New Books in Critical Theory

I met with John Komlos, an American economic historian of Hungarian descent and former holder of the Chair of Economic History at the University of Munich. We spoke about his latest book, Foundations of Real-World Economics: What Every Economics Student Needs to Know (Routledge, 2019). This is a very original textbook, a good answer to the call from the Rethinking Economics movement to revise our economics textbooks and programmes. Komlos argues that the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Trumpism and the other populist movements which have followed in their wake ‘have grown out of the frustrations of those hurt by the economic policies advocated by conventional economists for generations. Despite this, textbooks continue to praise conventional policies such as deregulation and hyperglobalization.’ His book demonstrates how misleading it can be to apply oversimplified models of perfect competition to the real world. ‘The math works well on college blackboards but not so well on the Main Streets of America. This volume explores the realities of oligopolies, the real impact of the minimum wage, the double-edged sword of free trade, and other ways in which powerful institutions cause distortions in the mainstream models. Bringing together the work of key scholars, such as Kahneman, Minsky, and Schumpeter, this book demonstrates how we should take into account the inefficiencies that arise due to asymmetric information, mental biases, unequal distribution of wealth and power, and the manipulation of demand.’ This book offers students a valuable introductory text with insights into the workings of real markets not just imaginary ones formulated by blackboard economists. A must-have for students studying the principles of economics as well as micro- and macroeconomics. It is a very original book, in the ambition, in the way it is written, even in its evocative chapter titles and in the unusual tables, carts, diagrams and pictures. I hope you will enjoy the podcast and the book itself. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

3 Huhti 201935min

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

21 Maalis 201941min

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

19 Maalis 201932min

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

12 Maalis 201951min

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

12 Maalis 20191h 8min

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

5 Maalis 201935min

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

28 Helmi 201937min

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

28 Helmi 201942min