Episodi

  • Benjamin Dalton, "Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity" (Edinburgh UP, 2026)

    Benjamin Dalton, "Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity" (Edinburgh UP, 2026)
    May 18 2026
    Our bodies and brains are radically transformable, mutable and plastic. From the neuroplasticity of the brain to the epigenetic malleability of our bodies and of all organic life, the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou invites us to consider our plasticity as both a creative resource and an ethical challenge. Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity (Edinburgh UP, 2026) brings Malabou's philosophy into dialogue with contemporary literature and film. It reads conceptions of plasticity and neuroplasticity in Malabou through the mutant bodies of Leos Carax's films; the shape-shifting bodies of Marie Darrieussecq's novels and theatre; the terrifying, traumatic metamorphoses depicted in the fiction of Marie NDiaye; and the anarchic sexualities and identities celebrated in the cinema and writing of Alain Guiraudie. It argues that, in different ways, Malabou's philosophy and literary and filmic texts develop modes of bearing witness to plasticity which can supplement, challenge and extend scientific understandings of biological plasticity, constituting ethical and creative sites of exploration.
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    1 ora e 30 min
  • Edith Szanto, "Twelver Shi'i Self-flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

    Edith Szanto, "Twelver Shi'i Self-flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
    May 7 2026
    Edith Szanto’s Twelver Shi'i Self-Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab (Edinburgh UP, 2025) is a striking and deeply immersive ethnographic study that takes the reader into the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab in Syria. This town was a vibrant center of Shi‘i life, pilgrimage, and healing, especially for Iraqi refugees until the 2011 Syrian uprising. By combining meticulous fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2010 with rich historical and social context, Szanto shows how these contested rituals served as both spiritual expression and pathways to worldly and psychological healing. The book examines controversial Muharram practices, especially self-flagellation, not simply as ritual acts but as deeply meaningful responses to trauma, displacement, and the search for justice and healing. In doing so, Szanto pays close attention to how people actually live their religion: through relationships with saints, engagement with religious authorities, media, ritual performance, and forms of spiritual healing. In this conversation, Szanto and I explore specific Muharram practices, including self-flagellation, the wedding of Qasim, and other ritualized forms of mourning, as well as gendered dynamics in who participates and why. We discuss what these practices looked like on the ground—what Muharram in Sayyida Zaynab felt like, how different communities understood and debated these rituals, and what purposes they served for those who participated in them. We talk about the Zaynabiyya seminary and how changes in its physical and institutional structure reshaped how knowledge was taught and who held authority. We also discuss relationships with saints, spiritual healers like Shaykh Abu Ahmad, and the ways that media, music, and ritual performance mediate piety. Szanto also treats us to reflecting on some of her experiences observing and engaging with these rituals. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Islamic studies generally, Shi‘i studies, Middle Eastern religious life, or the ways that communities navigate devotion, trauma, and healing through ritual.
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    6 min
  • Leslie Barnes, "Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

    Leslie Barnes, "Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
    Apr 7 2026
    In Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Leslie Barnes examines the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under global imperialism. She explores the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogates the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. Engaged with debates concerning the status of transactional sex, Sex Work in Southeast Asia explores the symbolic force and concrete conditions of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam, considering how these debates and the figures they ensnare are mediated by fiction and creative nonfiction. The book’s scenes of ambivalence show how the aesthetic treatment of sex work stretches the paradigms we use to make sense not only of sex work, but also of art, the evidentiary status of testimony and the spectacles of pleasure and suffering. Contesting essentialism and authenticity, and working to suspend judgement, these scenes encourage a re-examination of what we think we know about sex work, how we know it and what we do with that knowledge. Leslie Barnes is an Associate Professor of French Studies at the Australian National University. She is author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (2014) and co-editor of The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (2021). We previously chatted on New Books about her work on the great Cambodian film director Rithy Panh, so was excited to speak with her again about Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film.
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    1 ora e 23 min
  • Emotions of LGBT Rights

    Emotions of LGBT Rights
    Apr 6 2026
    In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks to Senthorun Raj about the Emotions of LGBT Rights. Emotions from disgust and fear to love and joy shape the legal frameworks that attempt to govern human sexual behavior around the world. Sen cautions against dividing emotions into good and bad, but instead asks us to take a critical stance on all emotions, to understand how they shape our policies. In the episode, we talk about Sara Ahmed, the Stonewall Riots, conversion therapy, and efforts to mandate for and against inclusive sex education. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Sen’s book, The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law (Edinburgh University Press 2025) uses emotion as a novel analytic lens to understand, analyse, and critique the relationship between individual, interpersonal, and institutional conflicts over LGBT rights. Emotions are central to the pursuit, organisation, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in law. Drawing from critical legal theories, this book cultivates the concept of “emotional grammar” to show how emotions structure law reform pursuits by threading together Hansard, legislation, case law, law reform consultations, and statutory guidance. By doing so, it explains why addressing this emotional grammar is important for scholars, lawyers, judges, legislators, and activists seeking to navigate conflicts over LGBT rights and reforms that aim to repair the inequalities faced by LGBT people. Senthorun Raj is an academic human rights lawyer with expertise in issues of race, gender, sexuality, and culture. He works as a Reader in Human Rights Law at Manchester Metropolitan University. Sen’s research and teaching interests include LGBTIQ+ rights, emotion, culture, equalities and human rights law, legal education, and critical legal theory. His latest monograph, builds on his previous book, Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity (Routledge, 2020), which explored the ways emotions shape legal judgments that enable progress for LGBT people. He is also the co-editor of The Queer Outside in Law: Recognising LGBTIQ People in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2020) and Queer Judgments (Counterpress, 2025). The image for this episode is a coloured lithograph, from 1868, depicting a double rainbow, by René Henri Digeon after Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat. It was sourced by Lili Epstein for High Theory from the Wellcome Collection.
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    21 min
  • Hans A. Harmakaputra, "Christian-Muslim Relations in Post-Reformation Indonesia: Resistance, Identity and Belonging" (Edinburgh UP, 2026)

    Hans A. Harmakaputra, "Christian-Muslim Relations in Post-Reformation Indonesia: Resistance, Identity and Belonging" (Edinburgh UP, 2026)
    Mar 31 2026
    The post-Reformation era has witnessed a vastly changing landscape in Indonesian Islam, particularly with the emergence of conservative Muslim voices. Christian-Muslim Relations in Post-Reformation Indonesia: Resistance, Identity and Belonging (Edinburgh UP, 2026) explores several strategies of Christian resistance against the resurgence of conservative voices in Indonesian Islam to establish a coherent view of Christian responses and a greater understanding of Christian-Muslim relations after the Reformation in 1998. These different strategies demonstrate that, despite their status as a religious minority, Indonesian Christians are far from passive and submissive. Instead, they actively negotiate their identity and role in contemporary Indonesia’s shifting political and social context to cultivate a sense of belonging.
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    1 ora e 27 min
  • David McCrone, "Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

    David McCrone, "Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
    Feb 3 2026
    Scotland is a nation that has undergone significant changes over the last 50 years or so. This is, of course, true of much of the Western world but, as David McCrone shows in his Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity (Edinburgh UP, 2025), these change have had particular impacts and been understood in particular ways in Scotland. Using a sociological approach in which politics, identity and culture need to be understood as impacted by broader process of social, structural change, McCrone discusses how following the fracturing of the ‘warfare/welfare nexus’ which, until the 1980s tied the nations of the United Kingdom together, Scotland is transformed. The country which in the postwar period had seen the most outward migration begins to welcome more people, the class structure changes after deindustrialisation, yet a strong sense of working-class identity remains, opportunities for women improve significantly, Scots increasingly come to think of themselves as Scots and ‘the referendum decade’ of 2011-2021 sees changes in political allegiance and formations. In our discussion David discusses what led him to a career producing the sociology of Scotland, how the country should be understood via its civil society, the importance of adopting a sociological approach to social change and what Émile Durkheim has to say about the number of Saltires flying from lampposts across the land. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), along with other texts.
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    1 ora e 49 min
  • Nicole Wegner, "Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

    Nicole Wegner, "Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
    Jan 31 2026
    Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Wegner is not a book about peacekeeping practices. This is a book about storytelling, fantasies and the ways that people connect emotionally to myths about peacekeeping. The celebration of peacekeeping as a legitimate and desirable use of military force is expressed through the unproblematised acceptance of militarism. Introducing a novel framework – martial peace – the book offers an in-depth examination of the Canadian Armed Forces missions to Afghanistan and the use of police violence against Indigenous protests in Canada as case examples where military violence has been justified in the name of peace. It critically investigates the peacekeeper myth and challenges the academic, government and popular beliefs that martial violence is required to sustain peace. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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    51 min
  • Julian Schmid, "Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

    Julian Schmid, "Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
    Dec 12 2025
    Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century (Edinburgh UP, 2025) by Dr. Julian Schmid considers how the long-standing superhero genre has been reinvigorated in the twenty-first century as an interlocutor of security and surveillance discourses following the events of ‘9/11’. While superheroes have a long cultural history, Dr. Schmid argues that their contemporary representations in Hollywood films and TV shows create and deepen specific discourses on security, terrorism and violence. He shows how the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, in particular, are important artefacts that can help us to understand how these discourses are popularised and ultimately normalised.The book offers a rich account of the emergence of superheroes against the backdrop of America’s history since its founding in 1776 and their rise to popularity through comic books since the 1930s. Analysing the connections between superheroes, foreign policy and security from ‘9/11’ to the present, it demonstrates the significance of superheroes for the construction of heroism and security in contemporary times.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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    45 min