New Books in Politics and Polemics Marshall Poe

Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a groundbreaking book, of which the findings have significant implications both for German-China relations and also in understanding the rising influence of autocratic China on liberal democracies globally. In today's interview, Associate Professor Andreas Fulda and I spoke about Germany's entanglement with China, and the extent of Germany's dependancies on China in terms of economics, technology, politics and academia. We spoke about the blind spots of policy makers and academics have, and the way that China policy is constructed and interpreted as a result. We also spoke about the implications for national security and German sovereignty, and the way that Germany entanglement with China is a warning sign for democratic states everywhere. 
Dr Fulda is a political scientist and China scholar with a keen interest in the philosophy of science. You can listen to an interview about his previous book, The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong KongSharp Power and its Discontents (Routledge: 2019) here. 
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Can capitalism be made ecologically sustainable? Can it be good for women? What theoretical approaches help us to grapple with these questions in ways that offer us strategies for how to proceed? Have we already become lost in some sort of gender essentialism to ask these questions together? 
In Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Johanna Oksala brings the resources of ecofeminism and Marxist feminism to these questions, arguing that capitalism cannot be made sustainable, nor can it do without the expropriation of bodies that produce new laborers and consumers. By attending to the rise of biocapitalism, Oksala further develops analytic resources for diagnosing the fundamental problems of an economic system predicated on profit, consumer choice, and endless growth. She also gives us theoretical tools for discerning strategies that will help us create a world beyond capitalism.
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States are holding primaries. The Democrats and Republicans will convene in July and August but it has already been decided that the presidential race will be a rematch. Former President Donald Trump will challenge President Joe Biden. To take stock of where the race stands five months out, we have two experts on the presidency. Dr. Meena Bose is the Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs at the Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs and director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, both at Hofstra University. Dr. Daniel E. Ponder is the L.E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University. Meena and Dan are the co-editors of a new De Gruyter Series in Presidential Politics, Leadership, and Policy Making. The first volume is Evaluating the Obama Presidency: From Transformational Goals to Governing Realities (De Gruyter, 2024) edited by Meena Bose and Paul Fritz. It includes a chapter on presidential leverage and Obama’s decision making on Syria by Dan Ponder and Jeff VanDenBerg.
Previously, Meena joined the podcast to discuss her book Executive Policymaking: The Role of the OMB in the Presidency (co-authored with Andrew Rudalevige) and Dan also chatted with Lilly about his book Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State. They are also veterans of Postscript and we are thrilled to welcome them back to talk about the 2024 presidential race.
During the podcast, we mentioned:

Frances Lee’s Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (U of Chicago, 2016)

Elaine Kamarck’s Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates (Brookings, 2016) and Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again (Brookings, 2016)

Ezra Klein’s New York Times opinion piece “The Democrats have a better option than Biden,” 21 February 2024

Ezra Klein’s interview with Elaine Kamarck, “Here’s How An Open Democratic Convention Would Work,” New York Times, 21 February 2024

Peter Baker’s “For Democrats Pining for an Alternative, Biden Team Has a Message: Get Over It,” New York Times, 2 March 2024


University of Chicago’s GenForward Poll (June 2024)


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How do unequal societies function? In Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net (Portfolio, 2024), Jesscia Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examines how America’s DIY society depends on the labour of mothers and excludes the sorts of social supports present in other countries. This dependence has hugely negative social and individual consequences, as demonstrated by the rich qualitiative and quantitative data examined in the book. Alongside the analysis of the problems and consequences of women’s role in the US, the book also thinks through solutions, demonstrating how much political discourse is far from the collective action that is likely to be effective for social change. An outstanding contribution to social science and contemporary politics, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary social inequalities.
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In this episode, we speak to Nivedita Menon about her new book, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South (Duke University Press, 2024; Permanent Black, 2023). 
Secularism as Misdirection is an ambitious and wide-ranging work, unravelling a term that is perhaps as contentious as it is ubiquitous in discourses of the Global South. Working across political theory, legal history, and religious thought, Menon reveals the dangers of secularism's false promise—likening it to a magic trick that draws "attention from where the trick is happening ... to objects that are made to appear more fascinating." 
Nivedita Menon is Professor at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Her previous books include Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and the landmark work, Seeing like a Feminist (Penguin/Zubaan, 2012). She has co-authored and edited several volumes, including Power and Contestation: India Since 1989 (2nd edition: Bloomsbury, 2013). In addition to her award-winning work as a scholar and translator, Menon is a prominent public intellectual, whose writing on issues such as academic freedom and feminist politics in India can be read at kafila.online, a vital independent blog that she helped found.

Arnav Adhikari is a doctoral candidate in English at Brown University, where he works on the aesthetics and politics of Cold War South Asia. His writing has appeared in Postcolonial Text and Global South Studies, amongst other venues.
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Today’s book is: More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press, 2024), by Meredith Broussard. When technology reinforces inequality, it's not just a glitch—it's a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world. The word “glitch” implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery? What if they're coded into the system itself? 
Meredith Broussard demonstrates in More Than a Glitch how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable. Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences. Broussard argues that the solution isn't to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as “other” to begin with. With sweeping implications for fields ranging from jurisprudence to medicine, the ground-breaking insights of More Than a Glitch are essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future.
Our guest is: Meredith Broussard, who is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of several books, including More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, and Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Her academic research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting and ethical AI, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can help support the show by downloading, sharing, posting about, or assigning any of our 200+ episodes.
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