New Books In Critical Theory

According to most experts, boys have more trouble in schools than girls. Further, African-American boys have even more trouble than, say, white boys. What to do? According to some, one possible solution to the latter problem is all-Black male schools, or "ABMSs." In her new book In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Keisha Lindsay critiques ABMSs from a feminist perspective and has some helpful things to say about how to educate young African-Americans generally.Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode, I talked with Dr. Jeong-Hee Kim about her new book, Understanding Narrative Inquiry: The Crafting and Analysis of Stories as Research (Sage Publications, 2016). The book offers a comprehensive overview of the theoretical foundation and practical guidance of narrative inquiry. It embodies narrative thinking by seamlessly weaving together epistemological theories, methodological discussions, and personal stories. Seasoned with Dr. Kim’s unique sense of humor, Understanding Narrative Inquiry is highly accessible and at the same time extremely insightful. A highlight of the interview will be Dr. Kim’s discussion on how to strike a balance between aesthetic play and rigorous social research in narrative studies. It is also helpful to hear her explanation of the various ways researchers can think with theories in crafting their stories. The book has received the 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from the Narrative Research Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Associ

Though early American labor organizers agitated for the eight-hour workday on the grounds that they were entitled to “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will,” free time as a political good has received little attention from politicians and political philosophers. In her book, Free Time (Princeton University Press, 2018), Julie L. Rose explains that this neglect arises from the mistaken characterization of free time as a matter of personal choice and preference. The book instead argues that not only should we understand free time as a resource that is required for the pursuit of one’s chosen ends and for the exercise of formal liberties and opportunities, but also that it is a resource to which citizens are entitled on the basis of the widely held liberal principles of individual freedom and equality. The claim that the fair distribution of free time is required for justice serves as grounds for the book to interrogate a whole host of policy choices—including maximum work

What can a researcher do to promote social justice? A conventional image of a researcher describes her staying in the ivory tower for most of the time, producing papers filled with academic jargons periodically, and occasionally providing consultations for policymakers. In Just Research in Contentious Times: Widening the Methodological Imagination (Teachers College Press, 2018), renowned critical psychologist Michelle Fine challenges us to imagine social research radically differently. According to Fine, if a researcher’s social justice work was only targeted at top politicians of this era, she probably would feel our era had never been darker. Fine argues that social research can do far more than that: It could create new solidarities across multiple marginalized groups, democratize the knowledge production process, disrupt the reproduction of oppressive social structure, and ultimately, sow the seed of positive social changes.  Just Research in Contentious Times documents Fine’s long-term grounded research

Television started as a dream of nineteenth-century science fiction. It took its place in the twentieth-century home, and became a fixture of family life and a transformative cultural force. Today, televisions are both less visible and more present than ever, thanks to screens on our walls and in our pockets. Chris Horrocks traces the cultural history of the television set in The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television (Reaktion Press, 2017). Horrocks is a filmmaker and professor in the School of Critical Studies and Creative Industries at Kingston University in London. His previous books include Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual (Berghahn, 2012), and Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality (Icon, 2000).Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at the University of Glasgow‘s Centre for Cultural Policy Research, explores this question by focusing on the idea of talent. The book offers a rich theoretical and empirical engagement with the contemporary television landscape, giving detailed analysis of the history of talent development, as well as the impact of digital and new platforms. The shifting landscape of talent, television, and the infrastructure of cultural intermediaries is illustrated with key case studies, ultimately showing how the winners and losers of the talent industry map onto existing inequalities. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary media.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Dancing with the Stars to the high-profile airport abandonment of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev by his American adoptive parents in April 2010, popular representations of post-Soviet immigrants in America span the gamut of romantic anti-Communist origin stories to horror stories of transnational adoption of children from Russia. In her latest book, The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States (New York University Press, 2018), Claudia Sadowski-Smith analyzes a plethora of sources from reality tv shows to memoirs and interviews to examine how post-Soviet migrants represent idealized examples of immigrant assimilation and upward mobility in the United States. Sadowski-Smith’s work adds critical analysis to both public and academic American immigration discourses. She evaluates how these migrants have access to a white racial identity often denied to Latino/a and Asian immigrants, how modes of migration impact post-Soviet migrants access to upward mobilit

How have academics been represented in children’s books? In Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, tells the story of the professor in children’s books since 1850. The book details the history of highly problematic depictions of academics, usually as kindly old men, baffled buffoons, or evil madmen, depictions that exclude those who are not white, often middle class origin, men. Terras’ work is a great example for digital humanities scholarship, offering a powerful case for new methods to answer crucial questions of equality and diversity for humanities scholars and across universities more generally. Alongside the analysis, Terras has published an anthology, The Professor in Children’s Literature, including some of the works discussed in the book. Both Picture-Book Professors and the accompanying anthology are open access and free to rea

How does postcolonial theory and the work of Freud help us understand trauma? In The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Fordham University Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Yusin, Associate Professor of English and Philosophy at Drexel University, explores both of these approaches for thinking trauma in the the context of a range of historical examples. The book offers a detailed engagement with a host of theorists and theoretical positions from Freud and the theory of psychoanalysis, through postcolonial theories of trauma, to Derrida’s political ideas. The extensive discussion of theory is placed in the context of Rwanda, the memorialisation of genocide, and the partition of India and Pakistan. In the current political context the book offers urgent insights into trauma, and will be of interest across the humanities. More information about the Kigali Genocide Memorial is available here along with the organization that supports widows of the genocide.Learn more about your ad choices. Visi

In The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism (West Virginia University Press, 2018), Tim Jelfs argues that debates about the nature of stuff—its moral valence, its spiritual value, and its status as either “goods” or “garbage”—have been at the heart of American cultural discourse for centuries, and reached a particularly fevered pitch in the 1980s. Bookended by Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech in 1979 and George H. W. Bush’s 1989 inaugural address, both of which lamented the apparent spiritual failings of materialism while at the same time avoiding a full condemnation of the same, Jelfs frames the 1980s as the “Age of Neoliberalism.” This period saw the resurgence of market-based responses to a series of crises, including oil price shocks and inflation. In this context, Jelfs examines texts as wide-ranging as political speeches, films, photography and other visual arts, and novels, using them to explore the particular nuances of American cultural discours

Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers are anthropologists who have an interest in studying film for its value in a way to view the world. In Violence’s Fabled Experiment (August Verlag, 2018), they examine three filmmakers: Werner Herzog, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Each artist is known for interesting, but controversial films that feature violence in different ways. In the book, Richard and Todd both critique and praise the importance of each and their methods and subjects. Richard and Todd are co-authors of the book, Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible. I interviewed them previously for this book in 2017.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I left the kitchen radio on while reading Jacqueline Rose‘s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) in preparation for this interview. It was June. Putting the book down for a minute to get a glass of water, I heard a news report that the children of refugee women were being removed from them at the American border. Rose is nothing if not prescient in her thinking and in this book, perhaps especially so. While most of us learn what we think “alla nachträghlichkeit” (after the fact), her mind has the capacity to trip the light fantastic. I follow her writing to discover what I won’t let myself know. Perhaps she has more access than most to the realm of the preconscious. It seems to be the case. This wide-ranging book (Rose is an exemplary literary critic and feminist theorist so she pulls from multiple intellectual arenas) is largely about motherhood and its enemies. She examines “mother” as a signifier demonstrating how it functions as a repository for blame and misogynis

How can human rights campaigns function in consumer and celebrity society? In The Mass Appeal of Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Joel Pruce, assistant professor in political science at the University of Dayton, explores this question through the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. Rich with examples and detailed histories of the evolution of both human rights campaigns and celebrity and consumerist practices, the book challenges us to rethink contemporary political movements. Including critical discussions of Amnesty International, Save Darfur, Paris Hilton, Pussy Riot, and Live8, the book is essential reading for anyone concerned with how to change the world for the better, rather than just for the benefit of celebrity and consumer capitalism.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the last few decades, questions relating to Islam’s compatibility with liberal secular democracy, or the question of why Islam remains incompatible with Western liberal norms of thought and politics have generated considerable commentary in both scholarly and journalistic communities. Among the central assumptions driving such compatibility talk relates to Islam’s allegedly inherent incapacity for critique, a virtue often heralded as a signature achievement and characteristic of liberal secularism. Irfan Ahmad’s Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) represents a devastating indictment of this dominant liberal assumption that Islam is inimical to critique. Turning this assumption on its head, Ahmad combines historical, textual, and ethnographic methods to argue that critique is and has always been central to Muslim intellectual thought and lived practice. The distinctive feature of this book is the way it fluctuates the camer

Nick Hubble’s The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) is a thrilling, and timely challenge to the orthodoxy that proletarian and high-modernist literatures ought to be understood in opposition to one another. Featuring writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, D. H. Lawrence, John Sommerfield, H. G. Wells, and Walter Brierley, this study creates new critical space that reveals the modernism in the proletarian, and the proletarian in the modernist. It foregrounds ideas of intersubjectivity, intersectional struggles, and emancipatory discourses that rely on some way of relating the ‘I’ to the ‘We’. Covering the critical discourses that have shaped our understanding of these literary movements in the UK since the interwar period, Hubble brings his critical intervention to bear on the contemporary historical moment, and asks how the proletarian answer to the modernist question might inform our political and cultural imaginations as a neoliberal consensus co

Historically ubiquitous at least since the 15th century and integral to the rise and consolidation of capitalism, land dispossession has re-emerged as a hot button issue for governments, industries, social movements and researchers. In his first book Dispossession Without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (Oxford University Press 2018), Michael Levien explores the causes and consequences of India’s land wars in the contemporary neoliberal period. He distinguishes between dispossession in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence (developmentalist) and dispossession in its present-day iteration (neoliberal) as fundamentally different “regimes”. How these regimes of dispossession – their motivations, methods and forms – interact with specific agrarian milieus reveals the mechanics of dispossession as “a social relation of coercive redistribution” in particular contexts and time periods. A longitudinal case study of a village called Rajpura in weste

As you’ll hear in this interview with Steven Stoll, his latest book Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017) is “really a book about capitalism.” Specifically, it’s about how the people of the southern mountains––meaning, the area between southern Pennsylvania and southern West Virginia––lost their land. Though the book focuses on Appalachia, Stoll presents readers with vivid confrontations between peasant economies and capitalism in the Atlantic World over the last four centuries to support his contentions. Stoll spends a lot of the book describing a time when people lived in the southern mountains without a dependence on money. That was possible when people could garden and draw from a rich ecological base, like a forest where they could grow rye, for example. (Speaking of rye, the third chapter offers a splendid reinterpretation of the Whiskey Rebellion by renaming it the Rye Rebellion––you’ll have to pick up the book to find out why.) That ecological base, Stoll argues, was compromised

This week we met Prof. Kurt Dopfer (Universität St Gallen, Switzerland) to talk about Modern Evolutionary Economics: An Overview (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a book he co-authored with eight other economists. Kurt attended in Nice the 30th annual edition of the EAEPE conference, the sponsor of the Economics channel at NBN. The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy is the scholarly home for the authors of this book. We tried to contextualize evolutionary economics within heterodox economics and to delineate the history of this approach to economics thanks to this book and the great and long career of Prof. Dopfer. The book is described by Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University) as ‘An excellent summary of what has been achieved in the field of evolutionary economics. I would hope that this book would be read by scholars steeped in ‘neoclassical’ economics and make them appreciate the power and potential of this scholarship.’ S. Metcalfe (University of Manchester) commented tha

How should we understand disability? In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Dr. Shelley Tremain explores this complex question from the perspective of feminist philosophy, using the work of Michel Foucault. The book is a fascinating critique of much contemporary philosophy and policy, providing a detailed, but easy to follow overview of key works in feminism and in Foucault’s thought. The book places these discussions in the context of inequalities within academic philosophy itself, drawing attention to the marginalisation of key questions of disability and gender from contemporary philosophy as it is currently organised. Overall the book is important reading not only for disability studies and philosophy, but anyone wanting to understand how society disadvantages difference. You can read more of Dr. Tremain’s work, and key debates on philosophy and disability as part of the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog.Learn more about your ad choices. Visi

‘Create two, three—many Freuds!’ That, Dagmar Herzog shows, was the forgotten slogan of the Cold War. With Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Prof. Herzog carries forward the groundbreaking research program into the politics of desire that already brought us Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany and Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and The Future of American Politics. The book offers fresh readings of the work of such titanic (and sadly misunderstood) figures as Karen Horney, Robert Stoller, Félix Guattari and Konrad Lorenz—and it will change the way you think about trauma, libido and the New Left. Our conversation focused primarily on the radical currents in Cold War psychoanalysis and what happens when the world comes crashing through the bedroom window. David Gutherz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research centers on the history of the human scien