Duke University Press Log

Remembering Julie Graham

We are sad to learn of the death of Julie Graham, co-editor of the book Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism. She wrote under the pen name J. K. Gibson-Graham with her friend and collaborator Katherine Gibson. Graham was Professor of Geography at University of Massachusetts. Our thoughts are with her family, friends, and colleagues.

Todd Shaw Wins W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Book Award

Congratulations to Todd C. Shaw, whose book Now Is the Time! Detroit Black Politics and Grassroots Activism, has won the National Conference of Black Political Scientists's W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Book Award.  In Now Is the Time!, Shaw, Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina, delves into the political strategies of post–Civil Rights Movement African American activists in Detroit, Michigan, to discover the conditions for effective social activism.

Jost Comments on Health Care Reform

Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, author of Health Care at Risk: A Critique of the Consumer-Driven Movement, has been busy commenting on health care reform. Most recently, he offered the New York Times some quotes. "If you lose your employer-related insurance, you will be able to move seamlessly into the exchange," he said. Jost also recently appeared on C-Span, NPR (speaking about the abortion issue), and in the San Diego Union-Tribune, where he answered readers' questions about the health care debate. As to whether he can now take a break because we're done talking about health care, Jost has this to say: "No. As soon as the law is signed, Republicans will begin campaigning to repeal it. But I believe once it is fully implemented in 2014, Americans will wonder how they ever lived without it."

David Brooks on Debating Moral Education

In his column for today's New York Times, David Brooks mentions our new collection Debating Moral Education: Rethinking the Role of the Modern University, edited by Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben. I particular Brooks singles out the essay "Players and Spectators: Sports and Ethical Training in the Modern University" by Duke University's Michael Allen Gillespie. Brooks calls the essay fascinating but he differs with Gillespie in his final assessment of the value of college sports. Gillespie, he writes, "wants to reform college sports into something smaller and more participatory." But Brooks believes college sports are important for community-building. He concludes, "Big-time college sports are absurd, but we would miss them if they were gone."

Bookforum Reviews Wacquant's Punishing the Poor

Kim Phillips-Fein reviews Loïc Wacquant's Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity in the October/November issue of Bookforum. "Wacquant’s new book, Punishing the Poor, is about prisons in America, but only on the surface," writes Phillips-Fein. "Its real concern is what Wacquant calls the “paradox of neoliberal penality”—the way in which the grandeur and power of the state as expressed in incarceration and punishment have grown over the past thirty years." Fein calls Wacquants findings "deeply disturbing," and concludes that the book reminds "us of the hypermodern yet archaic world of prisons still in our midst." (Free registration required to read the full review)

Timothy Stoltzfus Jost on Health Care Reform

A Washington Post article on health insurance co-ops this weekend quotes Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, author of Health Care at Risk: A Critique of the Consumer-Driven Movement. Jost says, "If we want to have co-ops in addition to the public plan and in addition to private insurance, that's great, let's see if it works." But if co-ops are the only alternative to private insurance, "then essentially what we have will be private insurance." Jost was also recently featured in a Forbes article about his first-hand experience with the German health care system, and he has been writing regular commentaries on health care reform for the Roanoke Times.

Kristin Bumiller Wins APSA Award

Kristin Bumiller, author of In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence, has just been announced as the winner of the American Political Science Association's Victoria Schuck Award. Awarded for the best book published in the previous calendar year on women and politics, this award will be presented at the 105th APSA Annual Meeting in Toronto on September 3, 2009. Congratulations, Kristin!

Wacquant Interviewed in Chronicle Review

Karen J. Winkler interviews sociologist Loïc Wacquant in this week's Chronicle Review. Wacquant's new book Punishing the Poor explains how over the past two decades neoliberal societies have sought to control the poor through a combination of penal sanction and welfare supervision. In the interview, Wacquant talks about "prisonfare," the role of the neoliberal state in regulation of the lower classes, and why scholars of criminal justice and scholars of welfare ignore each other.

Health Care Reform in the News

With Tom Daschle's resignation, the future of health reform takes center stage in the news. David Lazarus has an piece in today's Los Angeles Times arguing that health savings accounts (HSAs) should not be a major part of health reform. Cash-strapped employers have been using them to move their employees into high deductible/high premium policies, he says, and workers can barely afford to put any money away in their accounts. Timothy Stoltzfus Jost writes extensively about HSAs in his book Health Care at Risk: A Critique of the Consumer-Driven Movement. Anyone interested in health care reform should take a look at the book, praised by the Journal of the American Medical Association as "an analytic tour de force, comprehensive in scope, scrupulous in scholarship, balanced in approach, and incisive in its policy recommendations."

Race and Immigration in European Politics

This week NPR's Sylvia Poggioli is doing a series on Morning Edition about race and European politics. She has visited Germany and Italy and will cover France tomorrow. If Poggioli's reporting has whet your appetite for more information about this hot topic, Duke Press has much to offer. Patrick Weil's How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789 is a lively, readable history of how French nationality law has changed since the founding of the Republic. Herman Lebovics looks at contemporary France in Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age, providing a riveting account of how intense disputes about what it means to be French have played out over the past half-century. In Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany, Ruth Mandel explores Germany’s relation to the more than two million Turkish immigrants and their descendants living within its borders. Gregory Mann's Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century looks at how France has treated the African veterans of its colonial wars. Several books are coming up on this topic, too. Next fall look for Cynthia Miller-Idriss's Blood and Culture, about youth and citizenship in contemporary Germany; Kesha D. Fikes's Managing African Portugal, an ethnography of immigrant women from Cape Verde and how the coming of the European Union changed their lives; and Gineete Verstraete's Tracking Europe, which contrasts the struggle of the migrant worker with the privilege of the international and European tourist, using contemporary controversies over border security, labor, and citizenship as sites for the study of differential mobility and migration.