University of Minnesota Press

Jan 21 2025 96 ep. 56 mins 28

University of Minnesota Press Podcast artwork

Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.

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Our shared needs connect us: Writers respond to the science of animal conservation.

Jan 21 2025 44 mins

Humans are one species on a planet of millions of species. The literary collection Creature Needs is a project that grew out of a need to do something with grievous, anxious energy—an attempt to nourish the soul in a meaningful way, and an attempt to start somewhere specific in the face of big, earthly challenges and changes, to create a polyvocal call to arms about animal extinc

The partitioning of public education

Jan 14 2025 69 mins

Public schools are one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—and are also some of our most unequal institutions. In Unsettling Choice, Ujju Aggarwal explores how the expansion of choice-based programs led to greater inequality and segregation in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood during the years following the Great Recession, mobilizing mechanis

Science Fiction and the Alt-Right

Dec 10 2024 52 mins

The first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by a science fiction fan. So opens Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness, a book that traces ideas about white nationalism through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the ri

Public policy and the room where it happens.

Dec 03 2024 69 mins

Policy expert and climate scientist Anna Farro Henderson explores how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined in her new book, Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood. Grounded in her experience as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton, Henderson brings readers behind the closed doo

Cyberlibertarianism and the fraught politics of the internet

Nov 12 2024 56 mins

In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia, who passed away in 2023, traced how digital evangelism ha

Futures of the Sun

Nov 07 2024 61 mins

Energy transition is crucial to the struggle against climate change. Imre Szman is concerned with who is trying to lay claim to the narratives guiding our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, how they are doing it, and why and to what ends. Mark Simpson joins Szeman in conversation about Szeman’s new book, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life. Imre Sz

I know you are, but what am I? The cultural legacy of Pee-wee Herman.

Oct 23 2024 54 mins

"We aren't done with Pee-wee's Playhouse because there's much to learn from sticking with it." So opens Cait McKinney's I Know You Are, but What Am I?, a book that thinks across the ways we remember and misremember Pee-wee. McKinney explores the expansive, mediated landscape of the television show; engages a reparative retelling of the actor Paul Reubens's 1991 arrest in a suburban

Casino gaming in Macau

Oct 15 2024 62 mins

Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, including two of the world’s largest buildings. In Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution, Tim Simpson uncovers various roots of the region’s radical transformation. Here, Simpson is

Art and public space in socialist Zagreb

Oct 08 2024 51 mins

In the decades leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a collective of young artists based in Zagreb used the city’s public spaces as a platform for radical individual expression. The Group of Six Authors and their circle in the period from 1975 to 1985 are the focus of Adair Rounthwaite’s book This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb, which

On Trans Philosophy and troubling a Western-dominant sense of trans.

Sep 26 2024 63 mins

Across language and politics, feminism and phenomenology, and decolonial theory, Trans Philosophy addresses trans worldmaking in all its beauty and mundanity. The volume’s four editors, Perry Zurn, Andrea J. Pitts, Talia Mae Bettcher, and PJ DiPietro focus on the contributions of trans and gender-nonconforming philosophers from around the globe. Showcasing writing from a range of