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Viola Castellano’s new book Set to See Us Fail looks at how on how inequalities are reproduced, measured, managed, and contested within the child welfare system of New York. Here she tells us what drew her to this complex issue and what her work has revealed.
ANGELA RONG YANG ZHANG received the Australian Government Postgraduate Award and Emerging Researchers in Ageing Conference Bursary in 2015 and is currently Aged Care Research & Industry Innovation Australia (ARIIA) Grant supported researcher at College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University, Australia. Dr Zhang is also an Adjunct Fellow to School of Social Sciences at The University of Adelaide.
In this exclusive interview, Angela explores the inspiration and issues behind her new book, At Home in a Nursing Home: An Ethnography of Movement and Care in Australia.
Continue reading “AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Angela Rong Yang Zhang on At Home in a Nursing Home”
In the concluding part of our discussion of her new book A Magpie’s Tale, Anna tells us about the family she stayed with for the best part of a year – with sometimes as many as ten people in their small, two-room house – and how dramatic economic and political changes drastically changed the lives of many Kazakh families in Mongolia.
ANNA ODLAND PORTISCH has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Brunel University. In her new book A Magpie’s Tale: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on the Kazakh of Western Mongolia she recounts her time living with a Kazakh family in a small village.
It’s fascinating (“Can you imagine a stranger showing up on your doorstep and asking to stay for a year?”) and highly evocative (“It was so cold that night, the next morning the driver had to bring the engine back to life by lighting a small fire underneath the car”) and it gave us so much to discuss that we’ve split our discussion into two parts.
Anna’s story begins here and Part Two will follow very soon.
Continue reading “AUTHOR INTERVIEW(part 1): Anna Odland Portisch on A MAGPIE’S TALE”By TOM BRATRUD
Since Fire on the Island was one of our most popular and well-received titles in 2022, we are delighted that its author Tom Bratrud has kindly contributed this exclusive article describing his fieldwork, events on the island, and the aims of his book.
Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of David Émile Durkheim?
Bernhard Gissibl is author of The Nature of German Imperialism. Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in colonial East Africa, published this July by Berghahn. His work analyses the role of hunting and game conservation in the making of the col0nial state in what was then German East Africa. The book reveals the years of German colonial rule prior to World War I as the foundational period of Tanzania’s extensive wildlife conservation regime. Here he discusses his work, some of the surprises and challenges that the topic entailed, and what he found most rewarding about following the archival tracks left by the elephants and lions of the past. Continue reading “The Colonial Governance of the Natural World: A History of Tanzanian Wildlife Conservation”
After World War II, France embarked on a project of modernization, which included the development of the modern mass home. At Home in Postwar France identifies the “right to comfort” as an invention of the postwar period and suggests that the modern mass home played a vital role in shaping new expectations for well-being and happiness. Below, author Nicole C. Rudolph discusses her inspiration for writing this book.
Continue reading “Becoming Modern: The Mass Home and the Right to Comfort”
Fifty years of French cinema get their close-up in Hugo Frey’s Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995, published in July. Following, the author offers readers a new angle on the volume, which is itself a fresh perspective on French film against a nationalistic backdrop.
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Why did you write this book? What were your original aims?
The motivations for undertaking this research are complicated and now date from some time ago. Having written a study of the director Louis Malle (2004), I wanted to continue to develop my knowledge of French cinema, while still connecting to my other interests in national historiography and the collective memory of the Vichy period. However, I did not want to work on a conventional book about either ‘great French films of recent times’ or indeed something that just rehashed familiar debates already presented in titles such as Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome.
Ana Salzberg’s newly published monograph, Beyond the Looking Glass: Narcissism and Female Stardom in Studio-Era Hollywood, takes a closer look into the private and public personas of classic Hollywood’s female stars. Following, the authors shares more about her subject and offers a fresh glimpse of the “narcissism” of the female star.
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What drew you to the study of the female star in classic cinema? And what inspired you to research and write on this topic?
One of the remarkable things about golden-age stars is that you meet them virtually everywhere these days: Turner Classic Movies, DVD box-sets, biographies, bio-pics – not to mention their digitally animated counterparts in commercials. On a very immediate level that we all – not just researchers – experience, old Hollywood has new life.
Continue reading “Cinematic Gazing ‘Beyond the Looking Glass’”