In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Arts
New Books Network
Interviews with Oxford University Press authors about their books
Eric Adler, "The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today" (Oxford UP, 2020)
These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today (Oxford UP, 2020) demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescuing the humanistic disciplines in higher education. It reopens the passionate debates about the classics that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as a springboard for crafting a novel foundation for the humanistic tradition.
Eric Adler demonstrates that current defenses of the humanities rely on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of certain poorly defined skills such as "critical thinking." It criticizes this conventional approach, contending that humanists cannot hope to save their disciplines without arguing in favor of particular humanities content. As the uninspired defenses of the classical humanities in the late nineteenth century prove, instrumental apologetics are bound to fail. All the same, the book shows that proponents of the Great Books favor a curriculum that is too intellectually narrow for the twenty-first century. The Battle of the Classics thus lays out a substance-based approach to undergraduate education that will revive the humanities, even as it steers clear of overreliance on the Western canon. The book envisions a global humanities based on the examination of masterworks from manifold cultures as the heart of an intellectually and morally sound education.
Eric Adler is a Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland. Adler's scholarly interests include Roman historiography, Latin prose, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of the humanities.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.
01:03:5325/01/2023
Rens Bod, "A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present" (Oxford UP, 2014)
Many histories of science have been written, but A New History of the Humanities (Oxford UP, 2014) offers the first overarching history of the humanities from Antiquity to the present. There are already historical studies of musicology, logic, art history, linguistics, and historiography, but this volume gathers these, and many other humanities disciplines, into a single coherent account.
Its central theme is the way in which scholars throughout the ages and in virtually all civilizations have sought to identify patterns in texts, art, music, languages, literature, and the past. What rules can we apply if we wish to determine whether a tale about the past is trustworthy? By what criteria are we to distinguish consonant from dissonant musical intervals? What rules jointly describe all possible grammatical sentences in a language? How can modern digital methods enhance pattern-seeking in the humanities? Rens Bod contends that the hallowed opposition between the sciences (mathematical, experimental, dominated by universal laws) and the humanities (allegedly concerned with unique events and hermeneutic methods) is a mistake born of a myopic failure to appreciate the pattern-seeking that lies at the heart of this inquiry.
A New History of the Humanities amounts to a persuasive plea to give Panini, Valla, Bopp, and countless other often overlooked intellectual giants their rightful place next to the likes of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.
Rens Bod is a professor of humanities at the University of Amsterdam.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.
01:10:3023/01/2023
James Morton, "Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Southern Italy was conquered by the Norman Hauteville dynasty in the late eleventh century after over five hundred years of continuous Byzantine rule. At a stroke, the region's Greek Christian inhabitants were cut off from their Orthodox compatriots in Byzantium and became subject to the spiritual and legal jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic popes. Nonetheless, they continued to follow the religious laws of the Byzantine church; out of thirty-six surviving manuscripts of Byzantine canon law produced between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, the majority date to the centuries after the Norman conquest.
James Morton's Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy (Oxford UP, 2021) is a historical study of these manuscripts, exploring how and why the Greek Christians of medieval southern Italy persisted in using them so long after the end of Byzantine rule. The first part of the book provides an overview of the source material and the history of Italo-Greek Christianity. The second part examines the development of Italo-Greek canon law manuscripts from the last century of Byzantine rule to the late twelfth century, arguing that the Normans' opposition to papal authority created a laissez faire atmosphere in which Greek Christians could continue to follow Byzantine religious law unchallenged. Finally, the third part analyses the papacy's successful efforts to assert its jurisdiction over southern Italy in the later Middle Ages. While this brought about the end of Byzantine canon law as an effective legal system in the region, the Italo-Greeks still drew on their legal heritage to explain and justify their distinctive religious rites to their Latin neighbors.
Diki Sherpa is a PhD candidate at the Chinese university of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
01:19:1822/01/2023
Jennifer Forestal, "Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Political Theorist Jennifer Forestal’s new book is a fascinating exploration of contemporary democracy and how it operates in different spaces. Forestal’s avenue into the question of democracy and the space in which it functions comes out of the idea of how spaces are designed and for what reasons. This idea of built environments—be they city centers in urban areas, software architecture, or the existence and width of sidewalks—contribute to how we, as individuals and community members, operate in those spaces. Forestal is paying particular attention to participatory democracy, where community members come together to solve problems collectively.
Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments (Oxford UP, 2021)weaves together the concrete, the actual spaces where we can gather together or where we are pushed apart, and the theoretical, the way democracy, as a concept, draws on the will of the people to govern themselves. In examining democratic theory, Forestal integrates work from Aristotle, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Dewey, all of whom provide frameworks for thinking about and understanding interactions between individuals and the effort to share responsibility to govern in common.
Forestal unpacks the many ways that built environments guide our choices and behavior—from how the layout of a grocery store pushes us towards certain kinds of purchases, to the design of sidewalks or the absence of sidewalks as determining our public engagement or disengagement—and how this is an often overlooked or obscured exertion of power, especially political power. The power of the built environment trains us in a variety of ways, and this is an area where changing the design of the space in which we exist can also change our behavior and can shift our perspectives. Democratic theory is predicated on individuals acting together, and the space in which we do this contributes to the success of these efforts, or their fragmentation. Social media spaces are very much like the physical built environment, and Forestal examines three different social media spaces, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, exploring how they are and are not hospitable spaces for democracy.
Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments is an original analysis of how physical and virtual spaces provide individuals with barriers or openings to engagement, and how these spaces can shift our behavior and our priorities. Ultimately, democracy is an idea that must be translated by real people in real spaces and places, and how we all engage with one another is not just important, it is the basis for the implementation of this concept of self-government.
Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.
40:0419/01/2023
Ciara Breathnach, "Ordinary Lives, Death, and Social Class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Ciara Breathnach's book Ordinary Lives, Death, and Social Class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902 (Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on the evolution of the Dublin City Coroner's Court and on Dr Louis A. Bryne's first two years in office. Wrapping itself around the 1901 census, the study uses gender, power, and blame as analytical frameworks to examine what inquests can tell us about the impact of urban living from lifecycle and class perspectives. Coroners' inquests are a combination of eyewitness testimony, expert medico-legal language, detailed minutiae of people, places, and occupational identities pinned to a moment in time. Thus they have a simultaneous capacity to reveal histories from both above and below. Rich in geographical, socio-economic, cultural, class, and medical detail, these records collated in a liminal setting about the hour of death bear incredible witness to what has often been termed 'ordinary lives'. The subjects of Dr Byrne's court were among the poorest in Ireland and, apart from common medical causes problems linked to lower socio-economic groups, this volume covers preventable cases of workplace accidents, neglect, domestic abuse, and homicide.
Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref
01:09:0710/01/2023
Zen Chaplaincy, Activism, and Scholarship
In this episode of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Pierce Salguero sits down with Wakoh Shannon Hickey, who is a Soto Zen priest, hospice chaplain, scholar, and activist. She talks about her early experiences with social violence in the 1980s, her work as a hospital chaplain, and her 2019 book Mind Cure, which is a groundbreaking social history of religion and mindfulness in the U.S.
Resources:
Wakoh's Academia.edu page
Hickey, Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine (Oxford UP, 2019)
Helderman, Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (2019)
Brown, Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion? (2019)
Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (2019)
Find all episodes of the Blue Beryl Podcast here.
Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. He is also the host (with Lan Li) of the Blue Beryl podcast. Subscribe to Blue Beryl here.
56:1009/01/2023
Albert Glinsky, "Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2022)
The Moog synthesizer ‘bent the course of music forever’ Rolling Stone declared.
Bob Moog, the man who did that bending, was a lovable geek with Einstein hair and pocket protectors. He walked into history in 1964 when his homemade contraption unexpectedly became a sensation---suddenly everyone wanted a Moog. The Beatles, The Doors, The Byrds, and Stevie Wonder discovered his synthesizer, and it came to be featured in seminal film scores including Apocalypse Now and A Clockwork Orange. The Moog's game-changing sounds saturated 60's counterculture and burst into the disco party in the 70's to set off the electronic dance music movement. Bob had singlehandedly founded the synth industry and become a star in the process.
But he was also going broke. Imitators copied his technology, the musicians' union accused him of replacing live players, and Japanese competitors started overtaking his work. He struggled to hang on to his inventions, his business, and his very name. Bob's story upends our notions of success and wealth, showing that the two don't always go together.
In Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution (Oxford UP, 2022), author Albert Glinsky draws on exclusive access to Bob Moog's personal archives and his probing interviews with Bob's family and a multitude of associates, for this first complete biography of the man and his work. Switched On takes the reader on a roller coaster ride at turns triumphant, heart-breaking, and frequently laugh out loud absurd---a nuanced trip through the public and private worlds of this legendary inventor who altered the course of music.”
Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University. He can be reached at [email protected].
01:11:2507/01/2023
Robert M. Geraci, "Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S." (Oxford UP, 2021)
Twenty-first century life is increasingly governed by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning, big data analysis, facial recognition, and robotics. For decades, an ideology of apocalyptic progress and cosmic transformation has accompanied the advancement of AI in the United States; that vision is intimately connected to transhumanism, the idea that humanity can transcend its limits, even mortality, using technology. By describing the arrival and reconfiguration of transhumanist ideas in India, Robert M. Geraci's book Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S. (Oxford UP, 2021) reveals how the nexus of religion and technology contributes to public life and our modern self-understanding while suggesting that the apocalyptic approach to AI should be tempered by other visions.
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.
45:2905/01/2023
Joel Robbins, "Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Anthropological theory can radically transform our understanding of human experience and offer theologians an introduction to the interdisciplinary nature between anthropology and Christianity. Both sociocultural anthropology and theology have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of human experience and the place of humanity in the world. But can these two disciplines, despite the radical differences that separate them, work together to transform their thinking on these topics?
In Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (Oxford UP, 2020), Joel Robbins argues that they can. To make this point, he draws on key theological discussions of atonement, eschatology, interruption, passivity, and judgement to rethink important anthropological debates about such topics as ethical life, radical change, the ways people live in time, agency, gift-giving, and the nature of humanity. The result is both a major reconsideration of important aspects of anthropological theory through theological categories and a series of careful readings of influential theologians such as Moltmann, Pannenberg, Jüngel, and Dalferth informed by rich ethnographic accounts of the lives of Christians from around the world.
In conclusion, Robbins draws on contemporary secularism discussions to interrogate anthropology's secular foundations and suggests that the differences between anthropology and theology surrounding this topic can provide a foundation for transformative dialogue between them rather than being an obstacle to it.
Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India.
01:06:1203/01/2023
Paul J. Gutacker, "The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone." The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past (Oxford UP, 2023) challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants were deeply interested in the meaning of the Christian past. Paul J. Gutacker draws from hundreds of print sources-sermons, books, speeches, legal arguments, political petitions, and more-to show how ordinary educated Americans remembered and used Christian history.
Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis
44:4003/01/2023
Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi, "Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present" (Oxford UP, 2022)
What does it mean to be a meritocracy? Ask an ordinary person, and they would likely say it means promoting the best and brightest in today’s society based on merit. But that simple explanation belies many thorny questions. What is merit? How do we measure talent? How does equality come into play? And how do we ensure that meritocracies don’t degenerate into the same old privileged systems they strived to replace?
Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi write in their edited volume Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford UP, 2022) that “Few public policy issues generate as much analysis or rouse as much emotion as the question of how to make society more meritocratic,” Tarun, Michael, and their fellow contributors try to define, study, and interrogate the idea of meritocracy with reference to two countries in particular: India, and China.
In this interview, Tarun, Michael and I talk about meritocracy, why they chose Asia as their focus, and why it’s important to understand how this idea is implemented in practice.
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School and the first director of Harvard's Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. Michael Szonyi is Frank Wu Professor of Chinese History and former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.
(A quick editorial note! Tarun unfortunately had to leave slightly early in our interview, meaning he’s not present in the outro!)
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Making Meritocracy. 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.
42:3529/12/2022
Mary M. Burke, "Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
In this interview, she discusses her book, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (Oxford UP, 2023), which inserts successive Irish-American identities--forcibly transported Irish, Scots-Irish, and post-Famine Irish--into American histories and representations of race.
Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America's frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along its eastern seaboard. This cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas examines the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. Their racial transformations are indicated by the designations they acquired in the Americas: 'Redlegs,' 'Scots-Irish,' and 'black Irish.' In literature by Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Mitchell, Glasgow, and Yerby (an African-American author of Scots-Irish heritage), the Irish are both colluders and victims within America's racial structure. Depictions range from Irish encounters with Native and African Americans to competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between 'Saxon' Scots-Irish and 'Celtic' Irish Catholic. Irish-connected presidents feature, but attention to queer and multiracial authors, public women, beauty professionals, and performers complicates the 'Irish whitening' narrative. Thus, 'Irish Princess' Grace Kelly's globally-broadcast ascent to royalty paves the way for 'America's royals,' the Kennedys. The presidencies of the Scots-Irish Jackson and Catholic-Irish Kennedy signalled their respective cohorts' assimilation. Since Gothic literature particularly expresses the complicity that attaining power ('whiteness') entails, subgenres named 'Scots-Irish Gothic' and 'Kennedy Gothic' are identified: in Gothic by Brown, Poe, James, Faulkner, and Welty, the violence of the colonial Irish motherland is visited upon marginalized Americans, including, sometimes, other Irish groupings. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.
Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh
44:2026/12/2022
Sam Slote et al., "Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses" (Oxford UP, 2022)
James Joyce's Ulysses is filled with all sorts of references that can get in the way of many of its readers. Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses (Oxford UP, 2022), with over 12,000 individual annotations (and more than double the word count of Ulysses itself), explains these references and allusions in a clear and compact manner and is designed to be accessible to novices and scholars alike.
The annotations cover the full range of information referenced in Ulysses: a vast array of literary allusions, such as Shakespeare, Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, slang from various eras and areas, foreign language words and phrases, Hiberno-English expressions, Catholic ritual and theology, Irish histories, Theosophy, Freemasonry, cricket, astronomy, fashion, boxing, heraldry, the symbolism of tattoos, horse racing, advertising slogans, nursery rhymes, superstitions, music-hall songs, references to Dublin topography precise enough for a city directory, and much more besides.
The annotations reflect the latest scholarship and have been thoroughly reviewed by an international team of experts. They are designed to be accessible to first-time readers and college students and will also serve as a resource for Joycean specialists. The volume includes contemporaneous maps of Dublin to illustrate the cityscape's relevance to Joyce's novel. Unlike previous volumes of annotations, almost every note includes documentation about sources.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.
01:32:3222/12/2022
Jane Freeland, "Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968-2002" (Oxford UP, 2022)
In Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968-2002 (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jane Freeland traces the development of the shelter movement in East and West Germany. In the 1970s, feminist activists exposed the harmful gender norms and lack of legal protections that left women vulnerable to abuse in the home. Their efforts led to the founding of the first women’s shelter in West Berlin in 1976 and a broadly successful campaign that changed legal and social attitudes toward domestic abuse. Situating domestic violence activism within a broader history of feminism in post-war Germany, the book traces the evolution of this movement both across political division and reunification and from grassroots campaign to established, professionalized social service. It links histories of feminism in East and West Germany and challenges historiographies of reunification that focus on feminist failures. Feminist Transformations reflects on the tensions between the activists who founded the shelter movement and the media and bureaucratic institutions that helped build popular and political support, with important consequences for the trajectory of German feminism up to today.
Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.
57:0020/12/2022
Tom McLeish, "The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art" (Oxford UP, 2021)
What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creative process. The methodological process called the 'scientific method' tells us how to test ideas when we have had them, but not how to arrive at hypotheses in the first place. Hearing the stories that scientists and artists tell about their projects reveals commonalities: the desire for a goal, the experience of frustration and failure, the incubation of the problem, moments of sudden insight, and the experience of the beautiful or sublime.
Selected themes weave the practice of science and art together: visual thinking and metaphor, the transcendence of music and mathematics, the contemporary rise of the English novel and experimental science, and the role of aesthetics and desire in the creative process. Artists and scientists make salient comparisons: Defoe and Boyle; Emmerson and Humboldt, Monet and Einstein, Schumann and Hadamard. The book draws on medieval philosophy at many points as the product of the last age that spent time in inner contemplation of the mystery of how something is mentally brought out from nothing. Taking the phenomenon of the rainbow as an example, the principles of creativity within constraint point to the scientific imagination as a parallel of poetry.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.
35:2720/12/2022
Richard Brian Miller, "Why Study Religion?" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Can the study of religion be justified? Scholarship in religion, especially work in "theory and method," is preoccupied with matters of research procedure and thus inarticulate about the goals that motivate scholarship in the field. For that reason, the field suffers from a crisis of rationale. Richard B. Miller identifies six prevailing methodologies in the field, and then offers an alternative framework for thinking about the purposes of the discipline. Shadowing these various methodologies, he notes, is a Weberian scientific ideal for studying religion, one that aspires to value-neutrality. This ideal fortifies a "regime of truth" that undercuts efforts to think normatively and teleologically about the field's purpose and value. Miller's alternative framework, Critical Humanism, theorizes about the ends rather than the means of humanistic scholarship.
Why Study Religion? (Oxford UP, 2021) offers an account of humanistic inquiry that is held together by four values: Post-critical Reasoning, Social Criticism, Cross-cultural Fluency, and Environmental Responsibility. Ordered to such purposes, Miller argues, scholars of religion can relax their commitment to matters of methodological procedure and advocate for the value of studying religion. The future of religious studies will depend on how well it can articulate its goals as a basis for motivating scholarship in the field.
David Gottlieb is the Director of Jewish Studies at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. He is the author of Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press, 2019).
44:0920/12/2022
Dan Slater and Joseph Wong, "From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Why some of Asia’s authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer—and why others haven’t Over the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization—a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world’s poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia’s record of democratization has been much more uneven, despite the global correlation between development and democracy. Why have some Asian countries become more democratic as they have grown richer, while others—most notably China—haven’t?
In From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia (Princeton University Press, 2022),' Dan Slater and Joseph Wong offer a sweeping and original answer to this crucial question. Slater and Wong demonstrate that Asia defies the conventional expectation that authoritarian regimes concede democratization only as a last resort, during times of weakness. Instead, Asian dictators have pursued democratic reforms as a proactive strategy to revitalize their power from a position of strength. Of central importance is whether authoritarians are confident of victory and stability. In Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan these factors fostered democracy through strength, while democratic experiments in Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar were less successful and more reversible. At the same time, resistance to democratic reforms has proven intractable in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Reconsidering China’s 1989 crackdown, Slater and Wong argue that it was the action of a regime too weak to concede, not too strong to fail, and they explain why China can allow democracy without inviting instability. The result is a comprehensive regional history that offers important new insights about when and how democratic transitions happen—and what the future of Asia might be.
Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist.
58:1017/12/2022
Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto, "(Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media" (Oxford UP, 2022)
How do transnational Filipino families remain connected through mobile media technologies?
In (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media (Oxford UP, 2022), Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto explains the different ways in which smartphones, messaging apps, and social media facilitate transnational connectivity. He explains how relationships of care, intimacy, and connection to the homeland are established through digital routines shaped by power relations and familial expectations. Aside from providing an overview of the book’s key themes, the podcast goes deep into the methodological complexities of documenting intimate lives through mobile phone technologies as well as the ethical challenges of writing intimate portraits of Filipinos’ everyday lives.Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto is a lecturer at Deakin University in Australia.
Like this interview? You may also be interested in:
Elizaveta Friesem, Media is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Flame (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)
Zoetanya Sujon, The Social Media Age (SAGE, 2021).
Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel.
This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University.
29:3314/12/2022
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead. This book helps foreign countries, companies, and other organizations prepare for a future shaped by sustainability, technology—and a dramatic new chapter for China and our world.
Sample takeaways:
China-linked political + economic risk isn’t going away and will get worse. No-regrets supply chain diversification will only make more sense over time.
Environmental sustainability will become a bigger and bigger priority in the China market because of growing regulatory + consumer pressure. This is both in direct operations & larger supply chains.
Data privacy, security, and surveillance will pose growing dilemmas for multi-national companies. Data governance is becoming more fragmented, and compliance and cross-border transfer more difficult. Firms need to prepare for “data de-globalization.”
China is becoming a more isolated, but still large & important, innovation ecosystem. How to access & leverage this ecosystem, and the talent within it, will become a bigger challenge as China-global research collaborations, student flows, etc. shrink.
China’s frothy biotech sector is cooling, but will still be a major growth driver in the years ahead. And developments in biotech will disrupt and reshape many sectors and industries via biometrics, biomaterials, etc.
Dr. Scott Moore is an acclaimed authority on China, sustainability, and technology whose career has spanned the U.S. government, multi-lateral institutions, and academia. He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives. Before returning to academia, Dr. Moore worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change at the U.S. Department of State and at the World Bank. He graduated from Princeton University and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies books at Lived Places Publishing (New York & the UK), H-Diplo review editor, director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History (Germany & USA), research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), distinguished professor of history at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
39:3213/12/2022
Julia Ticona, "Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.
In this episode, our host Florence Madenga discusses the book Left to Our Own Devices
Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (2022) by Dr. Julia Ticona.
You’ll hear about:
Dr. Ticona’s intellectual trajectory and how her first monograph has been transformed from a dissertation project into a book
What audience the book is intended for and what critical scholarship means for the author
The design of the research project and the processes and ethics of conducting research about the gig economy
How the ongoing pandemic has changed or altered the way Dr. Ticona thinks about this book
The core arguments and take-away points from the book around keywords such as “digital inequality,” “precarity,” “platform economy,” and “digital hustle”
The global implications of a study on low-wage gig economy workers in the American labor market
The question of agency in workers’ everyday life and how people survive in the global platform economy
The gendered nature of labor in the gig economy and what Dr. Ticona calls “tethered care work”
How we can better understand the complexity of our mediated worlds and precarious work beyond the tech companies and digital platforms
About the book
Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.
You can find this book on the Oxford University Press website.
Author: Julia Ticona is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
Host: Florence Madenga is a doctoral fellow at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
Editor & Producer: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.
52:3209/12/2022
James Mark and Paul Betts, "Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and the decolonising world. It ranges from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, but at its core is the dynamic of the post-1945 period, when socialism's importance as a globalising force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'.
At the centre of this history is the encounter between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on one hand, and a wider world casting off European empires or struggling against western imperialism on the other. The origins of these connections are traced back to new forms of internationalism enabled by the Russian Revolution; the interplay between the first 'decolonisation' of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe and rising anti-colonial movements; and the global rise of fascism, which created new connections between East and South. The heart of the study, however, lies in the Cold War, when these contacts and relationships dramatically intensified. A common embrace of socialist modernisation and anti-imperial culture opened up possibilities for a new and meaningful exchange between the peripheries of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Such linkages are examined across many different fields - from health to archaeology, economic development to the arts - and through many people - from students to experts to labour migrants - who all helped to shape a different form and meaning of globalisation.
Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.
01:20:1009/12/2022
Jay Michaelson, "The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth" (Oxford UP, 2022)
In The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jay Michaelson explores the religious philosophy of the mercurial eighteenth-century figure Jacob Frank, who, in the wake of false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, led the largest mass apostasy in Jewish history. Based on close readings of Frank's late teachings, recorded in 1784 and 1790, Michaelson challenges scholarly presentations of Frank that depict him as a sex-crazed "degenerate," and presents Frank as an original and prescient figure at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, reason and magic, Kabbalah and Western Esotericism.
Jay Michaelson is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and a visiting scholar at the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion.
Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.
01:05:0806/12/2022
Ruti G. Teitel, "Transitional Justice" (Oxford UP, 2000)
Societies that are throwing off the yoke of authoritarian rule and beginning to build democracies face a daunting question: should they punish the representatives of the ancien regime or let bygones be bygones? In her interview, Professor Ruti Teitel talks both about these choices and more broadly about transitional justice as a field. Her book, Transitional Justice, published in year 2000 with Oxford University Press, takes this question to a new level with an interdisciplinary approach that challenges the very terms of the contemporary debate. The book explores the recurring dilemma of how regimes should respond to evil rule, arguing against the prevailing view favoring punishment, yet contending that the law plays a profound role in periods of radical change. In her interview, Teitel also touches on the growth of transitional justice as a field, the challenges to redress the past faced by Latin America, South Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as North America, the ways in which the International Criminal Court and other actors could prosecute perpetrators once the war in Ukraine is over, as well as her current and future research projects. The interview showcases her unparalleled knowledge of transitional justice scholarship and practice.
Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada.
59:2804/12/2022
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, "Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India" (Oxford UP, 2021)
In Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India (Oxford UP, 2021), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad offers illuminating new perspectives on contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity, based on studies of diverse classical Indian texts. He argues for a 'phenomenological ecology' of bodily subjectivity in health, gender, contemplation, and lovemaking.
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.
51:1301/12/2022
The Future of Multiculturalism: A Discussion with Patti Tamara Lenard and Peter Balint
What is the best way to achieve societal harmony in a place in which groups of people with different identities are living together. Should minority groups be given exemptions from general policies and laws or is it better to say majority privilege should be removed by finding solutions in which the law applies equally to the minority and the majority. Owen Bennett Jones was joined by co-authors Peter Balint and Patti Lenard who have discussed these issues in Debating Multiculturalism: Should There be Minority Rights? (Oxford UP, 2022).
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.
52:4525/11/2022
Kathryn Dickason, "Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred" (Oxford UP, 2021)
In popular thought, Christianity is often figured as being opposed to dance. Conventional scholarship traces this controversy back to the Middle Ages. Historical sources, however, suggest that medieval dance was a complex and ambivalent phenomenon. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice. In Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred (Oxford UP, 2021), Kathryn Dickason reveals a long tradition of sacred dance in Christianity, one that the professionalization and secularization of Renaissance dance obscured, and one that the Reformation silenced and suppressed.
Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.
43:1725/11/2022
Catherine N. Wineinger, "Gendering the GOP: Intraparty Politics and Republican Women's Representation in Congress" (Oxford UP, 2022)
In Gendering the GOP: Intraparty Politics and Republican Women's Representation in Congress (Oxford UP, 2022), Catherine N. Wineinger argues that to truly understand the evolution of women's congressional representation, it is necessary to move beyond an analysis of legislative behavior and toward an analysis of intraparty gender dynamics. Unlike previous research on women in Congress, Wineinger focuses exclusively on the experiences of Republican congresswomen to uncover some of the gendered implications of congressional polarization.
Developing a novel theory of partisan-gender identity, defined as a categorical identity that sits at the intersection of one's partisan affiliation and gender identity, Gendering the GOP argues that Republican women in Congress are not merely gender-blind partisans. In fact, polarization and party competition have incentivized Republican women to organize around their partisan-gender identity and distinguish themselves from both Democratic women and Republican men. In so doing, Republican congresswomen have increased their visibility as party messengers, while simultaneously upholding a party culture that limits women's presence and power in the institution. Through extensive interviews with women members of Congress and in-depth analyses of House floor speeches, Wineinger details how women have both navigated and shaped existing gender dynamics within the House GOP conference.
43:3324/11/2022
Aynne Kokas, "Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty" (Oxford UP, 2022)
On August 6, 2020, the Trump Administration issued a ban on TikTok in the United States, requiring that the owner, Beijing-based Bytedance, sell the company to American investors or shut it down. Legions of TikTokers were devastated at the possible loss of their beloved platform, and for what: a political grudge with China? American suitors like Walmart and Oracle tried to make a deal with Bytedance to keep the platform operating in the US. But then something curious happened. The Chinese government refused to let Bytedance sell TikTok on national security grounds. As it turns out, the pandemic era platform for dance challenges is a Chinese government asset.
As digital technologies and social media have evolved into organizing forces for the way in which we conduct our work and social lives, the business logic that undergirds these digital platforms has become clear: we are their product. We give these businesses information about everything--from where we live and work to what we like to do for entertainment, what we consume, where we travel, what we think politically, and with whom we are friends and acquaintances. We do this willingly, but often without a full understanding of how this information is stored or used, or what happens to it when it crosses international boundaries. As Aynne Kokas argues, both corporations and governments traffic much of this data without our consent--and sometimes illegally--for political and financial gain.
In Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford UP, 2022), Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens, putting US national security at risk. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley's disruption fetish, and Wall Street's addiction to growth have fuelled China's technological goldrush. In turn, American complacency yields an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives.
Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.
54:4022/11/2022
Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, "Genocide: Key Themes" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses have offered us a unique opportunity--a chance to see authors and editors in conversation with each other and themselves about the state and nature of Genocide Studies.
Genocide: Key Themes (Oxford University Press, 2022) emerged out of an effort to update and slim down their earlier, larger volume The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. In the just more than a decade between the two, the field has pushed forward in a variety of directions.
Moses and Bloxham have used this opportunity to create a volume that interrogates both the field itself and the state of its emergence. Some of the chapters are revisions of essays originally written for the Handbook, allowing the authors to expand, reframe or even withdraw their original ideas. Others are commissioned for this volume and reflect the new directions taken over the past decade.
It's a distinctive and compelling contribution to the field.
01:15:4522/11/2022
Charles Goodman, "The Tattvasaṃgraha Of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters" (Oxford UP, 2022)
The Tattvasaṃgraha of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters (Oxford University Press, 2022) collects excerpts from a massive encyclopedic work of the late period of Buddhism in India. Translator Charles Goodman has selected sections of this Sanskrit text which cover debates over the existence of prime matter, God, and an immaterial soul, as well as controversies around the cause and effect, karma, and Jain perspectivalism. Within these chapters, through a translation of the verses of the Tattvasaṃgraha as well as the canonical commentary the Tattvasaṃgrahapañjikā by Kamalaśila, the book showcases Buddhists debates with a wide range of interlocutors. Śānatarakṣita and Kamalaśila, from their vantage point late in the history of Indian Buddhism, collect a range of arguments against their historical opponents: Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Advaita Vedānta, Jainism, and even a group of Buddhists known as the Vātsīputrīyas. The book also includes an introductory chapter by the translator which explains the sophisticated underlying epistemological framework of this massive and massively influential text.
Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff.
01:01:0321/11/2022
Robert J. Savage, "Northern Ireland, the BBC, and Censorship in Thatcher's Britain, 1979-1990" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Robert J. Savage is a professor in the Boston College History Department and served as one of the directors of the University’s Irish Studies program for close to twenty years. He has been awarded Visiting Fellowships at Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Galway. Savage’s publications explore contemporary Irish and British history and include The BBC’s Irish Troubles: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland (2015) short listed for the Ewart-Biggs Literary Award; A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society 1960-1972, (2010) winner of the James S. Donnelly Sr. Book Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies and Sean Lemass, a biography (2014).
In this interview, he discusses his new book Northern Ireland, the BBC and Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2022), which explores issues of censorship, paramilitary violence and British and international politics in the 1980s.
Northern Ireland, the BBC and Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain is a study of how the Northern Ireland conflict was presented to an increasingly global audience during the premiership of Britain's 'Iron Lady', Margaret Thatcher. It addresses the tensions that characterized the relationship between the broadcast media and the Thatcher Government throughout the 1980s. Savage explores how that tension worked its way into decisions made by managers, editors, and reporters addressing a conflict that seemed insoluble. Margaret Thatcher mistrusted the broadcast media, especially the BBC, believing it had a left-wing bias that was hostile to her interests and policies. This was especially true of the broadcast media's reporting about Northern Ireland. She regarded investigative reporting that explored the roots of republican violence in the region or coverage critical of her government's initiatives as undermining the rule of law, and thereby providing terrorists with what she termed the 'oxygen of publicity'. She followed in the footsteps of the Labour Government that proceeded her by threatening and bullying both the BBC and IBA, promising that the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act would be deployed to punish journalists that came into contact with the IRA. Although both networks continued to offer compelling news and current affairs programming, the tactics of her government produced considerable success. Wary of direct government intervention, both networks encouraged a remarkable degree of self-censorship when addressing 'the Troubles'. Regardless, by 1988, the Thatcher Government, unhappy with criticism of its policies, took the extraordinary step of imposing formal censorship on the British broadcast media. The infamous 'broadcasting ban' lasted six years, successfully silencing the voices of Irish republicans while tarnishing the reputation of the United Kingdom as a leading global democracy.
Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh
34:2721/11/2022
Jennifer Eaglin, "Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol" (Oxford UP, 2022)
As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and affordable alternate energies has become an increasing priority in the twenty-first century. However, one nation has already been producing such a fuel for almost a century: Brazil. Its sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world.
Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford UP, 2022) offers the first full historical account of the industry's origins. The Brazilian government mandated a mixture of ethanol in the national fuel supply in the 1930s, and the success of the program led the military dictatorship to expand the industry and create the national program Proálcool in 1975. Private businessmen, politicians, and national and international automobile manufacturers together leveraged national interests to support this program. By 1985, over 95% of all new cars in the country ran exclusively on ethanol, and, after consumers turned away from them when oil was cheap, the government successfully promoted flex fuel cars instead. Yet, as Jennifer Eaglin shows, the industry's growth came with associated environmental and social costs in the form of water pollution from liquid waste generated during ethanol distillation and exploitative rural labor practices that reshaped Brazil's countryside.
By examining the shifting perceptions of the industry from a sugar byproduct to a national energy solution to a global clean energy option, Sweet Fuel ultimately reveals deeper truths about what a global large-scale transition away from fossil fuels might look like and challenges idealized views of green industries.
Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally.
01:17:3718/11/2022
Lynette H. Ong, "Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China" (Oxford UP, 2020)
How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford UP, 2020), Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019--the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Her research highlights one of the ways in which modern authoritarians conceal their actions in order to maintain their popularity among ordinary citizens, a theme also explored in my earlier interview with Daniel Treisman about his book Spin Dictators.
Author Lynette Ong is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, with a joint appointment at the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy’s Asian Institute. Her other books are The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions Between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in Contentious Politics, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012), She has published research articles in Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Comparative Politics, China Quarterly, China Journal, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and other prominent journals. Here research has also been covered in the Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the South China Morning Post.
Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China and he is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR) and USF’s new Center on Business Studies and Innovation in the Asia-Pacific.
46:2218/11/2022
Ruth Vanita, "The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Ruth Vanita's book The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics (Oxford UP, 2021) shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately unreal therefore humans should be judged on the basis of their actions, not birth. The book explores the dharmas of singleness, friendship, marriage, parenting, and ruling. Bhakta poets such as Kabir, Tulsidas, Rahim and Raidas drew on ideas and characters from the epics to present a vision of oneness. Justice is indivisible, all bodies are made of the same matter, all beings suffer, and all consciousnesses are akin. This book makes the radical argument that in the epics, kindness to animals, the dharma available to all, is inseparable from all other forms of dharma.
Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.
56:5117/11/2022
Adam Laats, "Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Who are America's creationists? What do they want? Why do they think Jesus rode around on a dinosaur? In Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution (Oxford UP, 2021), Adam Laats reveals that common misconceptions about creationism have led Americans into a full century of unnecessary culture-war histrionics about evolution education and creationism. In fact, America does not now and never has had deep, fundamental disagreement about evolution. Not about the actual science of evolution, that is, and not in ways that truly matter to public policy. Americans do have significant disagreements about creationism, though, and Laats offers a new way to understand those battles. By describing the history of creationism and its many variations, this book demonstrates that the real conflict about evolution is not between creationists and evolution. The true landscape of American creationism is far more complicated than headlines suggest.
Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.
30:3316/11/2022
R. Isabela Morales, "Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2022)
When Samuel Townsend died at his home in Madison County, Alabama, in November 1856, the fifty-two-year-old white planter left behind hundreds of slaves, thousands of acres of rich cotton land, and a net worth of approximately $200,000. In life, Samuel had done little to distinguish himself from other members of the South's elite slaveholding class. But he made a name for himself in death by leaving almost the entirety of his fortune to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces: all of them his slaves.
In Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford UP, 2022), R. Isabela Morales reconstructs the migration of this mixed-race family across the American West and South over the second half of the nineteenth century. Searching for communities where they could exercise their newfound freedom and wealth to the fullest, members of the family homesteaded and attended college in Ohio and Kansas; fought for the Union Army in Mississippi; mined for silver in the Colorado Rockies; and, in the case of one son, returned to Alabama to purchase part of the old plantation where he had once been held as a slave. In Morales's telling, the Townsends' story maps a new landscape of opportunity and oppression, where the meanings of race and freedom--as well as opportunities for social and economic mobility--were dictated by highly local circumstances.
During the turbulent period between the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century, the Townsends carved out spaces where they were able to benefit from their money and mixed-race ancestry, pass down generational wealth, and realize some of their happy dreams of liberty.
Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.
48:1215/11/2022
Naomi A. Moland, "Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism?: Children's Television and Globalized Multicultural Education" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Sesame Street has taught generations of Americans their letters and numbers, and also how to better understand and get along with people of different races, faiths, ethnicities, and temperaments. But the show has a global reach as well, with more than thirty co-productions of Sesame Street that are viewed in over 150 countries. In recent years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided funding to the New York-based Sesame Workshop to create international versions of Sesame Street. Many of these programs teach children to respect diversity and tolerate others, which some hope will ultimately help to build peace in conflict-affected societies. In fact, the U.S. government has funded local versions of the show in several countries enmeshed in conflict, including Afghanistan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria.
Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism?: Children's Television and Globalized Multicultural Education (Oxford UP, 2019) takes an in-depth look at the Nigerian version, Sesame Square, which began airing in 2011. In addition to teaching preschool-level academic skills, Sesame Square seeks to promote peaceful coexistence-a daunting task in Nigeria, where escalating ethno-religious tensions and terrorism threaten to fracture the nation. After a year of interviewing Sesame creators, observing their production processes, conducting episode analysis, and talking to local educators who use the program in classrooms, Naomi Moland found that this child-focused use of soft power raised complex questions about how multicultural ideals translate into different settings. In Nigeria, where segregation, state fragility, and escalating conflict raise the stakes of peacebuilding efforts, multicultural education may be ineffective at best, and possibly even divisive. This book offers rare insights into the complexities, challenges, and dilemmas inherent in soft power attempts to teach the ideals of diversity and tolerance in countries suffering from internal conflicts.
Sharonee Dasgupta is currently a graduate student in the department of anthropology at UMass Amherst.
33:1014/11/2022
David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)
They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom.
Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash.
Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.
Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.
01:05:4710/11/2022
Anna von der Goltz, "The Other '68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Anna von der Goltz’s The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2021) is a history of 1968 written from a new perspective—that of center-right student activists. Based on oral history as well as new archival sources, The Other ‘68ers examines the ideas, experiences, and repertoires of West German students who identified with the long-governing political movement known as Christian Democracy. Writing these activists back into the history of 1968 and its afterlives—including student protest, cultural revolt, internationalism, debates about left-wing violence and the terror of the Red Army Faction, the memory wars of the 1980s, and beyond—yields pioneeringly original conclusions than the traditional focus on left-wing revolutionaries and radicals has heretofore allowed.
Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).
01:19:3308/11/2022
Christopher Howard, "Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Societies are often judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members: the poor and near poor. In the United States, this responsibility belongs not only to governments, but also to charities, businesses, individuals, and family members. Their combined efforts generate a social safety net.
In Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America (Oxford UP, 2022), Christopher Howard offers the first comprehensive map of the US social safety net. He chronicles how different parts of American society talk about poverty-related needs. And he shows what Americans do to provide basic levels of income, food, housing, medical care, and daily care. Although the US social safety net is extensive, major gaps remain, particularly impacting Blacks, Hispanics, and individuals who are not employed full-time. Drawing heavily upon evidence from the years right before the COVID-19 pandemic, Howard demonstrates that these problems persist even when the economy seems healthy. Who Cares concludes with an initial assessment of how the social safety net performed during the pandemic.
Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.
35:4108/11/2022
Erin Webster, "The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Today’s guest, Erin Webster, is the author of The Curious Eye: Optics and Literature in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020). A book that casts its attention on the early modern period far and wide, The Curious Eye will be of interest to anyone interested in early modern mathematics, optic technology, poetic theory, and the contested relation of empiricism and empire. Erin is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary. Erin is a former Research Fellow and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, at the University of London, and is the recipient of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hancock Award for a distinguished article on the poet.
John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.
01:11:2604/11/2022
Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Today I talked to Hester Blum, editor of a new edition of Moby-Dick (Oxford UP, 2022).
"It will be a strange sort of a book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;--& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy.... Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this."
Moby-Dick has a monumental reputation. Less well known are the novel's unexpectedly weird, funny, tantalizing, messy, and wondrous moments. Narrator Ishmael, along with the whaleship Pequod's other meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, is beguiled into joining Captain Ahab in his vengeful pursuit of the white whale that dismasted him. But along the way, Ishmael takes the reader along many a detour into variegated ways of knowing. In a tone strangely compounded of fun and fury, Moby-Dick brings outlandish curiosity to bear on the multitudinous, oceanic scale of our diverse world.
William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association.
57:0002/11/2022
Saba Bazargan-Forward, "Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability" (Oxford UP, 2022)
We often find ourselves acting in concert with others, where what we do together goes beyond the causal contribution of any single participant. When a collection of individuals works together in a way that results in a wrongful harm, it’s intuitive to think that each of the participants should be held accountable. Yet this intuition needs to be squared with the fact that no single individual’s contribution was causally necessary for the wrongful harm to have occurred. Hence there’s a range of views about “collective responsibility” that posit group agents and collective intentions.
In Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability (Oxford UP, 2022), Saba Bazargan-Forward develops a different approach. On his view, ordinary features of human agency can be disbursed across individuals in a way that forms a division of agential labor. When such a division of labor is established, puzzles about collective responsibility can be resolved.
Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
01:12:4501/11/2022
Kyle Stevens, "The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Despite changes in the media landscape, film remains a vital force in contemporary culture, as do our ideas of what "a movie" or "the cinematic" are. Indeed, we might say that the category of film now only exists in theory. Whereas film-theoretical discussion at the turn of the 21st century was preoccupied, understandably, by digital technology's permeation of virtually all aspects of the film object, this volume moves the conversation away from a focus on film's materiality towards timely questions concerning the ethics, politics, and even aesthetics of thinking about the medium of cinema. To put it another way, The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory (Oxford UP, 2022), edited by Kyle Stevens, narrows in on the subject of film, not with a nostalgic sensibility, but with the recognition that what constitutes a film is historically contingent, in dialogue with the vicissitudes of entertainment, art, and empire. The volume is divided into six sections: Meta-Theory; Film Theory's Project of Emancipation; Apparatus and Perception; Audiovisuality; How Close is Close Reading?; and The Turn to Experience.
Kyle Stevens is the author of Mike Nichols: Sex, Language, and the Reinvention of Psychological Realism. His work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Adaptation, Critical Quarterly, New Review of Film and Television Studies, World Picture, and several edited collections. He is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Appalachian State University.
Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.
01:04:1425/10/2022
John Suval, "Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2022)
The squatter—defined by Noah Webster as "one that settles on new land without a title"—had long been a fixture of America's frontier past. In the antebellum period, white squatters propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. In a bold reframing of the era's political history, John Suval explores how Squatter Democracy transformed the partisan landscape and the map of North America, hastening clashes that ultimately sundered the nation.
With one eye on Washington and the other on flashpoints across the West, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy (Oxford UP, 2022) tracks squatters from the Mississippi Valley and cotton lands of Texas, to Oregon, Gold Rush-era California, and, finally, Bleeding Kansas. The sweeping narrative reveals how claiming western domains became stubbornly intertwined with partisan politics and fights over the extension of slavery. While previous generations of statesmen had maligned and sought to contain illegal settlers, Democrats celebrated squatters as pioneering yeomen and encouraged their land grabs through preemption laws, Indian removal, and hawkish diplomacy. As America expanded, the party's power grew. The US-Mexican War led many to ask whether these squatters were genuine yeomen or forerunners of slavery expansion. Some northern Democrats bolted to form the Free Soil Party, while southerners denounced any hindrance to slavery's spread. Faced with a fracturing party, Democratic leaders allowed territorial inhabitants to determine whether new lands would be slave or free, leading to a destabilizing transfer of authority from Congress to frontier settlers. Squatters thus morphed from agents of Manifest Destiny into foot soldiers in battles that ruptured the party and the country.
Deeply researched and vividly written, Dangerous Ground illuminates the overlooked role of squatters in the United States' growth into a continent-spanning juggernaut and in the onset of the Civil War, casting crucial light on the promises and vulnerabilities of American democracy.
John Suval holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a former editor of the Papers of Andrew Jackson and Research Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He lives in West Virginia. Website.
Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.
57:3919/10/2022
Peace A. Medie, "Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa" (Oxford UP, 2020)
In Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford UP, 2020), Peace A. Medie studies the domestic implementation of international norms by examining how and why two post-conflict states in Africa, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, have differed in their responses to rape and domestic violence. Specifically, she looks at the roles of the United Nations and women's movements in the establishment of specialized criminal justice sector agencies, and the referral of cases for prosecution. She argues that variation in implementation in Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire can be explained by the levels of international and domestic pressures that states face and by the favorability of domestic political and institutional conditions. Medie's study is based on interviews with over 300 policymakers, bureaucrats, staff at the UN and NGOs, police officers, and survivors of domestic violence and rape — an unprecedented depth of research into women's rights and gender violence norm implementation in post-conflict countries. Furthermore, through her interviews with survivors of violence, Medie explains not only how states implement anti-rape and anti-domestic violence norms, but also how women experience and are affected by these norms. She draws on this research to recommend that states adopt a holistic approach to addressing violence against women.
Peace A. Medie is an award-winning scholar and a writer. She is associate professor in politics at the University of Bristol. She studies state and non-state actors’ responses to gender-based violence and other forms of insecurity in countries in Africa. She is author of ‘Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa’ (OUP 2020). Her debut novel, His Only Wife, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and a Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020. Her second novel, Nightbloom, will be published in June 2023.
Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.
01:03:0617/10/2022
John Behr, "John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology" (Oxford UP, 2021)
John Behr's book John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford UP, 2021) brings three different kinds of readers of the Gospel of John together with the theological goal of understanding what is meant by Incarnation and how it relates to Pascha, the Passion of Christ, how this is conceived of as revelation, and how we speak of it. The first group of readers are the Christian writers from the early centuries, some of whom (such as Irenaeus of Lyons) stood in direct continuity, through Polycarp of Smyrna, with John himself. In exploring these writers, John Behr offers a glimpse of the figure of John and the celebration of Pascha, which held to have started with him.
The second group of readers are modern scriptural scholars, from whom we learn of the apocalyptic dimensions of John's Gospel and the way in which it presents the life of Christ in terms of the Temple and its feasts. With Christ's own body, finally erected on the Cross, being the true Temple in an offering of love rather than a sacrifice for sin. An offering in which Jesus becomes the flesh he offers for consumption, the bread which descends from heaven, so that 'incarnation' is not an event now in the past, but the embodiment of God in those who follow Christ in the present.
The third reader is Michel Henry, a French Phenomenologist, whose reading of John opens up further surprising dimensions of this Gospel, which yet align with those uncovered in the first parts of this work.
This thought-provoking work brings these threads together to reflect on the nature and task of Christian theology.
Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.
37:1613/10/2022
Neil Levy, "Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, alternative facts: we are awash in a vast sea of epistemically questionable, not to mention false, testimony. How can we discern what is epistemically good to believe from what is not? Why are so many of us vulnerable to believing in ways that are unresponsive to widely available evidence – in other words, to holding bad beliefs?
In Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People (Oxford UP, 2021), Neil Levy argues that we are in fact acting rationally, in accordance with how we have evolved to defer to our peers and authorities in our social networks. Levy, who is Professor of philosophy at Macquarie University and research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, argues that bad beliefs are more likely in epistemically polluted environments, and that our current epistemic environments are badly polluted. Overall, the book takes a bold stand against the traditional epistemological emphasis on the individual cognitive agent’s responsibility for justifying belief.
This book is available open access here.
Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.
01:10:5810/10/2022
Alexander Mikaberidze, "Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Every Russian knows him purely by his patronym. He was the general who triumphed over Napoleon's Grande Armée during the Patriotic War of 1812, not merely restoring national pride but securing national identity. Many Russians consider Field Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov the greatest figure of the 19th century, ahead of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, even Tolstoy himself. Immediately after his death in 1813, Kutuzov's remains were hurried into the pantheon of heroes. Statues of him rose up across the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union. Over the course of decades and centuries he hardened into legend.
As award-winning author Alexander Mikaberidze shows in Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace (Oxford UP, 2022), Kutuzov's story is far more compelling and complex than the myths that have encased him. An unabashed imperialist who rose in the ranks through his victories over the Turks and the Poles, Kutuzov was also a realist and a skeptic about military power. When the Russians and their allies were routed by the French at Austerlitz he was openly appalled by the incompetence of leadership and the sheer waste of life. Over his long career--marked equally by victory and defeat, embrace and ostracism--he grew to despise those whose concept of war had devolved to mindless attack.
Here, at last, is Kutuzov as he really was--a master and survivor of intrigue, moving in and out of royal favor, committed to the welfare of those under his command, and an innovative strategist. When, reluctantly and at the 11th hour, Czar Alexander I called upon him to lead the fight against Napoleon's invading army, Kutuzov accomplished what needed to be done not by a heroic charge but by a strategic retreat. Across the generations, portraits of Kutuzov have ranged from hagiography to dismissal, with Tolstoy's portrait of him in War and Peace perhaps the most indelible of all. This immersive biography returns a touchstone figure in Russian history to human scale.
01:10:0210/10/2022
René Provost, "Rebel Courts: The Administration of Justice by Armed Insurgents" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Warzones are sometimes described as lawless, but this is rarely the case. Armed insurgents often replace the state as the provider of law and justice in areas under their authority. Based on extensive fieldwork, Rebel Courts: The Administration of Justice by Armed Insurgents (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Dr. Réne Provost offers a compelling and unique insight into the judicial governance of armed groups, a phenomenon never studied comprehensively until now.
Using a series of detailed case studies of non-state armed groups in a diverse range of conflict situations, including the FARC (Colombia), Islamic State (Syria and Iraq), Taliban (Afghanistan), Tamil Tigers (Sri Lanka), PKK (Turkey), PYD (Syria), and KRG (Iraq), Rebel Courts argues that it is possible for non-state armed groups to legally establish and operate a system of courts to administer justice. Rules of public international law that regulate the conduct of war can be interpreted as authorising the establishment of rebel courts by armed groups. When operating in a manner consistent with due process, rebel courts demand a certain degree of recognition by international states, institutions, and even other non-state armed groups.
With legal analysis enriched by insights from other disciplines, Rebel Courts is a must read for all scholars and professionals interested in law, justice, and the effectiveness of global legal standards in situations of armed conflict.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
01:30:0806/10/2022