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PODCAST

New Books in Critical Theory

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

45:28

Helen Graham, "Deconstituting Museums:...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/16

What is the future of museums? In Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s Affective Work Helen Graham, an Associate Professor in School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, considers the current state of the sector and stresses the need for significant change. Drawing on both professional reflections and academic analysis, the book introduces the concept of the museum constitution as a key site for struggle within the institution. It shows the challenge of

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78:32

Angie Hobbs, "Why Plato Matters Now" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/14

Does Plato matter? An ancient philosopher whose work has inspired and informed countless thinkers and poets across the centuries, his ideas are no longer taught as widely as they once were. But, as Angie Hobbs argues in this clear-sighted book Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury, 2025), that is a mistake.If we want to understand the world we live in – from democracy, autocracy and fake news to celebrity, cancel culture and what money can and cannot do – there is no better place to start than Plato

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74:53

Kerry Gottlich, "From Frontiers to Borders: How...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/14

How did modern territoriality emerge and what are its consequences? From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality (Cambridge UP, 2025) examines these key questions with a unique global perspective. Kerry Goettlich argues that linear boundaries are products of particular colonial encounters, rather than being essentially an intra-European practice artificially imposed on colonized regions. He reconceptualizes modern territoriality as a phenomenon separate from

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64:34

Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body" (Wirklichkeit...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/13

The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is erotically charged, migration presenting as a sexual threat to white women being one of many examples. Germany’s strikingly successful right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland is, according to the historian Dagmar Herzog, characterized by this “sexy racism,” with its second main feature

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56:00

Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/13

All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, much less one exclusive to humans. Instead, it defines agency as an umbrella term for the concrete sociomaterial processes that emerge from the collaborative efforts of multiple entities acting together. Agency isn't the faculty of an individual entity or self; it's always the function of a network or assembly of actors. Second, many of the actors

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57:06

J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/10

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity (U of Minnesota Press, 2023), J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it.Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by

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40:02

Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/09

How can cultural industries survive in the twenty-first century? In Opera Wars Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future Caitlin Vincent, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at the University of Melbourne, examines the past, present and future of Opera to understand how music, performance, institutions and audiences battle to support this artform. Drawing on a wealth of research, as well as personal experience as a performer, librettist and entrepreneur, the book discusses key

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51:13

Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/08

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America’s resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national

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45:09

Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/07

A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth centuryA popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a

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73:52

Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism with...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/06

Lithium, a crucial input in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has the potential to save the world from climate change. But even green solutions come at a cost. Mining lithium is environmentally destructive. We therefore confront a dilemma: Is it possible to save the world by harming it in the process?Having spent over a decade researching mining and oil sectors in Latin America, Thea Riofrancos is a leading voice on resource extraction. In this episode, we discuss her 2025 book Extraction:

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69:36

Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/05

How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at

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53:53

Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora, "Screening Precarity:...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/04

Screening Precarity integrates a cultural analysis of film texts and history, industry transformations, and the violence and crises of political economy infrastructures, to study post-liberalization shifts in the Hindi film industry in India. The book investigates Bollywood as a media system that has moved away from the glee and gusto of liberalization in the 1990s to an industry contending with the failures and inadequacies of neoliberalism’s promises, and the ascendency of the material-affective

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36:10

Julia Elyachar, "On the Semicivilized: Coloniality,...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/04

On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2025) by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today,

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46:18

Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta, "Policing and...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/03

Why does Indias police force, created under British rule, still echo the priorities of a bygone empire? And what is it about this institution, tasked with maintaining the law and order, that has led to a normalization of daily violence? These are the key questions that inform the analyses in this volume by lawyers, academics and activists. Divided into four broad sections, it begins by looking at the origins of the modern police force in the 1860s and demonstrates their role in maintaining

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113:11

Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/02

What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophical

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48:25

Hans Kundnani, "Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/01

"Today’s 'pro-Europeans' would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt to link the two baffling and outrageous," writes Hans Kundnani in Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Oxford UP, 2023).Yet, he does so - taking the reader on a historical journey through the development of European identity from Christendom to the coincidence of the Enlightenment and the development of

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53:55

Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/12/31

What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved?In Critique of Political Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2023), Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship, has become a persistent conflation of two different concepts: political decolonization and political independence. This scholarly volume is an antinormative and critical refutation of the decolonial

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36:20

Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm, "Alle Thyng Hath Tyme:...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/12/30

Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life (Reaktion, 2023) recreates medieval people’s experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear and cyclical, embracing Creation and Judgement, shrinking to ‘atoms’ or ‘droplets’ and extending to the silent spaces of eternity. They might measure time by natural phenomena such as sunrise and sunset, the motion of the stars or the progress of the seasons, even as the late medieval invention of the mechanical clock was making time-reckoning more

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48:19

Russell T. McCutcheon, "Critics Not Caretakers:...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/12/29

Russell T. McCutcheon's essay collection Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Routledge, 2023) argues that the study of religion must be rethought as an ordinary aspect of social, historical existence, a stance that makes the scholar of religion a critic of cultural and historical practices rather than a caretaker of religious tradition or a font of timeless wisdom and deep meaning. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre

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50:57

Henrike Kohpeiß, "Bourgeois Coldness" (Divided...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/12/27

Bourgeois Coldness (Divided Publishing, 2025) refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those

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664 results

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