The University of Chicago Press Podcast

Magical thinking lies at the heart of J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood’s new book, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Oliver is professor of political science at the University of Chicago and Wood is assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University.In the book, they argue that our intuitions and differences in whether you use intuition or reason to guide your life, strongly relate to our politics. The intuitionists, those who believe in magical thinking, are sharply divided from the rationalists, those who rely on reason and science. Not only do these two groups differ on what makes them anxious, Oliver and Wood find that these emotional responses to stress seem to relate to ideology and political belief. Though there are examples of each way of thinking in both parties, intuitionists were more likely to support Donald Trump and respond to the conspiratorial politics that the President has promoted.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most people have heard of the Masters of Fine Arts–“MFA”–degree, but few know about the grueling process one must undergo to complete one. In Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education (University of Chicago Press, 2018), sociologist and ethnographer Dr. Gary Alan Fine asks how MFA students learn to make art and to speak intelligently about their work, how they become “artists” and what what it means to be an “MFA.”Gary Alan Fine is the James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Fine has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Center for Advancement Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Institute for Advanced Study.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2018), an amazing new book based on her field study in Africa where she investigated the Chinese investments. The book is extremely interesting for its methodology and unconventional findings. Lee’s research project lasted for 7 years during which she has conducted field research in copper mines and construction sites in Zambia. A key question addressed is if Chinese capital is a different type of capital. By the end of the conversation we will know if it is different and if yes, if it is a better or a worse type of capital. Lee has defined Chinese state capital compared with global private capital in terms of business objectives, labour practices, managerial ethos and political engagement with Zambia. She has written a book with huge policy implications. A great contribution to so many fields, sociology of labour first among them. But above all she has written a beautiful book that is a pleasure to read. At times it reads like a novel, particularly the long appendix, called ‘An ethnographer’s odyssey: the mundane and the sublime of searching China in Zambia’.We discussed why China’s presence in Africa is so controversial and what type of Chinese investors are there. Her work focuses on large state-owned companies. Lee’s project in Africa is a continuation of her previous field study of labour in China (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University of California Press, 2007). But this book has another important predecessor, the study of labour in Zambian mines conducted by the great British-American sociologist, Michael Burawoy. She told us about her relationship with him and his work. Lee also discussed whether it is appropriate to use the term “imperialism” to represent Chinese presence in Africa. She argues it is not. The book includes pictures of her field work in mines and construction sites. Definitely a beautiful book, brave piece of field research, nonconformist, original, important, erudite, pleasant to read.Carlo D’Ippoliti is associate professor of economics at Sapienza University of Rome, and is editor of the open access economics journals ‘PSL Quarterly Review’ and ‘Moneta e Credito’. His recent publications include the ‘Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics’ (Routledge, 2017) and ‘Classical Political Economy Today’ (Anthem, 2018), both as co-editor.Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2018) charts a “profound shift in attitude toward foreign technology” between the 16th century (when European devices arrived in Japan) and reforms to the traditional temporal system in 1873. While it provides an exceptionally rich and focused case study grounded in careful research with Japanese documents and material objects, Frumer’s book also offers a critical analysis of what it is that we’re doing when we study the relationship between societies and technologies that has potentially far-reaching consequences well beyond the history of Japan.Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Compared to the provinces’s native Uyghur population, Han Chinese settlers in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have not attracted as much scholarly or indeed journalistic attention of late. But in a profoundly troubled and troubling present for Xinjiang, one that is thankfully now gaining somewhat more notice from concerned parties... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a painting of a goanna, the contributions to this edited collection invite curiosity, care and wonder in their meditations on these objects of the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans.Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Marco Armiero is the Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Robert S. Emmett is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Roanoke College Environmental Studies program.Ruth A. Morgan is a Senior Research Fellow in the History Program at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Histories of banking and finance aren’t particularly well-known for being riveting, adventurous reads: they tend to be technical at the expense of being strongly narrative-driven. Peter James Hudson’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017) defies this stereotype. An examination of private lending in the Caribbean by North American bankers between the 1890s and the 1930s, Hudson tells a colorful, albeit at-times disturbing tale of a few American bankers who were able to operate virtually without restriction or regulation. Acting almost as freebooters, they dreamt up new practices to try out on Latin American governments, usually not to their benefit, while reinforcing many North American attitudes and stereotypes about Latin Americans, most of all racially.The result of this imperial lending was traumatic for Caribbean and Latin American governments. For much of this period, bankers enjoyed the official backing of the U.S. government, allowing them to operate with immunity and total security. Through President Taft’s policy of “Dollar Diplomacy,” they were able to operate as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. By making funds available to repressive governments, they helped to cement their place in power at the expense of their subjects, while the amount owed by these governments soon left them under the de facto control of banks and by extension the U.S. government. Ultimately, much of this system came crashing down with the Great Depression, which helped to expose these lending practices as dangerous and ill-regulated. Nevertheless, the effect on the region outlived these practices.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this American Political Science Association special podcast, we welcome a special guest host – and former guest of the podcast – Andy Lewis. In addition to his recent book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics, Andy is a contributor to the Religion in Public blog and is associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati.Andy and I had the real pleasure to talk with Michele Margolis about her new book From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Margolis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.The central argument of From Politics to the Pews is that a solid partisan identity forms before a solid religious identity, thus partisanship can inform religious behavior in ways that we may not have fully understood in the past. Margolis argues that many Americans step away from religion in early adulthood, returning later at the point of decisions about marriage and children. This break in religious activity and practice – though not necessarily in faith or belief– happens as partisan identity and behaviors have already set in. She relies on a wide variety of data to show how this happens and the implications for the relationship between partisanship, religion, and political behavior. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did prisons become a tool of racial inequality? Using historical data, Heather Schoenfeld’s new book Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2018) “answers how the United States became a nation of prisons and prisoners” (p. 5). Schoenfeld exposes the reader to the historical development of prisons and policy development. She focuses specifically on Florida as a case study to show how prisons become racialized social systems. Interestingly, much of the crime control we have today grew out of racialized punishments and unrest shaped during the civil rights era. Bringing us all the way up to 2016, Schoenfeld sheds light on how prisons developed over time, even as crime rates have fallen. Often incentivized as a source of economic potential in rural areas, prisons have a unique history in the U.S. and this book uncovers that fascinating history.This book will be of interest to Sociologists and Criminologists, but also Political Scientists and social activists. Sections of the book could be used in an undergraduate Criminology course or a course specifically focused on race and crime. This text would also be critically important to have in a graduate level Criminology course.Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th century. Over the course of the 19th century, rural America transformed into the familiar arrangement of large scale, mechanized mono-cropping for distant markets. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Midwest, where the prairie, plowed into “Amber Waves of Grain,” came to signify all the promises of settler colonialism. The Profit of the Earth explains the creation of this arrangement by excavating the ways that farmers, settlers, and, bureaucrats learned about the earth and its possibilities as they sought a living, a profit, tax income, or national progress. In this way, Fullilove demonstrates that the advent of the American style of agriculture grew out of the co-optation and reworking of local forms of rural knowledge.Courtney Fullilove is an Associate Professor of History and affiliated faculty in the Science in Society Program and the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University.Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, where he has recently defended his dissertation on race, medicine, and scientific exploration in 18th-century Mexico.Enter the code “NBN10” and get 10% off this book and any book at University Press Books, Berkeley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices