Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Herbert “Bert” Kritzer, the Marvin J. Sonosky Chair of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School, has a new book that explores the process for reform of judicial selection across the fifty states. This is a fascinating examination of the different approaches that state legislatures, governors, partisans, and citizens have pursued in reforming the process, within each state, of judicial selection at all levels. With a brief historical overview of how this process was initially pursued in the early days of the republic, Kritzer moves to the central time period of the book, which is examining the state systems that were in place in the mid-20th century and the moves across the country to modernize court systems and how those moves unfolded. The main period that Kritzer focuses on is between 1980 and 2020, and he carefully reviews the reform efforts that succeeded as well as those that failedJudicial Selection in the States: Politics and the Struggle for Reform (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines the legal and democratic subcultures as a way to frame and understand the reasons behind the move towards reforms. But the heart of the book is diving into various states to see what they tried to change, who tried to change it, and if they were at all successful in these reform efforts. One of the more popular plans for state-level judicial selection is the “Missouri Plan”, which was designed to improve the quality of judges by establishing a kind of review board/nominating commission that made recommendations to the governor of the state. Many states, between 1960 and 1980, moved towards adopting the Missouri plan as the method for judicial selection. But following this, states continued to reform with an eye towards more legal professionalism as the guiding tenet behind judicial selection. According to Kritzer’s research, this was very much the case between 1980 and 1999, and this was in concert with the overhauling of state constitutions as well. Around 2000 there is a bit of a shift, as partisan politics now starts to be more of the driver behind the moves to reform or change the selection of state judges. Judicial Selection in the States is an interesting exploration of the various forms of judicial selection, the moves towards reform over the decades, the shifting role of partisanship as well as the impetus towards more professional and merit-based outcomes.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we, so we reached across our mentor network to bring you these podcasts. Wish we’d include a specific topic? DM suggestions on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear about: how Black women contributed to America’s first freedom war, reading against the grain, rival geographies, fugitivity as an act of resistance, why we must center Black women’s voices, and a discussion of the book Running from Bondage.Our guest is: Dr. Karen Cook Bell, who is Associate Professor of History. Her areas of specialization include slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of African American History; Georgia Historical Quarterly; Passport; U.S. West-Africa: Interaction and Relations; Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians; Converging Identities: Blackness in the Contemporary Diaspora; and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah. She has published Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth Century Georgia, which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award; and Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America. She is editor of Southern Black Women’s Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction; and a contributor for Black Perspectives. She is a former AAUW Dissertation Fellow.Today’s book is: Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, which tells how enslaved women comprised one-third of all runaways, and the ways in which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. Dr. Cook Bell's contribution to the study of slave resistance explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls, and details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there two wars waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role. Running from Bondage emphasizes the chances taken by these Black founding mothers and the important contributions they made to the cause of liberty.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts, and a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth Century Georgia, by Karen Cook Bell Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, by Stephanie Camp “What Can We Learn from a Digital Database of Runaway Slave Advertisements,” International Social Science Review vol 76 no. (2001), by Tom Costa Never Caught, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar This interview on reclaiming lost voices with Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar  This interview about the social constructions of race with Dr. Brigette Fielder

Dr. Gary Shiffman’s book The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge UP, 2020) serves as a fantastic introduction to anyone interested in thinking critically about terrorist, insurgency, and criminal groups of all sorts. Using case studies from multiple continents, ideological contexts, and political situations, Dr. Shiffman shows how the language and tools familiar to economists can assist policy makers and security personnel to combat rival ‘firms,’ as he classifies them. Arguing strongly against essentialist labels and stories about why these groups act the way that they do, Dr. Shiffman offers us an approach to understanding ‘illicit’ groups that would be recognizable to leaders of many ‘legitimate’ organizations.Dr. Gary Shiffman is a Professor at Georgetown University, the CEO of two software companies, a former Naval Officer and Border Patrol leader, a former Fortune 200 executive, and an engaging writer. His is the author of one other book on the Economic Instruments of Security Policy.

Why did the United States invade Iraq, setting off a chain of events that profoundly changed the Middle East and the US global position? In The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Joseph Stieb offers a compelling look at how the United States pivoted from a policy of containment to regime change in Iraq after September 11, 2001. Starting with the Persian Gulf War, the book traces how a coalition of political actors argued with increasing success that the totalitarian nature of Saddam Hussein's regime and the untrustworthy behavior of the international coalition behind sanctions meant that containment was a doomed policy. By the end of the 1990s, a consensus belief emerged that only regime change and democratization could fully address the Iraqi threat. Through careful examination, Stieb expands our understanding of the origins of the Iraq War while also explaining why so many politicians and policymakers rejected containment after 9/11 and embraced regime change.Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II.

For all the diversity of views within the animal protection movement, there is a surprising consensus about the need for more severe criminal justice interventions against animal abusers. More prosecutions and longer sentences, it is argued, will advance the status of animals in law and society. In Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment (Cambridge UP, 2019), Professor Justin Marceau demonstrates that a focus on 'carceral animal law' puts the animal rights movement at odds with other social justice movements, and may be bad for humans and animals alike. Animal protection efforts need to move beyond cages and towards systemic solutions if the movement hopes to be true to its own defining ethos of increased empathy and resistance to social oppression. Providing new insights into how the lessons of criminal justice reform should be imported into the animal abuse context, Beyond Cages is a valuable contribution to the literature on animal welfare and animal rights law.Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

American society is rapidly secularizing – a radical departure from its historically high level of religiosity–and politics is a big part of the reason. Just as, forty years ago, the Religious Right arose as a new political movement, today secularism is gaining traction as a distinct and politically energized identity. Secular Surge: A New Faultline in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines the political causes and political consequences of this secular surge, drawing on a wealth of original data. The authors show that secular identity is in part a reaction to the Religious Right. However, while the political impact of secularism is profound, there may not yet be a Secular Left to counterbalance the Religious Right. Secularism has introduced new tensions within the Democratic Party while adding oxygen to political polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Still there may be opportunities to reach common ground if politicians seek to forge coalitions that encompass both secular and religious Americans.David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the former chairperson of the political science department. His research focuses on civic and politicalengagement, with a particular focus on religion (and secularism) and young people.Geoff Layman serves as the chair of the Department of Political Science and is the co-editor of the journal Political Behavior. His research focuses on political behavior, political parties, and religion and politics, with a particular emphasis on long-term changes in the parties and their electoral coalitions.Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on American Political Development (APD), federalism, education, and religion and politics. Her award-winning book America's Voucher Politics is out now with Cambridge University Press, and her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall has come to represent the entry of an isolated region onto the global stage. On the contrary, this study argues that communist states had in fact long been shapers of an interconnecting world, with '1989' instead marking a choice by local elites about the form that globalisation should take. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions, 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2019) draws on material from local archives to international institutions to explore the place of Eastern Europe in the emergence, since the 1970s, of a new world order that combined neoliberal economics and liberal democracy with increasingly bordered civilisational, racial and religious identities. An original and wide-ranging history, it explores the importance of the region's links to the West, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America in this global transformation, reclaiming the era's other visions such as socialist democracy or authoritarian modernisation which had been lost in triumphalist histories of market liberalism.Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

Mental Capacity in Relationship: Decision-Making, Dialogue, and Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), challenges the current legal landscape of mental capacity law and human rights legislation, arguing that assessments of mental capacity should take account the role of relationships in the decision-making capacity of individuals with impairments and mental disorders. Dr. Camillia Kong's is an interdisciplinary exploration, combining philosophy, legal analysis on the law of England and Wales, the European Convention of Human Rights, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Kong defends a concept of mental capacity, but one which at times provides scope for justifiable interventions into disabling relationships. The implications of Kong's hypothesis are groundbreaking; she provides a framework which articulates the practice of capacity assessments to help to better situate, interpret, and understand the decisions and actions of people with impairments. This monograph is the basis of another publication (co-written with Alex Ruck Keene) Overcoming Challenges in the Mental Capacity Act 2005: Practical Guidance for Working with Complex Issues (Jessica Kingsley, 2018). You can listen to that interview with Dr. Kong and Ruck-Keene here.Dr Camillia Kong is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice, Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the Principal Investigator of Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law.Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

Despite the proliferation of scientific ecology in the second half of the 20th C emphasizing the interconnection between environment and humanity, Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology (Cambridge UP, 2020) considers the intersection of ecology with the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s. This intellectual/literary history considers altered forms of the American wilderness narrative influenced by the ideas and vocabulary taken from psychoanalysis and various identity-based social movements that emerged in this chaotic moment. By deep reading the works of Edward Abbey, Simon Ortiz, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Jon Krakuer, among others, Dr. Menrisky demonstrates how these authors either dramatized or undermined concepts of ecological authenticity within the identity politics of ecology, or IPE. In this framework, IPE represents a story of oscillation: a back-and-forth between writers attempting to shore up a narrative of ecological authenticity and those willing to question it. IPE’s legacy remains within contemporary environmental conversations highlighted by concepts such as #liveauthentic.

Over time and across different genres, Afghanistan has been presented to the world as potential ally, dangerous enemy, gendered space, and mysterious locale. These powerful, if competing, visions seek to make sense of Afghanistan and to render it legible. In Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Nivi Manchanda, Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, uncovers and critically explores Anglophone practices of knowledge cultivation and representational strategies, and argues that Afghanistan occupies a distinctive place in the imperial imagination: over-determined and under-theorised, owing largely to the particular history of imperial intervention in the region. Focusing on representations of gender, state and tribes, Manchanda re-historicizes and de-mythologizes the study of Afghanistan through a sustained critique of colonial forms of knowing and demonstrates how the development of pervasive tropes in Western conceptions of Afghanistan have enabled Western intervention, invasion and bombing in the region from the nineteenth century to the present. In our conversation we discussed Afghanistan as a discursive regime, the imperial politics of knowledge production, modern myths about Afghanistan, the narratives of the “Great Game” and the “Graveyard of Empires,” the role of the native informant, the failed state, the “War on Terror,” the representation of the “Afghan woman” and Afghan masculinities, and a genealogy of the term “tribe.”Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.