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How do alternative economic ideas and practices develop? In Cash, Clothes, and Construction: Rethinking Value in Bolivia’s Pluri-economy (U Minnesota Press, 2023),  Kate Maclean, an Associate Professor at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London, considers the Pluri-economy of Bolivia to rethink ideas about gender, politics, development and the state. The book uses three core case studies, money, clothing, and construction, to explore how economic alternatives have emerged in Bolivia since the 2005 election of Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism (MAS). The book offers a feminist critique of both the expectations of neoliberal economics, and MAS’s alternatives, drawing on the perspectives and insights of indigenous women in Bolivia. Drawing on a deep engagement with place, as well as a rich theoretical and empirical contribution, the book will be essential reading across social science and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in alternatives to our current economic settlement.
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Today I talked to Donald Opitz and Derek Melleby about their book Learning for the Love of God: A Student's Guide to Academic Faithfulness (Brazos Press, 2014).
Most Christian college students separate their academic life from church attendance, Bible study, and prayer. Too often discipleship of the mind is overlooked if not ignored altogether. In this lively and enlightening book, two authors who are experienced in college youth ministry show students how to be faithful in their studies, approaching education as their vocation. This revised edition of the well-received The Outrageous Idea of Academic Faithfulness includes updates throughout, two new substantive appendixes, personal stories from students, a new preface, and a fresh interior design. Chapters conclude with thought-provoking discussion questions. Read a review of the book by local bookstore owner and friend of the authors here.
Donald Opitz (PhD, Boston University) is chaplain and senior director of Christian formation at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous articles and has worked as a pastor as well as a campus minister.
Derek Melleby (DMin, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) serves as a consultant with North Group Consultants. As the former Director of Calling & Career Development at Lancaster Bible College, Derek helped individuals connect to a sense of calling in their career. In that role, he served the student population, accompanying them on their journey to grow their self-awareness and develop the skills needed to make a positive impact on their communities. He has also provided executive leadership in a growth-oriented non-profit organization.
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Despite the hypervisibility of a constellation of female pop stars, the music business is structured around gender inequality. As a result, women in the music industry often seize on self-branding opportunities in fashion, cosmetics, food, and technology for the purposes of professional longevity. Extending Play: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise in the Early Twenty-First Century (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the ubiquity of brand partnerships in the contemporary music industry through the lens of feminized labor, to demonstrate how female artists use them as a resource for artistic expression and to articulate forms of popular feminism through self-commodification. In this book, author Alyxandra Vesey examines this type of promotional work and examines its proliferation in the early 21st century.
Though brand partnerships exist across all media industries, they are a distinct phenomenon for the music business because of their associations with fan club merchandise, concert merchandise, and lifestyle branding, often foregrounding women's participation in shaping these economies through fan labor and image management. Through textual and discourse analysis of artists' songs, music videos, interviews, social media usage, promotional campaigns, marketing strategies, and business decisions, Extending Play investigates how female musicians co-create branded feminine-coded products like perfume, clothes, makeup, and cookbooks and masculine-coded products like music equipment as resources to work through their own ideas about gender and femininity as workers in industries that often use sexism and ageism to diminish women's creative authority and diminish the value of the recording in order to incentivize musicians to internalize the demands of industrial convergence.
By merging star studies, popular music studies, and media industry studies, Extending Play proposes an integrated methodology for approaching contemporary cultural history that demonstrates how female-identified musicians have operated as both a hub for industrial convergence and as music industry professionals who use their extramusical skills to reassert their creative acumen.
Alyxandra Vesey is Assistant Professor in Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the gendered dynamics of creative labor in the music industries. Her work has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Television and New Media, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Camera Obscura, Velvet Light Trap, and Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture. Alyxandra on Twitter.
Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.
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The promise that you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is central to the story of the American Dream. It's the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However, time and again we have seen how this foundational myth, with its emphasis on individual determination, brittle self-sufficiency, and personal accomplishment, does not help us. Instead, as income inequality rises around us, we are left with shame and self-blame for our condition.
Alissa Quart argues that at the heart of our suffering is a do-it-yourself ethos, the misplaced belief in our own independence and the conviction that we must rely on ourselves alone. Looking at a range of delusions and half solutions--from "grit" to the false Horatio Alger story to the rise of GoFundMe--Quart reveals how we have been steered away from robust social programs that would address the root causes of our problems. Meanwhile, the responsibility for survival has been shifted onto the backs of ordinary people, burdening generations with debt instead of providing the social safety net we so desperately need.
Insightful, sharply argued, and characterized by Quart's lively writing and deep reporting, and for fans of Evicted and Nickel and Dimed, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (Ecco Press, 2023) is a powerful examination of what ails us at a societal level and a plan for how we can free ourselves from these self-defeating narratives

Acclaimed journalist Alissa Quart is a contributor to The Washington Post and New York Times and the author of several nonfiction works including Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers and Squeezed: Why our Families Can’t Afford America, as well as works of poetry like Thoughts and Prayers. Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the editor with David Wallis of Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the world’s richest country which we discussed on this podcast in February.
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Listen to this interview of Courtney Miller, PhD student in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about her paper "Did You Miss My Comment or What?" Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions (ICSE 2022).
Courtney Miller : "One of the things I really enjoyed after publication was the interest of other communities in our work. I mean, just the summer after we published, I went and gave a talk at the Linux Open Source conference, and it was really great to learn that — there's a lot of duality of thought in this world, but there's a lot of people who are pretty much studying the same types of problems as you but from completely different fields and completely different directions. And so, being able to incorporate their work in as well, while also having the bulk of our citations be to ICSE, of course, because that's our bread and butter in software engineering — all that comes together to make a better foundation for the paper."
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Marie-Louise Gay is an internationally-acclaimed, multi-award winning Canadian author and illustrator of over 60 books. In our interview, we celebrate the recent launch of her newest book, Walking Trees (Groundwood Books, 2024), and discuss her youth, her studies and professional career, and several of her leading books, including the series featuring Stella and Sam, and her secret recipe for doing things her way.
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