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The University of Chicago Press Podcast

The University of Chicago Press Podcast

By: New Books Network
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 Interviews with authors of University of Chicago Press books.New Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism World
Episodes
  • Shakirah E. Hudani, "Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Shakirah E. Hudani, "Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Sep 18 2025
    Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (U of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Shakirah Hudani examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation? Through extended ethnographic and qualitative research in Rwanda in the decades after the genocide of 1994, this book questions how repair after conflict is realized amidst large-scale urban transformation. Bridging African studies, urban studies, and human geography in its scope, this work ties Rwanda’s transformation to contexts of urban change in other post-conflict spaces, bringing to the fore critical questions about the ethics of planning in such complex geographies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    39 mins
  • Dan Davies, "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

    Dan Davies, "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
    Sep 1 2025
    For this episode of Liminal Library, I interviewed Dan Davies about The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind (U Chicago Press, 2025). Davies examines how we've systematically engineered responsibility out of our institutions, creating a world where major decisions happen without clear human accountability. Davies draws on Stafford Beer's cybernetics to explain how modern organizations function as systems with their own patterns and responses. As he puts it, "the system is not conscious and so does not have incentives, but it has consistent patterns of response to stimuli." This isn't about individual moral failures – it's about the industrialization of decision-making itself. We've moved from Harry Truman's "The Buck Stops Here" to complex processes and standardized criteria that diffuse responsibility across multiple layers. When things go wrong – financial crises, environmental failures, social breakdowns – no single person can be held accountable because no single person actually made the decision. Davies traces this transformation through three revolutions: the managerial revolution that shifted control from owners to professional administrators, the cybernetic revolution that offered tools to understand these systems but never fully materialized, and the neoliberal revolution that reshaped society while ignoring that increasingly, systems rather than people make the decisions affecting our lives. These accountability machines, as Davies calls them, operate according to their own logic and constraints. Understanding them is essential for grasping why institutional failures seem both inevitable and impossible to prevent within our current frameworks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    53 mins
  • Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

    Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
    Aug 31 2025
    Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book Feminisms: A Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This outstanding work, available later this year, takes a thematic approach to the topic of global feminist history to provide a unified vision that maintains appropriate nuance. Delap is a gender historian, writ large. Her first book, The Feminist Avant Garde (Cambridge 2007), examined the development of feminism in the Anglo-American context, tracing the ideas as developed in trans-Atlantic discourse. She then directed her gaze back to her homeland in subsequent publications, including Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford 2011) and the 2013 Palgrave release, Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Britain since 1890, Delap explore another expression of gender altogether. The breadth of her scholarship – women and men, intellectual elites and domestic servants, adults and children – prepared her to write this broad but fairly concise work of history. Enjoy our lively discussion! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 mins
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