Author: Marshall Poe

Today Crawford Gribben joins us to talk about his new book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford UP, 2021). Ireland has long been regarded as a 'land of saints and scholars'. Yet the Irish experience of Christianity has never been simple or uncomplicated. The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland describes the emergence, long dominance, sudden division, and recent decline of Ireland's most important religion, as a way of telling the history of the island and its peoples.

Throughout its long history, Christianity in Ireland has lurched from crisis to crisis. Surviving the hostility of earlier religious cultures and the depredations of Vikings, evolving in the face of Gregorian reformation in the 11th and 12th centuries and more radical protestant renewal from the 16th century, Christianity has shaped in foundational ways how the Irish have understood themselves and their place in the world. And the Irish have shaped Christianity, too. Their churches have staffed some of the religion's most important institutions and developed some of its most popular ideas.

But the Irish church, like the island, is divided. After 1922, a border marked out two jurisdictions with competing religious politics. The southern state turned to the Catholic church to shape its social mores, until it emerged from an experience of sudden-onset secularization to become one of the most progressive nations in Europe. The northern state moved more slowly beyond the protestant culture of its principal institutions, but in a similar direction of travel.

In 2021, fifteen hundred years on from the birth of Saint Columba, Christian Ireland appears to be vanishing. But its critics need not relax any more than believers ought to despair. After the failure of several varieties of religious nationalism, what looks like irredeemable failure might actually be a second chance. In the ruins of the church, new Columbas and Patricks shape the rise of another Christian Ireland.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Of the dozens of juicy questions for future inquiry that Dr. Michelle Nario-Redmond provides at the end of Ableism: The Causes and Consequences of Disability Prejudice (Published by Wiley in 2021), the following stands out the most to me, in my various group-membership roles:

How do we build common ground between disadvantaged groups for effective cross-impairment coalitions?

Though it seemed impossible for this question to feel any more urgent after over a year and a half of COVID-19 and the parallel prominence of social movements to make Black Lives Matter, a recent article by my latest author crush unpacking a profoundly intersectional moment in the meme culture of what we should be calling (thanks to Neal Stephenson’s 30-year old book) Metaverse 1.0 – AKA social media, especially those platforms now owned by the maybe-monopoly formerly known as Facebook – reminded me again of the immense possibilities of disability as a political identity (see Annamma & Morrison, 2018, particularly the footnotes for more background on this). Nicole Froio’s article-that-should-become-a-book extrapolates from a celebrity’s (whack!) Instagram post as an exemplification of what the writer dubs the masculine “performativity of doing the least,” in which the “‘model’ heterosexual family consists of an all-sacrificing mother, a paternalistic father, and children free from disability.”

The timing of Froio’s deft analysis and the 34,000 likes it has garnered–compared to the upwards of 2 million bestowed upon the post in question—remind me of beloved if nuclear boomer Bill Maher’s synchronous editorial segment comparing “model citizen” Greta Thunburg (who is autistic), with 13 million followers, to the “model” (capitalist straight femme normate) Kylie Jenner, with 279 million.

Christina Anderson Bosch is an assistant professor of special education at the California State University, Fresno, also on Twitter @DocCABosch.

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Just about everyone knows correlation does not equal causation, and probably that a randomized controlled experiment is the best way to solve that problem, if you can do one. If you’ve been following the economics discipline you will have heard about the Nobel Prize given to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for their work applying the experimental method to test real-world policy interventions out in the field. But what if you can’t do this? Are you just stuck with untestable claims? This year’s Nobel Prize to Josh Angrist, David Card, and Guido Imbens for methods of causal inference with observational data confirms that you don't have to give up. Scott Cunningham’s Causal Inference: The Mixtape (Yale UP, 2021) provides an accessible practical introduction to techniques developed by these luminaries and others. Along with the statistical theory, it provides intuitive explanations of these techniques, and examples of the computer code needed to run them. In our conversation we discuss why economists needed these techniques and how they work.

Scott Cunningham is a professor of economics at Baylor University. He researches topics including mental healthcare, sex work, abortion and drug policy. He is active on Twitter, has a blog on Substack, and frequently conducts workshops on causal inference methods. A complete web version of his book is available here.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

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The avocado is the iconic food of the twenty-first century. It has gone from a little-known regional food to a social media darling in less than a hundred years. This is an astounding trajectory for a fruit that isn’t sweet, becomes bitter when it is cooked and has perhaps the oddest texture of any fruit or vegetable. But the idea that this rich and delicious fruit is also healthy despite being fatty and energy-dense gives it unicorn status among modern eaters, especially millennials.

Through lively anecdotes, colourful pictures and delicious recipes, Jeff Miller's book Avocado: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2020) explores the meteoric rise of the avocado, from its co-evolution with the megaherbivores of the Pleistocene to its acceptance by the Spanish conquistadores in Mexico and its current dominance of food consumers’ imagination.

Jeff Miller is an Associate Professor of Hospitality Management at Colorado State University. He is the co-author of Food Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods (2009) and was named Culinary Educator of the Year in 2017. 

Amir Sayadabdi is a lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism.

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We interview Dr. Joel Whitebook, philosopher and psychoanalyst about his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2017). Dr. Whitebook works in Critical Theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, developing that tradition with his clinical and philosophical knowledge of recent advances in psychoanalytic theory.

The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since the last century, taking into account recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice, gender studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and more. Offering a radically new portrait of the creator of psychoanalysis, this book explores the man in all his complexity alongside an interpretation of his theories that cuts through the stereotypes that surround him. The development of Freud's thinking is addressed not only in the context of his personal life, but also in that of society and culture at large, while the impact of his thinking on subsequent issues of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory is fully examined. Whitebook demonstrates that declarations of Freud's obsolescence are premature, and, with his clear and engaging style, brings this vivid figure to life in compelling and readable fashion.

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Nora Krug and Timothy Snyder have published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Graphic Edition with Ten Speed Press, 2021. The book contains the slightly updated text from Professor Snyder’s best-selling 2017 edition but now gorgeously illustrated with Professor Krug’s artwork. Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University, is a prolific historian of Eastern and Central Europe in the 20th century who focuses on the violence of totalitarian regimes. He has published too many books to list here his 2010 Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and 2015 Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning deserve special mention. Nora Krug is a graphic artist, author, and Associate Professor of Illustrations at Parsons School of Design. Her 2019 autobiography Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home received substantial acclaim and was the recipient of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. Nora Krug was named Illustrator of the Year by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2019. Her drawings and visual narratives have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde diplomatique.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Why do so many Cambodian small landholders live in fear? How did the issuance of official land titles contribute to growing indebtedness in rural areas? Why did the government send thousands of university students to the countryside to help with the land titling process? And why did international donors eventually become so disllusioned?

In this podcast, Alice Beban, senior lecturer in development sociology at Massey University, discusses her new book Unwritten Rule: State Building Through Land Reform in Cambodia (Cornell 2021) with Duncan McCargo, Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Unwritten Rule draws on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork to paint a disturbing picture of how an ambitious land reform project, generously funded by leading donors, largely failed to deliver the benefits it promised.

In 2012, Cambodia—an epicenter of violent land grabbing—announced a bold new initiative to develop land redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. Alice Beban's Unwritten Rule focuses on this land reform to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia. Beban contends that the national land-titling program, the so-called leopard skin land reform, was first and foremost a political campaign orchestrated by the world's longest-serving prime minister, Hun Sen. The reform aimed to secure the loyalty of rural voters, produce "modern" farmers, and wrest control over land distribution from local officials. Through ambiguous legal directives and unwritten rules guiding the allocation of land, the government fostered uncertainty and fear within local communities. Unwritten Rule gives pause both to celebratory claims that land reform will enable land tenure security, and to critical claims that land reform will enmesh rural people more tightly in state bureaucracies and create a fiscally legible landscape. Instead, Beban argues that the extension of formal property rights strengthened the very patronage-based politics that Western development agencies hope to subvert.

If you liked this podcast, you may also enjoy two other podcasts, hosted by Duncan McCargo on related topics, here and here. 

Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here.

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Why do weak autocrats create strong autocracies? Using game-theoretic logic and an analysis of the post-colonial experience of sub-Saharan Africa, Anne Meng shows that by creating institutions that incorporate other elites into the inner circles of power, dictators create regimes that can outlast their founders. By creating clear lines of succession, they avoid disruptive power struggles that could bring down the regime.

Anne Meng is a professor of political science at the University of Virginia who studies authoritarian institutions. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Host Peter Lorentzen is a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China.

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