Helen Glew, “Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900-1955” (Manchester UP, 2016)

“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.” When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, they saw contributions from political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and engineers, but found that “the distinctive and necessary contribution of the humanities as such to this conversation” had “largely gone unarticulated” (5). The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale University Press, 2013) is a wide ranging, deeply researched, and compellingly argued corrective to that lacuna that places humanistic thought, and in particular literary history, in complex and satisfying conversation with the disciplines working to theorize surveillance for our moment. Arguing that “the ultimate target of all surveillance activity: the individual self” is best approached as a knot of questions rather than a stable given, Rosen and Santesso offer an account of “the ways that conceptions of selfhood have changed over time” (8). Working across modes and genres, their argument spans from the early modern period to the present day, along the way challenging current discussions of the role of literature in culture and the myth of interpretive competence that lies behind much thinking about surveillance. Through careful examination of diverse texts, from Locke’s Essay on Toleration through Orwell’s oeuvre and Tolkien’s novels to Enemy of the State and other films from our own era, Rosen and Santesso demonstrate that the “hermeneutic problems of surveillance are also literary problems” (13). Engaging thinkers who have attempted to grapple with the power of narrative to shape our lives–Swift, Bentham, Mill, Weber, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, Baudrillard, and others–Rosen and Santesso essentially set out to rethink modernity, exploring “the effects that fiction has on reality,” and finally offering us a new way of understanding how and why we watch and read our neighbors (9). Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

9 Feb 20171h 8min

How do we do sociology in the digital era? In Digital Sociologies (Policy Press, 2016) Jessie Daniels, Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, Karen Gregory a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, have brought together a wealth of scholarship to explore the challenge of digital. The book engages with a range of theoretical questions, including challenging the digital/traditional sociology binary, the role of institutions, digital’s impact on eduction, the racialized practices of Twitch, the meaning of motherhood, the quantified self, the question of the body, and the digital sociological imagination. The eclectic range of scholars, offering perspectives from across the academic life course and deploying examples from across the world, create an important intervention into our understanding of this emerging, and perhaps as a result of this book, established, field of study. Ultimately the book is a call for a new community of scholars to engage with this most important element of contemporary life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

9 Feb 201731min

As the first substantive account of the birthplace of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Robyn C. Spencer’s The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Duke University Press, 2016) rewrites elitist accounts that narrowly defined the party by its male leaders and masculine militarism. With a panoramic and critical lens on the role that gender politics played in effecting and affecting the Revolution – an internal and external activist project of overcoming oppression – Spencer’s organisational history weaves the urban parameters of Oakland, California, into a national and international narrative of racial consciousness. A book that Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams, has said “tears down myths and distortions,” The Revolution Has Come traverses the BPP’s uncritical embrace of heteropatriachy in self-defense tactics, the dialectic relationship of state oppression and Black Women’s leadership of the party, the role of community programs in reshaping notions of masculinity and the personal toll of sexual double-standards in unspoken dating rules. Using archival and interview research that includes artwork, wiretap transcripts, poems, trial documents and the BPP’s newsletter, Spencer provides an example of historical scholarship that forefronts the voices and mouthpieces of the BPP to creates a unique intimacy with the “coming of age” of the men and women who set the groundwork for current iterations of Black resistance. In the words of Spencer herself, “this book is right on time,” and is necessary reading for activists and scholars alike who are attempting to define the gendered assumptions and history of strength, self-care and endurance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

1 Feb 201748min

What is the role of evidence in the policy process? In The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence (Routledge, 2016), Justin Parkhurst, Associate Professor of Global Health Policy at the London School of Economics, maps the history of evidence based policy making and offers a new model for the good governance of appropriate evidence in policy. The book is both agenda setting and a detailed and insightful overview of evidence in policy. Moreover, the range of examples shows the importance of understanding the norms and values shaping politics and thus setting the circumstances for evidence use. In the complex and contested current context for evidence in policy, the book makes an important intervention charting the possibility of a more transparent form of decision making and a more evidence informed approach to policy. The book is available as an open access version here.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

30 Jan 201750min

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. Her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) centers the role of African Americans in ending slavery in the US by detailing the actions they took, the ideas they generated, and the ways they influenced white abolitionists. Acts of Black rebellion including the Haitian Revolution, escapes from bondage and slave revolts shaped the analysis and trajectory of the movement. Drawing on extensive archival research that spans centuries and nations, Sinha paints a complex picture of the transnational and radical movement to end slavery in the US from the 1500s to the Civil War. Previous historical scholarship on abolitionism focused on white participants in the “second wave” of abolitionism, depicting them as paternalistic middle-class reformers who believed in capitalism and imperialism. In contrast, Sinha treats the black and white streams of the abolition movement together, details the “first wave” of organized abolitionist activity as well as the second, and outlines the radical visions of democracy held by many abolitionists. These advocates linked their opposition to slavery to support of the labor movement, utopian socialism and women’s rights and questioned imperialism and market society. The robust movement to end slavery involved men and women, black and white, free, enslaved and formerly enslaved. Despite sometimes bitter disagreements over goals, strategy and tactics, abolitionists found ways to work together. The Slave’s Cause has been reviewed in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and numerous scholarly journals. It was also named to the National Book Awards Longlist for 2016, and as one of Stephen L. Carter’s’ top three “Great History Books of 2016.” Isabell Moore is a PhD Student in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social movements in the 20th century and she is involved in activism for racial, gender, economic and queer justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

6 Jan 20171h 5min

How should we understand the interwar years in Britain? In Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (University of Chicago Press, 2016) Matt Houlbrook, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham,tells the fascinating and complex story of Netley Lucas, a character whose fragmented and complex story offers clues to the social changes of the period. Netley’s career as confidence trickster, fraudulent journalist and editor, and creator of counterfeit royal biographies, forms the basis of an engagement with anxieties over class boundaries, the reassertion of social norms, and the nature of the historical source. The book is resplendent with a complex cast of characters and offers a rich portrait of the period. Houlbrook raises the question of how to tell the story of the trickster, if it is possible to capture a life of half-truths and duplicity, and the struggle of historical practice, ultimately causing us to question the possibility of history itself. The book is a fascinating tale, as well as being of interest across the humanities and to the general reader. 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 Dec 201642min

Born just five years after the abolition of slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois died the night before Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington in 1963. In the many decades between, W. E. B. Du Bois contributed as much to the political and social advancement of African Americans as any other figure in history. W. E. B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line (Pluto Press, 2016) offers an accessible and brief introduction to the life and times of W. E. B. Du Bois. It takes in his many achievements, such as being the first black man to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University and co-founding the NAACP, and sets them alongside the seismic political changes of the twentieth century many of which Du Bois weighed in on, including anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa. The author reveals a Du Bois who was focused not just on the immediate question of African American rights, but also took up the question of socialism, the rise of communism, and the complicated interrelationship of capitalism, poverty, and racism. The picture that emerges here is of a powerfully original thinker, fiercely engaged with the political, economic, and social questions of his day never letting up in his struggle to change the world for the better. Dr. Bill V. Mullen is a professor of American Studies at Purdue University, and teaches courses in African American Literature and Culture, American Studies, Working-Class Literature, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Literature. His previous written works include Afro-Orientalism, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics 1935-1946 and Un-American: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution. In addition to his current tenure at Purdue University, Dr. Mullen also has been a Fulbright lecturer at Wuhan University in the Peoples Republic of China. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

17 Dec 201652min

What is the future for Arts and Humanities in Europe? The podcast discusses these questions with Paul Benneworth, one of the authors, along with Magnus Gulbrandsen and Ellen Hazelkorn, of The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research (Palgrave, 2016). Dr. Benneworth, from the University of Twente’s Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, was part of a pan-European project to consider the impact of Impact and the way Arts and Humanities narrate their public value, research which was the basis for the book. The book draws on a wealth of empirical and theoretical material, including comparative case studies from Ireland, Norway, and The Netherlands. The comparative approach allows the book to contextualise engagements with science policy, the role and purpose of the university, public value, and innovation, to offer a new vision of Arts and Humanities research that avoids instrumentalisation. The book is important and essential reading for all interested in the future of higher education and research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

13 Dec 201644min