In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (Oxford UP, 2022) attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is the relationship between modern states and disasters? Disasters are commonly understood as exceptional occurrences that ruin societies and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific control called 'disaster management.' States and the international institutions perform disaster management to protect society. The book challenges this traditional narrative. It interprets 'disaster management' as a historical struggle to conservate the existence and experience of catastrophes and produce idealized authorities capable of protecting society from uncertainty. It examines the emergence of this struggle in the eighteenth century and reveals how rulers and experts struggling to master God, Nature, and each other, inaugurated modern meanings of risk, normalcy, power, and responsibility.By recovering this history of disaster management, the book reveals underlying legal structures and political-economies that smuggle the unspoken costs of modernity inside the rationalized representation of past catastrophes and future risks. Catastrophes, put bluntly, are not occurrences. They are inventions. Even in their most destructive forms, catastrophes are the stigmata through which the modern state renews itself. The book develops this argument by examining the Marseille plague (1720), the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the Bengal famine (1770), and showing how eighteenth-century beliefs reverberate in structure and policies of 'global' disaster management today. It concludes that Climate Change and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends onreckoning with this past.

Samuel Wright's A Time of Novelty: Logic, Emotion, and Intellectual Life in Early Modern India, 1500-1700 C.E. (Oxford UP, 2021) argues that a philosophical community emerges in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India that crafts an intellectual life on the basis of intellectual and emotional responses to novelty in Sanskrit logic (nyāya-śāstra). As the book demonstrates, novelty was a primary concept used by Sanskrit logicians during this period to mark the boundaries of a philosophical community in both intellectual and emotional terms. By retaining space for emotion when studying intellectual thought, this book recovers not only what it means to 'think' novelty but also what it means to 'feel' novelty.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

In A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism (Oxford UP, 2021), Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza examine public relations as a social and political force that shapes both our understanding of the environmental crises we now face and our responses to them. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnography, and archival research, Aronczyk and Espinoza document the evolution of PR techniques to control public perception of the environment since the beginning of the twentieth century. More than spin or misinformation, PR affects how institutions and individuals conceptualize environmental problems -- from conservation to coal mining to carbon credits. Revealing the linkages of professional strategists, information politics, and environmental standards, A Strategic Nature shows how public relations restricts alternative paths to a sustainable climate future.Melissa Aronczyk is an associate professor at Rutgers University in the School of Communication & Information. She is the author of Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity (Oxford 2013). Maria I. Espinoza is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at Rutgers University.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.

This book presents for the first time in English a complete translation of the Expository Commentary to the Daode jing, written by the Daoist monk Cheng Xuanying in the 7th century CE. This commentary is a quintessential text of Tang dynasty Daoist philosophy and of Chongxuanxue or Twofold Mystery teachings. Cheng Xuanying proposes a reading of the ancient Daode jing that aligns the text with Daoist practices and beliefs and integrates Buddhist concepts and techniques into the exegesis of the Daode jing.Building on the philosophical tradition of Xuanxue authors like Wang Bi, Cheng read the Daode jing in light of Daoist religion. Cheng presents Laozi, the presumed author of the Daode jing, as a bodhisattva-like sage and savior, who wrote the Daode jing to compassionately guide human beings to salvation. Salvation is interpreted as a metaphysical form of immortality, reached by overcoming the dichotomy of being and non-being, and thus also life and death. Cheng's philosophical outlook ties together the ancient text of the Daode jing and contemporary developments in Daoist thought which occurred under the influence of an intense interaction with Buddhist ideas. The commentary is a vivid testimony of the integration of Buddhist thought into an exegesis of the ancient classic of the Daode jing, and thereby also into Chinese philosophy.Friederike Assandri frames this new translation with an extensive introduction, providing crucial context for a new reading of the Daode jing. It includes a biography of Cheng Xuanying, a discussion of the historical and political context of Daoism in early medieval China in the capital Chang'an, and a discussion of Cheng's philosophy in relation to the interaction of Daoism and Buddhism. This commentary is essential reading for students and scholars interested in the history of Chinese philosophy, Daoist thought, and the reception of Buddhism in China.The Daode jing Commentary of Cheng Xuanying: Daoism, Buddhism, and the Laozi in the Tang Dynasty, translated by Friederike Assandri (OUP, 2021) is a much-needed translation of a text that is not only an important milestone in the history of the interpretation of the Laozi Daodejing, but also a snapshot of a complex moment in China's intellectual history in the early Tang. Students of Chinese philosophy and intellectual history will really benefit from this text now being available in English, and for the detailed introduction which does a great job of contextualising the text and its author Cheng Xuanying. Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He works on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty, and therefore is drawn to complicated questions of identity in premodern China like a moth is drawn to flame. He can be reached at lance.pursey@abdn.ac.uk.

Lynn Garafola's La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern (Oxford UP, 2022) is both readable and rigorous, a rare combination. As a historian and eminent dance scholar, Garafola brings her skills to the art of biography with acumen. We also get a deep sense of the woman and her works. The interview not only includes a discussion of Nijinska and the way in which her history has been overshadowed by her famous brother, as well as dance history which has foregrounded and celebrated male ballet choreographers, and modern choreographers after the first wave of women through the late 1940s, Garafola provides insights into Nijinska's works and suggests links for viewing the best productions to further understand this ephemeral art. What emerges from the interview is the story of a woman who survived revolutions, wars, geographic moves, misogyny, motherhood, and cared for her brother who was institutionalised, and continued to work as an artist through the end of her life.Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of International History.

Police use of advanced data collection and analysis technologies—or, "big data policing"—continues to receive both positive and negative attention through media, activism, and politics. While some high-profile cases illustrate its potential to hasten investigations or even solve previously unsolved crimes, and others showcase risks to individual liberties and vulnerable communities, we know surprisingly little about how and why police departments actually adopt and deploy these tools.Sarah Brayne's new book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford UP, 2021) provides the first in-depth study of these questions. Dr. Brayne recorded observations and interviews over a 5-year period of ethnographic fieldwork and follow-up with the LAPD. In the book, she examines the roles of extra- and intra-departmental factors in the uptake of big data tools, their relationship to the practice and culture of policing, and the impacts and reactions they've precipitated among captains, sworn officers, civilian analysts, and policed communities.A major theme of the book is the role of discretion: While data-driven decision-making tools may promise to replace biased human judgment, in practice they can instead displace human judgment—to earlier and less visible steps in the process, exacerbating the problem they are invoked to solve. Conversely, i was also interested in how Dr. Brayne suggests we shift our perspectives on these tools: She proposes to think of a "big data environment" that shapes our social behavior, and she flips the analogy of data as capital to describe a "cumulative disadvantage" that accrues to those with less access to and control over the data collected on them.Dr. Brayne's study has legal and scholarly as well as policy implications, and it will be of interest to anyone interested in the societal role of data or in that of police. I hope that it becomes part of the foundation for urgently needed future work at their intersection.Suggested companion work: Ballad of the Bullet by Forrest Stuart (listen to Stuart's interview with Sarah E. Patterson here)Sarah Brayne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the faculty at UT-Austin, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. Dr. Brayne is the founder and director of the Texas Prison Education Initiative, a group of faculty and students who volunteer to teach college classes in prisons throughout Texas. Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

The first book on alcohol in pre-modern India, James McHugh's An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian Religion and History (Oxford UP, 2021) uses a wide range of sources from the Vedas to the Kamasutra to explore intoxicating drinks and styles of drinking, as well as sophisticated rationales for abstinence found in South Asia from the earliest Sanskrit written records through the second millennium CE.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

The 1949 Geneva Conventions are the most important rules for armed conflict ever formulated. To this day they continue to shape contemporary debates about regulating warfare, but their history is often misunderstood. For most observers, the drafters behind these treaties were primarily motivated by liberal humanitarian principles and the shock of the atrocities of the Second World War. In Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Boyd van Dijk “shows how the final text of the 1949 Conventions, far from being an unabashedly liberal blueprint, was the outcome of a series of political struggles among the drafters, many of whom were not liberal and whose ideas changed radically over time. Nor were they merely a product of idealism or even the shock felt in the wake of Hitler’s atrocities. Constructing the Conventions meant outlawing some forms of inhumanity while tolerating others. It concerned a great deal more than simply recognising the shortcomings of Internatinal law as revealed by the experience of the Second World War. In making the Conventions, drafters sought to contest European imperial rule, empower the ICRC, challenge state sovereignty, fight Cold War rivalries, ensure rights during wartime, reinvent the concept of war crimes and prepare for (civil) wars to come.”Dr. van Dijk argues that to understand the politics and ideas of the Conventions' drafters is to see them less as passive characters responding to past events than as active protagonists trying to shape the future of warfare. In many different ways, they tried to define the contours of future battlefields by deciding who deserved protection and what counted as a legitimate target. Outlawing illegal conduct in wartime did as much to outline the concept of humanized war as to establish the legality of waging war itself.Using never previously accessed archival materials, the book provides a comprehensive historical account of the Conventions' past and contributes to a deeper understanding of the most important treaty of humanitarian law. The book therefore presents an eye-opening account of the making of international law and offers both historians and legal scholars with detailed information about international law's origins.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Sarah Farmer's Rural Inventions: The French Countryside After 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a history of national, regional, and local transformations during the period known as the Trente Glorieuses in France from 1945 to 1975. Rural communities and landscapes did not disappear during these years, but existed in complex relationship to urban populations, spaces, economies, and culture. "Modernization" was also a phenomenon in the countryside in various ways and the myth of an unchanging peasant world was just that. Examining state infrastructural and agricultural plans and projects; a rising French and international interest in second, "country" homes; utopian rural experiments and environmental activisms; peasant autobiographies; and (sometimes) nostalgic representations of rural life and landscapes in photographs and other visual sources, the book considers a range of objects and perspectives from/on the French countryside. Packed with compelling stories, actors, and arguments about some of the fundamental contradictions that structured French society during this period, the book challenges us to question our assumptions about what we mean when we say or think "rural" and "postwar" together.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

Screen time. Daycare. Praise. Sleep training. Spanking and time-outs. Helicopter versus "old school" parenting. There are a lot of questions facing parents of young children but consistent and reliable science-based answers can be hard to find. Parenting Made Complicated: What Science Really Knows about the Greatest Debates of Early Childhood (Oxford UP, 2021), written by child psychiatrist Dr. David Rettew, tackles many of the biggest controversies facing new parents today and examines the science behind these issues with writing that is lively, personal, non-preachy, and even funny. This book doesn't assume that the "correct" answer for each parenting dilemma is the same for each child. Instead it describes how different approaches may be required based on a child's unique temperament or other important factors. Practical, informed, and entertaining, Parenting Made Complicated is a complete resource for parents and professionals alike who are looking for dependable information about today's parenting controversies.Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics. Besides reading about science, innovation and entrepreneurship, I have become interested in the scientific and cultural aspects of parenting and motherhood since welcoming my first child.