Episodes

  • Danny Sriskandarajah, "Power to the People: Use Your Voice, Change the World" (Headline Press, 2024)

    Danny Sriskandarajah, "Power to the People: Use Your Voice, Change the World" (Headline Press, 2024)
    Sep 17 2024
    Power to the People: Use Your Voice, Change the World (Headline Press, 2024) is Danny Sriskandarajah‘s radical manifesto for change designed to inspire citizen action around the world. The book presents a blueprint for how we, as individuals, can make a difference through greater community engagement and how we can deliver a society that works for the many and not the few. He speaks to voter apathy and a growing sense that elections no longer matter, with politicians and institutions too focused on short-term issues to grapple with complex global problems such as climate change, rising inequality, and digital disruption. Yet the book is also filled with inspiring real-life examples of citizen power in action, ranging from a volunteer-run repair café in Danny's local suburb to Avaaz's successful campaigns to tackle endemic corruption in Brazil. From public ownership of social media spaces to democratizing share ownership and from re-energizing co-operatives to creating a people's chamber at the United Nations, this campaigning book has a mission to make us reclaim our power as citizens of the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    53 mins
  • Karl Marx, "Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Karl Marx, "Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Sep 16 2024
    Karl Marx (1818-1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx's lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital (Princeton UP, 2024) is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx's thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source. For Marx, our global economic system is relentlessly driven by "value"--to produce it, capture it, trade it, and, most of all, to increase it. Lifespans are shortened under the demand for ever-greater value. Days are lengthened, work is intensified, and the division of labor deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannize our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonization, and enslavement. With a foreword by Wendy Brown and an afterword by William Clare Roberts, this is a critical edition of Capital for our time, one that faithfully preserves the vitality and directness of Marx's German prose and renders his ideas newly relevant to modern readers. An audiobook narrated by Simon Vance is available 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
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    36 mins
  • Melissa Osborne, "Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Melissa Osborne, "Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Sep 11 2024
    Why do people go to college? In Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility (U Chicago Press, 2024), Melissa Osborne, an associate professor at Western Washington University, explores the experiences of students from low income and first-generation backgrounds who attend elite universities in the USA. The book offers a vital intervention for our understanding of the role of higher education and its connection to a range of social inequalities. It captures the sometimes difficult and ambivalent experiences of students from outside the traditional demographics for elite institutions. The analysis offers a nuanced understanding of the process of social mobility, showing the struggles of students and institutions, and the limits of individually-focused approaches to social change. Rich with ethnographic and qualitative data, as well as a powerful set of ideas for elite institutional change, the book is essential reading for educators everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    48 mins
  • Decolonial Muslim Political Activism and Thought in Britain

    Decolonial Muslim Political Activism and Thought in Britain
    Sep 11 2024
    Hizer Mir in conversation with Yahya Birt who speaks on decolonial Muslim political activism and thought in Britain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    27 mins
  • Josh Cowen, "The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers" (Harvard Education Press, 2024)

    Josh Cowen, "The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers" (Harvard Education Press, 2024)
    Sep 10 2024
    School vouchers are often framed as a way to help students and families by providing choice, but evidence shows that vouchers have a negative impact on educational outcomes. In The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers (Harvard Education Press, 2024), Josh Cowen describes voucher programs as the product of decades of work by influential conservatives and wealthy activists to support a vision of America where education is privatized and removed from the public sphere. Far from realizing the purported goal of educational equity, Cowen cites multiple research studies that conclude that voucher programs return poor academic outcomes, including lower test scores on state exams, especially among students who are at greater academic risk because of their race, their religion, their gender identity, or their family's income. The books traces the history of vouchers from it's initial proposal as part of conservative economic policy through its adoption as a method for families to resist school desegregation. Since then, the issue of education "freedom" has been a part of an ongoing culture war waged through policymaking, legislation, and litigation. Cowen describes the advocacy network that funds research and promotion of vouchers as a way to attain ideological goals related to conservative social policy, not educational outcomes. Recommended reading: East of Eden by John Steinbeck Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    42 mins
  • Are We Experiencing a Crisis of Culture?

    Are We Experiencing a Crisis of Culture?
    Sep 10 2024
    In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey spoke with Olivier Roy, professor of social and political sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and author of The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms (Oxford University Press, 2024). Roy argues that neoliberal globalization is dissolving not just subordinate cultures but also dominant ones by undermining the tacit understanding that undergird cultures and demanding that those norms be made explicit. Moreover, Roy discusses how identity politics has come to supplant the norms once implicit in a broader culture, undermining the possibility that people know how to live in society at all. These development reflect the decline of utopian dreams – for better or worse – and the difficulties involved in maintaining social bonds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    41 mins
  • Red Chidgey and Joanne Garde-Hansen, "Museums, Archives and Protest Memory" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

    Red Chidgey and Joanne Garde-Hansen, "Museums, Archives and Protest Memory" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
    Sep 9 2024
    In Museums, Archives and Protest Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Red Chidgey and Joanne Garde-Hansen address the emergence of ‘protest memory’ as a powerful contemporary shaper of ideas and practices in culture, media and heritage domains. Directly focused on the role of museum and archive practitioners in protest memory curation, they make a compelling contribution to our understanding of how social movements and activist experiences are publicly remembered and activated for social and environmental justice. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    59 mins
  • Jess Whatcott, "Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics" (Duke UP, 2024)

    Jess Whatcott, "Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics" (Duke UP, 2024)
    Sep 7 2024
    In Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (Duke UP, 2024), Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal that state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization were done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called menace to the future. Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    1 hr