The University of Chicago Press Podcast

Is the scientific value of objectivity in conflict with the social justice commitment to diversity? In her latest book, Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Sandra Harding (Education and Gender Studies, UCLA) argues not only that objectivity and diversity need not be in conflict, but that good research ought to be committed to both values at the same time. The book draws on a rich array of scholarship, spanning from 20th century philosophy of science to contemporary studies in indigenous and postcolonial philosophy and activism. It is an intricate study of the ways in which objectivity, positivism, and secularism are all deeply intertwined with their social contexts and historical moments. The book ultimately advocates a science that is both responsive to a methodological requirement for strong objectivity, and originates in local communities.Emily Crandall is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a current fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Jonathan Garb, the Gershom Scholem Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the rich psychological tradition in modern Kabbalah and modern mysticism. Tracing Kabbalistic writing from sixteenth-century Safed to contemporary New York, he shows how both psychoanalysis and modern Kabbalah have been expressions of the process of modernization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Peter Trawny, professor of philosophy and founder and director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal, explores the place of anti-Semitism in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Using Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks, Trawny explains that the philosopher’s anti-Semitism was not just a few stray remarks, but was deeply incorporated into his philosophical and political thinking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Contemporary debates would lead you to believe that science and religion are eternally at odds with each other. In The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Peter Harrison,Director, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Queensland, interrogates the modern assumptions behind this viewpoint and delineates the story of the categories science and religion. He shows that understanding these concepts divided as distinct realms of inquiry is a relatively recent history, politically shaped, and often accidental in its construction. In reality, what we conceptualize as these two separate spheres of life were intimately bound up with one another, often in concert in social life. Harrison also warns us about the consequences of projecting our contemporary conceptual spheres back through the past. In our conversation we discuss ancient Greek philosophy, early Christian thought, natural theology and natural philosophers, conceptions of progress, forms of charity, the professionalization of science, and the creation of scientists.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

April R. Haynes is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth- Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Haynes shows how the campaign against masturbation redefined women’s sexuality and reformulated the battle for political rights. Beginning with Sylvester Graham’s “Lecture to Mothers” to reform-minded women to the black abolitionists Sarah Mapps Douglas’s sex education lectures to African American women, masturbation became a topic with both gender and racial import. After a long history of neglect, it became tied to issues of purity, virtue and self-government. Through women reformers the proscriptions against masturbation were popularized and institutionalized. Haynes sheds light on the continued attention given to masturbation in American culture and the women’s movement, demonstrating its political significance.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Phaedra Daipha’s thoughtful new book uses a careful sociological study of a particular community of weather forecasters to develop a sociology of decision making. Based on fieldwork conducted over five years at a local office of the National Weather Service, Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth (University of Chicago Press, 2015) develops a theory of decision making as a habitual, practical, social activity shaped by particular contexts of action. In addition to working closely with (and contributing substantively to) pragmatist philosophy and theoretical STS, Masters of Uncertainty also offers a thick and fascinating description of the practices and local environments of a community of artisan-practitioners charged with creating a kind of object–a weather forecast–that many of us consume regularly. After developing a sociological theory of decision making within the context of this case study, Daipha concludes the book by testing the theory in two other fields: finance and medicine. This is a compelling and clearly-written account that will be of interest to sociologists, STS scholars, and general readers alike! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays special attention to the role played by language in the definition of any medical category, basing her analysis on a masterful analysis of a spectrum of written medical genres (including dialogue, autobiography, correspondence, narrative, and polemic) that have largely been forgotten by the history of medicine. Arnaud asks, “What made it possible to view dozens of different diagnoses as variants of a single pathology, hysteria?” The answer can be found in a long process of rewriting and negotiation over the definition of these diagnoses enabled this retrospective assimilation, which was driven by enormously diverse political and epistemological stakes. In a series of fascinating chapters, the book interweaves the history of hysteria with studies of gender, class, literature, metaphor, narrative, and and religion. It’s an expertly-researched and compellingly-written account that will amply reward readers interested in the histories of medicine and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Biography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that there are certain ways lives can be lived. This is particularly true of the lives of women, which are often, in biography, confined to the marriage plot and detailed as events in the lives of men. As Jessa Crispin writes in her new book, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats & Ex-Countries (University of Chicago Press, 2015), “The important task is to understand and modify the stories that are holding sway.”The founder and editor of the recently shuttered lit-blog Bookslut, Crispin spent a year and a half traveling abroad. Her genre-bending book, The Dead Ladies Project, is the legacy of that year and it’s a work that goes a long way in modifying the stories we typically tell, not just about women but about human beings- as thinkers, travelers, artists, and individuals.It’s a contemplative, wandering work, which captures the disorientations of travel, the anxiety/ecstasy of being alone, the ways in which we carry our pasts with us, and the integral role stories play in our understanding of our possibilities and the ways in which we live our lives.”What saves you is a new story to tell yourself about how things could be,” Crispin suggests and, as she moves from Berlin, Trieste, Sarajevo, St. Petersburg, contemplating the lives of William James, Nora Barnacle, Rebecca West, and Claude Cahun, she opens up story after story, expanding the narrative possibilities as she goes.Hers is a story which suggests the richness that comes of bouncing our lives off those of others. “It was the dead I wanted to talk to,” she writes, as she sets out on her travels. “I’d always been attracted to the unloosed, the wandering souls who were willing to scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere. I needed to know how they did it, how they survived.” It’s an account which suggests the hunger for and value of such stories- the stories of lives which, as Carolyn G. Heilbrun put it, enable us to forge new fictions and new narratives for our own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At what point does the world end? More importantly, how did this idea of a whole, unified world emerge to begin with? In Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Ayesha Ramachandran illustrates the anticipated enormity and surprising subtlety of these questions. Prose, vivid imagery and poetry form the text’s arc as Ramachandran distills an interdisciplinary evolution of Eurocentric debates about the relationship between self and god, self and nation, world and empire, and world and universe.Worldmakers combines a set of “founding” works, from maps to medical literature, to portray a period where allegory, the Cosmos, and classical myth interacted directly with physics and biology. Dr. Ramachandran creatively captures “two modes of world-making: imperial and cosmic” through the constructed notion of the “Other”, which frames not only the logic of imperial conquest, but earlier attempts to separate and organize the sciences. Rather than seeking to narrate a coherent whole, as is the goal of many of the book’s main characters, Ramachandran highlights the disparate trajectory of these ideas in mythical, then imperial and national, and finally scientific imagination.Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science & technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Amman, Jordan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katherine J. Cramer is the author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Cramer is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Morgridge Center for Public Service.Do rural voters have an identity? Do they view politics through a lens of rural America? In The Politics of Resentment, Cramer delves into the political beliefs of Wisconsin voters to understand rural consciousness. Collected over years of study, the book links the growing resentment of rural residents in the state to the rise of Governor Scott Walker. Cramer discovers the ways that resentment of urban parts of the state drives views toward the size and scope of government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices