates on these three happenings in order to raise questions about (over)representation in sports, the event, reconciliation and conciliation, the curse of service, the interplay between love and suffering, and coloniality and post-coloniality. In The Burden of Over-Representation, Farred re-interprets these moments using the work of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and most consistently Jacques Derrida. He also interweaves his analysis with larger discussions of literary theory, Hamlet, Judith Butler, Marx, and the Bible. His novel approach offers new avenues to approach physical culture – sport enables him to actualize Derridian critiques in new ways. “To think sport philosophically.” Instead of a passive and suffering Robinson, Farred sees a man cursed by his call to service, in part complicit in his own objectification, and in one moment exposed through a split second of Fanoninan profanity. Pienaar’s negation of Mandela’s congratulations (“No, thank you, Mr. President”), returned the divisive history of apartheid into a moment of national unity. Pienaar’s power in the face of the powerless President, his self-immolation in his moment of greatest triumph, displayed the limits of Mandela’s policy of reconciliation in a nation still riven by economic, political, and social inequity. Farred “sees” Derrida, or perhaps only his ghostly echo, at the World Cup in South Africa. Thinking through the spectral allows Farred to not only reframe the pied-noir philosopher as African thinker, but also show the spectrality of the state, and explain the presence of seventeen Frenchmen of Algerian descent on the Algerian team. The Burden of Over-Representation – as rich in philosophical insights as it is in humor – will be of interest to scholars fascinated by the connection between sports and philosophy, critical theory, race, and colonialism/post-colonialism. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France's Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

According to most experts, boys have more trouble in schools than girls. Further, African-American boys have even more trouble than, say, white boys. What to do? According to some, one possible solution to the latter problem is all-Black male schools, or "ABMSs." In her new book In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Keisha Lindsay critiques ABMSs from a feminist perspective and has some helpful things to say about how to educate young African-Americans generally. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In today’s episode, I talked with Dr. Jeong-Hee Kim about her new book, Understanding Narrative Inquiry: The Crafting and Analysis of Stories as Research (Sage Publications, 2016). The book offers a comprehensive overview of the theoretical foundation and practical guidance of narrative inquiry. It embodies narrative thinking by seamlessly weaving together epistemological theories, methodological discussions, and personal stories. Seasoned with Dr. Kim’s unique sense of humor, Understanding Narrative Inquiry is highly accessible and at the same time extremely insightful. A highlight of the interview will be Dr. Kim’s discussion on how to strike a balance between aesthetic play and rigorous social research in narrative studies. It is also helpful to hear her explanation of the various ways researchers can think with theories in crafting their stories. The book has received the 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from the Narrative Research Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Jeong-Hee Kim is a Professor of Curriculum Studies at Texas Tech University. Kim is a curriculum theorist, teacher educator, and narrative inquiry methodologist. Her research centers on various epistemological underpinnings of curriculum studies, focusing on phenomenological and hermeneutical ways of understanding the field of curriculum studies and teacher education. Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Her work employs critical qualitative research methodologies to examine topics such as youth culture, educational reform, and research ethics in both East Asian and American contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Though early American labor organizers agitated for the eight-hour workday on the grounds that they were entitled to “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will,” free time as a political good has received little attention from politicians and political philosophers. In her book, Free Time (Princeton University Press, 2018), Julie L. Rose explains that this neglect arises from the mistaken characterization of free time as a matter of personal choice and preference. The book instead argues that not only should we understand free time as a resource that is required for the pursuit of one’s chosen ends and for the exercise of formal liberties and opportunities, but also that it is a resource to which citizens are entitled on the basis of the widely held liberal principles of individual freedom and equality. The claim that the fair distribution of free time is required for justice serves as grounds for the book to interrogate a whole host of policy choices—including maximum work hours provisions, restrictions on over time, universal basic income, income subsidies to caregivers, publicly provided caregiving services and facilities for the elderly, disabled, and children, and workplace accommodations, among others. Though Rose notes that the specific choices societies make about how much free time is required and how exactly to guarantee it will vary, she ultimately argues that the just society must ensure that all citizens have their fair share of free time—time not consumed by meeting the necessities of life, time to devote to their own projects and commitments, whatever those might be. Emily K. Crandall is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What can a researcher do to promote social justice? A conventional image of a researcher describes her staying in the ivory tower for most of the time, producing papers filled with academic jargons periodically, and occasionally providing consultations for policymakers. In Just Research in Contentious Times: Widening the Methodological Imagination (Teachers College Press, 2018), renowned critical psychologist Michelle Fine challenges us to imagine social research radically differently. According to Fine, if a researcher’s social justice work was only targeted at top politicians of this era, she probably would feel our era had never been darker. Fine argues that social research can do far more than that: It could create new solidarities across multiple marginalized groups, democratize the knowledge production process, disrupt the reproduction of oppressive social structure, and ultimately, sow the seed of positive social changes. Just Research in Contentious Times documents Fine’s long-term grounded research efforts at the frontline of the battle for social justice. She and her research team work with dropout students, female prisoners, Muslim youths, LGBTQ teachers, and many other marginalized social groups to bear the witness of their sufferings, probe the inequality of the current system, and raise the public’s consciousness on pressing social issues. By doing that, she champions a research approach which emphasizes the participation of community members as co-researchers, one that she terms as critical participatory action research (CPAR). Just Research in Contentious Times blends her passion for CPAR with highly personal yet profoundly touching self-reflection, rigorous data analysis, and innovative theoretical discussions. It is a compelling and inspiring read for anyone who is interested in social justice work. Michelle Fine is a distinguished professor of critical social psychology, women’s studies, and urban education at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of an Urban High School (1991), Disruptive Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research (1992), Working Method: Research and Social Justice (with Lois Weis, 2004), and Muslim American Youth: Understanding Hyphenated Identities through Multiple Methods (with Selcuk Sirin, 2008). Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are youth culture, identity formation, qualitative research methods, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Television started as a dream of nineteenth-century science fiction. It took its place in the twentieth-century home, and became a fixture of family life and a transformative cultural force. Today, televisions are both less visible and more present than ever, thanks to screens on our walls and in our pockets. Chris Horrocks traces the cultural history of the television set in The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television (Reaktion Press, 2017). Horrocks is a filmmaker and professor in the School of Critical Studies and Creative Industries at Kingston University in London. His previous books include Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual (Berghahn, 2012), and Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality (Icon, 2000). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at the University of Glasgow‘s Centre for Cultural Policy Research, explores this question by focusing on the idea of talent. The book offers a rich theoretical and empirical engagement with the contemporary television landscape, giving detailed analysis of the history of talent development, as well as the impact of digital and new platforms. The shifting landscape of talent, television, and the infrastructure of cultural intermediaries is illustrated with key case studies, ultimately showing how the winners and losers of the talent industry map onto existing inequalities. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

From Dancing with the Stars to the high-profile airport abandonment of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev by his American adoptive parents in April 2010, popular representations of post-Soviet immigrants in America span the gamut of romantic anti-Communist origin stories to horror stories of transnational adoption of children from Russia. In her latest book, The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States (New York University Press, 2018), Claudia Sadowski-Smith analyzes a plethora of sources from reality tv shows to memoirs and interviews to examine how post-Soviet migrants represent idealized examples of immigrant assimilation and upward mobility in the United States. Sadowski-Smith’s work adds critical analysis to both public and academic American immigration discourses. She evaluates how these migrants have access to a white racial identity often denied to Latino/a and Asian immigrants, how modes of migration impact post-Soviet migrants access to upward mobility, and how these migrants understand anti-immigration legislation aimed at migrants of color. Overall, she examines post-Soviet migrants in the contemporary context of the racialization of immigrants in the United States. Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How have academics been represented in children’s books? In Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, tells the story of the professor in children’s books since 1850. The book details the history of highly problematic depictions of academics, usually as kindly old men, baffled buffoons, or evil madmen, depictions that exclude those who are not white, often middle class origin, men. Terras’ work is a great example for digital humanities scholarship, offering a powerful case for new methods to answer crucial questions of equality and diversity for humanities scholars and across universities more generally. Alongside the analysis, Terras has published an anthology, The Professor in Children’s Literature, including some of the works discussed in the book. Both Picture-Book Professors and the accompanying anthology are open access and free to read, and will be of interest to every academic as well as the wider public too! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How does postcolonial theory and the work of Freud help us understand trauma? In The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Fordham University Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Yusin, Associate Professor of English and Philosophy at Drexel University, explores both of these approaches for thinking trauma in the the context of a range of historical examples. The book offers a detailed engagement with a host of theorists and theoretical positions from Freud and the theory of psychoanalysis, through postcolonial theories of trauma, to Derrida’s political ideas. The extensive discussion of theory is placed in the context of Rwanda, the memorialisation of genocide, and the partition of India and Pakistan. In the current political context the book offers urgent insights into trauma, and will be of interest across the humanities. More information about the Kigali Genocide Memorial is available here along with the organization that supports widows of the genocide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism (West Virginia University Press, 2018), Tim Jelfs argues that debates about the nature of stuff—its moral valence, its spiritual value, and its status as either “goods” or “garbage”—have been at the heart of American cultural discourse for centuries, and reached a particularly fevered pitch in the 1980s. Bookended by Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech in 1979 and George H. W. Bush’s 1989 inaugural address, both of which lamented the apparent spiritual failings of materialism while at the same time avoiding a full condemnation of the same, Jelfs frames the 1980s as the “Age of Neoliberalism.” This period saw the resurgence of market-based responses to a series of crises, including oil price shocks and inflation. In this context, Jelfs examines texts as wide-ranging as political speeches, films, photography and other visual arts, and novels, using them to explore the particular nuances of American cultural discourse about stuff. Tim Jelfs is Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on interdisciplinary studies of literature, film, art, and more, with particular interest in discussions of materialism in post-1945 American culture. In addition to his current book on “Goods and Garbage,” his next project examines conversations about crisis and narrative culture in the United States from 9/11 to Donald Trump. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Chapman University, and American Jewish University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers are anthropologists who have an interest in studying film for its value in a way to view the world. In Violence’s Fabled Experiment (August Verlag, 2018), they examine three filmmakers: Werner Herzog, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Each artist is known for interesting, but controversial films that feature violence in different ways. In the book, Richard and Todd both critique and praise the importance of each and their methods and subjects. Richard and Todd are co-authors of the book, Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible. I interviewed them previously for this book in 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

I left the kitchen radio on while reading Jacqueline Rose‘s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) in preparation for this interview. It was June. Putting the book down for a minute to get a glass of water, I heard a news report that the children of refugee women were being removed from them at the American border. Rose is nothing if not prescient in her thinking and in this book, perhaps especially so. While most of us learn what we think “alla nachträghlichkeit” (after the fact), her mind has the capacity to trip the light fantastic. I follow her writing to discover what I won’t let myself know. Perhaps she has more access than most to the realm of the preconscious. It seems to be the case. This wide-ranging book (Rose is an exemplary literary critic and feminist theorist so she pulls from multiple intellectual arenas) is largely about motherhood and its enemies. She examines “mother” as a signifier demonstrating how it functions as a repository for blame and misogynist aggression. The book’s twilight message and hot tip for women on the religious right: beware veneration of the maternal for behind it often lies something quite venal. Mothers, Rose argues, cannot win for losing and yet remain fantastically vested with delivering the impossible: never ending happiness and total safety. “A simple argument,” she writes, “guides this book: that motherhood is, in Western discourse, the place in our culture where we … bury the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human.” To be fully human involves being in need of help, failing frequently and feeling unwieldy hate. (Her chapter on hating and the negation of mothers’ hateful feelings and the social impact of that negation is worth the price of the book alone.) I have the urge to offer an example from the social realm to make clear what Rose is getting at throughout this text—if only because I found myself fogging over at times while reading. My hazy response I believe relates to my resistance to the topic. Hearkening back to Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (another powerful book that caused me to often drift), Rose dares to look at motherhood as an institution, denaturalizing it to the core. The example that comes to mind comes from Kristin Luker’s incredible Dubious Conceptions, which debunked the ever-popular idea (see the Clinton Administration, circa 1996 that eviscerated the social safety net) that teen pregnancy creates poverty. The truth, Luker argues, is closer to the reverse: teen poverty may generate teen pregnancy, as poverty can foreclose roads to adulthood, leaving motherhood as a last resort. Poor teen girls who don’t carry to term and poor teen girls who become mothers occupy the same economic strata ten years on. It’s not the pregnancy that hurts their life chances but rather that economic policies are culpable. And yet, teenage mothers, scapegoats really, have long served to hide planned economic inequality; the truth, as it were, is buried in young female flesh. As our ugly summer wore on, I re-read this book, further preparing for the interview, in addition to spending time in the consulting room, doing what I do: listening to patients elaborate upon themselves. To state the obvious, the psychoanalyst makes her living being inundated with a plethora of words about mothers. To state the further obvious, as temps skyrocketed, Freud’s maxim regarding the repudiation of femininity as bedrock was being powerfully reinforced in America. July and August offered daily opportunities to witness... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How can human rights campaigns function in consumer and celebrity society? In The Mass Appeal of Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Joel Pruce, assistant professor in political science at the University of Dayton, explores this question through the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. Rich with examples and detailed histories of the evolution of both human rights campaigns and celebrity and consumerist practices, the book challenges us to rethink contemporary political movements. Including critical discussions of Amnesty International, Save Darfur, Paris Hilton, Pussy Riot, and Live8, the book is essential reading for anyone concerned with how to change the world for the better, rather than just for the benefit of celebrity and consumer capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory