Amilcar Cabral was one of the most significant African nationalists of his generation. Born in the Cape Verde Islands, Cabral led the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in its fight against Portuguese rule. In addition to helping found the party and then lead it, he also became a leading theoretician of revolutionary struggle and Marxism. Cabral shaped the larger independence struggle until his assassination in 1973, and though he did not live to see the independ...
Sep 29, 2021•56 min•Ep. 1077
As algorithms become ever more significant to and embedded in our everyday lives, ever more accessible introductions to them are needed. While several excellent technical and critical treatments have emerged in recent years, i had not come across a book for the general public that would provide a deep sense for the intuitions and motivations behind their development. Chris Bleakley 's new book offers this and more: conceptual rigor woven into historical vignettes in a style that i believe genera...
Sep 27, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 67
Listen to this interview of Joshua Schimel, Professor of soil ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded (Oxford UP, 2011). We talk about how writing is research, and about how the Vietnam War was really just one big fat rejected manuscript. Joshua Schimel : "One of the challenges, I think, we have in science is that all the way up through university, we're being taught scientific knowledg...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 88
Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story of how Al Qaeda grew in the West. In forensic and compelling detail, Jytte Klausen traces how Islamist revolutionaries exiled in Europe and North America in the 1990s helped create and control one of the world's most impactful terrorist movements--and how, after the near-obliteration of the organization during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they helped build it again. She shows how the diffusion of Islami...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 124
Horror fans are attracted to movies designed to scare us, but others shudder already at the thought of the sweat-drenched nightmares that terrifying movies often trigger. The fear of sleepless nights and the widespread beliefs that horror movies can have negative psychological effects and display immorality make some of us very, very nervous about them. In A Very Nervous Person's Guide To Horror Movies (Oxford University Press, 2021) horror expert Mathias Clasen examines the psychological scienc...
Sep 20, 2021•48 min•Ep. 101
Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha's book Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments (Oxford UP, 2021) examines diverse retellings of the Ramayana narrative as interpreted and embodied through a spectrum of performances. Unlike previous publications, this book is neither a monograph on a single performance tradition nor a general overview of Indian theatre. Instead, it provides context-specific analyses of selected case studies that explore contemporary enactmen...
Sep 16, 2021•46 min•Ep. 138
Between 1942 and 1945, the United States government forcibly removed approximately 120,000 people "of Japanese ancestry" from their homes and into self-proclaimed concentration camps across the American West and South. At every step in the way, social workers played integral roles in the intricate machinery of racism and bureaucracy that allowed this process to take place. Dr. Yoosun Park, an associate professor of social policy and practice at the University of Pennsylvania, describes the role ...
Sep 15, 2021•49 min•Ep. 72
What is grand strategy? What does it aim to achieve? And what differentiates it from normal strategic thought--what, in other words, makes it "grand"? In answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy and warfare, so much so that "grand strategy" has become almost an equivalent of "military history." The traditional attention paid to military affairs is understandable, but in today's world it leaves out much else that could be considered political, and therefore strategic. It...
Sep 14, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 4
Jelle J. P. Wouters' book In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency: Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast India (Oxford UP, 2018) declutters and reconceptualizes the top-down notion of conceptualizing and understanding Naga village, social bodies, state, and violence. As the title suggests it goes to the shadows or the ground reality of political life that affects the everyday life o the people offering a rich ethnographic purview. Jelle Wouters illustrates an ‘insurgency complex’ that reveals how e...
Sep 13, 2021•43 min•Ep. 121
Medieval Kashmir in its golden age saw the development of some of the most sophisticated theories of language, literature, and emotion articulated in the pre-modern world. James D. Reich's book To Savor the Meaning: The Theology of Literary Emotions in Medieval Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the overlap of literary theory and religious philosophy in this period by looking at debates about how poetry communicates emotions to its readers, what it is readers do when they savor these emotions, a...
Sep 09, 2021•38 min•Ep. 137
When considering pivotal years in Russian history, one naturally thinks of 1861 (the Serf Emancipation), the 1905 Revolution, or the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Dr. Paul Werth’s 1837: Russia's Quiet Revolution (Oxford UP, 2021), invites us to reconsider that list of revolutionary years. Werth’s wide-ranging discussion analyzes such subjects as Pushkin’s death and Petr Chadaaev’s criticism of Russia’s past, to the Khiva campaign in which the Russian’s learned all they ever wanted to know about cam...
Sep 07, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 169
Tanya Jakimow's book Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia (Oxford UP, 2020) offers a novel approach to understanding power in development through theories of affect and emotion. Development agents - people tasked with designing or delivering development - are susceptible to being affected in ways that may derail or threaten their 'sense of self'. This susceptibility is in direct relation to the capacity of others to engender feelings in develop...
Sep 01, 2021•40 min•Ep. 86
From the moment that Tsars as well as hierarchs realized that having their subjects go to confession could make them better citizens as well as better Christians, the sacrament of penance in the Russian empire became a political tool, a devotional exercise, a means of education, and a literary genre. It defined who was Orthodox, and who was 'other.' First encouraging Russian subjects to participate in confession to improve them and to integrate them into a reforming Church and State, authorities...
Sep 01, 2021•56 min•Ep. 168
Epistemology traditionally focuses on the analysis of central epistemological concepts, such as knowledge, justification, evidence, truth, and belief. But having knowledge is also a matter of acquiring knowledge . And this means that epistemology must also address questions of our conduct – how we should go about finding things out, what it means to be a good inquirer, and so on. This suggests that people can behave badly as epistemic agents. It falls to epistemologists to examine bad epistemi...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 263
In this episode for the Economic and Business History channel, I interviewed Dr. Susan V. Spellman, Associate Professor of History at Miami University. She is the author of Cornering the Market Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business (Oxford University Press, 2016). In popular stereotypes, local grocers were avuncular men who spent their days in pickle-barrel conversations and checkers games; they were backward small-town merchants resistant to modernizing impulses. Corneri...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr 2 min
When we think about modern trade, we tend to think about the sea: port cities and large ships carrying goods back and forth. It’s a story that tends to put Europe at the center, as the pinnacle of shipping and maritime technology. Jagjeet Lally’s India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (Hurst, 2021) corrects this narrative. For Jagjeet, the way we talk about globalization misses the continued land trade that happened throughout Central Asia, with India as a hub. Traders traveled...
Aug 26, 2021•39 min
Political Theorist Jason Frank, the John L. Senior Professor of Government at Cornell University, has written a new book, The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly (Oxford UP, 2021), that explores the concept of “people out of doors” and how we think about demonstrations by citizens in the streets, popular assemblies, and other configurations of the voice of the people. The idea of “the people” is a key component of democratic thinking and democratic theory, and Frank’s analysis...
Aug 19, 2021•58 min•Ep. 539
German Ambassador Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau believed that Germany and the Soviet Union were locked together in a Schicksalgemienshaft , or “community of fate.” The interaction of these two nations, Brockdorff-Rantzau thought, would decide the course of history, in Europe and beyond. Anyone familiar with the history of German-Soviet relations in the twentieth century might be inclined to agree with the ambassador’s assessment; though they might find his use of the word “community,” with all i...
Aug 10, 2021•56 min•Ep. 102
Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with Axis Powers. All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's CIA. Brian Masaru Hayashi brings to light for the first time the role played by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans in Ame...
Aug 03, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 101
Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that...
Aug 02, 2021•54 min•Ep. 11
Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (Oxford UP, 2021) helps us think about the complexity of the American political system that has grown up over the past 200 years, and how this system functions (or, at times, misfunctions) given the demands and pressures on the governmental system and the American constitutional framework. Stephen Skowronek, John Dearborn, and Desmond King focus on the concept of the deep state , a term that was frequently used during t...
Jul 29, 2021•54 min•Ep. 536
Development economists have been doing intensive research in recent years on conditional cash transfer programs as a tool to help get people out of poverty. Meanwhile in the US there has been a lot of talk about Universal Basic Income as a remedy for inequality and social disclocations. On paper, China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee, or Dibao, sounds a lot like Universal Basic Income. Jennifer Pan shows that this tool of poverty alleviation has instead been turned into a tool of surveillance and...
Jul 29, 2021•59 min•Ep. 71
In July 2021, nine summers after its then president saved the euro with three choice words (“whatever it takes”), the European Central Bank published the results of a thoroughgoing review of its strategy. A policy framework built for times when inflation posed a modest upside challenge had coped – but only just – with successive financial, sovereign-debt, banking and health crises that threatened chronically weak inflation at best and deflation at worst. Essential to the review was research cond...
Jul 28, 2021•47 min•Ep. 51
Scott Krzych's book Beyond Bias: Conservative Media, Documentary Form, and the Politics of Hysteria (Oxford University Press, 2021) offers the first scholarly study of contemporary right-wing documentary film and video. Drawing from contemporary work in political theory and psychoanalytic theory, the book identifies what author Scott Krzych describes as the hysterical discourse prolific in conservative documentary in particular, and right-wing media more generally. In our chat, Scott and I revie...
Jul 23, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 86
Why do we find pervasive gender-based discrimination, exclusion and violence in India when the Indian constitution builds an inclusive democracy committed to gender equality? This is the puzzle that animates Natasha Behl’s book, Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India (Oxford University Press, 2019), but it is, as we explore in episode eight of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science , in no way merely an intellectual one. To the contrary, Gendere...
Jul 23, 2021•54 min•Ep. 8
The extra Calvinisticum, that the eternal Son maintains his existence beyond the flesh during his earthly ministry and perpetually, divided the Lutheran and Reformed traditions during the Reformation. K. J. Drake's book The Flesh of the Word: The Extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to Early Orthodoxy (Oxford UP, 2021) explores the emergence and development of the extra Calvinisticum in the Reformed tradition by tracing its exposition from Ulrich Zwingli to early Reformed orthodoxy. Rather than bein...
Jul 19, 2021•31 min•Ep. 174
It might seem somewhat paradoxical that in the Wars of 1898 and their aftermath—the era in which the United States expanded its imperial reach deep into the Caribbean and Pacific—international law became a feature of US foreign policy. In the midst of all of the militarism (think of Teddy Roosevelt’s roughriders storming Cuba), colonial conquest, and the use of torture to quash Philippine resistance to US colonial rule, the US government sought to make its empire legalistic and to help build a b...
Jul 15, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 103
Quantum mechanics is full of weird findings – for example, that systems widely separated can somehow still be correlated, and that a system may be in two different possible states at the same time. Entanglement and superposition, among other phenomena, have prompted debate since the inception of QM about how, exactly, we should understand what it tells us about reality. In The World in the Wave Function (Oxford UP, 2021), Alyssa Ney defends wave function realism, the claim that the basic represe...
Jul 09, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 257
Political Theorist Sara Rushing’s new book, The Virtues of Vulnerability: Humility, Autonomy, and Citizen-Subjectivity (Oxford UP, 2020), examines the very real experiences that individuals have in the context of healthcare, especially healthcare and medical approaches to the most human of all experiences, birth, illness, and death. Rushing’s analysis posits that the corporal bodies that we all inhabit are also sites of politics—not the problem for politics, as others have theorized, but rather ...
Jul 08, 2021•53 min•Ep. 530
There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the Civil Rights Movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy set the n...
Jul 07, 2021•59 min•Ep. 109
