New Books in Higher Education

Discover how activist academics challenge traditional norms in academia, emphasizing authenticity, vulnerability, and relational aspects. Explore their roles in reshaping academia, promoting social justice impact, and empowering marginalized communities. Learn about the transformative power of theory, the joy of authentic academic work, and the importance of collective initiatives for social change.

Academic libraries are changing in the face of information technologies, economic pressures, and globally disruptive events such as the current pandemic. In Refocusing Academic Libraries Through Learning and Discourse: The Idea of a Library (Chandos, 2023), Mary K. Bolin argues for a radical vision of library transformation, offering practical solutions for transforming organizational and workflow structures for the future. This book analyzes existing organizational structures and proposes new ones that can be adapted to individual libraries. It discusses the challenges posed by virtual learning environments, digital initiatives and resources, changes to cataloging standards and succession planning, as well as changes brought about by the current pandemic. It aims to help library leaders find new models of organization that make the best use of limited resources. Refocusing Academic Libraries Through Learning and Discourse: The Idea of a Library helps inform discussions taking place in academic libraries about organizational patterns and divisions of labor. These discussions are now more critical than ever because academic libraries are facing a time of disruption. This book will give librarians leverage to think outside traditional bureaucratic structures and re-think how libraries serve their patrons. The book examines existing structures and proposes new ones. Specifically, the book proposes organizational models and lays out a process for planning organizational transformation and implementing a new organization. Seven chapters offer a radical vision of library transformation, proposing a collaborative process for changing academic libraries into organizations that are fit for the second quarter of the twenty-first century and beyond. This book will be invaluable to librarians looking for solutions to library organizational and workflow structures.Mary K. Bolin, PhD, has more than 40 years of experience as a librarian and faculty member, administrator, and LIS instructor. She received a PhD in Higher Education Administration from the University of Nebraska in 2007, has an MA in English (Linguistics) from the University of Idaho. and an MSLS from the University of Kentucky. She spent her career as a practitioner at the University of Georgia, University of Idaho, and University of Nebraska--Lincoln. She has been an instructor in the School of Information at San Jose State University, teaching cataloging and metadata, since 2008.Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program and Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century's worth of nude "posture" photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America's largely forgotten posture panic--a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic health consequences. Tracing the rise and fall of this socially manufactured epidemic, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2024) also tells how this period continues to feed today's widespread anxieties about posture.In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement and fears of disability gave slouching a new scientific relevance. Bad posture came to be seen as an individual health threat, an affront to conventional race hierarchies, and a sign of American decline. What followed were massive efforts to measure, track, and prevent slouching and, later, back pain--campaigns that reached schools, workplaces, and beyond, from the creation of the American Posture League to posture pageants. The popularity of posture-enhancing products, such as girdles and lumbar supports, exploded, as did new fitness programs focused on postural muscles, such as Pilates and modern yoga. By 1970, student protests largely brought an end to school posture exams and photos, but many efforts to fight bad posture continued, despite a lack of scientific evidence.A compelling history that mixes seriousness and humor, Slouch is a unique and provocative account of the unexpected origins of our largely unquestioned ideas about bad posture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The podcast discusses demystifying the grad school application process for first-gen BIPOC students, focusing on insider knowledge, step-by-step instructions, and culturally relevant guidance. It explores personal journeys in academia, navigating letters of recommendation, imposter phenomenon, mentorship, funding options, and breaking down barriers to empower listeners.

Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are increasingly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive. Why? Love, Money, and Parenting investigates how economic forces and growing inequality shape how parents raise their children. From medieval times to the present, and from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden to China and Japan, Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti look at how economic incentives and constraints—such as money, knowledge, and time—influence parenting practices and what is considered good parenting in different countries.Through personal anecdotes and original research, Doepke and Zilibotti show that in countries with increasing economic inequality, such as the United States, parents push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success. Economics has transformed the hands-off parenting of the 1960s and ’70s into a frantic, overscheduled activity. Growing inequality has also resulted in an increasing “parenting gap” between richer and poorer families, raising the disturbing prospect of diminished social mobility and fewer opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In nations with less economic inequality, such as Sweden, the stakes are less high, and social mobility is not under threat. Doepke and Zilibotti discuss how investments in early childhood development and the design of education systems factor into the parenting equation, and how economics can help shape policies that will contribute to the ideal of equal opportunity for all. Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids (Princeton UP, 2019) presents an engrossing look at the economics of the family in the modern world.Matthias Doepke is professor of economics at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.Fabrizio Zilibotti is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke UP, 2021) explores the significance of transnational educational mobility in the life aspirations of young, middle-class Chinese women. Based on extensive, long-term ethnographic research, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neo-traditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.Fran Martin is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on television, film, literature and other forms of cultural production in contemporary transnational China (The PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), with a specialization in transnational flows and representations and cultures of gender and sexuality.Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do art schools influence music? In No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk (Duke UP, 2022), Gavin Butt, a Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle, tells the story of art, music and higher education in Leeds in the mid-1970s. Using archives and interviews, as well as analysis of the music and art of the era, the book shows the importance of art and art theory to a huge range of bands, including Gang of Four, Scritti Politti and Soft Cell. The analysis also takes a critical perspective on art, music and the era, thinking through the importance of class, gender, and racial inequalities to punk and post-punk. A rich and detailed defence of the importance of arts education, the book will be of interest across the arts and humanities, as well as for anyone wanting to know more about why Leeds matters! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics co-author and University of Chicago Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career, including being an early leader in applied microeconomics and how the Freakonomics media empire got started, along with his recent decision to retire from academic economics.Transcript available here. Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a research associate at the Hoover Institution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In response to student demands reflecting the urgency of societal and ecological problems, universities are making a burgeoning effort to infuse environmental sustainability efforts with social justice. In this edited volume, we extend calls for higher education leaders to revamp programming, pedagogy, and research that problematically reproduce dominant techno-scientific and managerial conceptualizations of sustainability. Students, staff and community partners, especially those from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups, are at the forefront of calls for critical sustainabilities programming, education and collaborations. Their work centers themes of power relations, (in)equity, accessibility, and social (in)justice to study the interrelationships between humans, non-humans, and the environment. Their voices, perspectives and lived experiences are provocations for institutions to think and act more expansively. Critical Campus Sustainabilities: Bridging Social Justice and the Environment in Higher Education (Springer, 2023) amplifies some of these voices and bottom up efforts toward a more critical approach to sustainability on campus. We ground our recommendations on findings from campus-wide surveys that were taken by over 8,000 undergraduates in 2016, 2019, and 2022. Furthermore, we share the design principles and lessons learned from several innovative, award-winning initiatives designed to foster critical sustainabilities at UC Santa Cruz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Who Owns Religion?: Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century (U Chicago Press, 2019), scholar and noted university administrator Laurie Patton looks at the cultural work of religious studies through scholars' clashes with religious communities, especially in the late 1980s and 90s. "Others" about whom scholars wrote to their colleagues were now also readers who could agree or condemn in public forums. These controversies were also fundamentally about something new: the very rights of secular, Western hermeneutics to interpret religions at all. Patton's book holds out hope that scholars can find a space for their work between the university and the communities they study. Their role, she suggests, is similar to that of the wise fool in many classical dramas and indeed in many religious traditions. Scholars of religion have multiple masters and must move between them while speaking a truth that not everyone may be interested in hearing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices