Scotland is a nation that has undergone significant changes over the last 50 years or so. This is, of course, true of much of the Western world but, as David McCrone shows in his Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity (Edinburgh UP, 2025), these change have had particular impacts and been understood in particular ways in Scotland. Using a sociological approach in which politics, identity and culture need to be understood as impacted by broader process of social, structural change, McCrone discusses how following the fracturing of the ‘warfare/welfare nexus’ which, until the 1980s tied the nations of the United Kingdom together, Scotland is transformed. The country which in the postwar period had seen the most outward migration begins to welcome more people, the class structure changes after deindustrialisation, yet a strong sense of working-class identity remains, opportunities for women improve significantly, Scots increasingly come to think of themselves as Scots and ‘the referendum decade’ of 2011-2021 sees changes in political allegiance and formations.

In our discussion David discusses what led him to a career producing the sociology of Scotland, how the country should be understood via its civil society, the importance of adopting a sociological approach to social change and what Émile Durkheim has to say about the number of Saltires flying from lampposts across the land.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), along with other texts.

Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Wegner is not a book about peacekeeping practices. This is a book about storytelling, fantasies and the ways that people connect emotionally to myths about peacekeeping. The celebration of peacekeeping as a legitimate and desirable use of military force is expressed through the unproblematised acceptance of militarism.

Introducing a novel framework – martial peace – the book offers an in-depth examination of the Canadian Armed Forces missions to Afghanistan and the use of police violence against Indigenous protests in Canada as case examples where military violence has been justified in the name of peace. It critically investigates the peacekeeper myth and challenges the academic, government and popular beliefs that martial violence is required to sustain peace.

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

Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century (Edinburgh UP, 2025) by Dr. Julian Schmid considers how the long-standing superhero genre has been reinvigorated in the twenty-first century as an interlocutor of security and surveillance discourses following the events of ‘9/11’. While superheroes have a long cultural history, Dr. Schmid argues that their contemporary representations in Hollywood films and TV shows create and deepen specific discourses on security, terrorism and violence. He shows how the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, in particular, are important artefacts that can help us to understand how these discourses are popularised and ultimately normalised.
The book offers a rich account of the emergence of superheroes against the backdrop of America’s history since its founding in 1776 and their rise to popularity through comic books since the 1930s. Analysing the connections between superheroes, foreign policy and security from ‘9/11’ to the present, it demonstrates the significance of superheroes for the construction of heroism and security in contemporary times.

 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

In Phenomenology of Black Spirit (Edinburgh UP, 2023), Ryan Johnson and Biko Mandela Gray study the relationship between Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Black Thought from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis.

This staging of an elongated dialectical parallelism between Hegel's classic text and major 19th-20th-century Black thinkers explodes the western canon of philosophy. Johnson and Mandela Gray show that Hegel's abstract dialectic is transformed and critiqued when put into conversation with the lived dialectics of Black Thought: from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs through to Malcolm X and Angela Davis.

While Hegel articulates the dynamic logics that we see in these Black thinkers, when they are placed in parallel and considered together, the whiteness, both explicit and implicit, of Hegelianism itself is revealed. Forcing Hegelianism into the embodied history of Black Thought reveals a phenomenology of America whose spirit is Black.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

This book rediscovers a lost history of the Roman Empire, written by Sextus Aurelius Victor (ca. 320-390) and demonstrates for the first time both the contemporary and lasting influence of his historical work. Though little regarded today, Victor is the best-attested historian of the later Roman Empire, read by Jerome and Ammianus, honoured with a statue by the pagan Emperor Julian and appointed to a prestigious prefecture by the Christian Theodosius. Through careful analysis of the ancient evidence, including newly discovered material, this book re-examines the two short imperial histories attributed to Victor in the manuscripts, known today as the Caesares and the Epitome de Caesaribus, and discusses a wide range of both canonical and neglected authors and texts, from Sallust and Tacitus to Eunapius and the Historia Augusta.

New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

George Woudhuysen is Associate Professor in Roman History, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Nottingham

Justin Stover is Senior Lecturer; Medieval Latin at the University of Edinburgh

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn  (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary 'nonhuman turn' in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.
Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality, and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality, and affect, this book explores technology as a source of subject matter and conceptual metaphors, but also probes how ideas and words are modes of technicity through which we shape and reshape the world. Fusing literature, philosophy, and theology, it offers readers new contexts - and questions - for the egalitarian ontological commitments of contemporary post- and nonhuman thinking.

Guest Dr. Madeleine Chalmers  is a lecturer in French studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, and holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Dr. Chalmers is the recipient of or shortlisted for a number of prestigious essay prizes, and has written numerous articles as well on topics ranging from modernist authors  to automation and the idea of “bricolage,” as well as editing a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies on “French Perspectives on Conflict” in 2022.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at the University of Alabama with research focusing on speculative literatures of metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, as well as the translator of the novels Mevlido's Dreams and The Inner Harbour.

Archives are not only sources for history but have their own histories too, which shape how historians can tell stories of the past. In Managing Paperwork in Mamluk Cairo: Archives, Waqf and Society (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Daisy Livingston explores the archival history of one of the most powerful polities of the late-medieval Middle East: the ‘Mamluk’ sultanate of Cairo. Relying on surviving original documents, Livingston focuses on archival practices connected to waqf, the pious endowments that became one of the characteristic features of late-medieval Islamic societies. By centering a close exploration of documents connected to processes of endowment and property exchange, this book sheds light on a startling culture of document accumulation that was shared by the diverse social groups involved in founding and managing endowments: sultans and emirs, qadis, legal notaries, and scribes. Emphasizing the documents’ life cycles from production, to preservation, to disposal and loss, it argues for the use of surviving documents to tell their own archival histories.

Daisy Livingston is Associate Professor of Medieval Islamic History in the Department of History at Durham University. As a historian of the medieval Middle East, in particular Egypt between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, her research focuses on various aspects of documentary culture, especially histories of archiving.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Loy Lising speaks with Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller about the 3rd edition of her best-selling textbook Intercultural Communication (Edinburgh UP, 2025).

A comprehensive and critical overview of the field of intercultural communication

Combining perspectives from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, the third edition of this popular textbook provides students with an up-to-date overview of the field of intercultural communication. Ingrid Piller explains communication in context using two main approaches. The first treats cultural identity, difference and similarity as discursive constructions. The second, informed by multilingualism studies, highlights the use and prestige of different languages and language varieties as well as the varying access that speakers have to them.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

The first edited collection dedicated to the historical specifics of Irish shame

Shame has haunted Ireland since the inception of Irishness itself. As such, it has come to seem an ineluctable modality of Irish life. In fact, the contours of Irish shame have evolved over time, shifting with alterations in their colonial predicament, and in their response, whether complicit or resistant, to economic, political, and cultural dispossession. Irish Shame offers an anatomy of that condition. In twelve essays, it traces the ethnic, religious, biopolitical, psychosocial and neurodiverse parameters of shame as a force in Irish life.

Since the 1980s, readers and scholars alike have celebrated migrant literature for not only depicting migration, but for inspiring  reflections on class, race, gender, nations, and mobility. But, beyond  depicting migration, is it possible for migrant literature to be a force of movement itself? Poetics of the Migrant: Migrant Literature and the Politics of Motion calls upon the philosophy of movement and a counter-history of migration to invent a theory and method for analysing migrant literature. The text uncovers patterns of movement that migrant texts enact and create – in other words, a movement-oriented poetics. Poetics of the Migrant understands movement as the defining force of human history; and the migrant is the primary figure of cultural and political transformation. Migrant literature makes it possible to transform how we process and interpret social history through social motion. Perhaps, from here, we can imagine a different world: one where movement and migrancy are legible and thinkable.

About Kevin Potter:

Kevin Potter is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English & American Studies at the University of Vienna. His research and teaching primarily focus on Marxist theory, migrant literature, anarchist thought, dystopian fiction, and Palestine. His first book, Poetics of the Migrant was released in 2023 through Edinburgh University Press, and received honorable mention for the 2024 Hugh J. Silverman Prize from the Association for Philosophy and Literature.

About Pavan Mano:

Pavan Mano is Lecturer in Global Cultures in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King's College London (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/p...). He works at the intersections of critical & literary theory, politics and culture. His first monograph, Straight Nation, interrogates postcolonial nationalism and the governance of sexuality in Singapore (https://manchesteruniversitypr...).