In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Carla Chamberlin and Mak Khan speak with Ingrid Piller about linguistic diversity and social justice.We discuss whether US native speakers of English can teach English ethically; how migrant parents can foster their children’s biliteracy; what the language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic are; whether multilingualism researchers have a monolingual English-centric blind spot; and how the research paradigms of World Englishes and multilingualism connect.First published on November 19, 2020.“Chats in Linguistic Diversity” is a podcast about linguistic diversity in social life brought to you by the Language on the Move team. We explore multilingualism, language learning, and intercultural communication in the contexts of globalization and migration.

Evaluation has become a key tool in assessing the performance of international organisations, in fostering learning, and in demonstrating accountability. Within the United Nations (UN) system, thousands of evaluators and consultants produce hundreds of evaluation reports worth millions of dollars every year. But does evaluation really deliver on its promise of objective evidence and functional use?By unravelling the internal machinery of evaluation systems in international organisations, The Politics of Evaluation in International Organisations (Oxford University Press, 2023) challenges the conventional understanding of evaluation as a value-free activity. Dr. Vytautas Jankauskas and Dr. Steffen Eckhard show how a seemingly neutral technocratic tool can serve as an instrument for power in global governance; they demonstrate and explain how deeply politics are entrenched in the interests of evaluation stakeholders, in the control and design of IO evaluation systems, and to a lesser extent also in the content of evaluation reports. The analysis draws on 120 research interviews with evaluators, member state representatives, and IO secretariat officials as well as on textual analysis of over 200 evaluation reports. The investigation covers 21 UN system organisations, including detailed case studies of the ILO, IMF, UNDP, UN WOMEN, IOM, UNHCR, FAO, WHO, and UNESCO.Shedding light on the (in-)effectiveness of evidence-based policymaking, the authors propose possible ways of better reconciling the observed evaluation politics with the need to gather reliable evidence that is used to improve the functioning of the United Nations. The answer to evaluation politics is not to abandon evaluation or isolate it from the stakeholders but to acknowledge surrounding political interests and design evaluation systems accordingly.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Paris, 1599. At the end of the French Wars of Religion, the widow Renée Chevalier instigated the prosecution of the military captain Mathurin Delacanche, who had committed multiple acts of rape, homicide, and theft against the villagers who lived around her château near the cathedral city of Sens. But how could Chevalier win her case when King Henri IV's Edict of Nantes ordered that the recent troubles should be forgotten as 'things that had never been'? A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France (Oxford UP, 2024) is an original and wide-ranging account of the impact of the religious wars on daily life. Based on neglected archival sources and an exceptional criminal trial, it recovers the experiences of women, peasants, and foot soldiers, who are marginalized in most historical accounts. Tom Hamilton shows how this trial contributed to a wider struggle for justice and an end to violence in postwar France. People throughout the society of the Old Regime did not consider rape and pillage as inevitable consequences of war, and denounced soldiers' illicit violence when they were given the chance. As a result, the early modern laws of war need to be understood not only as the idealistic invention of great legal thinkers, but also as a practical framework that enabled magistrates to do justice for plaintiffs and witnesses, like Chevalier and the villagers who lived under her protection. 

What can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straumann shares vital insights with 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, 2019). Through his fast-paced narrative, Straumann reveals how inflexible treaties created an inescapable debt trap that spawned Nazism. Caught between investor confidence and domestic political pressure, unrealistic agreements left decision makers little room for maneuver when crisis struck. 1931 reminds us of hard lessons relevant to designing resilient agreements today.Tobias Straumann is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Zurich and teaches economic history both to historians and economists. His research interests span numerous contributions to contemporary European business, monetary, and financial history. 1931 is his fourth book.Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His book exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title A Discriminating Terror. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.

Mumbai is generally recognized as an environment of extraordinary religious diversity. The city is known at one and the same time for a habitual cosmopolitanism and a series of violent religion-related conflicts and clashes. While there is much academic scholarship on various aspects of urban history and realities, Michael Stausberg's edited volume Religions, Mumbai Style: Events-Media-Spaces (Oxford UP, 2023) is the first international academic publication focusing on religion(s) in Mumbai. An extended introductory essay provides a scenario of the religious history of the city from the earliest colonial periods to the present; it also discusses such topics as public celebration and landmark religious places. By taking a thematic approach, the contributions highlight the dynamics of religious life in the city. Chapters discuss spatial settings such as so-called slums (Dharavi) and ghettos (Mumbra), but also roadside shrines and taxis. Other chapters focus on class and civil society organizations. Contributions discuss the crossing of religious boundaries, e.g., in dealing with intermarriage and conversion, and challenges faced by religious groups as to how to reconcile the religious diversity of the city with their own desire for recognition. Lines of tension and conflict often run within, and not so much between, communities.The two final chapters of the volume address the reflection of religion in fiction set in Mumbai and in the work of the Bombay poet Arun Kolatkar.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Why do some of our identity-defining commitments resist reason and critical reflection, and why do we persist in them even when they threaten our happiness, safety, and comfort?Paul Katsafanas argues in his book Philosophy of Devotion:The Longing for Invulnerable Ideals (Oxford UP, 2023) that these commitments involve an ethical stance that he calls devotion to sacred ideas. A sacred value is one that we cannot trade with ordinary values, or even consider trading off. When a value is sacred, no rational considerations will disrupt commitment to it. Philosophy of Devotion offers a detailed philosophical account and defense of these features both reasonable and unreasonable, beneficial and detrimental. Katsafanas explains that a life with meaningful commitments is richer and more meaningful than a life without deep, sustained commitments. At the same time, that same devotion can deform into forms of individual and group fanaticism that can be alienating, extremist, and violent. This fanaticism is driven by feelings of persecution and threat to a fragile self, and exacerbated by feelings of ressentiment, a growing anger and resentment of opposition that becomes self-perpetuating.   In this book Katsafanas also provides an alternative to fanaticism, a way to express non-pathological forms of devotion. With this approach, individuals can avoid the dangers of fanaticism on the one hand and an empty lack of meaning on the other. This perpetual quest requires maintaining a form of existential flexibility, which may include oscillation between affirming these sacred values and deepening understanding through consideration of challenging questions. Recommended reading: The True Believer by Eric HofferMeghan Cochran studies belief and action as a technologist working in customer experience and as a student of religion, business, and literature.

The US government is laboring under an enormous debt burden, one that will impact the living standards of future generations of Americans by limiting investment in people and infrastructure. In his new book, Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future (Oxford University Press, 2019), Brookings Institution senior scholar William Gale tackles the challenge head on, addressing what needs to happen to healthcare spending, Social Security, individual taxes, and corporate taxes, in order to make the numbers add up. It makes for sober reading, and the longer we wait, the worse the situation becomes. And the key challenge may not even be fiscal, but political, as the disagreements in Washington over the debt are as deep as the debt is large. Gale ends by making a few simple, inside-Washington suggestions as to how he thinks the political impasse can be broken.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

What makes a species a species? Aristotle answered the species question by positing unchanging essences, properties that all and only members of a species shared. Individuals belonged to a species by possessing this essence. Biologists and philosophers of biology today are either not essentialists at all, or if they are think there are essences they are relational, historical properties. In his provocative book Biological Essentialism (Oxford UP, 2023), Michael Devitt argues for a new form of biological essentialism in which intrinsic essences, probably largely genetic properties, are part of what tie species together and that the actual explanatory practices of biologists commit them to this view. Devitt, who is distinguished professor of philosophy, emeritus, at CUNY Graduate Center, responds to many philosophers critical of his position, and applies his essentialism to debates about race realism and anti-realism.Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Listen to Episode No.6 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and today as well, Bradley Alger, Professor Emeritus, Department of Physiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is How the hypothesis means.What does out knowledge mean after it’s been hypothesized and tested? And what can we claim to know by having tested it? Also, just how far into the scientific enterprise does hypothetical testing reach — in other words, why are scientists writing so much when the hypotheses they test seem to be testing so little? What's all the communication about? These questions — and many, many more — make the meat of this lively discuss about meaning and the hypothesis.Listeners might be interested in my interview with Bradley Alger about his book Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis: From Reproducibility Crisis to Big Data (Oxford UP, 2019). And if you want to buy the book, go here. You can learn all about the hypothesis at The Scientific Hypothesis.

George Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America’s Drug War, with Oxford University Press. George has been teaching and writing in the realms of evidence, prosecution practice, and criminal legal history since 1995. He began practice as a prosecutor in Massachusetts and later taught at the law schools of Boston College, Harvard, and Yale. Beware Euphoria is the most recent among a slew of other books, articles, and essays that he’s published over the years, and perhaps the most contrarian. In this interview, George discusses his research methods and how he came to the conclusion that the history of America’s drug war, while racially motivated, was not meant to target minorities, but protect the morals and health of America’s white youth.Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.