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There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and destroy us or become our overlords.
In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP), Shannon Vallor argues that the actual, and very alarming, existential risk of AI that we face right now is quite different. Because some AI technologies, such as ChatGPT or other large language models, can closely mimic the outputs of an understanding mind without having actual understanding, the technology can encourage us to surrender the activities of thinking and reasoning. This poses the risk of diminishing our ability to respond to challenges and to imagine and bring about different futures. In her compelling book, Vallor, who holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute, critically examines AI Doomers and Long-termism, the nature of AI in relation to human intelligence, and the technology industry's hand in diverting our attention from the serious risks we face. -
This episode of the Language on the Move Podcast is part of the Life in a New Language series. Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh.
In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book.
Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Loy Lising, with a focus on low-skilled migrants and how their experiences are shaped by monolingual ideologies.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. -
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The story of four remarkable women who shaped the intellectual history of the 20th century: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch.
On the cusp of the Second World War, four women went to Oxford to begin their studies: a fiercely brilliant Catholic convert; a daughter of privilege longing to escape her stifling upbringing; an ardent Communist and aspiring novelist with a list of would-be lovers as long as her arm; and a quiet, messy lover of newts and mice who would become a great public intellectual of our time. They became lifelong friends. At the time, only a handful of women had ever made lives in philosophy. But when Oxford's men were drafted in the war, everything changed.
As Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch labored to make a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, as they made friendships and families, and as they drifted toward and away from each other, they never stopped insisting that some lives are better than others. They argued that courage and discernment and justice--and love--are the heart of a good life.
The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (Oxford UP, 2021) presents the first sustained engagement with these women's contributions: with the critique and the alternative they framed. Drawing on a cluster of recently opened archives and extensive correspondence and interviews with those who knew them best, Benjamin Lipscomb traces the lives and ideas of four friends who gave us a better way to think about ethics, and ourselves.
Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Honors Program at Houghton University. He lives with his family in Fillmore, New York, when his teaching doesn't call him to London for a season.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. -
Paige Reynolds's book Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world.
Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book. Such structures provide a stability that is valuable and even necessary for such characters to flourish, as well as an instrument of containment or repression that threatens to, and in some cases does, destroy them. The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.
Disclaimer/apology: Slightly stormy conditions during the recording of the interview led to slightly reduced sound quality. -
American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius (Oxford UP, 2024) explores the impact of climate change on early modern radical religious groups during the height of the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century. Focusing on the life and legacy of Johannes Kelpius (1667-1707), an enormously influential but comprehensively misunderstood theologian who settled outside of Philadelphia from 1604 to 1707, Timothy Grieve-Carlson explores the Hermetic and alchemical dimensions of Kelpius's Christianity before turning to his legacy in American religion and literature.
This engaging analysis showcases Kelpius's forgotten theological intricacies, spiritual revelations, and cosmic observations, illuminating the complexity and foresight of an important colonial mystic. As radical Protestants during Kelpius's lifetime struggled to understand their changing climate and a seemingly eschatological cosmos, esoteric texts became crucial sources of meaning. Grieve-Carlson presents original translations of Kelpius's university writings, which have never been published in English, along with analyses and translations of other important sources from the period in German and Latin. Ultimately, American Aurora points toward a time and place when climate change caused an eruption of esoteric thought and practice and how this moment has been largely forgotten.
Timothy Grieve-Carlson is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Westminster College. -
This episode of the Language on the Move Podcast is part of the Life in a New Language series. Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh.
In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book.
Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Shiva Motaghi Tabari, with a focus on parenting in migration.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. -
In Law and Personality Disorder: Human Rights, Human Risks, and Rehabilitation (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr Ailbhe O'Loughlin considers the controversial and under-researched concern of what to do with dangerous people with severe personality disorders. She brings together scientific evidence, law and policy, to consider risk prevention, public security and human rights. This is a controversial area of law and policy, informed by ongoing debates about 'dangerous' offenders which exists at the intersection of liberal legal principles and advocates of social defence.
In today's conversation, we spoke about preventative detention, the effectiveness of therapeutic intervention and risk management, gaps in human rights protections, and the assumptions that the legal principles and processes that govern this population are founded on. O'Loughlin draws out key issues for reform and calls for further evidence-based inquiry with regards to criminal defences, sentencing and dispositions. This will be an important book for policy makers, legal academics, psychiatrists and anyone who works with this category of offenders.
Dr Ailbhe O'Loughlin is a Senior Lecturer at York Law School, at The University of York. Her research focuses on the intersection between mental health and criminal justice. -
In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Michael Gordin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, about the differences between science and pseudoscience and how the COVID-19 Pandemic showed that most people don't realize that science is highly dynamic. Gordin is the author of (among other books) of On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford UP, 2021).
Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. -
We commonly think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our politics and eroding our civic culture. Trolls are changing the norms of democratic politics and shaping how we communicate in the public sphere. Adding a twist to Neil Postman's classic thesis, this book argues that we are not so much amusing as trolling ourselves to death. But how did this come to be? Is this transformation attributable solely to digital technology? Or are there deeper political, economic, and cultural roots?
This book moves beyond the familiar picture of trolls by recasting trolling in a broader historical light. It shows how trolling is the logical expression of widespread alienation, cynicism, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism. Drawing from Postman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, this book explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling. It explains the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, "cancel culture," and public shaming. Taking inspiration from G. F. W. Hegel, Paulo F reire, and bell hooks, this book makes a case for building a spirit of trust to counter the culture of mass distrust that feeds the epidemic of political trolling.
Dr. Jason Hannan is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the editor of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial (Sydney University Press, 2020). His current book project is Reactionary Speech: Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Denial.
Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. -
Childhood as lived during the French Third Republic was very different from childhood during the modern era. Working-class children laboured alongside adults in the home, on the streets, and in places of work. French authorities sought to change this and redefine childhood by means of government organizations, separate legal structures, and schools for delinquent children. French authorities visited places of work, schools, and interviewed parents. Yet gender based divisions between males and females were still reinforced.
Professor Sachs was an assistant professor of history at Texas State University and will start as assistant professor with Texas A & M next year. In her latest publication, An Age to Work: Working Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris (Oxford University Press, 2023), Professor Sachs uses police reports, records of interviews, and postcards to explore the history of working class children in Paris. Dr. Sachs received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2017. Prior to coming to Texas State, she taught at William & Mary and Denison University. -
Placing the Frontier in British North-East India: Law, Custom, and Knowledge (Oxford UP, 2023) is a study of the travels of colonial law into the North-East frontier of the British Empire in India. Focusing on the nineteenth century, it examines the relationship of law and space, and indigenous place-making. Inhabitants of the frontier hills examined in this book were not defined as British subjects, yet they were incorporated within the colonial legal framework. The work examines the nature of this legal limbo that produced both the hills and their inhabitants as interruptions but equally as integral to the imperial project. Through a study of place-making by indigenous inhabitants of the frontier, it further demonstrates the heterogeneous narratives of self and belonging found in sites of orality and kinship that shape the hills in the present day.
The book contributes to the historiography of law in colonial South Asia. It focuses on an understudied region that reveals intricacies of colonial law that are crucial for an analysis of forms of governance of marginalized communities throughout India. The breadth of literary and non-literary sources used in the book allows for the juxtaposition of local reproductions of the past and histories of belonging that defy binary notions of history and memory, myth and reality, and physical and imaginative space. -
Ishita Tiwary’s book Video Culture in India: The Analog Era (Oxford UP, 2024) is an unprecedented attempt in foregrounding the diverse media history of the analog video era in India. It reconstructs the evolution of analog video culture through interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, archival resources, and discarded tapes. At the same time, it provides key information on the socio-political context of video culture, which existing digital media studies lack.
Dr. Ishita Tiwary is an Assistant Professor in Film Studies and the Canada Research Chair at the Department of Cinema at Concordia University, Montreal. She is also the director of the research lab “Raah." Ishita Tiwary's research interests include video cultures, media infrastructures, migration, contraband media practices, and media aesthetics. She has published essays in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, JumpCut, Post Script: Essays in Film and Humanities, Culture Machine, MARG: Journal of Indian Art, and in edited collections on topics of media piracy, video histories, and streaming platforms.
Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her interdisciplinary academic interests lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha -
This episode of the Language on the Move Podcast is part of the Life in a New Language series. Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh.
In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book.
Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Vera Williams Tetteh, with a focus on the experiences of African migrants.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. -
In How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor (Oxford UP, 2019), Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller address a seemingly simple question: What counts as the same? Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, why do we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us? For that matter, how do we live in harmony with groups who may not share the sense of a common fate? Such relationships lie at the heart of the problems of pluralism that increasingly face so much of the world today.
Note that "counting as" the same differs from "being" the same. Counting as the same is not an empirical question about how much or how little one person shares with another or one event shares with a previous event. Nothing is actually the same. That is why, as humans, we construct sameness all the time. In the process, of course, we also construct difference.
Creating sameness and difference leaves us with the perennial problem of how to live with difference instead of seeing it as a threat. How Things Count as the Same suggests that there are multiple ways in which we can count things as the same, and that each of them fosters different kinds of group dynamics and different sets of benefits and risks for the creation of plural societies. While there might be many ways to understand how people construct sameness, three stand out as especially important and form the focus of the book's analysis: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor.
Theo Stapleton is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, whose fieldwork was conducted at the first Chinese Buddhist temple in Tanzania. -
Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration.
Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Oxford UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.
Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. -
The Los Angeles shoreline is one of the most iconic natural landscapes in the United States, if not the world. The vast shores of Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu are familiar sights to film and television audiences, conveying images of pristine sand, carefree fun, and glamorous physiques. Yet, in the early twentieth century Angelenos routinely lamented the city's crowded, polluted, and eroded sands, many of which were private and thus inaccessible to the public.
Between the 1920s and the 1960s, LA's engineers, city officials, urban planners, and business elite worked together to transform the relatively untouched beaches into modern playgrounds for the white middle class. They cleaned up and enlarged the beaches--up to three times their original size--and destroyed old piers and barracks to make room for brand-new accommodations, parking lots, and freeways. The members of this powerful "beach lobby" reinvented the beach experience for the suburban age, effectively preventing a much-feared "white flight" from the coast. In doing so, they established Southern California as the national reference point for shoreline planning and coastal access. As they opened up vast public spaces for many Angelenos to express themselves, show off their bodies, and forge alternative communities, they made clear that certain groups of beachgoers, including African Americans, gay men and women, and bodybuilders, were no longer welcome. Despite their artificial origins, LA's beaches have proved remarkably resilient. The drastic human interventions into nature brought social and economic benefits to the region without long-term detrimental consequences on the environment. Yet the ongoing climate crisis and rapid sea level rise will eventually force the city to reckon with its past building.
Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Oxford UP, 2024) not only uncovers how the Los Angeles coastline was constructed but also how this major planning and engineering project affected the lives of ordinary city-dwellers and attracted many Americans to move to Southern California. Featuring a foreword by Jenny Price, it recounts the formidable beach modernization campaign that transformed Los Angeles into one of the world's greatest coastal metropolises. -
This episode of the Language on the Move Podcast is part of the Life in a New Language series. Life in a New Language (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh.
In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book.
Today, Brynn chats with Ingrid Piller, one of the book’s six co-authors, with a focus on migrants’ challenges with finding work.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. -
The 2020 Presidential Election in the United States marked, for many, a return to "compassionate politics." Joe Biden had run on a platform of empathy, emphasising his personal history as a means of connecting with everyone from American workers who had lost jobs to military families who had lost loved ones. Although perceptions of candidate compassion are broadly understood to influence vote choice, less understood is the question of how candidates convince voters they truly "care about people like them." In Feeling their Pain: Why Voters Want Leaders who Care (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Jared McDonald provides a framework for understanding why voters view some politicians as more compassionate than others.
Dr. McDonald shows that perceptions of compassion in candidates for public office are based on the number and intensity of commonalities that bind citizens to political leaders. Commonalities can come in many forms, such as a shared experience ("I've been through what you've been through"), a shared emotion ("I feel the way you feel"), or a shared identity ("I am who you are"). Compassion is conceptualised through the lens of self-interest. Compassion may be universal, such as when candidates convey empathy to all individuals who are struggling. Or compassion may be exclusionary, such as when candidates express a preference for some groups over others. Thus, the way campaigns choose to wield compassion in their messaging strategies has important implications not only for election outcomes, but for American political polarisation as well.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. -
Cosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Kira Huju narrates the birth, everyday life, and fracturing of a Western-dominated global order from its margins. It offers a critical sociological examination of the elite Indian Foreign Service and its members, many of whom were present at the founding of this order. Dr. Huju explores how these diplomats set out to remake the service in the name of a radically anti-colonial global subaltern, but often ended up seeking status within its hierarchies through social mimicry of its most powerful actors. This is a book about the struggles of belonging: it revisits what it takes to be a recognized member of international society and asks what the experience of historically marginalised actors inside the diplomatic club can tell us about the evident woes of global order today. In interrogating how Indian diplomats learned to live under a Westernised world order, it also offers a sociologically grounded reading of what might happen in spaces like India as the world transitions past Western domination.
An awkward balancing act animates the order-making of India's cosmopolitan diplomats: despite a genuine desire to strive toward a postcolonial world founded on diversity, difference, and the symbolic representation of a global subaltern, there is a strong sense of a lingering caricature-like notion of a white, European-dominated homogenous club, to which Indian diplomats feel a deep-rooted and colonially embedded desire to belong. Cosmopolitanism operates inside this balancing act not as an international ethic upholding an equal, tolerant, or liberal global order, but rather as an elite aesthetic which presumes cultural compliance, diplomatic accommodation, and social assimilation into Western mores.
Based on 85 interviews with Indian diplomats, politicians, and foreign policy experts, as well as archival work in New Delhi, the book asks what the experience of historically marginalised actors inside the diplomatic club tells us about the social hierarchies of race, class, religion, gender, and caste under global order.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. -
In China's Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War, and Peace in the New Chinese Century (Oxford University Press, 2024), authors Dr. John Keane and Dr. Baogang He, target a development of enormous significance: China's return, after two centuries of decline and subjugation, to a position of prominence in world affairs. The daring thesis is that China is a newly rising empire of a kind never before witnessed: a galaxy empire. The first to be born of the digital communications era, this young empire is economically and politically powerful, and heavily armed. Its gravitational, push-pull effects are impacting every continent--and even outer space, where China is competing with the United States, India, and Europe to become the leading power.
The galaxy empire interpretation rejects clichéd misdescriptions of China as a "big power" or monolithic "autocracy", and it explains why China defies older definitions of land, sea, and air-based empires. The book charts the developments that have made its rising empire so novel, including the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, the rapid rise of a global Chinese middle class, and internal colonialism in Tibet and Xinjiang. The book notes the protean, shapeshifting qualities of this young empire. It therefore warns against the political and military perils of simple-minded, friend-versus-enemy thinking and "Big China, Bad China" politics. But it also proffers a forewarning to China's rulers: while every rising empire aims to shift the balance of power in its favour, no empire lasts forever, and some are stillborn, because they indulge illusions of greatness and reckless power adventures.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. - Se mer
