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Urban Studies
American West December 2, 2022

West Side Rising

How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement

Char Miller

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
On September 9, 1921, a tropical storm raged above San Antonio, Texas. The rain that night flooded the city's many waterways, distributing unequal destruction throughout its many neighborhoods. For the whiter …

Urban Studies

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Interviews with scholars of urban studies about their new books

Sociology December 2, 2022

Egypt's Housing Crisis

The Shaping of Urban Space

Yahia Shawkat

Hosted by Rituparna Patgiri
Along with football and religion, housing is a fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian life: it can make or break marriage proposals, invigorate or slow down the economy, and popularize or embarrass …
Middle Eastern Studies November 30, 2022

Protesting Jordan

Geographies of Power and Dissent

Jillian Schwedler

Hosted by Ronay Bakan
Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have …
American Studies November 30, 2022

Heaven on the Hudson

Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park

Stephanie Azzarone

Hosted by Robert Snyder
On the west side of Manhattan, Riverside Park winds between the banks of the Hudson River and the elegant housing of Riverside Drive. In her new book Heaven on the …
Sociology November 28, 2022

Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents

Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London

Paul Watt

Hosted by Anna Zhelnina
It is widely accepted that London is in the midst of a serious housing crisis, manifested most obviously in city's soaring rents. While the causes of this crisis are manifold …
Military History November 23, 2022

Understanding Urban Warfare

John Spencer and Liam Collins

Hosted by Stephen Satkiewicz
With the growing urbanization of the world's population, it also follows that much of contemporary military operations would also be conducted within such urban centers. The challenges faced by military …
Sociology November 23, 2022

When Race Meets Class

African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City

Rhonda F. Levine

Hosted by Zalman Newfield
In When Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City (Routledge, 2019), Rhonda Levine provides a 15-year ethnography that follows the lives of individual, low-income African …
British Studies November 18, 2022

The History of the London Underground Map

Caroline Roope

Hosted by Miranda Melcher
Few transportation maps can boast the pedigree that London’s iconic ‘Tube’ map can. Sported on t-shirts, keyrings, duvet covers, and most recently, downloaded an astonishing twenty million times in app …
Critical Theory November 17, 2022

Highly Discriminating

Why the City Isn't Fair and Diversity Doesn't Work

Louise Ashley

Hosted by Dave O'Brien
Can we make the finance industry fair? In Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn’t Fair and Diversity Doesn’t Work (Bristol UP, 2022), Louise Ashley, Associate Professor and IHSS Fellow at Queen Mary …
Christian Studies November 16, 2022

Bethlehem's Syriac Christians

Self, Nation and Church in Dialogue and Practice

Mark D. Calder

Hosted by Ari Barbalat
Mark D. Calder's Bethlehem's Syriac Christians: Self, Nation and Church in Dialogue and Practice (Gorgias Press, 2017) is anthropological study of Syriac Orthodox Christian identity in a time of displacement …
American West November 15, 2022

Seattle from the Margins

Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City

Megan Asaka

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Seattle has a reputation as a city of Progressive values, but as Megan Asaka argues in Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City (U Washington Press …
World Affairs November 14, 2022

Spatializing Authoritarianism

Natalie Koch

Hosted by Geoffrey Gordon
How do authoritarian political leaders use the built environment to shape understandings of national identity and history? How do major urban development projects affect the political fortunes of authoritarian governments …
Higher Education November 14, 2022

Transforming the Urban University: Northeastern University, 1996-2006

A Discussion with Richard Freeland, president emeritus of Northeastern University

Richard Freeland

Hosted by David Finegold
It is rare to see colleges and universities achieve major and rapid changes in their national rankings. Richard Freeland, the president emeritus of Northeastern University, discusses how they were able …
African American Studies November 7, 2022

Dream Books and Gamblers

Black Women's Work in Chicago's Policy Game

Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach

Hosted by James West
Ubiquitous illegal lotteries known as policy flourished in Chicago's Black community during the overlapping waves of the Great Migration. Policy "queens" owned stakes in lucrative operations while women writers and …
Anthropology November 4, 2022

Subaltern Frontiers

Agrarian City-Making in Gurgaon

Thomas G. Cowan

Hosted by Garima Jaju
In urban and peri-urban areas across the Global South, politicians, planners and developers are engaged in a voracious scramble to refashion land for global real estate investment and transfer state …
Anthropology November 4, 2022

Lifelines

The Traffic of Trauma

Harris Solomon

Hosted by Sneha Annavarapu
In Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma (Duke UP, 2022), Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients …
Genocide Studies November 4, 2022

From Bureaucracy to Bullets

Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home

Bree Akesson and Andrew R. Basso

Hosted by Miranda Melcher
There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue …
Asian Review of Books November 3, 2022

Imagine a City

A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World

Mark Vanhoenacker

Hosted by Nicholas Gordon
How does a pilot see the cities of the world? Unlike residents, who live there full-time, or tourists, who travel once and perhaps never again, pilots are brief, but regular …
Geography November 1, 2022

In the Midst of Things

The Social Lives of Objects in the Public Spaces of New York City

Mike Owen Benediktsson

Hosted by Stentor Danielson
How ordinary urban objects influence our behavior, exacerbate inequality, and encourage social change Assumptions about human behavior lie hidden in plain sight all around us, programmed into the design and …
British Studies October 31, 2022

Derailed

How to Fix Britain's Broken Railways

Tom Haines-Doran

Hosted by Miranda Melcher
Why don't trains run on time? Why are fares so expensive? Why are there so many strikes? Few would disagree that Britain's railways are broken, and have been for a …