In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Sara Swenson is Assistant Professor of Religion and Affiliated Faculty in Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages at Dartmouth College. Her areas of expertise include Religions of Southeast Asia, Buddhism in Vietnam, Gender and Sexuality, Affect Theory, and Ethnography. She received her Ph.D. in Religion from Syracuse University in 2021. She also holds an M.Phil. in Religion and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Women's and Gender Studies from Syracuse University, an M.A. in Comparative Religion from Iliff School of Theology, and a B.A. in English from the University of Minnesota Duluth. She pursues projects that highlight the power and agency of everyday people. Religions are often a vital resource for grassroots social action and community engagement, as exemplified by Buddhism in Vietnam. Her projects have received generous grant support from the American Council of Learned Societies; Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship; Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA); and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies. Swenson’s new book, Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2025) is one of the first major ethnographic studies on Buddhism in southern Vietnam, featuring new histories and interpretations of this rich subject. It shares new context for how religious practices affect urban migration, development, and humanitarian concerns, and presents theoretical advancements for understanding grassroots charity. Near Light We Shine offers a diversity of perspectives on grassroots Buddhist practices throughout Vietnam, by featuring interviews that have never been published before from marginalized Buddhist practitioners in Vietnam, such as day laborers, queer men, elderly women, and retired communist soldiers. References mentioned in the interview:  Le Hoang Anh Thu, "Doing Bodhisattva's Work: Charity, Class, and Selfhood of Petty Traders in Hồ Chí Minh City" here Nhung Lu Rots, "Towards an Alternative Buddhist Modernity: Hòa Hảo Charity Healing and Herbal Medicine in the Mekong Delta" here Elizabeth Perez, Religion in the Kitchen here Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) at the University of Wisconsin here Van Nguyen-Marshall, Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam, 1954–1975 here Casey R. Collins, Buddhist Contramodernism: Shinnyo-en's Reconfigurations of Tradition for Modernity here

In Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have created an invisible infrastructure not only to affect local school districts but also to shape US education. He illustrates this by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how local organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have transformed data and worked with high schools to address the problem of students dropping out. The book argues that changes in a decentralized system happen less through top-down policy mandates or bottom-up social movements, and more through “outside-in” initiatives of networked organizations spread across various local systems. By detailing change across multiple levels and across multiple locations, Trinidad uncovers new ways to think about educational transformation, policy reform, and organizational change. João Souto-Maior (website: here) is a postdoc at Stanford University.

Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford UP, 2025) offers a fresh account of evangelical power by uncovering how the American Tract Society (ATS) leveraged print media to spread its message across an expanding nation. One of the era's largest media corporations and a pillar of the benevolent empire, the ATS circulated some 5.6 billion printed pages between its founding in 1825 and the eve of the Civil War. It wasn't just the volume of materials that mattered—it was the sophisticated media infrastructure that evangelicals developed for their message to reach readers, coast to coast. Media infrastructure refers to the material assemblages that work below the surface of media content, including the format of publications, the avenues of their movement, and the circumstances surrounding their reading. As a non-coercive yet effective form of power, infrastructure shaped how, when, and why readers engaged with evangelical texts. While showing how the ATS became a formidable force in American society during the nineteenth century, Empire of Print opens larger questions about the entanglements among people, things, texts, and institutions, the dynamics of power in a media-saturated world, and the salience of race, class, and region in the distribution and reception of media. Sonia Hazard is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website here

All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, much less one exclusive to humans. Instead, it defines agency as an umbrella term for the concrete sociomaterial processes that emerge from the collaborative efforts of multiple entities acting together. Agency isn't the faculty of an individual entity or self; it's always the function of a network or assembly of actors. Second, many of the actors involved in these processes are nonhuman-things without intentions, will, or even awareness. This relational and collective approach adopts a conception of action that doesn't hinge on mental states. To act is to participate in, contribute to, shape, facilitate, organize, constrain, and modify the course of events. This book argues that there's no such thing as an individual action and that agency is collectively distributed across a heterogeneous field of human and nonhuman actors. For readers interested in the link between quantum physics and relational metaphysics, please check out this recorded talk, especially Rovelli's linked here You can also check out his book Helgoland. For a more detailed analysis of why substance metaphysics fail us, see, The Non-Existence of the Real World. For readers interested in wuwei (non-coercive self-organizing communities in nature), please check out Honeybee Democracy, Biocivilisations, and FLUKE. About the urgency of building a non-cruel optimism, check out the classic critique of neoliberal individualism: Cruel Optimism and Psychopolitics and Burnout society.

An eye-opening look at how all American workers, even the highly educated and experienced, are vulnerable to the stigma of unemployment. After receiving a PhD in mathematics from MIT, Larry spent three decades working at prestigious companies in the tech industry. Initially he was not worried when he lost his job as part of a large layoff, but the prolonged unemployment that followed decimated his finances and nearly ended his marriage. Larry's story is not an anomaly. The majority of American workers experience unemployment, and millions get trapped in devastating long-term unemployment, including experienced workers with advanced degrees from top universities. How is it possible for even highly successful careers to suddenly go off the rails? In The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed (Oxford UP, 2024), Ofer Sharone explains how the stigma of unemployment can render past educational and professional achievements irrelevant, and how it leaves all American workers vulnerable to becoming trapped in unemployment. Drawing on interviews with unemployed workers, job recruiters, and career coaches, Sharone brings to light the subtle ways that stigmatization prevents even the most educated and experienced workers from gaining middle-class jobs. Stigma also means that an American worker risks more than financial calamity from a protracted period of unemployment. One's closest relationships and sense of self are also on the line. Eye-opening and clearly written, The Stigma Trap is essential reading for anyone who has experienced unemployment, has a family member or friend who is unemployed, or who wants to understand the forces that underlie the anxiety-filled lives of contemporary American workers. The book offers a unique approach to supporting unemployed jobseekers. At a broader level it exposes the precarious condition of American workers and sparks a conversation about much-needed policies to assure that we are not all one layoff away from being trapped by stigma. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.