University of Minnesota Press

Dianne Harris offers a rare exploration of the racial and class politics of architecture in her book LITTLE WHITE HOUSES, which examines how postwar media representations associated the ordinary single-family house with middle-class whites to the exclusion of others. This book adds a new dimension to our understanding of race in America and the inequalities that persist in the housing market in the United States. Harris is an archi...

Race plays a fundamental role in naturalizing social, political, and economic inequalities in the United States. Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph Lowndes document the changing politics of race and class in the age of Trump in their book PRODUCERS, PARASITES, PATRIOTS: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, which ultimately brings to light the changing role of race in right-wing politics. Racial subordination is an endu...

The dynamics of adoptee communities have shifted in the decades since the first edition of OUTSIDERS WITHIN was published in 2006, yet the volume continues to provide critical perspectives that have gained renewed relevance during contemporary crises. Here, three writers and artists, Korean and Vietnamese adoptees who were adopted across geographic borders in the 1970s, talk isolation, racism, identity struggle, adoption policy, an...

What if we tended to an ailing ecosystem just as we would a body in the throes of a chronic medical condition? Ranae Lenor Hanson’s memoir WATERSHED encourages us to discover how the health of our bodies and the health of the world they inhabit are inextricably linked. In this episode, Hanson is joined by educators and community leaders Lena Jones and Teddie Potter. This conversation was recorded in June 2020.

Ranae Lenor Hanson is ...

The Migrant’s Paradox connects global migration with urban marginalization, exploring how “race” maps onto place across the globe, state, and street. Suzanne Hall examines the brutal contradictions of sovereignty and capitalism in the formation of street livelihoods in the urban margins in five cities in Britain, in places where jobs are hard to come by and the impacts of historic state underinvestment are deeply felt. Hall is asso...

Craig Robertson’s THE FILING CABINET explores how this now-neglected artifact profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet continues to shape how we interact with information and data in the digital age. In this episode, Robertson, who is associate professor of media studies at Northeastern University in Boston (also author of THE PASSPO...

Jamie Lorimer’s THE PROBIOTIC PLANET calls for a rethinking of artificial barriers between science and policy and a sweeping overview of diverse probiotic approaches. Bruce Clarke’s GAIAN SYSTEMS is a pioneering exploration of the complex evolution of Gaia’s many variants. In a conversation that ranges from Lynn Margulis to science fiction, neocybernetics to COVID-19, Lorimer and Clarke ultimately seek insight into solving an envir...

CAPTURE is a book that reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century US cultural canon. In a conversation that ranges from references to Muybridge and Audubon, Poe and Hawthorne, Whitman and Thoreau, environmental humanities and biopolitics, presentation and representation, capture and captivity, (with a cameo from Sylvester Graham of the Grah...

Amid xenophobic challenges to America’s core value of welcoming the tired and the poor, Irina Aristarkhova calls for new forms of hospitality in her engagement with the works of eight international artists. In ARRESTED WELCOME, the first monograph on hospitality in contemporary art, she employs a feminist perspective and asks who, how, and what determines who is worthy of welcome. With a focus on lessons that contemporary artists t...

“I may not be able to find my family but it always made me feel a step closer to help others.” OUTSIDERS WITHIN is a landmark publication that explores transracial adoption and the heavy emotional and cultural toll on those who directly experience it. The volume has many contributors who explore transracial adoption through essays, fiction, poetry, and art. OUTSIDERS WITHIN is coedited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, a...

The urgency of climate change means it is not sufficient for environmental scholarship to describe our complex relationship to the natural world. It must also compel a response. TIMESCALES: THINKING ACROSS ECOLOGICAL TEMPORALITIES gathers scholars from different fields, placing traditional academic essays alongside experimental sections, to promote innovation and collaboration. This episode asks: Why art? Why art … at all? With cli...

Scammer’s Yard is an ethnography that focuses on the stories of three young Black Jamaicans who strive to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. Author Jovan Scott Lewis raises unsettling questions about the fairness of a world economy that relegates Caribbean populations to durative sufferation. This groundbreaking book asks whether true reparation for th...

If you’ve ever wondered what to do with your summer and considered (1) making history, (2) spending the whole thing on a wild 2,000-mile canoe trip, and (3) putting your relationship with your best friend to the ultimate test, then you know exactly what author Natalie Warren has experienced. In the summer after graduating college, Natalie and Ann Raiho set off on the banks of the Minnesota River with the ultimate goal of reaching t...

TIMESCALES is a book that explores how time has seemed to shift in the Anthropocene and examines the human inability to see and to witness time as an element of environmental catastrophe. The volume brings together humanities scholars, scientists, and artists to develop new ways of thinking about the world with its human and nonhuman entanglements and diverse systems of knowledge. Carolyn Fornoff is assistant professor of Latin Ame...

“Historically, women have had to frame their own intellectual advancement in alternative terms.” When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. WHAT A LIBRARY MEANS TO A WOMAN is a book by Sheila Liming that examines personal libraries as technologies of self-crea...

When talking about climate change, what do an oceanographer and a literary scholar have in common? How might these distant disciplines begin to speak to each other? TIMESCALES: THINKING ACROSS ECOLOGICAL TEMPORALITIES is a volume that includes frictive chit-chats from scholars from far-flung disciplines and explores what they have to teach each other about the timescales of environmental change. Bethany Wiggin is one of three co-ed...

On this podcast, Mindy Greiling, a mental health advocate and former state representative, has hosted a series of conversations around mental health care in Minnesota: the first was with Alisa Roth on the state’s criminal treatment of mental illness, and the second with Dr. George Realmuto on mental health and substance abuse. In this third and final installment in the mental health series, Mindy talks about recovery with John Trep...

Consumption is on pause for a lot of people during the novel coronavirus pandemic. Whether that's given you cause to clean out your stuff or become closer with your stuff, we're here to talk about meaning we assign to the objects around us. Christine Harold is a professor of communication at the University of Washington. Her new book THINGS WORTH KEEPING: The Value of Attachment in a Disposable World, investigates the attac...

Mindy Greiling was a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives for twenty years. She has served on state and national boards of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and is on the University of Minnesota Psychiatry Community Advisory Council. George Realmuto is a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Both George and Mindy are parents of children with brain disease. Mindy’s...