brian bean, "Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition" (Haymarket, 2025)

How can the history of women’s work in film and TV help address inequality today? In Women’s Activism Behind the Screens: Trade Unions and Gender Inequality in the British Film and Television Industries (University of Bristol Press, 2020), Frances Galt, a Teaching Associate in history at Newcastle University, looks at the history of women’s struggles for equality within unions in the screen industry, to show the lessons of how gender equality has progressed and receded since the 1930s. The book draws on a rich blend of archival, oral history, and policy document research, presenting the context for key moments in the fight to support the status of women in the film and television industries. A fascinating history, with crucial lessons for contemporary activism, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. 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 Mar 202143min

Morton Schoolman, Professor in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the State University of New York at Albany, has published a new book that explores the idea of democratic enlightenment in the United States, and the way that we may want to consider both how to achieve this enlightenment and how we can be guided by our literary and philosophical traditions. Schoolman explains that we need to come to democratic enlightenment through a process of reconciliation, and that this concept of reconciliation is at the heart of the work by Walt Whitman and Theodore Adorno.  The centerpieces of A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics (Duke UP, 2020) are explications of how Whitman and Adorno each, separately, approach this need and capacity for reconciliation, and how they delineate it in their work, and finally, how it is vitally important to democracy. Schoolman’s reading of Whitman notes that this is what Whitman set out to do with his poetry, to teach or guide the capacity to reconcile identity, especially with all those who are different. Whitman’s work and his reflection on this need for reconciliation was written during the period of Reconstruction, and he saw the need and the means to provide a path towards healing America’s differences through the democratic media of his time, poetry. Theodore Adorno is pursuing a parallel concept in his work, examining modern artwork as the fulcrum for reconciliation, explaining that these images, while they may be static in some form, are, in fact, images in motion—all visual works of art are in motion. Thus, both Adorno and Whitman provide Schoolman with an aesthetic space and definition for the place where democratic reconciliation can and does occur. But Schoolman builds on the foundation provided by these two theorists, himself constructing the place where he thinks it is most likely that citizens will experience and engage with this idea of reconciliation, especially around those who have been othered or prevented from inclusion by American politics and culture. Schoolman centers this space in film, in part because films are accessible by so much of the populace, and because they provide the aesthetic images, not only the narrative framework, to confront and engage democratic reconciliation. A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics is a fascinating and complex exploration of how aesthetic education has an important role in democratic politics, especially in regard to the function of the reconciliation image as a dynamic component of that education. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

4 Mar 20211h 11min

It’s often said that the time in our lives can often pass without us noticing. Old age can come before we realize it, and it brings with it new elements to our own daily lives that we couldn’t have anticipated before. Observed from a distance and growing old can seem like a universal experience, but observed up close, it becomes clear that the different ways people age are as varied and unique as the people themselves, and these differences can come from within and without. Whether you get to live out your twilight years in a comfortable retirement home in the country, or an understaffed inner-city hospital, these experiences will be profoundly different, and likely had different paths that led to them. Viewed in this way, aging is seen not as some eternal experience that is the same for all people, but as a fundamental part of our politics and economic dynamics, for better and for worse. The COVID-crisis of the last year has brought to light how vulnerable our elderly are, how understaffed our care-facilities are, and how much needs to change to provide lives of safety, comfort and dignity to our elders, but in many ways all this crisis has done is exacerbated certain tensions and antagonisms that were already there, barely concealed by the relentless optimism of neoliberal technocrats. Changing these systems will mean rethinking the aging process, and connecting it with broader questions traditionally raised by the fields of critical theory and radical critiques of political economy. Diving right into this project are my guests today, Carroll Estes and Nicholas DiCarlo, here to discuss their recent publication Aging A-Z: Concepts Toward Emancipatory Gerontology (Routledge 2019). Styled as a sort of dictionary, the book has entries for a number of terms you would expect a book like this to have: Ableism, Home Care and Retirement all make appearances. Readers will be surprised, however, by the number of entries that also make appearances: Climate Change, Colonialism, Epistemology, Leninist Strategy and Praxis all make appearances as well. This book then is incredibly broad in scope, and attempts to force readers to realize the ways in which aging is affected that go beyond one’s immediate concern, bringing a new layer of understanding to the phrase: ‘The personal is political.’ Speaking as someone who has spent the entirety of the COVID-crisis working in elderly care, this book was a joyful revelation to flip through, and should be considered critical reading by anyone impacted by aging. Carroll Estes has a long and distinguished career in both academia and activism. She is professor emerita of Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. It was there that she founded the Institute for Health and Aging. She has written numerous books and articles on the politics of aging, including the co-authored The Long Term Care Crisis, which was a 1994 Most Important Book (Choice Magazine). She is also the recipient of numerous academic honors, and is the former president of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the American Society on Aging (ASA) and the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE). Nicholas DiCarlo writes about aging and social policy at the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco. They have a Masters of Social Work, and a private psychotherapy practice in Oakland. 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 Mar 20211h 8min

Why do books and publishing matter to the contemporary history of Britain? In Penguin Books and Political Change: Britain's Meritocratic Moment, 1937–1988 (Manchester UP, 2020), Dean Blackburn, aLecturer in Modern British History at the University of Nottingham, explores Britain in the twentieth century through the story of Penguin’s ‘Specials’. The book charts the shifting social, political, and intellectual context for the publication of the books, looking at key texts as well as offering a broader framework for understanding the social changes that the books shaped, and were shaped by. In addition, the book adds a fresh perspective on the idea of meritocracy, engaging with directly with the current moment’s critical interrogation of that term. Packed with rich and detailed case studies of 50 years of Penguin books, the book will be essential reading across arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the history of the UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

24 Feb 202137min

The medium of cinema emerged during the height of Victorian-era European empires, and as a result, settler colonial imperialism has thematically suffused film for well over a century. In Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World on Film (Routledge, 2020), Drs. Janne Lahti (Academy of Finland Fellow in history, University of Helsinki) and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (Professor of English, Virginia Tech University) bring together a collection of scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine how film has been used to both justify and, in some cases, push against global systems of settler colonial conquest. The essays in the collection are truly global, stretching from Australia to central Asia to Hawaii, the American West, and beyond, and cover film history from the early twentieth century up to the “final frontier” of early twenty first century science fiction films. Together, Lahti and Weaver-Hightower make a strong case for further settler colonial cultural studies as a means of understanding how entertainment can be a force for resistance or a tool for colonial oppression. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

24 Feb 202149min

Is intersectionality a critical social theory? What must intersectionality do to be both critical and a social theory? Must social justice be a guiding normative principle? And what does or should social justice mean in intersectional theory? Patricia Hills Collins explores these questions, and many more, in Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Duke University Press, 2019). Engaging a wide range of thinkers, activists, and traditions, including Classical American Pragmatism, the Frankfurt School, and Ida B. Well-Barnett, Collins helps us to reconsider how we think of intersectionality’s history in order to shape its future. 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 Feb 20211h 4min

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez pens towards decolonial freedom. Her recently published book, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020), uses peripheralized (5) novels, visual/sonic works, poetry, essays, and short stories by diasporic and exiled Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone writers and artists towards “render[ing] legible what these texts offer to subjects who resist ongoing forms of colonialism…” (1). By centering the relationality of Equatorial Guinea, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic from the foundations of Ethnic Studies and Women of Color Feminist methodologies, Figueroa-Vásquez holds space for the different ways Afro-descendant peoples are racialized across the Atlantic while simultaneously attending to the anti-Blackness seemingly endemic to the modern world. But what does it mean to decolonize? For Figueroa-Vásquez, “In the contexts of the literature outlined in the texts, I pose that the lifeblood of these worlds takes the shape of decolonizing diasporas – radical Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and usher in new ways of knowing and being, and interrogate and excavate location and dislocation” (25). By linking the diasporic Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa to the works of Black, Indigenous, and women of color thinkers, the world of decolonial thought emerges through the pages of Decolonizing Diasporas. It is through the literary poetics and artwork made under conditions of destierro – a theory and methodological formulation set out by the author – which become forces that challenge structures of power that give rise to possibilities of subverting colonial mentalities. Decolonizing Diaspora reads like a detailed manual for decolonization specifically designed for Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone diasporic subjects on their journey of reimaging and creating other worlds. Each chapter builds on the next. Recognizing the intimate impacts of dictatorship, occupation, and coloniality of gender opens up sites of resistance (Ch. 1) that require faithful witnessing (Ch. 2). Faithful witnessing is a necessary action in Figueroa-Vásquez’s conception of destierro as a decolonial method (Ch.3) and in turn, reveals the condition for demanding reparations and reparations of the imagination (Ch. 4). With an emphasis on decolonial love and relations across difference, the possibilities of Afro-Atlantic resistance and futurities beyond coloniality come into clear view (Ch.5). Even then, Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez guides us back to the Introduction of the book with her last vignette “Relations Again,” in which she underscores the relationships between Equatorial Guinea and the Latinx Caribbean islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. The reader has no choice but to begin again. Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx 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

18 Feb 20211h 9min

In today’s episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, Sneha Annavarapu talks with Dr. Caterina Fugazzola, Earl S Johnson Instructor in Sociology at the University of Chicago, about her research on the contemporary tongzhi (LGBT) movement in the People’s Republic of China. Dr. Fugazzola briefly discusses her current book project (under contract with Temple University Press) in which she explains how grassroots groups organizing around sexual identity have achieved significant social change—in terms of visibility, social acceptance, and participation—in virtual absence of public protest, and under conditions of tightening governmental control over civil society groups. But, more pertinently to our special series, our guest tells us about what drew her to the project, and the kinds of dilemmas, issues, and opportunities that marked her fieldwork in the region. For instance, she walks us through what it is like to do ethnographic fieldwork on a cruise ship! We also chat about what it means to do ethnographic observations online and why teaching digital ethnographic methods is a welcome opportunity to rethink our very dated presumptions around physical co-presence in fieldwork being desirable to gather more “authentic” data. In all, tune in for a very candid, witty, and insightful conversation around fieldwork and for a dose of Dr. Fugazzola’s vivacious and contagious energy for the affordances of digital ethnography. Learn more about Ethnographic Marginalia here. Dr. Caterina Fugazzola is is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Sociology. Her general interests include social movements, gender and sexuality studies, transnational sociology, and qualitative research methods. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

18 Feb 202144min