New books in 2022

Book cover featuring a brightly colour astract painting of a head with a helmet on and colourful shapes

CounterStories from the Writing Center, edited by Wonderful Faison and Frankie Condon, Utah State University Press. 2022.

CounterStories from the Writing Center gathers emerging scholars of colour and their white accomplices to challenge some of the most cherished lore about the work of writing centres. Writing within an intersectional feminist frame, this volume’s contributors name and critique the dominant role that white, straight, cis-gendered women have played in writing centre administration as well as in the field of writing centre studies. This work will shake the field’s core assumptions about itself.

Practicing what Derrick Bell has termed “creative truth telling,” these writers are not concerned with individual white women in writing centres but with the social, political, and cultural capital that is the historical birthright of white, straight, cis-gendered women, particularly in writing centre studies. The essays collected in this volume test, defy, and overflow the bounds of traditional academic discourse in the service of powerful testimony, witness, and counterstory.

Book cover featuing a background of abstract swirling lines

China's Foreign Policy Since 1949: Continuity and Change, by Kevin Cai, Routlege, 2022.

This book provides a systematic and comprehensive analysis and overview of China’s foreign policy since 1949. It starts with constructing an analytical framework for explaining Chinese foreign policy and then, on the basis of that, outlines and analyzes developments in different areas of foreign policy – such as security policy, international economic policy and policy toward multilateralism – and foreign policy toward different areas of the world – such as the United States, East Asia, Europe and developing countries. The book also examines decision-making in Chinese foreign policy, discusses issues of current concern, including maritime disputes, Xi Jinping’s more assertive approach to foreign policy, the One Belt One Road initiative and the trade war with the United States. The book concludes with a comparative analysis of the three phases of China’s foreign policy since 1949 and provides a brief assessment of how China’s foreign policy is likely to develop going forward.

Illustration of wild horses running across a lush grassy field with mountains and wispy clouds in the background

All the Horses of Iceland, by Sarah Tolmie, MacMillan, 2022

New York Times' Top Ten Fantasy Book of the Year 2022. Everyone knows of the horses of Iceland, wild, and small, and free, but few have heard their story. Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland weaves their mystical origin into a saga for the modern age. Filled with the magic and darkened whispers of a people on the cusp of major cultural change, All the Horses of Iceland tells the tale of a Norse trader on the Silk Road and the ghostly magic that followed him home to the land of fire, stone, and ice. His search for riches will take him from Helmgard, through Khazaria, to the steppes of Mongolia, where he will barter for horses and return with much, much more.

Book cover featuring text on a smeared grey and white background suggesting ghosts or obscured faces

Restorative justice in the classroom: Liberating students’ voices through relational pedagogy, Crystena Parker-Shandal, Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2022.

This book focuses on how teachers can transmit and practice values through classroom circles that attend to and empower all students’ voices. A growing number of teachers are using relational pedagogy, drawing on Indigenous circle practice, as a pedagogical tool. Done well, circles can build and sustain dialogue and peaceful relations. Done poorly, circles reflect and reinforce relations of power, which, if disregarded, can be damaging for participants whose voices are silenced or not sufficiently heard. Parker-Shandal’s consideration of teachers’ professional learning and training in restorative justice in education focuses on ethnographic, classroom-based research in diverse urban elementary schools. Her data include observations of classrooms, teacher surveys, and interviews with students, teachers, and principals. The book provides a detailed account of the lived experience of students and teachers as they engage with and experience the transformative power of constructive dialogue about conflicts embedded in curriculum subject matter through restorative justice pedagogies.

1950s horror illustration featuring a beautiful woman in a low cut black dress surrounded by monsters and flames

The Forbidden Body: Sex, Horror, and the Religious Imagination, by Douglas E. Cowan, NYU Press, 2022

Throughout history, religion has attempted to control nothing so much as our bodies: what they are and what they mean; what we do with them, with whom, and under what circumstances; how they may be displayed—or, more commonly, how they must be hidden. Yet, we remain fascinated, obsessed even, by bodies that have left, or been forced out of, their “proper” place. The Forbidden Body examines how horror culture treats these bodies, exploring the dark spaces where sex and the sexual body come together with religious belief and tales of terror. Cowan argues that stories of religious bodies “out of place” are so compelling because they force us to consider questions that religious belief cannot comfortably answer: As illuminating as it is unsettling, The Forbidden Body offers a fascinating look at how and why we imagine bodies in all the wrong places.

Book cover featuring a small figure in a painting overshadowed by a dark, stormy sky in rough brushstrokes

The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity by Galen Watts, Oxford. University Press, 2022.

Increasingly, North Americans and Western Europeans identify as 'spiritual but not religious'. But what does 'spirituality' actually mean? And what does this recent 'spiritual turn' reveal about the nature of twenty-first century liberal democracies? Secularization theorists argue that spirituality lacks institutional support and a shared tradition, thereby evincing religious decline. Meanwhile, critical commentators contend that the spiritual turn embodies all of the ills of post-1960s liberal democracies. This book challenges these popular misconceptions. Combining cultural sociology with intellectual history and political philosophy, and drawing from first-hand interview and fieldwork data, along with discourse analysis of best-selling books, it shows that rather than reflecting religious decline, the spiritual turn marks the rise of an enduring cultural structure in Western modernity-the religion of the heart.

Tracing the religion of the heart to the 1960s, The Spiritual Turn illuminates its elective affinities with the romantic liberal social imaginary that crystallized in popular consciousness during this era, and transformed the institutional spheres of Western liberal democracies, eventually giving birth to a new social order-romantic liberal modernity. Then, inspired by the Durkheimian tradition, it presents case studies of three sites where the religion of the heart is institutionalized in a specific discursive form-a Twelve Step group, a neo-Pentecostal church, and a Toastmasters public speaking club. The book concludes that while critics may have reason to disparage both spirituality and romantic liberal modernity more generally, the reality is far more complex than their criticisms suggest-and more importantly, far less hopeless.

On Expertise: Cultivating Character, Goodwill, and Practical Wisdom, by Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher, Penn State University Press, 2022.

There is a deep distrust of experts in America today. Influenced by populist politics, many question or downright ignore the recommendations of scientists, scholars, and others with specialized training. It appears that expertise, a critical component of democratic life, no longer appeals to wide swaths of the body politic. ... Timely, practical, and sophisticated, On Expertise provides vital scaffolding for our understanding of expertise and its real-world application. This book is essential for beginning the work of rehabilitating the expert class amid a politics of extreme populism and anti-intellectualism.

The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age, by Ian Milligan, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Historians make research queries on Google, ProQuest, and the HathiTrust. They garner information from keyword searches, carried out across millions of documents, their research shaped by algorithms they rarely understand. Historians often then visit archives in whirlwind trips marked by thousands of digital photographs, subsequently explored on computer monitors from the comfort of their offices. They may then take to social media or other digital platforms, their work shaped through these new forms of pre- and post-publication review. Almost all aspects of the historian's research workflow have been transformed by digital technology. In other words, all historians – not just Digital Historians – are implicated in this shift. The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age equips historians to be self-conscious practitioners by making these shifts explicit and exploring their long-term impact. 

Policing Mental Health: Public safety and crime prevention in Canada, by Laura Huey, Jennifer L. Schulenberg, & Jacek Koziarski, Springer, 2022.

This brief addresses the question of the various ways in which mental health-related issues have become police responsibility. It provides a detailed understanding of the myriad of ways in which police are often called upon to be the primary responder to mental health-related issues, well beyond the standard media images of individuals in extreme crisis.

Drawing upon the results of two separate ethnographies of police practices in Canada, this volume examines how public policing has become entangled in cases of persons with mental illness (PMI). It examines two aspects of the police role and mandate that brings police officers into contact with individuals dealing with mental health disorders: public safety, and crime prevention and response. It explores police perceptions towards the roles they play in the lives of PMI, and police demands in these types of calls for service that have transformed aspects of public policing.

Constitutional Crossroads: Reflections on Charter Rights, Reconciliation, and Change, edited by Kate Puddister and Emmett Macfarlane, UBC Press, 2022.

The patriation of the constitution and the entrenchment of a new bill of rights, Aboriginal and treaty rights, and a homegrown amending formula have had considerable consequences for Canadian governance, public policy, and the evolution of the constitution. Constitutional Crossroads brings together established and rising stars of political science and law not only to develop a robust account of the 1982 constitutional reform but to analyze the ensuing scholarship that has shaped our understanding of the constitution. Contributors bypass historical description to offer reflective analyses of different aspects of Canada’s constitution as it is understood in the twenty-first century.

With a focus on the themes of rights, reconciliation, and constitutional change, Constitutional Crossroads provides profound insights into institutional relationships, public policy, and the state of the fields of law and politics.

Uniting Nations: Britons and Internationalism, 1945-1970, by Daniel Gorman, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Uniting Nations is a comparative study of Britons who worked in the United Nations and international non-governmental and civil society organizations from 1945 to 1970 and their role in forging the postwar international system. Daniel Gorman interweaves the personal histories of scores of individuals who worked in UN organizations, the world government movement, Quaker international volunteer societies, and colonial freedom societies to demonstrate how international public policy often emerged 'from the ground up.' He reveals the importance of interwar, Second World War, colonial, and voluntary experiences in inspiring international careers, how international and national identities intermingled in the minds of international civil servants and civil society activists, and the ways in which international policy is personal. It is in the personal relationships forged by international civil servants and activists, positive and negative, biased and altruistic, short-sighted or visionary, that the “international” is to be found in the postwar international order.

Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion, edited by Daniel Gorman and Martin Gutmann, Oxford University Press, 2022.

Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals enables professionals, scholars, and students engaged with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to develop a richer understanding of the legacies and historical complexities of the policy fields behind each goal.

Each of the seventeen chapters tells the decades- or centuries-old backstory of one SDG and reveals the global human connections, governance tools and frameworks, and the actors involved in past efforts to address sustainable development challenges. Collectively, the seventeen chapters build a historical latticework that reveals the multiple and often interwoven sources that have shaped the challenges later encompassed in the SDGs. Engaging and insightfully written, the book's chapters are authored by international experts from multiple disciplines. The book is an indispensable resource and a vital foundation for understanding the past's indelible footprint on our contemporary sustainable development challenges.

The Missing Archives, by Yan Li, Writers' Publishing House, 2022.

(In Chinese)

Violencia, poder y afectos: Narrativas del miedo en Latinoamérica, edited by Marco Ramírez Rojas and David Rozotto, Tamesis Books, 2022.

"Violence, Power and Affects: Narratives of Fear in Latin America" offers a critical contribution to studies of the representation of socio-politically inflicted fears in contemporary literature and film. It looks at the immediate and long-lasting consequences of violence and terror in Latin American societies from several theoretical perspectives. This book answers two central questions: How have sociopolitical fears been enacted, represented and performed in societies marked by repression, conflict and abuse of power? And how has this emotion shaped aesthetic and ideological discourses and cultural productions? Looking at contemporary writers and cultural producers including Mónica Ojeda, Cristina Rivera Garza, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Alonso Cueto and Manlio Argueta, the contributors of this volume examine the climate of terror and anxiety resulting from the civil wars in Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru; the war on drugs in Mexico; the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama; and dynamics of class and gender power imbalances in Ecuador and Mexico.

Galatian Victories and Other Studies into the Agency and Identity of the Galatians in the Hellenistic and Early-Roman Periods, edited by Altay Coskun, Peeters Publishers, Leuven, Belgium, 2022.

Stephen Mitchell's Anatolia (1993) and Karl Strobel's Die Galater (1996) were by no means end points for the study of Hellenistic and Roman Galatia. Rather, they stimulated several new research initiatives. The introduction to this volume synthesises the results of some 700 mostly very recent scholarly publications, before ten case studies explore new trends in military, political, cultural and religious history. Methodologically refined approaches to the fragmentary literary sources have nuanced our understanding of the Galatians' migration, settlement, state formation, warfare and diplomacy. Investigations into the Galatians as the object of Attalid and Seleukid propaganda are complemented by studies into their political agency as independent tribes with varying objectives. For the Roman period, Greek inscriptions available in constantly growing numbers, besides coinage and other archaeological data, allow for a nuanced understanding of what provincialisation meant in practice: the loss of political autonomy was immediate (25 BC), as was the foundation of colonies in Pisidia; a landscape of monumentalised cities in the heartland of Galatia followed only slowly in the course of the next century. Cultic innovation was also diverse: the temple for the goddess Roma and the god Augustus was constructed in Ankyra from 5 BC to AD 14, whereas traditional Hellenistic-Phrygian cults densely resurface in the epigraphic evidence of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Interest in Paul's evangelisation of Asia Minor has been the catalyst of scholarly interest in the Galatians since the 4th century. Two studies devoted to the historical context of Paul's Letter to the Galatians try to connect the bulk of Pauline scholarship with latest research on urbanisation, ethnic constructs and spatial conceptions in the Graeco-Roman world, to lift discussions to a new level.

Security: A Philosophical Investigation, by David Welch, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

How do we know when we are investing wisely in security? Answering this question requires investigating what things are worth securing (and why); what threatens them; how best to protect them; and how to think about it. Is it possible to protect them? How best go about protecting them? What trade-offs are involved in allocating resources to security problems? This book responds to these questions by stripping down our preconceptions and rebuilding an understanding of security from the ground up on the basis of a common-sense ontology and an explicit theory of value. It argues for a clear distinction between objective and subjective security threats, a non-anthropocentric understanding of security, and a particular hierarchy of security referents, looking closely at four in particular-the ecosphere, the state, culture, and individual human beings. The analysis will be of interest not only to students and scholars of International Relations, but also to practitioners.

Religion, Spirituality and Secularity among Millennials: The Generation Shaping American and Canadian Trends, by Sarah Wilkins-LaFlamme, Routledge, 2022.

This book explores the world of religion, spirituality and secularity among the Millennial generation in the United States and Canada, with a focus on the ways Millennials are doing (non)religion differently in their social lives compared with their parents and grandparents. It considers the influences exercised on the (non)religious and spiritual landscapes of young adults in North America by the digital age, precarious work, growing pluralism, extreme individualism, environmental crisis, advanced urbanism, expanded higher education, emerging adulthood, and a secular age. Based on extensive primary and secondary quantitative data, complemented with high-quality qualitative research, including interviews and focus groups, this book offers cross-national comparisons between the United States and Canada to highlight the impact of different social environments on the experience of religion, spirituality and secularity among the continent’s most numerous generation. As such, it will appeal to scholars of religion and sociology, with interests in religious and societal change as well as in religious practice among young adults.

Carceral Afterlives: Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda, by Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Ohio University Press, 2022.

Drawing upon social history, political history, and critical prison studies, this book analyzes how prisons and other instruments of colonial punishment endured after independence and challenges their continued existence.

In Carceral Afterlives, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart traces the politics, practices, and lived experiences of incarceration in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the beginning of Yoweri Museveni’s presidency in 1986. During these decades, Ugandans experienced multiple changes of government, widespread state violence, and war, all of which affected the government’s approach to punishment. Bruce-Lockhart analyzes the relationship between the prison system and other sites of confinement—including informal detention spaces known as “safe houses” and wartime camps—and considers other forms of punishment, such as public executions and “disappearance” by state paramilitary organizations.