World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham UP, 2020) recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world t ... Show More
Today
Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)
Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in t ... Show More
1h 1m
Today
Mary Edwards, "Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his frie ... Show More
1h 47m
Aug 2023
Jenna N. Hanchey, "The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO" (Duke UP, 2023)
In The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO (Duke UP, 2023), Jenna N. Hanchey examines the decolonial potential emerging from processes of ruination and collapse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tanzania at an internationally fu ... Show More
1 h
Oct 2024
Michael J. Thompson, "Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism" (Routledge, 2024)
In Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism (Routledge, 2024), Michael J. Thompson reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic critici ... Show More
58m 50s
Nov 2023
Charles S. Maier, "The Project-State and Its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries" (Harvard UP, 2023)
We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intell ... Show More
50m 49s
Sep 2024
Jack Palmer, "Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
Jack Palmer’s Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) invites us to reconsider a figure who sociology thought it knew well. Presenting Bauman as occupying an ‘exilic’ position as ‘in, but not of, the West’ Palmer pres ... Show More
1h 18m
Feb 2024
Andrius Gališanka, "John Rawls: The Path to a Theory of Justice" (Harvard UP, 2019)
It is hard to overestimate the influence of John Rawls on political philosophy and theory over the last half-century. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide, and he is one of the few philosophers whose work is known in the corridors of power as well as in the halls of a ... Show More
1h 14m
Oct 2024
489. Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith | Spencer Klavan
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with author, lecturer, and podcaster Spencer Klavan. They discuss the fruits and follies of the postmodern worldview, how our conscious and subconscious rank order data and form perceptions, where disparate creation myths and biblical depictions o ... Show More
1h 46m
Feb 2025
Magnus Course, "Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
An ethnographic exploration of anthropological failures through the Mapuche archetypes of witch, clown, and usurper, Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) invites readers to consider concepts of failure, knowing, and being in the world wi ... Show More
1h 13m
Mar 2023
Charles L. Briggs, "Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge" (Utah State UP, 2021)
A provocative theoretical synthesis by renowned folklorist and anthropologist Charles L. Briggs, Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge (Utah State UP, 2021) questions intellectual foundations and charts new paths forward. Briggs argues, through ... Show More
1h 21m
Jun 2024
Emma Heaney, "Feminism Against Cisness" (Duke UP, 2024)
The contributors to Feminism Against Cisness (Duke UP, 2024) showcase the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness: the fallacy that assigned sex determines sexed experience. The essays demonstrate that this ... Show More
46m 56s
Sep 2023
Alda Balthrop-Lewis, "Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Balthrop-Lewis's Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge UP, 2021) presents a ground-breaking interpretation of Henry David Thoreau's most famous book, Walden. Rather than treating Walden Woods as a lonely wilderness, Balthrop-L ... Show More
41m 16s