Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Why we need to write about difficult topics.
Four American towns trying to save themselves.
The structural processes behind poverty.
A discussion of the book The Fight to Save the Town.
Today’s book is: The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (Avid Reader, 2022), by Mich ... Show More
Yesterday
Terry Williams, "Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel r ... Show More
27m 9s
Yesterday
Lesly-Marie Buer, "RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky" (Haymarket, 2020)
Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting how women, families, and communities cope with generational systems of oppression. Prescription opioids are associated wi ... Show More
44m 56s
Yesterday
George Fisher, "Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)
George Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America’s Drug War, with Oxford University Press. George has been teaching and writing in the realms of evidence, prosecuti ... Show More
1h 3m
Aug 2023
Travis Holloway, "How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene" (Stanford UP, 2022)
the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster.
The irony of ... Show More
51m 14s
May 2017
Kate Daloz, “We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America” (PublicAffairs, 2016)
Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America (PublicAffairs, 2016) traces the path taken by many children of suburbia in the 1960s across the country ... Show More
54m 30s
Jul 2021
Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students: A Conversation with Lisa Nunn
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an ex ... Show More
52m 57s
Feb 2024
Miami Ain’t No Sanctuary City
Welcome home, y’all! We are back with episode 4 of the Native Land Pod, co-hosted by Andrew Gillum, Angela Rye, and Tiffany Cross. They kick off the conversation with an exploration of Sanctuary City policies, dissecting the economic realities and social responsibilities at play ... Show More
1h 51m