Yesterday

Biko Koenig, "Worker Centered: Allyship & Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Worker Centered: Allyship & Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement (Oxford UP, 2024) is a close-to-the-ground, ethnographic narrative of a workplace organizing campaign at a company whose workforce was primarily low wage and immigrant. The book details the overall strategy ... Show More

1h 1m

Mar 10

Jacob Stegenga, "Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

In Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2026), philosopher Jacob Stegenga breaks with the most dominant epistemologies of science to argue that in judging scientific activity, we should focus on its justification, not the achievement ... Show More

48m 20s

Mar 10

Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress

Fifty years of changemaking and reform haven't fixed Congress—what does that reveal about American democracy? In Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress, Maya Kornberg chronicles the efforts of congressional reformers over the last fifty years and document ... Show More

54m 54s

Mar 2023

Roger Biles and Mark H. Rose, "A Good Place to Do Business: The Politics of Downtown Renewal Since 1945" (Temple UP, 2022)

The “Pittsburgh Renaissance,” an urban renewal effort launched in the late 1940s, transformed the smoky rust belt city’s downtown. Working-class residents and people of color saw their neighborhoods cleared and replaced with upscale, white residents and with large corporations ho ... Show More

1h 1m

Apr 2024

Bruce O'Neill, "Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Bruce O'Neill's Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) gets to the bottom of the twenty-first-century city, literally. Underground moves beneath Romania’s capital, Bucharest, to examine how the demands of global accumulation have extended u ... Show More

41m 57s

Oct 2024

Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga, "A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Neighborhoods have the power to form significant parts of our worlds and identities. A neighborhood's reputation, however, doesn't always match up to how residents see themselves or wish to be seen. The distance between residents' desires and their environment can profoundly shap ... Show More

59m 21s

May 2021

Kathryn Garcia on Why New York Needs a Mayor Who Understands How the City Works

Kathryn Garcia, New York City’s former sanitation commissioner and a Democrat currently running in the city’s 2021 mayoral race, discusses innovating by leveraging relationships of trust, holistic thinking as a tool to evolve municipal programs, and her plan to create “the most c ... Show More

32m 44s

Dec 2023

Chhaya Kolavalli, "Well-Intentioned Whiteness: Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

Chhaya Kolavalli's book Well-Intentioned Whiteness: Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City (U Georgia Press, 2023) documents how whiteness can take up space in U.S. cities and policies through well-intentioned progressive policy agendas that support green urb ... Show More

29m 29s

Sep 2025

New York City's Manufacturing Renaissance

New York City's Brooklyn Navy Yard has evolved from a collection of warehouses into a model for 21st-century manufacturing, where climate-tech, smart city solutions, and advanced fabrication companies grow alongside distilleries, designers, and robotics startups. Now, the mission ... Show More

8m 23s

Aug 2024

Miguel Montalva Barba, "White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America: Race, Place, and Space" (Policy Press, 2024)

White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America: Race, Place, and Space (Policy Press, 2024) examines the connections between race, place, and space, and sheds light on how they contribute and maintain racial hierarchies. Dr. Miguel Montalva Barba focuses on the White residents ... Show More

51m 27s

Jan 2024

Emily Brooks, "Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City" (UNC Press, 2023)

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's appr ... Show More

1h 8m

Apr 2025

Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ... Show More

1h 7m

Dec 2024

Carrie M. Lane, "More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

This study of organizing and decluttering professionals helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our time and energy. For a widely dreaded, often mundane task, organizing one’s possessions has taken a surprising hold on our cultural ima ... Show More

38m 43s

Roger Biles and Mark H. Rose, "A Good Pl...