Episodes

  • Sarah Ball, "Behavioural Public Policy in Australia: How an Idea Became Practice" (Routledge, 2022)

    Sarah Ball, "Behavioural Public Policy in Australia: How an Idea Became Practice" (Routledge, 2022)
    Oct 22 2024
    Max Weber once remarked that bureaucracy’s power comes from its massing of expert and factual knowledges. It amasses this power, in part, by keeping much of its expertise and factual knowledge from public view. Only occasionally does someone with access reveal more of what’s going on behind the scenes, and how it might matter for our thinking about how facts are produced and contested, and what kinds of facts matter to policy makers and why. Sarah Ball is one such person. In Behavioural Public Policy in Australia: How an Idea Became Practice (Routledge, 2024), the former public servant draws on interviews and ethnographic observation to chart the making of a behavioural public policy unit in the Australian public service, asking — and answering — questions about how the unit sought to make facts and establish expertise, and how the many meanings of behavioural insights were contested and accommodated along the way. If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in others in the series on the interpretation of policy, like Sarah Wiebe talking about Everyday Exposure, and more recently, José Ciro Martínez on States of Subsistence. Sarah recommends Informality in Policymaking by Lindsey Garner-Knapp and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies
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    43 mins
  • Jane Lydon, "Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land?" (Routledge, 2021)

    Jane Lydon, "Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land?" (Routledge, 2021)
    Oct 15 2024
    Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land? (Routledge, 2021) explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. The anti-slavery campaign was deeply entwined with the administration of the empire and its diverse peoples, as well as the radical changes demanded by industrialization and rapid social change in Britain. Abolition posed problems to which colonial expansion provided the answer, intimately linking the end of slavery to systematic colonization and Indigenous dispossession. By defining slavery in the Caribbean as the opposite of freedom, a lasting impact of abolition was to relegate other forms of oppression to lesser status, or to deny them. Through the shared concerns of abolitionists, slave-owners, and colonizers, a plastic ideology of 'free labour' was embedded within post-emancipation imperialist geopolitics, justifying the proliferation of new forms of unfree labour and defining new racial categories. The celebration of abolition has overshadowed post-emancipation continuities and transformations of slavery that continue to shape the modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies
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    1 hr and 30 mins
  • Gary Mucciaroni, "Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

    Gary Mucciaroni, "Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945" (U Toronto Press, 2024)
    Aug 24 2024
    Since the mid-nineteenth century, public officials, reformers, journalists, and other elites have referred to “the labour question.” The labour question was rooted in the system of wage labour that spread throughout much of Europe and its colonies and produced contending classes as industrialization unfolded. Answers to the Labour Question explores how the liberal state responded to workers’ demands that employers recognize trade unions as their legitimate representatives in their struggle for compensation and control over the workplace. In Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945 (University of Toronto Press, 2024), Dr. Gary Mucciaroni examines five Anglophone nations – Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States – whose differences are often overlooked in the literature on political economy, which lumps them together as liberal, “market-led” economies. Despite their many shared characteristics and common historical origins, these nations’ responses to the labour question diverged dramatically. Dr. Mucciaroni identifies the factors that explain why these nations developed such different industrial relations regimes and how the paths each nation took to the adoption of its regime reflected a different logic of institutional change. Drawing on newspaper accounts, parliamentary debates, and personal memoirs, among other sources, Answers to the Labour Question aims to understand the variety of state responses to industrial unrest and institutional change beyond the domain of industrial relations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Karen Patel, "Craft as a Creative Industry" (Routledge, 2024)

    Karen Patel, "Craft as a Creative Industry" (Routledge, 2024)
    Aug 20 2024
    How can we diversify the creative industries? In Craft as a Creative Industry (Routledge, 2024), Karen Patel, an Associate Professor in Media and Director of the Centre for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts (CEDIA) at Birmingham City University, examines the craft industries of Australia and the UK to show new ways of organising these crucial parts of the economy. The book uses case studies and lived experience from women makers of colour, situated within the history of context of both countries’ craft sectors, to demonstrate the scale of inequalities in craft and the need for change. A compact and easy to read intervention into current debates, the book is essential reading across creative industries, as well as 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/australian-and-new-zealand-studies
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    52 mins
  • The Dragon and the Nguzunguzu

    The Dragon and the Nguzunguzu
    Aug 19 2024
    Nguzunguzu is the traditional figurehead which was formerly affixed to canoes in the Solomon Islands. In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to Rodolfo Maggio, a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki about his book project on the dragon and the nguzunguzu, namely the relationship between China and the Soloman Islands. The dragon and the nguzunguzu are taken as symbols of, respectively, Chinese and Solomon Islands identity. This essentializing maneuver is complicated by the appreciation of the two faces of both the dragon and the nguzunguzu. Nguzunguzu are traditionally used to adorn canoes: they can be either belligerent or peaceful, depending on the relationship between those who paddle and those who see them coming. Similarly, in Chinese folklore, dragons can bring prosperity or destruction, depending on their relationships with the humans who encounter them. Nguzunguzu and dragons are thus similar as symbols of supernatural forces whose potential can concretize as either propitious or nefarious, depending on their relationships with humans. Maggio encountered a dragon-nguzunguzu hybrid during his fieldwork in 2024. As explicitly phrased by the carver, the hybrid represents his attempt to localize China. This inspires Maggio’s book project, encouraging him to use this hybrid figure as an entry point to offer a grassroot perspective on the interactions between Chinese and Solomon Islanders. Rodolfo Maggio is a social anthropologist of moral and economic values in the Asia-Pacific region. At the University of Helsinki, he is working on an ERC-funded project “properties of units and standards”. Previously, Maggio had an episode on Kiribati in the Chinese Pacific and an episode on Sino-Pacific Relations with Nordic Asia Podcast that might interest listeners. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies
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    20 mins
  • Mavis Kerinaiua and Laura Rademaker, "Tiwi Story: Turning History Downside Up" (NewSouth, 2023)

    Mavis Kerinaiua and Laura Rademaker, "Tiwi Story: Turning History Downside Up" (NewSouth, 2023)
    Aug 18 2024
    Tiwi Story: Turning History Downside Up (New SouthPress, 2023) is a groundbreaking work of history that spans from Deep Time to the present. Applying a range of historical methodologies, it centres Tiwi oral histories and visits key episodes that include the creation stories of the islands, trade relationships with Macassans and Japanese, the failed British colonisation attempt of the 1820s, Tiwi experiences of World War II, and the enduring influence of the mission founded by Catholic priest Francis Xavier Gsell. The Tiwi Islands are situated north of Darwin at the outer reaches of Northern Australia, but the accounts shared in this book offer vital lessons for makers of First Peoples history across the region. Women’s experience, intercultural relations and religious conversion all become ripe for reappraisal in this rich, multi-vocal work. In this interview, co-editors and authors Mavis Kerinaiua and Dr Laura Rademaker talk to Dr Alexandra Roginski about the ‘canon’ of Tiwi stories, book making as community process, and the place of the work within a wider project of recording and strengthening Tiwi culture. Interview biographies Mavis Kerinaiua is a Tiwi historian, educator and researcher. She has contributed to historical exhibits at the Northern Territory Library and the Patakijiyali Museum and worked as a researcher for the Australian National University and Flinders University. She has worked in cultural liaison for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and in education on Bathurst Island. Creator of the Turtuni Framework for research practice, Kerinaiua is an expert in culturally responsive and appropriate research. Laura Rademaker is a historian of Aboriginal Australia and religion with a PhD from the Australian National University and an interest in oral history. She is the author of Found in Translation (University of Hawai‘i), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize and awarded the Australian Historical Association’s Hancock Prize. Dr Alexandra Roginski is a historian, writer and heritage practitioner based on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. She is the author of two books: Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding Lives in a Museum Mystery (Monash University Publishing, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies
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    48 mins
  • Ebony Nilsson, "Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

    Ebony Nilsson, "Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
    Jul 24 2024
    Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Ebony Nilsson explores the lives of left-wing Soviet refugees who fled the Cold War to settle in Australia, and uncovers how they adjusted to life under surveillance in the West. As Cold War tensions built in the postwar years, many of these refugees happily resettled in the West as model refugees, proof of capitalist countries' superiority. But for a few, this was not the case. Displaced Comrades provides an account of these Cold War misfits, those refugees who fled East for West, but remained left-wing or pro-Soviet. Drawing on interviews, government records and surveillance dossiers from multiple continents this book explores how these refugees' ideas took root in new ways. As these radical ideas drew suspicion from western intelligence these everyday lives were put under surveillance, shadowed by the persistent threat of espionage. With unprecedented access to intelligence records, Nilsson focuses on how a number of these left-wing refugees adjusted to life in Australia, opening up a previously invisible segment of postwar migration history, and offering a new exploration of life as a Soviet 'enemy alien' in the West. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies
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    40 mins
  • Alfred Peredo Flores, "Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962" (Cornell UP, 2023)

    Alfred Peredo Flores, "Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962" (Cornell UP, 2023)
    Jul 14 2024
    In Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Alfred Peredo Flores argues that the US occupation of the island of Guåhan (Guam), one of the most heavily militarised islands in the western Pacific Ocean, was enabled by a process of settler militarism. During World War II and the Cold War, Guåhan was a launching site for both covert and open US military operations in the region, a strategically significant role that turned Guåhan into a crucible of US overseas empire. In 1962, the US Navy lost the authority to regulate all travel to and from the island, and a tourist economy eventually emerged that changed the relationship between the Indigenous CHamoru population and the US military, further complicating the process of settler colonialism on the island. The US military occupation of Guåhan was based on a co-constitutive process that included CHamoru land dispossession, discursive justifications for the remaking of the island, the racialization of civilian military labour, and the military's policing of interracial intimacies. Within a narrative that emphasises CHamoru resilience, resistance, and survival, Dr. Flores uses a working class labour analysis to examine how the militarization of Guåhan was enacted by a minority settler population to contribute to the US government's hegemonic presence in Oceania. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies
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    50 mins