In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

How can we make sense of the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump? What forces moved American politics from the first African-American president and an all-Democratic Congress (2008) to ethno-nationalist rhetoric and GOP control of Congress (2016)? What do the reactions to these political events – the rise of the Tea Party and the Anti-Trump resistance – tell us about these, and future, presidential elections?In there new book Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2019), Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo focus on changing organizational configurations – such as voluntary local citizens’ groups, elite advocacy organizations, consortia of wealthy donors (e.g., Koch’s Americans For Prosperity), and candidate-led political campaigns – to explain these radical shifts.The book has a unique methodology: a rich mix of quantitative and qualitative data analyzed by a collaborative team of authors from political science, sociology, and history. The range is extraordinary, combining what is best about both field work and big data in the social sciences. The authors document the changing organizational configurations – at both the national and state levels – with an emphasis on the states that were pivotal in the 2016 election: Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania. The book offer insights about national trends while capturing the importance of federalism – and attending to unique factors in swing states.The authors excavate how top-down efforts (ultra-free market fundamentalism funded by groups like Americans For Prosperity) combined with bottom-up organizations (popular, local, and diverse groups who often channeled ethno-nationalist resentment) to push Republican politics to the right. Their analysis of progressive groups reacting to the Trump presidency reveals grassroots organizing that is both similar and different to the Tea Party movement. Rather than pushing the Democratic party to the left, the resisters work within the Democratic party (often energizing moribund organizations).Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

Today’s right wing media has a long history that is largely unknown to its current listeners. In The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement (Oxford University Press, 2020), Paul Matzko details its emergence in the 1950s and the response to its rise by some of the leading political and religious institutions of the era.As Matzko explains, the origins of postwar conservative media lay in the broader changes taking place in broadcasting in 1950s. As the major networks shifted their focus from radio to television, local radio stations were eager to find programmers willing to pay to put programs on the air. This gave conservative religious broadcasters such as Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis an opportunity to spread their message to a nationwide audience. Fearing the growing influence of commentators organizing against their policies, the Kennedy administration sought to use such means as the previously underdeveloped Fairness Doctrine to constrain it. Working in conjunction with the National Council of Churches, they placed growing pressure on the broadcasters – particularly the acerbic McIntire – in an ultimately successful effort to undermine their nationwide stature. Yet while McIntire’s radio ministry was gone by the early 1970s, his example was followed a decade later by others who took advantage of broadcast deregulation in the late 1970s and 1980s to launch the modern era of conservative broadcasting.

China is a veto-holding member of the UN Security Council yet Chinese officials have been skeptical of using the powers of the UN to pressure nations accused of human rights violations. The PRC has emphasized the norm of sovereignty and rejected external interference in its own internal affairs. Yet they have supported UN intervention when states have been accused of mass human rights abuses. Why has China acquiesced and supported intervention? Neither realism or liberalism offer complete explanations for China’s seeming inconsistency. Courtney Fung finds that social constructions by way of public discourse of regime change matter when embedded in wider material conditions. She argues that anxieties about loss of status help explain China’s choices.In her new book China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status (Oxford University Press, 2019), Fung explores three cases involving mass atrocities: Darfur (2004-2008), Libya (2011-2012), and Syria (2011-2015). China’s focus on status requires thinking about China’s twin statuses as both a great power and a developing state. China focuses on recognition from its intervention peer group: the Western, permanent members of the UN Security Council, US, UK, and France (P3). But China is also concerned with the Global South, which includes geographic-specific regional organizations and often the host state. Fung urges political scientists (and foreign policy experts implementing policy) to take “status triggers” in both peer groups seriously.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Stacy Wolf of Princeton University about her book Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America (Oxford University Press, 2019), an exploration of the complexities of amateur and local theatre across the United States. From backstage moms to tiny divas to dinner theatres, Wolf demonstrates that this charming pastime of American culture that is anything but past. On the contrary, musical theatre continues to be an important culture touchstone for many and a pipeline to national phenomenon such as the High School Music franchise. Told in a stunning voice with a wealth of attention to its case studies and examples, Beyond Broadway feels like backstage pass combined with a cross-country road trip in early Fall. A must read for anyone interested in the untold story of musical theater, American culture, and truly embedded ethnography with a ground-up point of view.I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Stacy about this fascinating book. I’d love to hear from you at rhetoriclee@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @rhetoricleespeaking. Share your thoughts about the interview with the hashtag #newbooksnerd. ~lee

In his book Devotional Sovereignty: Kingship and Religion in India (Oxford University Press, 2020), Caleb Simmons examines the reigns of Tipu Sultan (r. 1782-1799) and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (r. 1799-1868) in the South Indian kingdom of Mysore to demonstrate the extent to which both rulers--one Muslim and one Hindu--turned to religion to fortify the royal identity of kings during precarious political times.  Both courts revived pre-modern notions of Indian kingship in reaction to the British, drawing on devotion to Hindu gods, goddesses, and gurus to conceptualize and fortify their reigns.We made mention of images in the interview, and they can be found here.For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship.

For much of the last century, ballet class has been a rite of passage for millions of little girls in the United States. Some of these students have gone on to professional careers as dancers, but many more take class for a few years—or many years—before moving on to other pursuits. But the sheer prevalence of the experience has created an educated and appreciative audience that supports dance companies and dance training. It has also created a whole subset of “girl culture”: ballet books and films, pink tutus and sparkly tiaras, an inundation of princesses and swans.In Ballet Class: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2020), Melissa R. Klapper explores how this phenomenon developed. From the misperception that boys never take ballet class to the racist assumption that members of a corps de ballet need to resemble one another physically, ballet has mirrored the larger society in negative respects as well as positive ones, and it has evolved together with the culture as a whole. For this and many other reasons that Klapper lays out through rich and complex analysis delivered in lively, compelling prose, the history of ballet class really does open a window onto the development of American culture between World War I and the present.C. P. Lesley, a historian and amateur dancer, hosts New Books in Historical Fiction. Under this pen name, she also writes historical novels. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a seismic shift in attitudes toward gay and lesbian people, with a majority of Americans now supporting same-sex marriage and relations between same-sex, consenting adults. However, support for transgender individuals lags far behind; a significant majority of Americans do not support the right of transgender people to be free from discrimination in housing, employment, public spaces, health care, legal documents, and other areas. Much of this is due to deeply entrenched ideas about the definition of gender, perceptions that transgender people are not "real" or are suffering from mental illness, and fears that extending rights to transgender people will come at the expense of the rights of others. So how do you get people to rethink their prejudices?In their book Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights (Oxford University Press, 2020), Melissa R. Michelson and Brian F. Harrison examine what tactics are effective in changing public opinion regarding transgender people. The result is a new approach that they call Identity Reassurance Theory. The idea is that individuals need to feel confident in their own identity before they can embrace a stigmatized group like transgender people, and that support of members of an outgroup can be encouraged by affirming the self-esteem of those targeted for attitude change. Michelson and Harrison, through their experiments, show that the most effective messaging on transgender issues meets people where they are, acknowledges their discomfort without judgment or criticism, and helps them to think about transgender people and rights in a way that aligns with their view of themselves as moral human beings.In this interview, Dr. Michelson, Dr. Harrison, and I discuss common issues faced by transgender people, and the ideologies that contribute to anti-transgender discrimination. We then discuss three of the nine experiments conducted by Michelson and Harrison that provide empirical evidence to support the claims in their book. Lastly, we discuss potential ways to change discriminatory beliefs towards transgender people. I recommend this book for people interested in public opinion, social psychology, and LGBTQ issues.Dr. Melissa R. Michelson (@profmichelson) is Professor of Political Science at Menlo College. Dr. Brian F. Harrison is a Lecturer at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Founder and President of Voters for Equality.Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar.

Beginning with Etan Patz's disappearance in Manhattan in 1979, a spate of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children stoked anxieties about the threats of child kidnapping and exploitation. Publicized through an emerging twenty-four-hour news cycle, these cases supplied evidence of what some commentators dubbed "a national epidemic" of child abductions committed by "strangers."In Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020), Paul M. Renfro narrates how the bereaved parents of missing and slain children turned their grief into a mass movement and, alongside journalists and policymakers from both major political parties, propelled a moral panic. Leveraging larger cultural fears concerning familial and national decline, these child safety crusaders warned Americans of a supposedly widespread and worsening child kidnapping threat, erroneously claiming that as many as fifty thousand American children fell victim to stranger abductions annually. The actual figure was (and remains) between one hundred and three hundred, and kidnappings perpetrated by family members and acquaintances occur far more frequently. Yet such exaggerated statistics-and the emotionally resonant images and narratives deployed behind them-led to the creation of new legal and cultural instruments designed to keep children safe and to punish the "strangers" who ostensibly wished them harm. Ranging from extensive child fingerprinting drives to the milk carton campaign, from the AMBER Alerts that periodically rattle Americans' smart phones to the nation's sprawling system of sex offender registration, these instruments have widened the reach of the carceral state and intensified surveillance practices focused on children.Stranger Danger reveals the transformative power of this moral panic on American politics and culture, showing how ideas and images of endangered childhood helped build a more punitive American state.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

“Never again!” This was the rallying cry, seemingly universal and unanimous, among liberal nation-states as they formed the United Nations (UN) in 1945 and later signed the UN Declaration on Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. Emerging from the ashes of a global war that took some 60 million lives, and after witnessing the atrocities of Nazi Germany, a worldwide community appeared resolute in its commitment to not only condemn, but to also strive to prevent future “crimes against humanity.”In The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America (Oxford University Press, 2017), María Cristina García evaluates how the end of the Cold War brought new and unanticipated challenges to upholding this commitment from 1989 to the present. Through nine case studies that examine the central actors, debates, policies, and conflicts that have shaped the U.S. response to humanitarian crises in the post-Cold War era, Dr. García explains the tensions that exist between different branches of government, the increasing importance of advocacy work by the humanitarian community, and the emergence of a deeply complicated asylum bureaucracy. Weighing the competing forces of fear and advocacy, García skillfully demonstrates the obsoleteness of the current definition of “refugee” in US statute. In its place, she argues for historically informed policies that address the realities of displacement in today’s world.David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.

In Classical Indian Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2020), Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri survey both the breadth and depth of Indian philosophical traditions. Their odyssey touches on the earliest extant Vedic literature, the Mahābhārata, the Bhagavad-Gīta, the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, the sūtra traditions encompassing logic, epistemology, the monism of Advaita Vedānta, and the spiritual discipline of Yoga. They even include textual traditions typically excluded from overviews of Indian philosophy, e.g., the Cārvāka school, Tantra, and Indian aesthetic theory. They address various significant themes such as non-violence, political authority, and the status of women, and the debate on the influence of Indian thought on Greek philosophy. Interestingly, this publication stems from a podcast series, which we also discuss in this podcast.Peter Adamson received his BA from Williams College and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. He worked at King's College London from 2000 until 2012. He subsequently moved to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, where he is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy. He has published widely in ancient and medieval philosophy, and is the host of The History of Philosophy without Any Gaps podcast.Jonardon Ganeri is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of Attention, Not Self (2017), The Self (2012), The Lost Age of Reason (2011), and The Concealed Art of the Soul (2007). Ganeri's work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. He became the first philosopher to win the Infosys Prize in the Humanities in 2015.For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com.