Today’s podcast marks the beginning of what I hope might become a regular feature on the podcast. The session was recorded live on the campus of Bryant University at the end of weekend conference with the title Genocide in World History, sponsored by the New England region of the World History Association. I’m hoping that occasional reports from conferences will help shed light on new research and new directions in the field. They will of necessity be a bit rawer than ordinary interviews. But I think the benefits far outweigh occasional blemishes.

The conference at Bryant stressed the need to see genocide through the lens of the discipline of world history. Individual panels tended to focus on specific cases. But several papers took an explicitly comparative perspective. And the capstone session looked carefully at what it might mean to study genocide from the perspective of a world historian.

The podcast features four participants from the conference: Jonathan Bush, Jon Cox, Tommy O’Connell and Michael Bryant. I hope you find their contributions interesting.

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How has American cultural and artistic policy changed over the last 25 years? Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programmes Redefined US Artists for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2014) explains the process of policy-making, funding models, NGOs and specific places that have shaped the current cultural settlement in the USA. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s book uses examples of policy reports, theatre and cross-arts organisations, as well as drawing on debates about creative platemaking. The multi-disciplinary approach allows Performing Policy to speak directly to the history of arts funding, in the context of the U.S.’s culture wars, as well as to the contemporary question of the role and purpose of the artist in society, along with how those artists might be educated. The book will be important reading for cultural policy and arts management students, as well as those in cultural studies.

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We treat children differently than we treat adults. For example, if we would like children to do something, we use directives with them, rather than asking them. When we do ask them to do something, we expect them to do it, even if they are busy or uninterested. In fact, we would be surprised, annoyed, or angry if they refused. Although something said to a child might be phrased as a question, it is rarely a choice. Perhaps this is not a problem as long as adults have the best interests of children in mind. But what if they do not? Are we treating children fairly? Do they have any advocates without conflicting interests? In Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (CreateSpace, 2013), John Holt compares the plight of children to other oppressed groups and outlines ways for adults to show greater respect to children in their lives as well as his rationale for extending basic rights afforded to adults to any child who would like to invoke them.

Pat Farenga, the president of Holt Associates, recently republished the text for the first time in 25 years, and he joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work with Holt Associates on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at@patfarenga. You can reach the host on Twitter at@tsmattea.

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Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who famously made the decision in the 1970s to henceforth only produce his creative work in his native Gikuyu, rather than in English, authors the foreword to Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2013), which he calls a “historic intervention in the debates about African philosophy.” The collection offers a balanced representation, along an east-west axis, of the continent, with essays in Luo, Gikuyu, Amharic, Igbo, Akan (also known as Twi), and Wolof. The dual-language format allows readers to see the text (including Ethiopic script) as written by the authors, with the English translation on the facing page. In this engaging interview, Chike Jeffers, editor of Listening to Ourselves, describes the genesis of the anthology and the project’s import for the expression and dissemination of African thought, going forward.

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In Building A Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (UNC Press, 2014), Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis Sonia Song-Ha Lee challenges two common misperceptions surrounding the Civil Rights Movement. The first is the presumption that Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans played marginal roles in the advancement of civil rights and social justice causes, and second, that the aims and methods of Latinos diverged from those of African Americans preventing the two groups from building interracial coalitions and cooperating in their pursuit of racial and socioeconomic justice. Focusing on the social and political context of postwar New York City, Dr. Lee describes the issues, people, and organizations that were central in establishing cross-racial coalitions between Puerto Rican and African American parents, students, and activists. Realizing their shared struggle against racism, poverty, and marginalization, Professor Lee argues that Puerto Ricans and African Americans developed an “overlapping” sense of ethno-racial identity in which notions of blackness and Latinidad were “intertwined and mutually reinforced” through social and political activism.

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In the 1850s, when the majority of the population of Colombia (known then as New Granada) embraced the emancipation of the remaining 17,000 people still enslaved, the lettered elite quickly tied emancipation to emerging ideas of universal citizenship in the Colombian republic. Yet there was no agreement over the rights that emancipatory citizenship would provide. Jason McGraw explores the political struggles over citizenship–and the recognition of that citizenship–in the six decades after emancipation in his book, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (UNC Press, 2014). Combining social, political, and intellectual history, McGraw carefully shows how lettered elites, who mostly succeeded in eliminating illiterate Colombians from formal politics, never managed to silence fully the rich vernacular politics of the working classes. In the process, The Work of Recognition argues for the centrality of Afro-Colombians, the Caribbean region, and the legacy of emancipation to Colombian national political struggles of the nineteenth century and the emergence of robust labor politics in the early twentieth.

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In this interview Dr. Theodore Jacobs discusses his book The Possible Profession: The Analytic Process of Change (Routledge, 2013) . Dr. Jacobs is a pioneer in the use of countertransference in the analytic setting and is regarded as the originator of the term “enactment” to describe the actions and emotions that occur within both the patient and analyst during treatment.

In this interview we discuss how psychoanalytic technique has evolved and how Jacobs’ classical orientation has changed over his career. Dr. Jacobs also shared his views on self disclosure, current practice and the integration of one and two person psychologies. The interview concludes with Dr. Jacob’s thoughts on the current state of the profession, some of his favorite theorists, institute training, and the internecine battles that have occurred in psychoanalysis over the years.

Theodore J. Jacobs, M.D., is a child and adolescent psychoanalyst as well as an adult analyst in private practice. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (Emeritus) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Institute for Psychoanalytic Education. Dr. Jacobs is also a past president of The Association for Child Psychoanalysis.

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In late imperial China, how did local elites connect with and influence the central government? How was local information made and managed? How did the state incorporate frontier areas into the empire? How were books produced and read, and by whom? In his new book, Joseph R. Dennis helps answer these questions and more by studying the genre of local gazetteers. Focusing on the Ming period, Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100-1700 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) argues that gazetteers were “important points of intersection between the central government and local societies and one of the main vehicles for transmitting local information to central government officials.” In seven chapters that collectively move readers through the life cycle of a gazetteer, Dennis’s story informs the histories of the frontier, the state, kinship, the law, material culture, and the book industry. It will be a must-read for all scholars and students of late imperial Chinese history.

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In Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game (Workman Publishing Company, 2015), Jon Birger, an award-winning journalist and contributor to Fortune magazine, explores the social implications of dating markets with a shortage of college-educated men.

Birger argues that demographics, not values, affect dating and marriage. Our discussion focuses on his investigation of how gender ratios in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community can explain the “Shidduch crisis.”

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How are scientific discoveries transmitted to medical clinical practice? When the science is new, controversial, or simply unclear, how should a doctor advise his or her patients? How should information from large randomized controlled trials be weighed against the clinician’s hard-won judgment from treating hundreds of patients? These are some of the questions that are considered by Miriam Solomon in Making Medical Knowledge (Oxford University Press 2015). Solomon, who is professor of philosophy at Temple University, provides an historically grounded critical assessment of the methods used in recent decades to turn basic science results into medical knowledge: consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine.

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