In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

How did the idea of time change during the nineteenth century? In Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the British World (Oxford University Press, 2015) Ryan Vieira, a sessional lecturer at McMaster University, explores Parliament in the nineteenth century to understand both the bureaucratic structures and the individual parliamentarians’ experiences of time. The understanding of time was shaped by changes in the ideas of industriousness, efficiency and respectability, as well as new communications and technologies.The book challenges current understandings of constitutional change and parliamentary reform, offering a new story of the Victorian age. Moreover, the book considers the context of the British Empire, thinking through the impact of these changes on parliamentary systems across the globe. The book will be essential reading for historians and students of politics, as well as a fascinating text for the general reader.  

Does sex play a determinative role in political contests? Recognising the dual political realities of voters holding gender stereotypes and female candidates achieving electoral success, Kathleen Dolan’s innovative book When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections (Oxford University Press, 2014) is crucial for understanding the gendered dynamics of America’s political climate. As part of the Presidential Gender Watch 2016 Syllabus, Professor Dolan’s two-wave survey methodology delves into the gendered psyche of elections by analysing the public attitudes and voter choice of over 3000 individuals. Finding that gender stereotypes in voter consciousness are present but not determinative, Dolan rewrites the conventional wisdom that stereotyped attitudes are detrimental to a woman’s electability. However, in forcing the reader to acknowledge the nexus between voter and candidate, Dolan’s data analysis extends to campaign strategy. Based on the 2010 races for Congress and Governor, When Does Gender Matter? builds on the work of other political scientists that have found evidence of candidate emergence being gendered (Lawless and Fox 2010), and analyses every televised campaign ad of the candidates for whom the 3000 survey participants voted. In the gendered terrain between attitude and action, for both voter and candidate, Dolan’s scholarship provides a roadmap for its multi-disciplinary readership into the gendered psyche of American elections. Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonc’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture. Find her on twitter @TaylorFoxSmith3.

Why is falling in love so exciting and painful at the same time? And what explains our longing for people who are bad for us or no longer love us back? In her book On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2015), philosopher and cognitive scientist Berit Brogaard tackles these and other difficult questions through the lenses of biochemistry, philosophy, and psychology. She argues that love is an emotion to which humans can become addicted but which they also possess the power to overcome. In our interview, we discuss cutting-edge ways of conceptualizing romantic love as well as practical, real-life strategies for navigating its many ups and downs. Berit Brogaard is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research at University of Miami, as well as Professor of Philosophy at University of Oslo. She answers letters from love-stricken readers on her Psychology Today webpage The Mysteries of Love. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Richard Crockatt is an Emeritus Professor in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. His book, Einstein & Twentieth-Century Politics: ‘A Salutary Moral Influence‘ (Oxford University Press, 2016), is an intellectual biography of Einstein’s political thought. As one the most compelling figures of the twentieth century, Einstein first gained public attention for his scientific theories placing him on the world stage. Developing a broad network of liberal internationalists he had the opportunity to speak for and support some of the most critical political issues of his day. Crockatt follows him through his early days and his connections with men like Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells and Albert Schweitzer that shaped his thought as a global public intellectual. From his position of professional influence and personal charm, he worked on behalf of pacifism, Zionism, world government, freedom, and against the arms race. Einstein’s positions emerged from deep moral conviction yet his thought remained complex, non-dogmatic and at times seemingly contradictory. Crockatt has captured the deep moral sensibility and agile political mind of a scientist who exercised “a salutary moral influence.” Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project, tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

The philosopher (and 1972 presidential candidate) John Hospers once wrote, “justice is getting what one deserves. What could be simpler?” As it turns out, this seemingly simple idea is in the opinion of many contemporary political philosophers complicated enough to be implausible. According to many these theorists, the question of what one deserves is no less vexed than the question of what justice requires. Some even hold that the question of what one deserves can be answered only by reference to a conception of justice. Accordingly, it seems as if a defense of Hospers’ simple idea requires a lot of effort. In Distributive Justice: Getting What We Deserve from Our Country (Oxford University Press, 2016), Fred Feldman provides an original version of desertism, the view according to which justice prevails in a society when all of its members get what they deserve from whatever entity has the job of enacting justice. He forcefully argues that, once it is articulated with the requisite nuance and precision, desertism is an attractive conception of distributive justice.

Sabeel Rahman is the author of Democracy Against Domination (Oxford University Press, 2016). Rahman is assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. Combining perspectives from legal studies, political theory, and political science, Democracy Against Domination reinterprets Progressive Era economic thought for the challenges of today. The book offers a new approach to regulation and governance rooted in democratic theory and the writing of Louis Brandeis and John Dewey. In order to oversee complex economic activities and financial markets, Rahman argues for more democracy, not less, more participation by citizens and more participatory institutions established to facilitate this aim.

Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins are the authors of Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (Oxford University Press, 2016). Grossmann is director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social research and associate professor of political science at Michigan State University; Hopkins is assistant professor of political science at Boston College. With heated confirmation hearings occurring on Capitol Hill and the inauguration days away, Republicans and Democrats are debating what makes a good Cabinet official and what makes good federal policy. Why is it that the two parties have such different visions for what makes good policy and the importance of ideology? Asymmetric Politics offers an answer: the GOP has been, at its core, an ideological movement while the Democrats are a coalition of social groups. Hopkins and Grossmann support this argument with a huge amount of information about the electorate, party organizing, and elected officials. They show that the polarization observed by so many has to be understood in the context of these pronounced asymmetries between the two parties.

For the start of 2017, Dave Karpf is back on the podcast with his new book, Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Karpf is associate professor of media and public affairs at The George Washington University and author of The MoveOn Effect also published by Oxford. Much of the attention paid to digital politics is about speech. What did Donald Trump say on Twitter today? And who responded? Karpf’s book suggest that that attention has overlooked the other side of digital politics: listening. In Analytic Activism, Karpf focuses on how organizations use the digital footprints we all leave online to inform strategy. A/B testing and digital petitions allow political groups to hear what constituents care about and then later to use that information to mobilize and drive action.

We are all familiar with the idea that some persons are disabled. But what is disability? What makes it such that a condition–physical, cognitive, psychological–is a disability, rather than, say, a disease or illness? Is disability always and intrinsically bad? Are disabilities things to be cured? Might disabilities be merely ways of being different? And what role should the testimony and experiences of disabled persons play in addressing these questions? In The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2016) Elizabeth Barnes argues that, at least for a range of physical conditions characterized as disabilities, disabilities are merely ways in which bodies can be different, not ways of their being intrinsically badly off. She argues that this view of disability as mere difference has important implications for broader moral and social issues concerning disabled persons; she also argues that her view is better able to respect the experiences and testimony of disabled persons.

On today’s program we will be speaking with David W. Stowe about his recent book Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (Oxford University Press, 2016). Song of Exile weaves together the 2,500-year history of one of the most famous psalms in the Hebrew Bible; it examines the entire psalm, including the more obscure last stanza; and it draws on historical and interview research with musicians who have used Psalm 137 in their music. David W. Stowe earned his PhD from Yale University in 1993. He is currently interim chair of the English Department at Michigan State University. During the 2012-13 academic year, Stowe held a research fellowship in Music, Worship, and the Arts at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, where he researched and wrote an initial draft of this book, Song of Exile, which presents the cultural history of Psalm 137. Among his other books, he wrote No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (UNC Press 2011). He also wrote How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard UP, 2004), which won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu.