Episodes

  • House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.

    House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.
    Nov 6 2025
    At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan’s first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also the chief architect of legislation that restored home rule to Washington, DC, and almost single-handedly ignited the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including Diggs’s rarely seen personal papers, FBI documents, and original interviews with family members and political associates, political scientist Dr. Marion Orr reveals that Diggs practiced a politics of strategic moderation. Dr. Orr argues that this quiet approach was more effective than the militant race politics practiced by Adam Clayton Powell and more appealing than the conservative Chicago-style approach of William Dawson—two of Diggs’s better-known Black contemporaries. Vividly written and deeply researched, House of Diggs is the first biography of Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the most consequential Black federal legislators in US history. Congressman Diggs was a legislative lion whose unfortunate downfall punctuated his distinguished career and pushed him and his historic accomplishments out of sight. Now, for the first time, House of Diggs restores him to his much-deserved place in the history of American politics. Our guest is: Dr. Marion Orr, who is the inaugural Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Brown University. He specializes in urban politics, race and ethnic politics, and African-American politics. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who produces the Academic Life podcast. She is a dissertation and grad student coach, and a developmental editor for humanities scholars at all stages of their careers. She writes the Academic Life Newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.Com. Playlist for listeners: The End of White Politics The Vice-President's Black Wife No Common Ground The Social Constructions of Race Smithsonian American Women The First and Last King of Haiti Of Bears and Ballots Never Caught Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And get free bonus content HERE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
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    55 mins
  • Liam Graham, "Physics Fixes All the Facts" (Springer Nature, 2025)

    Liam Graham, "Physics Fixes All the Facts" (Springer Nature, 2025)
    Nov 5 2025
    Complex systems seem to magically emerge from the interactions of their parts. A whirlpool emerges from water molecules. A living cell from organic molecules. You emerge from the cells of your body. Not since chaos has a concept from physics spread like wildfire to other disciplines. Emergence can be found from chemistry to economics; from psychology to ecology. At its heart is the alluring idea that there's more to the world than physics, that there is a holistic component to nature, an edge of mystery. "Physics Fixes All the Facts" starts by taking you on a tour through a fascinating world of complexity, exploring phenomena from the inside of an atomic nucleus to bacterial behaviour to the ability of your thoughts to affect the world. These examples are used along with a thorough exploration of the philosophical literature to untangle the notoriously poorly defined concept of emergence. This reveals something surprising: the term emergence is redundant. In its weak form it is so weak that it applies to everything. In its strong form it is so restrictive that it is like the belief that there are pixies in your garden, impossible to exclude but not worth spending your time on. Emergence either applies to all systems or to none. Rather than telling us something about the nature of the world, it is an illusion, an artefact of our cognitive limitations. The past decade has seen a dozen or so monographs and collections about emergence, almost all resolutely supportive of the concept. This book aims to redress the balance. But it is more than just a campaign against the idea of emergence. Graham presents a framework called Austere Physicalism and argues that it is the only coherent way to view the world. He uses this framework to reinterpret so-called emergent phenomena and investigates its wider implications for science. In this radically materialist view, we are nothing but physical systems among others. "Physics Fixes All the Facts" ends by exploring what this means for our sense of free will and consciousness. The book will appeal to academics in fields which use the concepts of complexity or emergence. Scientists and philosophers alike will find unexpected and exciting ideas in these pages. But the target audience is much broader including students who want to add context to their studies and the intellectually curious with some scientific background. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
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    47 mins
  • Carol Mason, "From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary" (U California Press, 2025)

    Carol Mason, "From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary" (U California Press, 2025)
    Nov 5 2025
    Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactics, personnel, and funds have contributed to a global rise of the Right.From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary (University of California Press, 2025) is a scholar’s story of why and how abortion foes join other militants in waging war against the federal government. Reflecting on her thirty years of analyzing the intersections of race, reproduction, and right-wing movements, Carol Mason examines primary antiabortion sources that influenced political currents of the last fifty years. From Cold War conspiracism and apocalyptic fundamentalism to anti-statist terrorism, Tea Party populism, and MAGA insurrection, opposing abortion has come to imperil democracy worldwide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
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    57 mins
  • Muhammad H. Zaman, "Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable" (The New Press, 2025)

    Muhammad H. Zaman, "Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable" (The New Press, 2025)
    Nov 4 2025
    In Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable (The New Press, 2025), Professor Muhammad H. Zaman reveals the troubling history of how science and public health have been manipulated to serve the interests of power. Moving from the U.S.–Mexico border to Pakistan, from the Tuskegee syphilis trials to COVID-19 vaccine disinformation campaigns, the book traces a pattern in which infection becomes a weapon of exclusion, exploitation, and control. With clarity and urgency, Zaman demonstrates that the problem lies not in science itself, but in the ways it can be co-opted to marginalize, stigmatize, and even endanger the very people it is meant to protect. At once historical and contemporary, Infected is a searing call to recognize the ethical stakes of global health, and to build systems that resist the misuse of knowledge against those who can least afford its betrayal. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Professor Muhammad H. Zaman to discuss how power, politics, and privilege use science against the world’s most vulnerable. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
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    36 mins
  • brian bean, "Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition" (Haymarket, 2025)

    brian bean, "Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition" (Haymarket, 2025)
    Nov 4 2025
    Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism. Their End Is Our Beginning traces the roots and development of policing in global capitalism through colonial rule, racist enslavement, and class oppression, along the way arguing how police power can be challenged and, ultimately, abolished. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, all of whom share compelling and knowledgeable perspectives on what it takes to—even if temporarily—take down the cops and build a thriving community-organized society, free from the police. The lessons they offer bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice. Featuring illustrations by Chicago-based artist Charlie Aleck, Their End Is Our Beginning is an incendiary book that offers a socialist analysis of policing and the capitalist state, a vital discussion of the contours of abolition at large, and the revolutionary logic needed for liberation. Guest: brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist organizer, writer, and agitator originally from North Carolina. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine. Their work has been published in Truthout, Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Red Flag, New Politics, Socialist Worker, International Viewpoint, and more. In addition to Their End Is Our Beginning, brian coedited and contributed to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, also published by Haymarket Books. Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Joshua Castellino, "Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment" (Policy Press, 2025)

    Joshua Castellino, "Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment" (Policy Press, 2025)
    Nov 4 2025
    While decolonization liberated territories, it left the root causes of historical injustice unaddressed. Governance change did not address past wrongs and transferred injustice through political and financial architectures. In Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment (Bristol University Press/Policy Press, 2024) Dr. Joshua Castellino presents a five-point plan aimed at system redress through reparations that addresses the colonially induced climate crisis through equitable and sustainable means. In highlighting the structural legacy of colonial crimes, Dr. Castellino provides insights into the complexities of contemporary societies, showing how legal frameworks could foster a fairer, more just world. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
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    53 mins
  • Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)

    Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)
    Nov 3 2025
    For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expedited the entry of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial South Asia and sent them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the United States. Although this arrangement was conceived as temporary, over the decades it has become a permanent fixture of the medical system, with FMGs comprising at least a quarter of the physician labor force since the act became law. This cohort of practitioners has not been extensively studied, rendering the impacts of immigration and foreign policy on the everyday mechanics of US health care obscure. In The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare, Dr. Alam foregrounds global dynamics embedded in the medical system to ask how and why Asian physicians—and especially practitioners from South Asia—have become integral to US medical practice and ubiquitous in the US public imaginary. Drawing on transcripts of congressional hearings; medical, scientific, and social scientific literature; ethnographies; oral histories; and popular media, Dr. Alam explores the enduring consequences of postcolonial physician migration. Combining theoretical and methodological insights from a range of disciplines, this book analyzes both the care provided by immigrant physicians as well as the care extended to them as foreigners. Our guest is: Dr. Eram Alam, who specializes in the history of medicine, with a particular emphasis on globalization, race, migration, and health during the twentieth century. She is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She received her PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and holds a BA and BS from Northwestern University and a MA from the University of Chicago. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a developmental editor, and the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She writes the show’s newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.com Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Where Is Home? Immigration Realities Secret Harvests Who Gets Believed The House on Henry Street Womanist Bioethics Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes, or by donating here. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
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    52 mins
  • Nancy Neiman, "Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures" (Routledge, 2020)

    Nancy Neiman, "Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures" (Routledge, 2020)
    Nov 1 2025
    A series of market-related crises over the past two decades – financial, environmental, health, education, poverty – reinvigorated the debate about markets and social justice. Since then, counter-hegemonic movements all over the globe are attempting to redefine markets and the meaning of economic enterprise in people’s daily lives. Assessments of market outcomes tend toward the polemical, with capitalists and socialists, globalization advocates and anti-globalization movements, those on the political right and those on the left, all facing off to argue the benefits or harms brought about by markets. Yet not enough attention has been paid to analyzing the conditions under which markets result in just outcomes. Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures (Routledge, 2020) explores how culture, politics, and ideology help shape market incentives in an attempt to reclaim the language of economic rationality and the policymaking legitimacy that accompanies it. Through a variety of case studies – labor relations in the U.S. meatpacking industry, the globalization process in Juaìrez, Mexico, financial reform in Cuba, and an interfaith Ugandan coffee cooperative – this book provides a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote just or unjust outcomes (e.g., discrimination, income inequality, environmental degradation, or racial justice, human rights, and equitable growth). This book touches on subject matter as varied as food, religion, banking, and race and gender equality, from a multi-disciplinary perspective. It offers an analysis of markets based on community rather than pure individualism that has the potential to change the way we think about economic rationality. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars in political science, economics, sociology, geography, gender studies, critical race studies, environmental studies, and all those interested in the critique of mainstream economics and neoliberal logic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
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    1 hr and 14 mins