In Conversation: An OUP Podcast cover art

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

By: New Books Network
Listen for free

About this listen

 Interviews with Oxford University Press authors about their booksNew Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism Science Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Nina Wilen, "Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Nina Wilen, "Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Nov 25 2025
    The Sahel has become a focal point of international security interventions, with external actors providing extensive security force assistance (SFA) to local military, police, and paramilitary forces. Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Nina Wilen critically examines the rationale, implementation, and consequences of these efforts (2012-2024). With unique access to both military operations and strategy-making in European capitals, the author provides an innovative methodological approach, exclusive material, and a comprehensive perspective. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, including participant observation of military operations and over 100 interviews with policymakers, military personnel, and security practitioners across the Sahel and Europe,this book offers an unprecedented analysis of how SFA has shaped local security dynamics and broader geopolitical competition. The book argues that SFA in the Sahel is driven not just by regional security threats, such as insurgency, violent extremism, and transnational crime, but also by external actors' strategic interests. Through a comparative analysis of bilateral (France, U.S.) and multilateral (EU, UN) initiatives, it demonstrates how SFA has been framed as the primary policy tool to manage instability. Securitizing the Sahel offers both theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding SFA in fragile states. It challenges prevailing frameworks, provides critical insights for policymakers, and highlights the unintended consequences of militarized external assistance in the Sahel and beyond. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
    Show More Show Less
    52 mins
  • Shatema Threadcraft, "Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Shatema Threadcraft, "Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Nov 22 2025
    Western democracies are haunted. Michael Hanchard suggests that the specter of race is what haunts our democracies, but it may be more accurate to suggest that they are haunted by their own racialized death machines—by racialized premature death. If this haunting is not adequately attended to, democracies cannot fulfill their function. Even W. E. B. Du Bois, whose lynching-as-crucifixion stories are important among the stories of Black peoplehood and represent an important attempt to reckon with death in democracy, did not attend to the haunting. But many innovative Black female democrats did. Black women face a crisis of premature death. They are 10 percent of the US female population yet represent 59 percent of women murdered. Their deaths are most often instances of intimate partner violence and occur in private, whereas most large-scale Black political mobilization centers on deaths that are “spectacular.” The centrality of spectacular death has functioned to marginalize Black women in the stories of Black peoplehood and has ensured that they are not the main beneficiaries of large-scale Black political mobilization. But the dearth of mobilization around the deaths of women has not stopped Black women from attending to that which haunts our democracy. Moreover, it is not simply Du Bois’s abolition democracy toward which the women have worked. Their work has involved experimentation with novel democratic forms, and we should think about that work—their methods and the substance of their contributions—within the framework of “Morrisonian truant democracy,” which provides the solution to the problem of mobilization. Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2025) Professor Shatema Threadcraft is the Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Shatema continued their conversation.
    Show More Show Less
    58 mins
  • Joseph P. Viteritti, "Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Joseph P. Viteritti, "Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Nov 11 2025
    Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education and demands to desegregate public schools, race and class remain the most reliable predictors of educational achievement in America. In attempting to address this divide, many school reformers have championed school choice: solutions like charter schools, vouchers, and other innovations designed to build more options into the system. Today, at least thirty-five states have laws that enable parents to send their children to private and religious schools at public expense while forty-six states have legalized charter schools. In Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Joseph P. Viteritti tells the definitive history of the school choice movement. In the 1990s, school choice emerged as an effort by a coalition of Black activists and conservative lawmakers seeking to offer economically disadvantaged students of color a way out of failing schools. As Viteritti shows, however, today's movement--championed by Republicans, conservatives, and faith-based organizations--has become less about placing disadvantaged children in better schools and more about providing public funding to students, irrespective of income, attending private--and frequently religious--schools. Viteritti, an education insider and supporter of school choice for underserved students, profiles six influential figures, the "radical dreamers," who were integral to understanding the movement for greater education equality and the role that choice can play in fully realizing the movement's potential. Radical Dreamers urges us to have an honest conversation about education in America and where we have gone wrong. Viteritti's compelling narrative of how some of the most passionate educators conceived of school choice provides a valuable context to our nation's long struggle to offer every child in America a good education, and how that goal was undermined by advocates on both the left and right.
    Show More Show Less
    42 mins
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.