Scott Moranda, “The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany” (U. Michigan Press, 2014)
The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new state ...
19 Aug 201746min
Brooke Erin Duffy “(Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media and Aspirational Work” (Yale UP, 2017)
What is life like in the aspirational economy? In (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017) Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant pro...
16 Aug 201738min
Ivan Ascher, “Portfolio Society: A Capitalist Mode of Prediction” (Zone Books, 2016)
Is Marx still relevant? Any social scientist will answer with a resounding yes! In what he refers to as a thought experiment, Ivan Ascher uses Marx to understand the financial market. In Portfolio Soc...
12 Aug 201729min
Sarah Bond, “Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean” (U of Michigan Press, 2016)
Dominant social norms and expectations shape how individuals and their public activities are understood. In Roman antiquity, various shifts influenced the production and dissolution of prejudices towa...
12 Aug 201747min
Ilana Gershon, “Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)
Labor markets are not what they used to be, as Ilana Gershon argues in Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Job seekers are ...
6 Aug 201744min
Alejandra Mancilla, “The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016)
We are accustomed to the thought that individuals facing dire circumstances may rightfully take use of others’ property in order to save their own lives. For example, one thinks it obvious that in ord...
1 Aug 20171h 6min
Bruce O’Neill, “The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order” (Duke University Press, 2017)
In The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017) Bruce O’Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward m...
28 Jul 201721min
Victor Tan Chen, “Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy” (U. California Press, 2015)
We are nearly a decade removed from the start of the Great Recession, and many indicators show that the economy is doing relatively well. But during this economic catastrophe, a significant number of ...
24 Jul 20171h
