Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast

Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023) explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this unique history uncovers the foundational role of palatability in shaping Western water treatment processes. By focusing on the relationship between taste and the environment, Christy Spackman shows how efforts to erase unwanted tastes and smells have transformed water into a highly industrialized food product divorced from its origins. The Taste of Water invites readers to question their own assumptions about what water does and should naturally taste like while exposing them to the invisible—but substantial—sensory labor involved in creating tap water.

Christy Spackman is Assistant Professor of Art/Science at Arizona State University, where she holds a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. She is also Director of the Sensory Labor(atory), an experimental research collective dedicated to creatively disrupting longstanding sensory hierarchies. Her academic work focuses on how the sensory experiences of making, consuming, and disposing of food influence and are influenced by “technologies of taste,” her term for the oft-overlooked technologies and practices used to manage the sensory aspects of foods during production.

Garrett Broad is Associate Professor of Communication Studies in Rowan University’s Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, where he also serves as Provost’s Fellow in the Catalysts for Sustainability Initiative. His research and teaching explores the connections between contemporary social movements, food systems, and digital media technology. He is the author of More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change, as well as a variety of articles on food's relationship to environmental sustainability, economic equity, and the health of humans and nonhuman animals.

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How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race (U California Press, 2023) examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop's introduction into the musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. With the introduction of hip hop to these programs, the radio industry was fundamentally altered, as stations struggled to incorporate the genre's diverse audience. At the same time, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs fit within the confines of radio formats, the sound of hip hop changed. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial structuring of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre's growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the mainstream.

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Can brands really support positive social change? In Big Brands are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture (U California Press, 2024), Francesca Sobande, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University explores this question by considering the morality of contemporary brands in contemporary, digitial, culture. The book offers a rich set of case studies, ranging from the ways corporations co-opt social justice campaigns and how nations brand themselves, through to influencers, music festivals, and high end television. A significant contribution to both the theory and practice of branding and marketing, the book will be of interest across social sciences, business, and humanities, as well as anyone interested in the role of branding in modern life.

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Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023) tells the story of the Sandinistas' innovative diplomatic campaign, which captured the imaginations of people around the globe and transformed Nicaraguan history at the tail end of the Cold War. The Sandinistas' diplomacy went far beyond elite politics, as thousands of musicians, politicians, teachers, activists, priests, feminists, and journalists flocked to the country to experience the revolution firsthand. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, Eline van Ommen reveals the role that Western Europe played in Nicaragua's revolutionary diplomacy. Blending grassroots organizing and formal foreign policy, pragmatic guerrillas, creative diplomats, and ambitious activists from Europe and the Americas were able to create an international environment in which the Sandinista Revolution could survive despite the odds. Nicaragua Must Survive argues that this diplomacy was remarkably effective, propelling Nicaragua into the global limelight and allowing the revolutionaries to successfully challenge the United States' role in Central America.

Eline van Ommen is Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Leeds.

Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.

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Bankers brought the global economic system to its knees in 2007 and nearly did the same in 2020. Both times, the US government bailed out the banks and left them in control. How can we end this cycle of trillion-dollar bailouts and make finance work for the rest of us? Busting the Bankers' Club confronts the powerful people and institutions that benefit from our broken financial system—and the struggle to create an alternative.

Drawing from decades of research on the history, economics, and politics of banking, economist Gerald Epstein shows that any meaningful reform will require breaking up this club of politicians, economists, lawyers, and CEOs who sustain the status quo. Thankfully, there are thousands of activists, experts, and public officials who are working to do just that. Clear-eyed and hopeful, Busting the Bankers' Club: Finance for the Rest of Us (U California Press, 2024) centers the individuals and groups fighting for a financial system that will better serve the needs of the marginalized and support important transitions to a greener, fairer economy.

Busting the Bankers’ Club is an eye-opening account of the failures of our financial system, the sources of its staying power, and the path to meaningful economic reform from Professor Gerald Epstein, Founding Codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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After WAY too long a hiatus, Peoples & Things is back! GET EXCITED!! In this episode, host Lee Vinsel interviews Christy Spackman, Assistant Professor of Art/Science with a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University, about her recent book, The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023). Most Americans drink water that has gone through industrial filtration and treatment. Those processes often leave a flavor in water. 

The Taste of Water tells the fascinating story of how scientists, engineers, and water system workers have worked for decades to ensure that processed water has an appealing flavor. Vinsel and Spackman talk about a lot of other things along the way, from how water fits into the field of food studies to Spackman’s future plans. HEY! Peoples & Things has a new newsletter, where you can learn behind the scenes details about the podcast and much more. Check it out here.

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Vulnerable narratives of fatherhood are few and far between; rarer still is an ethnography that delves into the practical and emotional realities of intensive caregiving. Grounded in the intimate everyday lives of men caring for children with major physical and intellectual disabilities, Worlds of Care: The Emotional Lives of Fathers Caring for Children with Disabilities (U California Press, 2021) undertakes an exploration of how men shape their identities in the context of caregiving. Anthropologist Aaron J. Jackson fuses ethnographic research and creative nonfiction to offer an evocative account of what is required for men to create habitable worlds and find some kind of “normal” when their circumstances are anything but. Combining stories from his fieldwork in North America with reflections on his own experience caring for his severely disabled son, Jackson argues that care has the potential to transform our understanding of who we are and how we relate to others.

Aaron J. Jackson is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University. His research focuses on fatherhood, care, and disability.

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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How can we build a more equal economy? In Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy (U California Press, 2024), Neil Lee, a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, explores the question of how societies have fostered and supported innovation. The book challenges conventional assumptions that innovative economies must be unequal. Drawing on 4 detailed, and critical, case studies- Switzerland, Austria, Taiwan and Sweden, the book shows how Europe has good models of innovation; how the state matters; and how innovation and shared prosperity policies are mutually reinforcing. Accessible and clearly written, the book will be essential reading across social sciences and public policy, as well as anyone wanting a blueprint for equitable economic development,

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Hearing Luxe Pop: Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music (U California Press, 2021) explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music, in which popular-music idioms are merged with lush string orchestrations and big-band instrumentation. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of orchestration and arranging, traveling from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook, the teenage symphonies of Motown to the “countrypolitan” sound of Nashville, the sunshine pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco, and Jay-Z’s hip-hop-orchestra events to indie rock bands performing with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. This book attunes readers to hear the discourses gathered around the music and its associated images as it examines pop’s relations to aspirational consumer culture, theatricality, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and glamorous lifestyles.

Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University ([email protected]).

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Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is a bold, rigorous and award-winning history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Dr. Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today’s global wine industry exists as a result of settler colonialism and that imperialism was central, not incidental, to viticulture in the British colonies.

Wineries were established almost immediately after the colonisation of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand as part of a civilising mission: tidy vines, heavy with fruit, were symbolic of Britain’s subordination of foreign lands. Economically and culturally, nineteenth-century settler winemakers saw the British market as paramount. However, British drinkers were apathetic towards what they pejoratively called "colonial wine."

The tables only began to turn after the First World War, when colonial wines were marketed as cheap and patriotic and started to find their niche among middle- and working-class British drinkers. This trend, combined with social and cultural shifts after the Second World War, laid the foundation for the New World revolution in the 1980s, making Britain into a confirmed country of wine-drinkers and a massive market for New World wines. These New World producers may have only received critical acclaim in the late twentieth century, but Imperial Wine shows that they had spent centuries wooing, and indeed manufacturing, a British market for inexpensive colonial wines. This book is sure to satisfy any curious reader who savours the complex stories behind this commodity chain.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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