"Data Driven"

New from Princeton University Press: Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance by Karen Levy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have long valued the day-to-day independence of their work, sharing a strong occupational identity rooted in a tradition of autonomy. Yet these workers increasingly find themselves under many watchful eyes. Data Driven examines how digital surveillance is upending life and work on the open road, and raises crucial questions about the role of data collection in broader systems of social control.

Karen Levy takes readers inside a world few ever see, painting a bracing portrait of one of the last great American frontiers. Federal regulations now require truckers to buy and install digital monitors that capture data about their locations and behaviors. Intended to address the pervasive problem of trucker fatigue by regulating the number of hours driven each day, these devices support additional surveillance by trucking firms and other companies. Traveling from industry trade shows to law offices and truck-stop bars, Levy reveals how these invasive technologies are reconfiguring industry relationships and providing new tools for managerial and legal control—and how truckers are challenging and resisting them.

Data Driven contributes to an emerging conversation about how technology affects our work, institutions, and personal lives, and helps to guide our thinking about how to protect public interests and safeguard human dignity in the digital age.

Visit Karen Levy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Order out of Chaos"

New from Cornell University Press: Order out of Chaos: Islam, Information, and the Rise and Fall of Social Orders in Iraq by David Siddhartha Patel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Order out of Chaos explains why Iraqis turned to the mosque after state collapse. In 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq destroyed the Bathist state. Despite this the citizens of Basra established predictable routines of daily life and social order as the familiar and customary structures of state-imposed order collapsed. What enabled individuals in Basra to work together to produce order amid anarchy? The answer: the Friday mosque.

A week after the regime fell, Shii imams introduced Friday congregational prayers and associated sermons for the first time in most places since the 1950s. These sermons facilitated the spread of common knowledge and coordination, both locally and nationally, and contributed to the emergence of a relatively cohesive imagined community of Iraqi Shia that came to dominate Iraq's political order.

Combining rational choice approaches, ethnographic understanding, and GIS analysis, David Siddhartha Patel reveals the interconnectedness of the enduring problem of how societies create social order in a stateless environment, the origins and limits of political authority and leadership, and the social and political salience of collective identity.

Visit David Siddhartha Patel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Under the Gun"

New from Cambridge University Press: Under the Gun: Political Parties and Violence in Pakistan by Niloufer A. Siddiqui.

About the book, from the publisher:

Political parties are integral to democracy and yet they frequently engage in anti-democratic, violent behaviour. Parties can employ violence directly, outsource violence to gangs and militias, or form electoral alliances with non-state armed actors. When do parties engage in, or facilitate, violence? What determines the strategies of violence that they employ? Drawing on data from Pakistan, Under the Gun argues that party violence is not a simple manifestation of weak state capacity but instead the intentional product of political incentives, further complicating the process of democratization. Using a rigorous multi-method approach based on over a hundred interviews and numerous surveys, the book demonstrates that a party's violence strategy depends on the incentives it faces in the subnational political landscape in which it operates, the cost it incurs from its voters for violent acts, and its organizational capacity for violence.

Visit Niloufer A. Siddiqui's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Culture Transplant"

New from Stanford University Press: The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left by Garett Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative new analysis of immigration's long-term effects on a nation's economy and culture.

Over the last two decades, as economists began using big datasets and modern computing power to reveal the sources of national prosperity, their statistical results kept pointing toward the power of culture to drive the wealth of nations. In The Culture Transplant, Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands—toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government—that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth. And the cultural traits migrants bring to their new homes have enduring effects upon a nation's economic potential.

Built upon mainstream, well-reviewed academic research that hasn't pierced the public consciousness, this book offers a compelling refutation of an unspoken consensus that a nation's economic and political institutions won't be changed by immigration. Jones refutes the common view that we can discuss migration policy without considering whether migration can, over a few generations, substantially transform the economic and political institutions of a nation. And since most of the world's technological innovations come from just a handful of nations, Jones concludes, the entire world has a stake in whether migration policy will help or hurt the quality of government and thus the quality of scientific breakthroughs in those rare innovation powerhouses.

Follow Garett Jones on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: 10% Less Democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Violent Victors"

New from Princeton University Press: Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections by Sarah Zukerman Daly.

About the book, from the publisher:

One of the great puzzles of electoral politics is how parties that commit mass atrocities in war often win the support of victimized populations to establish the postwar political order. Violent Victors traces how parties derived from violent, wartime belligerents successfully campaign as the best providers of future societal peace, attracting votes not just from their core supporters but oftentimes also from the very people they targeted in war.

Drawing on more than two years of groundbreaking fieldwork, Sarah Daly combines case studies of victim voters in Latin America with experimental survey evidence and new data on postwar elections around the world. She argues that, contrary to oft-cited fears, postconflict elections do not necessarily give rise to renewed instability or political violence. Daly demonstrates how war-scarred citizens reward belligerent parties for promising peace and security instead of blaming them for war. Yet, in so casting their ballots, voters sacrifice justice, liberal democracy, and social welfare.

Proposing actionable interventions that can help to moderate these trade-offs, Violent Victors links war outcomes with democratic outcomes to shed essential new light on political life after war and offers global perspectives on important questions about electoral behavior in the wake of mass violence.

Follow Sarah Zukerman Daly on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Perpetrator Disgust"

New from Oxford University Press: Perpetrator Disgust: The Moral Limits of Gut Feelings by Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic.

About the book, from the publisher:

What is the significance of our gut feelings? In this volume, Munch-Jurisic considers this question through the phenomenon of perpetrator disgust. Across time and cultures, individuals who have committed atrocities have been known to exhibit severe emotional and physical distress during the act of violence or upon recalling it, with symptoms as severe as vomiting and convulsions. Munch-Jurisic explores whether such responses reflect a moral judgment on the part of the perpetrator and asks what conclusions we can draw about the relationship of our gut feelings to human nature, cognition, and moral frameworks.

Drawing on a broad range of historical examples of perpetrator disgust and the latest philosophical and scientific research on emotions, Munch-Jurisic argues that gut feelings do not carry a straightforward and transparent intentionality in themselves, nor do they motivate any core, specific response. Instead, she suggests, they are templates that can embody a broad range of values and morals. With this core insight, she proposes a contextual understanding of emotions, by which an agent's environment shapes their available hermeneutic equipment (such as concepts, categories, and names) that an agent relies on to understand their emotions and navigate the world.

Grounded in empirical evidence and historical context, Perpetrator Disgust explores intriguing new avenues of inquiry in moral psychology and promises to be of interest to any student or scholar of philosophy, psychology, or sociology whose research considers violence, ethics, or emotions.

Follow Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unsettling the University"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education by Sharon Stein.

About the book, from the publisher:

Shifts the narrative around the history of US higher education to examine its colonial past.

Over the past several decades, higher education in the United States has been shaped by marketization and privatization. Efforts to critique these developments often rely on a contrast between a bleak present and a romanticized past. In Unsettling the University, Sharon Stein offers a different entry point—one informed by decolonial theories and practices—for addressing these issues.

Stein describes the colonial violence underlying three of the most celebrated moments in US higher education history: the founding of the original colonial colleges, the creation of land-grant colleges and universities, and the post–World War II "Golden Age." Reconsidering these historical moments through a decolonial lens, Stein reveals how the central promises of higher education—the promises of continuous progress, a benevolent public good, and social mobility—are fundamentally based on racialized exploitation, expropriation, and ecological destruction.

Unsettling the University invites readers to confront universities' historical and ongoing complicity in colonial violence; to reckon with how the past has shaped contemporary challenges at institutions of higher education; and to accept responsibility for redressing harm and repairing relationships in order to reimagine a future for higher education rooted in social and ecological accountability.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Poverty and Wealth in East Africa"

New from Duke University Press: Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History by Rhiannon Stephens.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

Follow Rhiannon Stephens on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beijing's Global Media Offensive"

New from Oxford University Press: Beijing's Global Media Offensive: China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World by Joshua Kurlantzick.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major analysis of how China is attempting to become a media and information superpower around the world, seeking to shape the politics, local media, and information environments of both East Asia and the World.

Since China's ascendancy toward major-power status began in the 1990s, many observers have focused on its economic growth and expanding military. China's ability was limited in projecting power over information and media and the infrastructure through which information flows. That has begun to change. Beijing's state-backed media, which once seemed incapable having a significant effect globally, has been overhauled and expanded. At a time when many democracies' media outlets are consolidating due to financial pressures, China's biggest state media outlets, like the newswire Xinhua, are modernizing, professionalizing, and expanding in attempt to reach an international audience. Overseas, Beijing also attempts to impact local media, civil society, and politics by having Chinese firms or individuals with close links buy up local media outlets, by signing content-sharing deals with local media, by expanding China's social media giants, and by controlling the wireless and wired technology through which information now flows, among other efforts.

In Beijing's Global Media Offensive--a major analysis of how China is attempting to build a media and information superpower around the world, and how this media power integrates with other forms of Chinese influence--Joshua Kurlantzick focuses on how all of this is playing out in both China's immediate neighborhood--Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand--and also in the United States and many other parts of the world. He traces the ways in which China is trying to build an information and influence superpower, but also critically examines the new conventional wisdom that Beijing has enjoyed great success with these efforts. While China has worked hard to build a global media and information superpower, it often has failed to reap gains from its efforts, and has undermined itself with overly assertive, alienating diplomacy. Still, Kurlantzick contends, China's media, information and political influence campaigns will continue to expand and adapt, helping Beijing exports its political model and protect the ruling Party, and potentially damaging press freedoms, human rights, and democracy abroad. An authoritative account of how this sophisticated and multi-pronged campaign is unfolding, Beijing's Global Media Offensive provides a new window into China's attempts to make itself an information superpower.

Follow Joshua Kurlantzick on Twitter.

The Page 69 Test: Charm Offensive.

The Page 99 Test: A Great Place to Have a War.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists: Queer Women in the Urban South by La Shonda Mims.

About the book, from the publisher:

After World War II, Atlanta and Charlotte emerged as leading urban centers in the South, redefining the region through their competing metropolitan identities. Both cities also served as home to queer communities who defined themselves in accordance with their urban surroundings and profited to varying degrees from the emphasis on economic growth. Uniting southern women's history with urban history, La Shonda Mims considers an imaginatively constructed archive including feminist newsletters and queer bar guides alongside sources revealing corporate boosterism and political rhetoric to explore the complex nature of lesbian life in the South.

Mims's work reveals significant differences between gay men's and lesbian women's lived experiences, with lesbians often missing out on the promises of prosperity that benefitted some members of gay communities. Money, class, and race were significant variables in shaping the divergent life experiences for the lesbian communities of Atlanta and Charlotte; whiteness especially bestowed certain privileges. In Atlanta, an inclusive corporate culture bolstered the city's queer community. In Charlotte, tenacious lesbian collectives persevered, as many queer Charlotteans leaned on Atlanta's enormous Pride celebrations for sanctuary when similar institutional community supports were lacking at home.

Follow La Shonda Mims on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue