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New Books in Geography

New Books in Geography

Written by: Marshall Poe
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 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: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geographyNew Books Network Science Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Damon Scott, "The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco" (U Texas Press, 2024)

    Damon Scott, "The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco" (U Texas Press, 2024)
    Jan 24 2026
    The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Stephen Legg, "Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

    Stephen Legg, "Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
    Jan 23 2026
    Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities (U Georgia Press, 2025) is the first book-length account of anticolonialism in Delhi, as the capital of Britain's empire in India. It pioneers a spatial governmentality analysis of the networks, mobilizations, and hidden spaces of anticolonial parrhesia, or courageous speech and actions, in the two decades before independence in 1947. Reading across imperial and nationalist archives, newspapers, memoirs, oral histories, and interviews, Stephen Legg exposes subaltern geographies and struggles across both the new and old cities, which have traditionally been neglected in favor of the elite spaces of New Delhi. Presenting the dual cities as one interconnected political landscape, Legg studies Indian National Congress efforts to mobilize and marshal support between the mass movements of Civil Disobedience (1930-34) and Quit India (1942-43). The book's six chapters compare the two movements in terms of their public spaces of nonviolent anticolonialism, their problematization by violence, and their legacies. This bottom-up analysis, focused on the streets, bazaars, neighborhoods, homes, and undergrounds of the two cities, foregrounds the significance of physical and political space; it highlights the pioneering role of women in crafting these spaces; and it exposes the microtechniques that Congress used to encourage Gandhi's nonviolence and to tolerate its testing in the face of the rising popularity of the radical left. Legg's rereading of Michel Foucault's final lectures on parrhesia produces a bold new approach to questions of postcolonialism, resistance, and South Asian governmentalities. This allows anticolonialism to be read not as an outside but as a coherent and bottom-up project of self-transformation and space-making that was elite coordinated but whose sovereignty lay with a disobedient and not always nonviolent public. This book provides an innovative and restive historical geography of spaces of anticolonialism in the capital of contemporary India's 1.4 billion people. Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at University of NottinghamSaumya Dadoo is a Ph.D Candidate at MESAAS, Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    48 mins
  • Laurie Parsons, "Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown" (Manchester UP, 2023)

    Laurie Parsons, "Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown" (Manchester UP, 2023)
    Jan 18 2026
    Climate change is devastating the planet, and globalisation is hiding it. Laurie Parsons's book Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown (Manchester UP, 2023) opens our eyes. Around the world, leading economies are announcing significant progress on climate change. World leaders are queuing up to proclaim their commitment to tackling the climate crisis, pointing to data that shows the progress they have made. Yet the atmosphere is still warming at a record rate, with devastating effects on poverty and precarity in the world's most vulnerable communities. Are we being deceived? Outsourcing climate breakdown explores the murky practices of exporting a country's environmental impact. A world in which corporations and countries are allowed to maintain a clean, green image while landfills in the world's poorest countries continue to expand and droughts and floods intensify under the auspices of globalisation, deregulation and economic growth. Taking a wide-ranging, culturally engaged approach to the topic, the book shows how this is notonly a technical problem, but a problem of cultural and political systems and structures - from nationalism to economic logic - deeply embedded in our society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
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    45 mins
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