Duke University Press Log

Sujatha Fernandes Quoted in New York Times

Sujatha Fernandes, author of Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela and Cuba Represent!Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures, is quoted in today's New York Times. In an article by Simon Romero, Fernandes comments about groups like the Communications Liberation Army and Guerrilla Communications, who create grafiti-based murals in Caracas. "These groups share the objective of reclaiming public space and turning it into a kind of street periodical that can be constantly renewed and painted over to get their message out," says Fernandes. Who Can Stop the Drums? is an ethnography the social movements of Caracas's barrios.

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.

Jesook Song's Book Launch at Toronto Women's Bookstore

Jesook Song, author of South Korean's in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society, had a launch party for her new book at the Toronto Women's Bookstore on March 25th. Below are a couple of pictures from that event.

 

 

Speakers at Jesook Song's launch party: (in order from left to right) Joseph Wong, Maureen FitzGerald, Tania Li, Jesook Song, David McNally, Katharine Rankin, Bonnie McElhinny, and Rachel Silvey.

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)

Happy Women's Equality Day!

Happy Women's Equality Day! In honor of this day, first established in 1971, we thought we would draw attention to all the great women's studies books out there, such as Kathy Davis' The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders. This book tells of the feminist success story of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970). Using interviews and responses to the original book, Davis shares the story of this remarkable book’s global circulation. Want to win a copy? Check out our contest on our Facebook page!

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!

Brenda Weber's Makeover TV Reviewed in Publishers Weekly

Brenda R. Weber's Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity is reviewed in Publishers Weekly. According to the reviewer, Weber "offers a long-overdue analysis of what being made over means in American culture. . . her work is worthy of attention." The reviewer also calls Makeover TV a "dense and insightful critique." The book will be available in November.

Image: Marking the Site of Surgery. Brand New You. “Nicola,” September 4, 2005.

Kim Dae-jung and the Asian Debt Crisis

 

Former South Korean President, Kim Dae-jung, passed away Tuesday, August 18th at the age of 83. Mr. Kim was president of South Korea from 1998-2003, and his presidency overlapped with the devastating Asian Debt Crisis (1997-2001). In the recently released South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society, author Jesook Song discusses Mr. Kim's role in creating the neoliberal welfare state that was a response to the crisis. For more information about Mr. Kim and the debt crisis, check out Song's new book.

Wacquant Reviewed in Times Higher Education Supplement

Loïc Wacquant's Punishing the Poor gets a great review in this week's Times Higher Education Supplement. Reviewer Louise Hardwick writes: "Boldly conceived and carefully constructed, the book details the grandeur of a penal state resourced by the plundering of the social one and dissects the attitudes that legitimate it in all its grandeur. Moreover, Wacquant not only chronicles the enthronement of the penal state in the US but also its imitative climb towards ascendancy in Western Europe." She concludes that the book is "urgent and timely, absorbing and alarming," and "should warn us that Britain's increasing dependence on our penal state and the accelerating erosion of our social state are one and the same thing, and may prove a disaster."