Listen to Insights From Academics on the UNC Press Presents Podcast

With recent episodes on conservative backlash against liberal education, the criminalization of immigration in North Carolina, Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico, and more, you’re sure to learn something new on the UNC Press Presents podcast. Produced in partnership with the New Books Network, the podcast features authors talking about their books & areas of expertise. In this post we’re highlighting a few of our most recent episodes but you can browse all episodes on the UNC Press Presents webpage, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Omar Valerio-Jiménez on his new book Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship

This book analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans’ civil rights struggles over several generations. Omar Valerio-Jiménez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts.

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America, talks about conservatives and higher eduction

By examining the range of conservative student organizations and coalition building, Shepherd shows how wealthy donors and conservative intellectuals trained future GOP leaders such as Karl Rove, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, Pat Buchanan, and others in conservative politics, providing them with tactics to consciously drive American politics and culture further to the authoritarian right and to “reclaim” American higher education.

Tune in for a conversation about ICE and Immigration in North Carolina with Felicia Arriaga, author of Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America

In recent years, dozens of counties in NC have partnered with federal law enforcement in the criminalization of immigration—what many have dubbed “crimmigration.” Arriaga argues that the methods used by these partnerships are employed throughout the US, but have been particularly visible in NC, where the Latinx population increased by 111 percent between 2000 and 2010. Arriaga’s evidence also reveals how Latinx communities are resisting and adapting to these systems.

John Soluri in conversation with Miranda Melcher on his new book, Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia

Creatures of Fashion explains how struggles for control over the production of commodities and the reproduction of animals drove social and environmental changes that tied Patagonia to global markets, empires, and wildlife conservation movements and provides perspectives vital for understanding contemporary conflicts over mass consumption, the conservation of biodiversity, and struggles for environmental justice in Patagonia and beyond.