Lennard J. Davis, "Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It" (Duke UP, 2024)
For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulte...
30 Okt 202431min
Anuradha Sajjanhar, "The New Experts: Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises in Modi's India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
How are technocratic experts supporting populist politics? In The New Experts Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises in Modi’s India (Cambridge UP, 2024), Anuradha Sajjanhar, a Lecturer in Politics...
30 Okt 202437min
Michael Hardt, "The Subversive Seventies" (Oxford UP, 2023)
A thought-provoking reconsideration of how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mold for today's activism. The 1970s was a decade of "subversives". Faced with various progressive and revol...
29 Okt 20241h 24min
Andrew deWaard, "Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture" (U California Press, 2024)
Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not aud...
27 Okt 20241h 19min
Kostas Kampourakis, "Ancestry Reimagined: Dismantling the Myth of Genetic Ethnicities" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Recent social and political psychological research indicates that increased access to ancestry testing has strengthened the notion of genetic essentialism among some groups, or the idea that our biolo...
27 Okt 202439min
Omer Aijazi, "Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) grapples with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict and examines how people attempt to flourish ...
25 Okt 202437min
Matilde Masso, "Contested Money: Towards a New Social Contract" (Routledge, 2023)
Discussing money is always accompanied by controversy as well as enchantment. Debating what money is and how it performs its main functions in the contemporary economy is fundamental to understanding ...
25 Okt 202449min
Deborah Valenze, "The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History" (Yale UP, 2023)
A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics Wit...
24 Okt 20241h 9min
