The University of Chicago Press Podcast

Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricists, who sought to establish for the collection of sense data what astronomers had done for the movements of heavenly bodies, they appeal to a general consensus that the acceleration of data collection through computing technologies requires a parallel shift toward computational thinking. This raises the question, however, of how computational practices have changed over the last few decades. Sabina Leonelli’s Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (U of Chicago Press, 2016) is the first book-length treatment of how large-scale data collection impacts the work of the life sciences. The book offers a historically and socially informed epistemology of data, situating its production, consumption, and regulation within laboratory practices.In fact, while much work in the history and sociology of biotechnology has attended to the kind of scalar changes associated with visible endeavors like the Human Genome Project, Leonelli’s account bucks this trend by looking at how plant biologists have made use of new tools and adopted different norms of sharing. The political economy of data she describes is biopolitical in a more pervasive sense, and the book offers support for the Open Science movement while subjecting it to keen philosophical scrutiny.Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever go backpacking through Europe? In Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Richard Ivan Jobs traces the postwar cultural history of the making of Europe through the stories and perspectives of the young people who moved across the continent’s borders. A history of European integration from the end of the Second World War to the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, the book emphasizes the roles that young people played in postwar recovery and reconciliation efforts, their participation in Europeanization, the upheavals of 1968, and the ways that young people’s movements were circumscribed by the Cold War and transformed by its end.Backpack Ambassadors examines the emergence of a “community of practice” defined by young people themselves, a community complicated by gender, class, race, and other differences. While youth are the key agents in this history, the book also considers the policies, programs, and regulations of the states that sought to encourage and manage the movement of young travelers across Europe in various ways. Transnational in subject and method, the chapters of the book draw on multiple archives and sources from several countries, including interviews with former backpackers and the experiences of the author himself. Absorbing in its myriad stories and compelling in its analysis, Backpack Ambassadors is a must-read for anyone interested in research and writing that connects culture and politics while pushing past the limits of national history. Highly readable and human in its approach, the book is also a fantastic resource for those teaching European integration at the undergraduate or graduate levels.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How should we understand our new golden age of television? In New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Martin Shuster, Director of Judaic Studies and Assistant Professor at Goucher College, interrogates New Television and offers both a defense and critique. Drawing on the work of the late Stanley Cavell, along with others including Hannah Arendt, the book explores the ontology of New Television, the medium of the screen, and the nature of storytelling. New Television has a vast range of examples, including chapters specifically focused on The Wire, Weeds and Justified. Along with detailed aesthetic philosophical discussion of each program, the book ultimately poses the problem of the politics of New Television, questioning the extent to which it offers critical, emancipatory, or regressive contributions to our understanding of modern life. The book is essential reading for anyone watching television, and also those who are not! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen C. Yeazell‘s Lawsuits in a Market Economy: The Evolution of Civil Litigation (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an in-depth look at the development and current situation of civil litigation. It beings with the question of why civil lawsuits have become such a political question and uses that to explore our world of settlements, arbitration, trials and insurance adjusting. It gives an expert, informed and even-handed look at what can be a contentious topic and is accessible to the layperson and edifying even to the professional. It portrays our environment of civil litigation as an evolving one where real people solve real problems, often for society’s benefit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Will voters this fall be voting for or against Donald Trump, even though he isn’t on the ballot? Will they be voting on national issues, such as immigration or relations with North Korea, even when the election is for city council or mayor? If all politics is ultimately local, then the answer should be no. Instead, most assume that national issues will dominate vote choice up and down the ballot in 2018. For Daniel Hopkins, this is not a new phenomenon: the United States has been nationalizing for a long time, and political behavior has long reflected it. Hopkins is the author of The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized (University of Chicago Press, 2018). He is associate professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania.In his new book, Hopkins marshals an incredible amount of data, from reanalysis of existing data to newly collected surveys to original experiments. From this mound of data, he shows how US politics has nationalized and why. The increasingly national news media and party polarization has change the way voters consume political information and what they are consuming. The result is an orientation of parties to national issues and political behavior that reflects this shift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Joanna Radin explores the conjuncture of time and temperature in Cold War “salvage biology” projects.Cryobiology, genetic epidemiology, and freezer anthropology constructed a dense and tangled global infrastructure of blood circulation. By following these circuits, Radin weaves a narrative about the Cold War human sciences that takes readers up to present ethical debates about the insufficiency of informed consent and the need to better involve communities whose vital materials have been taken for the sake of biomedical research. This book will be of interest to all historians of science, technology, and medicine, as well as to anthropologists and scholars working in Native American and Indigenous Studies.Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we think of globalization and global cities, we might be inclined to think of New York or London. Yet in recent years, Guangzhou, the central manufacturing node in the world, has acted as a magnet for foreign traders. Anthropologist Gordon Mathews (with Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang) chronicles... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do emotions affect participation in protests, and in politics more generally? In The Emotions of Protests (University of Chicago Press, 2018), James M. Jasper develops a solid critique to approaches that present political action as strictly rational and emotions as something outside the realm of strategy. Instead, Jasper speaks about feeling-thinking processes to highlight the interaction between strategic thinking and emotions, and the impact they have on participation in politics.Jasper divides emotions in five categories: reflex emotions (what we normally thinking of when we refer to emotions), urges, moods, affective commitments, and moral commitments. Through an extensive elaboration of these five concepts and the different emotions associated with each of them, Jasper builds a solid ground for the development of what he terms a ‘theory of action’.This book will stimulate sociologists and political scientists interested in social movements and protests, as well as anyone attracted by debates about rationality.Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sit-in movement that swept the Southern states in 1960 was one of the iconic moments of the post-World War II civil rights movement. Yet the images of students patiently sitting at “whites-only” lunch counters conveys only one facet of a complex series of events. In The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Christopher W. Schmidt chronicles the movement and its impact on the political and legal struggle for civil rights for African Americans. As Schmidt explains, prior to the sit-ins the main civil rights organizations were fighting segregation primarily through the courts. The incremental pace of change frustrated younger activists, with four students at North Carolina A&T ultimately deciding to fight segregation through direct protest. Yet the lunch counter protests they inspired were viewed with considerable ambivalence by the civil rights leadership, who were doubtful that the counters could be compelled to accept black patrons under existing law. Their uncertainly was reflected on the Supreme Court, where the justices’ division on the legality of segregation in privately-run facilities ultimately left the matter to be resolved by Congress in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent debates about partisan polarization have focused primarily on ideology and policy views. In Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018), social identity moves to the center of how to think about the differences that divide the country. Instead of alignment of just party and ideology, recent social sorting has resulted in an array of social identities grouping together within each party. The consequence of this sorting is strong in-group bias and extreme emotional response to electoral outcomes.Uncivil Agreement is written by Lilliana Mason. Mason is assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland, College Park. Mason combines analysis of historic survey data on elections and novel social experiments. What she discovers is a new dimension of the polarization debate, and one that has few obvious solutions. As she notes throughout the book, this is worrisome for the democracy and the responsiveness of parties to the electorate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices