Welcome to our weekly roundup of news from university presses! Once again, there is a lot to share this week from our fellow academic publishing houses and much to learn on What SUP at the social university presses. This week, we found conversations on the cloud, assisted suicide, and Grace Lee Boggs. What did you read this week?
The University Press of Florida analyzes the emergence of a dangerous interracial fellowship in Jim Crow-era South Carolina: the Bahá’í Faith. Members of this religious community rejected segregation and advocated for an interracial spiritual democracy.
The MIT Press talks to former network engineer Tung-Hui Hu about the digital cloud and were it came from. It turns out that our understanding and conceptualization of the cloud are wrong, and that, as an inherently cultural phenomenon, it reproduces hidden structures of race, power and inequality.
University of California Press remembers the legendary social activist Grace Lee Boggs, who passed away on Monday at the age of 100. She participated in most of the great freedom and human rights movements of the past 70 years: from the labor, civil rights, Black Power, and women’s to the environmental justice, antiwar and Asian American movements.
Princeton University Press asks the seemingly simple question about one of the most beloved birds: “Where do penguins live?” Well, do you know the answer?
Oxford University Press tackles the tough discussion on the ethics of assisted suicide and provides a thoughtful analysis of the arguments of both sides of the debate.
Stanford University Press analyzes the dangers in politicizing the uses of ultrasound imagery and its effects on wider societal discourse that regard women as mere “hosts” of fetal life and denies them their humanity.
Harvard University Press recaps the UN Sustainable Development Summit held in New York last month and deconstructs the adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The article’s main argument? That the real human rights work of the SDG era is only just beginning.
Columbia University Press features an interview with Stephen S. Lee on the historical grouping of minority writers and artists who drew inspiration from the Soviet Union in the interwar period, also known as “the ethnic avant-garde.”
Burning With Passion: Selected Poems from Catullus