New Books in Geography

Mitul Baruah's Slow Disaster: Political Ecology of Hazards and Everyday Life in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam (Routledge, 2022) presents a fascinating, ethnographic account of the challenges faced by communities living in Majuli, India, one of the largest river islands in the world, which has experienced immense socio-environmental transformations over the years, processes that are emblematic of the Brahmaputra Valley as a whole. Written in an engaging style, full of the author's insider perspectives, this insightful volume explores the processes of flooding and riverbank erosion in Majuli, including re-configuration of the island’s geographies, loss of local livelihoods, and large-scale displacement of the population. The book begins with an examination of the physical geography of Majuli and its ecological complexities, leading to discussion on the role of the state in water governance and hazard management, as well as popular resistance by the rural communities on the island. The book focuses on livelihoods as a way of offering economic context to living in challenging environmental conditions and examines the interactions between the state and a whole host of non-state actors, and the everyday, arbitrary functioning of the bureaucracy in a hazardscape. This volume is an invaluable resource for scholars interested in political ecology of hazards and vulnerability, water and hydraulic infrastructure, rural livelihoods and agrarian questions, state theorizations, island studies, and resistance and social movements, as well as those with an interest in northeast India more generally across various disciplines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In this episode, Thomas Aiello joins E. James West to discuss Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate (University of Georgia Press, 2023). Building on his earlier book The Grapevine of the Black South, which focused on the rise and fall of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate through its flagship publication the Atlanta Daily World, this book further reshapes the place of southern newspapers in the historiography of Black journalism. Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration traces the development and trajectory of the individual newspapers of the Syndicate, evaluating those with surviving issues, and presenting them as they existed in proximity to their Atlanta hub. In so doing, he emphasizes the thread of practical radicalism that ran through Syndicate editorial policy, providing a fuller picture of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate and the Black press in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The Paraguayan Chaco is a settler frontier where cattle ranching and agrarian extractivism drive some of the world's fastest deforestation and most extreme land tenure inequality. Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco (U California Press, 2023) shows that environmental racism cannot be reduced to effects of neoliberalism but stems from long-standing social-spatial relations of power rooted in settler colonialism. Historically dispossessed of land and exploited for their labor, Enxet and Sanapaná Indigenous peoples nevertheless refuse to abide settler land control. Based on long-term collaborative research and storytelling, Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná dialectics of disruption enact environmental justice by transcending the constraints of settler law through the ability to maintain and imagine collective lifeways amidst radical social-ecological change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador (Rutgers University Press, 2023) relates the stories of the people of Penipe, Ecuador living in and between several villages around the volcano Tungurahua and two resettlement communities built for people displaced by government operations following volcanic eruptions in 1999 and 2006. The stories take shape in ways that influence prevailing ideas about how disasters are produced and reproduced, in this case by shifting assemblages of the state first formed during Spanish colonialism attempting to settle (make “legible”) and govern Indigenous and campesino populations and places. The disasters unfolding around Tungurahua at the turn of the 21st century also provide lessons in the humanitarian politics of disaster—questions of deservingness, reproducing inequality, and the reproduction of bare life. But this is also a story of how people responded to confront hardships and craft new futures, about forms of cooperation to cope with and adapt to disaster, and the potential for locally derived disaster recovery projects and politics. A.J. Faas (PhD, Anthropology, University of South Florida) is an Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator at San Jose State University in California, where he studies disasters, environmental crises, and displacement and resettlement. He focuses on the anthropology of the state, postcolonialism, cooperation and reciprocity, economic anthropology, organizations and bureaucracy, and the politics of nature, culture, and memory. Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Based on qualitative interviews with sustainability-oriented parents of young children, Kirstin Munro's book The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households (Bristol UP, 2023) describes what happens when people make interventions into mundane and easy-to-overlook aspects of everyday life to bring the way they get things done into alignment with their environmental values. Because the ability to make changes is constrained by their culture and capitalist society, there are negative consequences and trade-offs involved in these household-level sustainability practices. The households described in this book shed light on the full extent of the trade-offs involved in promoting sustainability at the household level as a solution to environmental problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The purpose of the present volume, Dindshenchas Érenn (U College Cork, 2022), is to provide an accessible overview and entry into the complex literary creation known as Dindshenchas Érenn ‘History of the Notable Places of Ireland’. The five chapters in the book consider different aspects of the Dindshenchas corpus, ranging from the manuscript sources; the format and structure of the various texts so labelled; an overview of the scholarship published to date; the dating of the corpus; the Dindshenchas as a branch of aetiological literature; and an analysis of the literary connections between the Dindshenchas and medieval Irish literature generally. Dindshenchas Érenn was published as a part of the series, Cork Studies in Celtic Literatures, in 2023. Dr. Marie-Luise Theuerkauf is a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral fellow on the 'Mapping the Medieval Mind' project, with Prof. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr David McCay, in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. Her academic interests include Celtic languages and literatures, with a specialisation in medieval Irish; dindshenchas (placename history), Irish metrics; Medieval Welsh literature; and Arthurian literature and folklore. She is also the editor of the forthcoming volume, Dublaídi Dindshenchais: Proceedings of a Conference on the Medieval Irish Place-name Tradition, which is being published by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher, who is currently the Coordinator for Digital Engagement for the International Center of Medieval Art and an assistant editor for the journal, Church Archaeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the definitive guide to businesses where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep. Most Americans only know of the guide from the 2018 Green Book movie or the 2020 Lovecraft Country TV show. Alvin Hall set out to revisit the world of the Green Book to instruct us all on the real history of the guide that saved many lives. With his friend Janée Woods Weber, he drove from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, shops, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. They explored historical and cultural landmarks, from the theatres and clubs where stars like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne performed to the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Along the way, they gathered memories from some of the last living witnesses for whom the Green Book meant survival--remarkable people who not only endured but rose above the hate, building vibrant Black communities against incredible odds. Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance (HarperOne, 2023) is a vital work of national history as well as a hopeful chronicle of Black resilience and resistance. Nicole Trujillo-Pagán is a sociologist and Associate Professor at Wayne State University who studies race, the Latina/o/x population, and socio-spatial mobility. You can follow her on Twitter @BorderStruggles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Based on critical theory and ethnographic research, Gediminas Lesutis' book The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering (Routledge, 2021) explores how intensifying geographies of extractive capitalism shape human lives and transformative politics in marginal areas of the global economy. Engaging the work of Judith Butler, Henri Lefebvre, and Jacques Rancière with ethnographic research on social and political effects of mining-induced dispossession in Mozambique, in the book Lesutis theorises how precarity unfolds as a spatially constituted condition of everyday life given over to the violence of capital. Going beyond labour relations, or governance of life in liberal democracies, that are typically explored in the literature on precarity, the book shows how dispossessed people are subjected to structural, symbolic, and direct modalities of violence; this simultaneously constitutes their suffering and ceaseless desire, however implausible, to be included into abstract space of extractivism. As a result, despite the multifarious violence that it engenders, extractive capital accumulation is sustained even in the margins, historically excluded from contingently lived imaginaries of a "good life" promised by capitalism. Presenting this theorisation of precarity as a framework on, and a critique of, the contemporary politics of (un)liveability, the book speaks to key debates about precarity, dispossession, resistance, extractivism, and development in several disciplines, especially political geography, IPE, global politics, and critical theory. It will also be of interest to scholars in development studies, critical political economy, and African politics. Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Urban landscapes are complex spaces of sociocultural diversity, characterized by narratives of both conviviality and conflict. As people with multiple ethnicities and nationalities find their common destinies in thriving globalizing cities, social cohesiveness becomes more precarious as different beliefs, practices, ambitions, values, and affiliations intersect in close proximity, producing social tensions. Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan's Tensions in Diversity: Spaces for Collective Life in Los Angeles (U Toronto Press, 2022) presents a multi-method comparative study that draws on the experiences of 140 residents of native and immigrant origin, community organizers, and municipal officers in three culturally diverse neighborhoods of varying income levels in Los Angeles County. Using cognitive mapping analysis combined with data from interviews, surveys, and participant observation, this book explores how exactly coexistence is socio-spatially experienced and negotiated in daily life. Tensions in Diversity identifies the planning and design considerations that enable intercultural learning in the public places within diverse cities. In doing so, this book foregrounds urban space as an active force in shaping coexistence and convivial public environments. Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit her website or follow Anna on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People’s Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan’s politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC’s efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan’s national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen’s treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide. Ian Rowen is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the editor of Transitions in Taiwan. Follow him on Twitter @iirowen. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Like other global frontiers, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands are a hotspot for migration, land claims, and markets for newly introduced commodities. These topics and more are the focus of Sango Mahanty’s recent book, Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands (Cornell University Press, 2022). The book argues that frontier agricultural markets emerge from diverse commodity networks that constitute a dynamic and disruptive market ‘rhizome.’ In this podcast, Sango addresses several related themes, including: the relationship between frontiers and borderlands in this region; the role of rural migration and land-claiming in frontier markets; the nexus between market formation and state formation; and what it means to think ‘rhizomically’ about frontier markets. Sango also touches on how these insights translate to ongoing processes of social and environmental change, such as those imposed by climate change. Sango Mahanty is Professor in the Resources, Environment, and Development Program at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy. Sango is a critical geographer who studies the politics of green economies, frontier markets and nature-society transformations in Cambodia and Vietnam. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Nomadic Pastoralism among the Mongol Herders: Multispecies and Spatial Ethnography in Mongolia and Transbaikalia (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is based on anthropological research Charlotte Marchina carried out between 2008 and 2016 to investigate the spatial features of nomadic pastoralism among the Mongol herders of Mongolia and Southern Siberia. In addition to classical survey methods, Charlotte used GPS tracking to analyze the ways in which pastoralists envision and concretely occupy the landscape, which they share with their animals, non-herders, and invisible entities and deities. In this episode, we discuss differences between pastoralism in Mongolia and Siberia, changes in Mongol herding throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and how animals and animal knowledge of the landscape shape pastoralist systems. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke UP, 2022), Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession in Tulsa and beyond. He shows how the processes that led to the massacre, subsequent urban renewal, and intergenerational poverty shored up by nonprofits constitute a form of continuous slow violence. Now, in their attempts to redevelop resources for self-determination, Black Tulsans must reconcile a double inheritance: the massacre’s violence and the historical freedom and prosperity that Greenwood represented. Their future is tied to their geography, which is the foundation from which they will repair and fulfill Greenwood’s promise. Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. 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/geography

What does “development” mean for Indigenous peoples? Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands (U Arizona Press, 2022) lays out an alternative path showing that conscious attention to relationships among humans and the natural world creates flourishing social-ecological economies. Economist Ronald L. Trosper draws on examples from North and South America, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia to argue that Indigenous worldviews centering care and good relationships provide critical and sustainable economic models in a world under increasing pressure from biodiversity loss and climate change. He explains the structure of relational Indigenous economic theory, providing principles based on his own and others’ work with tribal nations and Indigenous communities. Trosper explains how sustainability is created at every level when relational Indigenous economic theory is applied—micro, meso, and macro. Good relationships support personal and community autonomy, replacing the individualism/collectivism dichotomy with relational leadership and entrepreneurship. Basing economies on relationships requires changing governance from the top-down approaches of nation-states and international corporations; instead, each community creates its own territorial relationships, creating plurinational relational states. This book offers an important alternative to classic economic theory. In Indigenous Economics, support for Indigenous communities’ development and Indigenous peoples’ well-being go hand-in-hand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The story of water in the United States is one of ecosystemic disruption and social injustice. From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and Flint, Michigan, to the Appalachian coal and gas fields and the Gulf Coast, low-income communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color face the disproportionate effects of floods, droughts, sea level rise, and water contamination. In Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition (U Nebraska Press, 2023) Matthew S. Henry examines cultural representations that imagine a just transition, a concept rooted in the U.S. labor and environmental justice movements to describe an alternative economic paradigm predicated on sustainability, economic and social equity, and climate resilience. Focused on regions of water insecurity, from central Arizona to central Appalachia, Henry explores how writers, artists, and activists have creatively responded to intensifying water crises in the United States and argues that narrative and storytelling are critical to environmental and social justice advocacy. By drawing on a wide and comprehensive range of narrative texts, historical documentation, policy papers, and literary and cultural scholarship, Henry presents a timely project that examines the social movement, just transition, and the logic of the Green New Deal, in addition to contemporary visions of environmental justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Little, Brown, 2023), the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. Palo Alto is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course. Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History. He was born in Santa Cruz, CA and graduated from the University of Maryland. Twitter. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality Along the Balkan Route (Duke UP, 2022), Piro Rexhepi explores the overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes in the Balkans that are designed to protect whiteness and exclude Muslim, Roma, and migrant communities. Rather than focusing on present crises to the exclusion of the histories that have gotten us to this point, Rexhepi takes a wide lens to understand how different mechanisms and regimes of exclusion are historically intertwined. This book makes a bold and important intervention against 'colorblindness' and white assimilation in the region, pushing us instead to disturb hierarchies of power by forging solidarities with those who are most excluded and marginalized by the Euro-American colonial project. Piro Rexhepi is a researcher based in London. He received his PhD in Politics from the University of Strathclyde. His new review essay, co-authored with Harun Buljina and Dženita Karić, is "Feel-good Orientalism and the Question of Dignity," is available to read on The Maydan. You can follow him on Twitter @pirorexhepi. Dino Kadich is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Cambridge. You can follow him on Twitter @dinokadich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Compare two children – one born in north India, the other in the south. The child from south India is far less likely to die in the first year of her life or lose her mother during childbirth.She will also receive better nutrition, go to school and stay in school longer; she is more likely to attend college and secure employment that pays her more. This child will also go on to have fewer children, who in turn will be healthier and more educated than her. In a nutshell, the average child born in south India will live a healthier, wealthier, more secure life than one born in north India. Why is south India doing so much better than the north? And what does that mean? In South vs. North: India's Great Divide (Juggernaut, 2023), data scientist Nilakantan RS shows us how and why the southern states are outperforming the rest of the country and its consequences in an increasingly centralized India. He reveals how south India deals with a particularly tough set of issues – its triumphs in areas of health, education and economic growth are met with a policy regime that penalizes it; its success in population control will be met with a possible loss of political representation. How will the region manage such an assault? Hard-hitting, troubling and full of fascinating data points, South vs North is an essential book about one of the biggest challenges that India faces today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Among all the world’s most storied and legend-filled regions, the place known to some over time as ‘Manchuria’ has had an especially wide range of ideas projected onto it. Everyone from Manchu emperors to Chinese exiles, European missionaries, Korean poets, indigenous shamans, Russian botanists, Japanese colonists and socialist planners have sought to know and understand this region, framing its vast forests, mountains, plains and earth according their own political, spiritual or scientific priorities over the past 400 years. Ruth Rogaski’s extraordinary new book Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (U Chicago Press, 2022) shows how these acts of knowing have brought multiple Manchurias into existence as people, culture, nature and ecology have been entangled in diverse ways at different points in time. Today, perhaps befitting its status as a contested and layered borderland space, ‘Manchuria’ itself is a contested term, but this only makes Rogaski’s beautifully written multi-perspectival and multilingually-sourced history of this fascinating region all the more valuable. Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

A new model of urban governance, mapping the route to a more equitable management of a city’s infrastructure and services. The majority of the world’s inhabitants live in cities, but even with the vast wealth and resources these cities generate, their most vulnerable populations live without adequate or affordable housing, safe water, healthy food, and other essentials. And yet, cities also often harbor the solutions to the inequalities they create, as this book makes clear. With examples drawn from cities worldwide, Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities (MIT Press, 2022) outlines practices, laws, and policies that are presently fostering innovation in the provision of urban services, spurring collaborative economies as a driver of local sustainable development, and promoting inclusive and equitable regeneration of blighted urban areas. Identifying core elements of these diverse efforts, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione develop a framework for understanding how certain initiatives position local communities as key actors in the production, delivery, and management of urban assets or local resources. Within this framework, they explain the forms such initiatives increasingly take, like community land trusts, new kinds of co-housing, neighborhood cooperatives, community-shared broadband and energy networks, and new local offices focused on citizen science and civic imagination. The “Co-City” framework is uniquely rooted in the authors’ own decades-long research and first-hand experience working in cities around the world. Foster and Iaione offer their observations as “design principles”—adaptable to local context—to help guide further experimentation in building just and self-sustaining urban communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890 (Cambridge UP, 2022) is the first interdisciplinary history of Lake Tanganyika and of eastern Africa's relationship with the wider Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century. Philip Gooding deploys diverse source materials, including oral, climatological, anthropological, and archaeological sources, to ground interpretations of the better-known, European-authored archive in local epistemologies and understandings of the past. Gooding shows that Lake Tanganyika's shape, location, and distinctive lacustrine environment contributed to phenomena traditionally associated with the history of the wider Indian Ocean World being negotiated, contested, and re-imagined in particularly robust ways. He adds novel contributions to African and Indian Ocean histories of urbanism, the environment, spirituality, kinship, commerce, consumption, material culture, bondage, slavery, Islam, and capitalism. African peoples and environments are positioned as central to the histories of global economies, religions, and cultures. Philip Gooding is a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Ocean World Centre and a course Lecturer in the History and Classical Studies department at McGill University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at the Department of History, University of London (SOAS) in 2017. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume titled Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the diaspora. The authors scrutinize the perception of Douglaness over time, contemporary Dougla negotiations of social demands, their expansion of ethnicity as an intersectional identity, and the experiences of Douglas within the diaspora outside the Caribbean. Through an examination of how Douglas experience their claim to multiracialism and how ethnic identity may be enforced or interrupted, the authors firmly situate this analysis in ongoing debates about multiracial identity. Based on interviews with over one hundred Douglas, Barratt and Ranjitsingh explore the multiple subjectivities Douglas express, confirm, challenge, negotiate, and add to prevailing understandings. Contemplating this, Dougla in the Twenty-First Century adds to the global discourse of multiethnic identity and how it impacts living both in the Caribbean, where it is easily recognizable, and in the diaspora, where the Dougla remains a largely unacknowledged designation. This book deliberately expands the conversation beyond the limits of biraciality and the Black/white binary and contributes nuance to current interpretations of the lives of multiracial people by introducing Douglas as they carve out their lives in the Caribbean. Sue Ann Barratt is lecturer and head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS), University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, holding a BA in Media and Communication Studies with Political Science, an MA in Communication Studies, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. Her research areas are interpersonal interaction, human communication conflict, social media use and its implications, gender and ethnic identities, mental health and gender-based violence, and Carnival and cultural studies. Aleah N. Ranjitsingh is an assistant professor in the Caribbean Studies Program, Africana Studies Department of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies from the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS), University of the West Indies, St. Augustine and; MA and BA degrees in Political Science from Brooklyn College (CUNY). Her research areas are gender and politics; Latin American and Caribbean politics; African diaspora studies with particular reference to North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean; and gender and ethnic identities. Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

How did Britain become a global superpower? Historian and classicist Ian Morris thinks geography has a lot to do with it. Prof. Morris discusses his latest book, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) which traces the long history of Britain's complex relationship with the European continent. He draws surprising parallels between characters ranging from the Roman Britons and Nigel Farage, to the Papacy and the European Union. Prof. Ian Morris is the Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor in History at Stanford University, as well as the author of the critically acclaimed Why the West Rules—for Now (Picador, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In this episode of High Theory, Jack Jen Gieseking tells us about queer space. Queer geographies matter alongside queer temporalities. And it turns out that lesbian life in the 1950s cannot be generalized from the specific history of Buffalo, New York. In the episode they reference a number of scholarly books including J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press, 2005); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke UP, 2010); Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Routledge, 1993); Mairead Sullivan, Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger between Feminist and Queer (Minnesota UP, 2022); Henri Lefebre, The Production of Space (La production de l'espace, Editions Anthropos, 1974, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1919). He also names a number of scholars, including the geographer Gill Valentine, the historian David Harvey, and cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin, and the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality. Jack Jen Gieseking is a Research Fellow at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center. Their book A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers was published by NYU Press in 2020, and has a companion website called An Everyday Queer New York. They are working on a new book called Dyke Bars*: Queer Spaces for the End Times that uses the trans asterisk to invite consideration of queer spaces not historically claimed as dyke bars. Image: “Last Lesbian Bars in New York City” © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Not long ago it seemed flood control experts were close to mastering the unruly flows funnelling toward Hudson Bay and the Prairie city of Winnipeg. But as more intense and out-of-synch flood events occur, wary cities like Winnipeg continue to depend on systems and specifications that will soon be out of date. Rivers have impulses that defy many of the basic human assumptions underpinning otherwise sophisticated technologies. This is the river-city expression of climate change. In Just One Rain Away: The Ethnography of River-City Flood Control (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Stephanie Kane shows how geoscience, engineering, and law converge to affect flood control in Winnipeg. She questions technicalities produced and maintained in tandem with settler folkways at the expense of the plural legal cultures of Indigenous nations. The dynamics of this experimental ethnography feel familiar yet strange: here, many of the starring actors are not human. Ice and water - materializing as bodies, elements, and digital signals - act with diatoms, diversions, sensors, sandbags, and satellites, looping theories about glacial erratics and feminist science studies into scenes from neighbourhood parks, conferences, survey maps, plays, archival photos, a novel, an emergency press conference, LiDAR images, and a lab experiment in a bathtub. Through storytelling and environmental analytics, Just One Rain Away provides a starting point for cross-cultural discussions about how expert knowledge and practice should inform egalitarian decision-making about flood control and, more broadly, decolonize current ways of thinking, being, and becoming with rivers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What transformative effects does a multimillion-dollar industry have on those who work within it? The Industrial Ephemeral presents the untold stories of the people, politics, and production chains behind architecture, real estate, and construction in areas surrounding New Delhi, India. In The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction (U California Press, 2022), the personal histories of those in India's large laboring classes are brought to life as Namita Vijay Dharia discusses the aggressive environmental and ecological transformation of the region in the twenty-first century. Urban planning and architecture are messy processes that intertwine migratory pathways, corruption politics, labor struggle, ecological transformations, and technological development. The aggressive actions of the construction activity produce an atmosphere of ephemerality in urban regions, creating an aesthetic condition that supports industrial political economy. Dharia's brilliant analysis of the aesthetics and experiences of work lends visibility to the struggle of workers in an era of growing urban inequality. Garima Jaju is a Smuts fellow at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Over the past 50 years, scholars across the social sciences have employed critical juncture analysis to understand how social orders are created, become entrenched, and change. In this book, leading scholars from several disciplines offer the first coordinated effort to define this field of research, assess its theoretical and methodological foundations, and use a critical assessment of current practices as a basis for guiding its future. Contributors include stars in this field who have written some of the classic works on critical junctures, as well as the rising stars of the next generation who will continue to shape historical comparative analysis for years to come. David Collier and Gerardo L. Munck's Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies. Insights and Methods for Comparative Social Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) will be an indispensable resource for social science research methods scholars and students. Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In April 1988, after years of failed negotiations over the status of the Northwest Passage, Brian Mulroney gave Ronald Reagan a globe, pointed to the Arctic, and said "Ron that's ours. We own it lock, stock, and icebergs." A simple statement, it summed up Ottawa's official policy: Canada owns the icy waters that wind their way through the Arctic Archipelago. Behind the scenes, however, successive governments have spent over a century trying to figure out how to enforce this claim and on which legal basis to assert Canadian sovereignty over Arctic waters. In Lock, Stock, and Icebergs: A History of Canada's Arctic Maritime Sovereignty (UBC Press, 2016), Adam Lajeunesse, a Professor of Public Policy and Fellow of the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University, guides readers through the evolution of Canada's Arctic sovereignty, showing how the Northwest Passage and the surrounding waters became Canadian. Listen to this engaging podcast to understand what inspired Lajeunesse to write the book, what are the main points of his argument, and how its insights are still relevant today. Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

For many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of worship, they are also pilgrimage destinations, centres of learning, political hotspots, and foci of economic activities. In these temples, not only the human and the divine interact, but they are also meeting places of different members of the communities, be they local or coming from afar. Hindu temples do not exist in isolation, but stand in multiple relationships to other temples and sacred sites. They relate to each other in terms of architecture, ritual, or mythology, or on a conceptual level when particular sites are grouped together. Especially in urban centres, multiple temples representing different religious traditions may coexist within a shared sacred space. Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives (HASP, 2022) pays close attention to the connections between individual Hindu temples and the affiliated communities, be it within a particular place or on a trans-local level. These connections are described as temple networks, a concept which instead of stable hierarchies and structures looks at nodal, multi-centred, and fluid systems, in which the connections in numerous fields of interaction are understood as dynamic processes. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

It is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. In Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century (Polity, 2022) Steffen Mau shows that this view is misleading: borders are not getting more permeable in the era of globalization, but rather are being turned into powerful sorting machines. Today they fulfill their separation function better and more effectively than ever. While the cross-border movement of people has steadily increased in recent decades, a counter-development has taken place at the same time: in many places, new deterrent walls and militarized border crossings are being created. Borders have also become increasingly selective. Supported by digitalization, they have been upgraded to smart borders, and border control has expanded spatially on a massive scale, even becoming a global enterprise that is detached from territory. Steffen Mau shows how the new sorting machines create mobility and immobility at the same time: for some travellers, borders open like department-store doors, but for others they remain closed more firmly than ever. While a small circle of privileged people are allowed to travel almost everywhere today, the vast majority of the world’s population continues to be systematically excluded. Nowhere is the Janus face of globalization more evident than at the borders of the 21st century. Originally published in German in 2021, this new English edition was translated by Nicola Barfoot. Steffen Mau is Professor of Macrosociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His recent works include The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social (2019) and Inequality, Marketization and the Majority Class: Why Did the European Middle Classes Accept Neo-Liberalism? (2015). Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Cultivating Q Methodology is a collection of essays is in honor of Professor Steven R. Brown, the preeminent scholar of Q methodology. Q methodology, innovated by the British physicist/psychologist William Stephenson (1902-1989), Q methodology is a conceptual framework and set of procedures to systematically and scientifically study the subjective. Professor Brown has dedicated his academic life, more than 50 years and counting, to advancing the methodology and Stephenson's profound ideas. Each of the contributors in this volume are experts in the methodology as well, and the book is divided into 3 sections: 1. Chapters honoring Brown's legacy; 2. Chapters devoted to methodological aspects of Q; and 3. Applications of Q methodology to various topics. Professor Steven R. Brown has directly impacted the work of each of the contributors of this volume, and hundreds more who have sought to use Q methodology to study topics spanning the human sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011. Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research, activist and scholar Carwil Bjork-James provides an up-close history of the indigenous-led protests that changed Bolivia. At the heart of the study is a new approach to the interaction between protest actions and the parts of the urban landscape they claim. These “space-claiming protests” both communicate a message and exercise practical control over the city. Bjork-James interrogates both protest tactics—as experiences and as tools—and meaning-laden spaces, where meaning is part of the racial and political geography of the city. Taking the streets of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz as its vantage point, The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia (U Arizona Press, 2020) offers a rare look at political revolution as it happens. It documents a critical period in Latin American history, when protests made headlines worldwide, where a generation of pro-globalization policies were called into question, and where the indigenous majority stepped into government power for the first time in five centuries. Brad Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. He teach world history at Kennesaw State University currently. PhD in Public History with specialization in oral history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In his new book, Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (MIT Press, 2022), Mathew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity. The book examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Dr. Gandy’s long-standing fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from postindustrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Dr. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether “urban political ecology,” broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences, and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought. In this episode, Tayeba Batool talks to Dr. Mathew Gandy about his inspiration to write this book, and how an attention to spontaneous ecologies adds to the critical discourse on “new cultures of nature” and the “constellation” of diverse ecological relations, ideas, and assemblages. Moving beyond planned urban spaces (such as parks), Dr. Gandy argues that an attention to the “marginal or interstitial spaces of urban nature” or wastelands brings forward the most compelling assemblages of relations, biodiversity, and life in cities. The conversation also highlights the role of language in setting up taxonomic borders and ideological agendas for species and diversity, and advocates caution against global theories of urban change. Dr. Gandy also shares his thoughts on future direction of urban political ecology and how the book innovates across disciplines of botany, geography, cultural history, and urban studies. You can also learn more about his film project, “Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin” here. Dr. Mathew Gandy is Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography and Fellow of King’s College at University of Cambridge. Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community. Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation (U Minnesota Press, 2023), Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities. Fast food has historically been tied to the country's self-image as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life's simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry's core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food's racial and spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King, McDonald's, and more. Deeply researched, grippingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in the closest thing Americans have to a national meal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What worlds take root in war? In A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (U California Press, 2022), anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these ecologies make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as a place where life must go on. Eyad Houssami makes theatre and has participated in the revitalization of an ancient organic farm in southern Lebanon. He is editor of the Arabic-English book Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre (Pluto Press/Dar Al Adab) and was editor-at-large of Portal 9, a bilingual literary and academic journal about urbanism. His doctoral research project on ecology and agriculture in post-independence Lebanon at the University of Leeds and this work are supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Sritama Chatterjee talks about a model of literary criticism that she developed in the process of writing her new essay on shipbreaking in Bangladesh. It is a form of materialist understanding for texts, places, and geographies together, taking into account particular signifiers of a place and looking at correspondent literary responses. Sritama is a literary and cultural theorist of the Indian Ocean World, in the Literature program at the Dietrich School of Arts and sciences, University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation project titled, “Ordinary Environments and Aesthetics in Contemporary Indian Ocean Archipelagic Writing” has been awarded an Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from her graduate school for outstanding research and scholarly excellence. Her work on the Indian Ocean archipelagos also takes the shape of a collaborative public-facing, community project Delta Lives, which platforms communities in Sundarbans telling their stories. As part of her commitment to rethinking environmental humanities pedagogy, she has edited a cluster on “Water Pedagogies: From the Academy and Beyond” published by NICHE Canada which brings together a set of eleven articles from scholars and activists reflecting on water pedagogy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In 2012, Cambodia’s most prominent environmental activist was brutally murdered in a high-profile conservation area in the Cardamom Mountains. Tragic and terrible, this event magnifies a crisis in humanity’s efforts to save nature: failure of the very tools and systems at hand for advancing global environmental action. Sarah Milne spent more than a decade working for and observing global conservation projects in Cambodia. During this time, she saw how big environmental NGOs can operate rather like corporations. Their core practice involves rolling out appealing and deceptively simple policy ideas, like Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). Yet, as policy ideas prove hard to implement, NGOs must also carefully curate evidence from the field to give the impression of success and effectiveness. In Corporate Nature: An Insider's Ethnography of Global Conservation (U Arizona Press, 2022), Milne delves inside the black box of mainstream global conservation. She reveals how big international NGOs struggle in the face of complexity—especially in settings where corruption and political violence prevail. She uses the case of Conservation International’s work in Cambodia to illustrate how apparently powerful NGOs can stumble in practice: policy ideas are transformed on the ground, while perverse side effects arise, like augmented authoritarian power, illegal logging, and Indigenous dispossession. The real power of global conservation NGOs is therefore not in their capacity to control what happens in the field but in their capacity to ignore or conceal failings. Milne argues that this produces an undesirable form of socionature, called corporate nature, that values organizational success over diverse knowledges and ethical conduct. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The episode features Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatca, co-authors of an extraordinary, field-shifting new book – Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). Dr. Boatca is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, where she teaches and publishes widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Dr. Parvulescu joins us from St. Louis where she teaches at the Washington University’s English Department. A prolific author, she has worked in the fields of literary theory and criticism, visual culture, female labor and migration, and the East-West relations in contemporary European history. The result of their sustained collaboration, Creolizing the Modern develops a comparative, multidisciplinary method for engaging with areas of the world that have inherited multiple, conflicting imperial and anti-imperial histories. Transylvania, one such historical region at the intersection of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, has offered Boatca and Parvulescu a platform for a multi-level reading of topics that include the region's capitalist integration into global commercial circuits, antisemitism and slavery, multilingualism, gender relations, and religion. Using Liviu Rebreanu’s 1920 modernist novel Ion as an analytical point of departure and a chronicle of Transylvania’s modernities, the co-authors provide innovative decolonial perspectives that aim to creolize modernity and the modern world-system. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Prakash Kashwan's edited volume Climate Justice in India (Cambridge UP, 2022) brings together a collective of academics, activists, and artists to paint a collage of action-oriented visions for a climate just India. This unique and agenda setting volume informs researchers and readers interested in topics of just transition, energy democracy, intersectionality of access to drinking water, agroecology and women's land rights, national and state climate plans, urban policy, caste justice, and environmental and climate social movements in India. It synthesizes the historical, social, economic, and political roots of climate vulnerability in India and articulates a research and policy agenda for collective democratic deliberations and action. This crossover volume will be of interest to academics, researchers, social activists, policymakers, politicians, and a general reader looking for a comprehensive introduction to the unprecedented challenge of building a praxis of justice in a climate-changed world. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Today I talked to Ted Conover, author of Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge (Knopf, 2022) In May 2017, Conover went to Colorado to explore firsthand a rural way of life that is about living cheaply, on your own land—and keeping clear of the mainstream. The failed subdivisions of the enormous San Luis Valley make this possible. Five-acre lots on the high prairie can be had for five thousand dollars, sometimes less. Conover volunteered for a local group trying to prevent homelessness during the bitter winters. He encountered an unexpected diversity: veterans with PTSD, families homeschooling, addicts young and old, gay people, people of color, lovers of guns and marijuana, people with social anxiety—most of them spurning charity and aiming, and sometimes failing, to be self-sufficient. And more than a few predicting they’ll be the last ones standing when society collapses. Conover bought his own five acres and immersed himself for parts of four years in the often contentious culture of the far margins. He found many who dislike the government but depend on its subsidies; who love their space but nevertheless find themselves in each other’s business; who are generous but wary of thieves; who endure squalor but appreciate beauty. In their struggles to survive and get along, they tell us about an America riven by difference where the edges speak more and more loudly to the mainstream. Ted Conover is the author of several books, including Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and National Geographic. He is a professor at, and the former director of, New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

This book cuts new ground, challenging the assumption of law as an objective concept. It draws out the way that binary frameworks situate and create the notion of the individual in law, delininating responsibilities and rights between concepts such as the state / individual, public / private, care / disability and capacity / incapacity. In The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries (Routledge, 2022) Dr. Beverley Clough draws into question spatial dynamics of law and disability. While she does so through the lens of analysis of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, this liminal work will be cause for broader application in all areas of law which function on "common-sense" understandings of autonomy and law. It will be useful for lawyers, policy makers, practitioners, and any person who wishes to understand the law and the way that it constructs subjectivity. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022) examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a black feminist “poethical” perspective. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler's 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African-American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes capital as the juridical architecture and ethical grammar of the world. Here, raciality—a symbol of coloniality—justifies deployments of total violence to enable expropriation and land extraction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Today I talked to Chris McMorran about his new book Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2022). Amid the decline of many of Japan’s rural communities, the hot springs village resort of Kurokawa Onsen is a rare, bright spot. Its two dozen traditional inns, or ryokan, draw nearly a million tourists a year eager to admire its landscape, experience its hospitality, and soak in its hot springs. As a result, these ryokan have enticed village youth to return home to take over successful family businesses and revive the community. Chris McMorran spent nearly two decades researching ryokan in Kurokawa, including a full year of welcoming guests, carrying luggage, scrubbing baths, cleaning rooms, washing dishes, and talking with co-workers and owners about their jobs, relationships, concerns, and aspirations. He presents the realities of ryokan work—celebrated, messy, ignored, exploitative, and liberating—and introduces the people who keep the inns running by making guests feel at home. McMorran explores how Kurokawa’s ryokan mobilize hospitality to create a rural escape from the globalized dimensions of everyday life in urban Japan. Ryokan do this by fusing a romanticized notion of the countryside with an enduring notion of the hospitable woman embodied by nakai, the hired female staff who welcome guests, serve meals, and clean rooms. These women are the face of the ryokan. But hospitality often hides a harsh reality. McMorran found numerous nakai in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who escaped violent or unhappy marriages by finding employment in ryokan. Yet, despite years of experience, nakai remain socially and economically vulnerable. Through this intimate and inventive ethnography of a year in a ryokan, McMorran highlights the importance of both the generational work of ryokan owners and the daily work of their employees, while emphasizing the gulf between them. With its focus on small, family-owned businesses and a mobile, vulnerable workforce, Ryokan makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the Japanese workplace. It also will interest students and scholars in geography, mobility studies, and women’s studies and anyone who has ever stayed at a ryokan and is curious about the work that takes place behind the scenes. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Along with football and religion, housing is a fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian life: it can make or break marriage proposals, invigorate or slow down the economy, and popularize or embarrass a ruler. Housing is political. Almost every Egyptian ruler over the last eighty years has directly associated himself with at least one large-scale housing project. It is also big business, with Egypt currently the world leader in per capita housing production, building at almost double China’s rate, and creating a housing surplus that counts in the millions of units. Despite this, Egypt has been in the grip of a housing crisis for almost eight decades. From the 1940s onward, officials deployed a number of policies to create adequate housing for the country’s growing population. By the 1970s, housing production had outstripped population growth, but today half of Egypt’s one hundred million people cannot afford a decent home. Egypt's Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space (American U in Cairo Press, 2020) takes presidential speeches, parliamentary reports, legislation, and official statistics as the basis with which to investigate the tools that officials have used to ‘solve’ the housing crisis—rent control, social housing, and amnesties for informal self-building—as well as the inescapable reality of these policies’ outcomes. Yahia Shawkat argues that wars, mass displacement, and rural–urban migration played a part in creating the problem early on, but that neoliberal deregulation, crony capitalism and corruption, and neglectful planning have made things steadily worse ever since. In the final analysis he asks, is affordable housing for all really that hard to achieve? Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to cool the atmosphere, to negative emission technologies that capture and inject carbon dioxide underground. "You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to feel called to some kind of action when you see what we humans have done." But Elizabeth wonders what the best alternatives are. Should we set aside half the earth for biodiversity? Why is it that genetic engineering has become the cultural flashpoint for fear of unintended consequences? There are no easy answers at this point. Elizabeth thinks that if you're not frightened by what's going right now, including American politics around vaccination refusal, you're not paying attention. Because this episode is associated with the annual Brandeis New Student Book Forum, first-year students Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman (who also goes by Nidhi) jump in with some thoughts. Noticing repeated mentions of Henry David Thoreau in the book, Nidhi inquires about his role in inspiring Elizabeth's writing. Hedy's question about environmental justice and the comparative agency of rich and poor countries moves Elizabeth to talk about the staggering inequities in consumption and the goal of convergence in carbon emissions. What is the mechanism by which this happens, though? Do humans have the right to implement these technologies? Is the solution to issues created by human control really more control? Mentioned in the Episode E.O. Wilson, Half Earth "Gene editing could revive a nearly lost tree"; the chestnut gene splicing debate in a recent Washington Post article. (Elizabeth has reported on Bill Powell's work) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006) Cli-fi: climate fiction in all its bleakness. For example, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future Rob Nixon, Slow Violence: how to see things happening at different time scales. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962) Henry David Thoreau, "the touchstone" of American nature writing. e.g Walden (1854); dated yes, but "in most ways ahead of his time" Des Poissons dans le Desert: Elizabeth's book title in French! Listen to the episode here. Read the transcript here. Special credit and thanks for this episode goes to Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman, who took part in the audio editing and the preparation of the show notes, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society. With this book, Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression, and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan. Based on twenty-five years of field research, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent (Stanford UP, 2022) examines protests as they are situated in the built environment, bringing together considerations of networks, spatial imaginaries, space and place-making, and political geographies at local, national, regional, and global scales. Schwedler considers the impact of time and temporality in the lifecycles of individual movements. Through a mixed interpretive methodology, this book illuminates the geographies of power and dissent and the spatial practices of protest and repression, highlighting the political stakes of competing narratives about Jordan's past, present, and future. Ronay Bakan is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Known as highly mobile cattle nomads, the Wodaabe in Niger are today increasingly engaged in a transformation process towards a more diversified livelihood based primarily on agro-pastoralism and urban work migration. Space, Place and Identity: The Wodaabe of Niger in the 21st Century (Berghahn Books, 2020) by Florian Köhler examines recent transformations in spatial patterns among the Wodaabe, notably in the context of urban migration and in processes of sedentarization in rural proto-villages. “Space, Place and Identity” analyses the consequences that these recent changes entail for social group formation and collective identification, and how these also impact the integration of the Wodaabe into wider society among the structures of the modern nation state. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

“History has not been kind to Himalaya,” writes historian and travel writer John Keay in his latest book Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). The region, nestled between India, China and Central Asia, has long been subject to political and imperial intrigue–and at times violent invasion. But the region also provided a wealth of scientific information, like geographers puzzling over how these tall peaks were thrust upwards by plate tectonics. And, of course, it’s the home to a Tibetan culture and people that has been present for centuries That’s all from Keay’s latest book, which collects years of detail on history, geography, and culture, in one volume. John Keay has been writing about Himalaya and traveling there since the 1960s. He wrote the two-volume Explorers of the Western Himalayas (John Murray: 1977, 1979) and wrote and presented a major BBC R3 documentary series on the Himalayan kingdom; other works include India: A History (Grove Press: 2000) and China: A History (HarperCollins: 2008). In this interview, John and I talk about just a few details from his book: the Younghusband Expedition, plate tectonics, and local legends like the “Ogress of the Rocks” You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Himalaya. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography