New Books Network

In Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing (San Diego State UP, 2024),  Michael James Roberts, Kristin Lawler, and David P. Cline take the widespread participation of skateboarders and surfers in the Black Lives Matter movement as a catalyst to reconsider the significance of the cultural politics of surfing and skateboarding. It is the first academic volume to bring together leading scholars in the areas of both surfing and skateboarding studies. This episode also invites Jarret Rose to discuss his contribution to this anthology.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His current research projects include the study of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, temporal urban environments in rural historical towns, student experiences of hanging out and being at home while at college and university, and a more recent study on the making of rodeo. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email.
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In her new book, Born to Lose: The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon (Headpress, 2026) film historian Rachel Walther draws on extensive archival research delving into the film’s backstory, tracing how an unbelievable true crime tale of love, bank robbery, and LGBTQI+ activism became a box-office smash and catapulted a group of Brooklyn outsiders into the media spotlight. Name-checked on TV shows from The Simpsons to Drunk History, and now a Broadway play, Dog Day Afternoon’s legacy continues to inspire filmmakers, writers, and actors. Walther’s deep dive interrogates the film’s place in the 1970s zeitgeist, set against a background of antiwar activism and the fight for gay and trans rights, and in doing so shows its continuing relevance today.
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Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not really Chinese, or not really Muslim.

Rian Thum, in his book Islamic China: An Asian History (Harvard UP, 2025), strives to make Chinese Muslims “ordinary”, placing them in both Chinese and global history by following pilgrims, merchants, and others across the Ming, Qing, and Republican eras.

Rian is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation, he is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, winner of the Fairbank Prize for East Asian History from the American Historical Association and the Hsu Prize for East Asian Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Islamic China. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Today we meet EWP adjunct faculty Suryamayi Aswini Clarence-Smith to explore her work in Utopian studies, shaped by her upbringing in Auroville and her roots in Integral Yoga. We discuss integral approaches to education and her CIIS course, Prefiguring Utopia, which asks what a utopian learning experience might look like. We discuss the limits of rational teleology in utopian praxis and the importance of integral frameworks, like the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, that emphasize the complementarity of multiple ways of knowing, harmonizing the planes and parts of the self, necessary to support collective transformation. The conversation also explores the scholar-practitioner as a site of transformation, and she shares a little about her course at CIIS, Awareness Through the Body, which guides students in exploring embodiment and contemplation, experimenting with their physical and psychic constitution, and we discuss this as a practice of cultivating conditions for transformative experiences grounded in revolutionary, evolutionary, and utopian ideals.

Book - Prefiguring Utopia: The Auroville Experiment

Book Talk - here

Dr. Suryamayi Clarence-Smith is an award-winning scholar, educator and facilitator based in Auroville, India, the largest intentional community in the world. Suryamayi holds a PhD in International Development from the University of Sussex, and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley; she is currently affiliated with the Sri Aurobindo International Institute for Educational Research (SAIIER) in Auroville. Her research on utopian and prefigurative practice has been published by leading editors and publishers in the field, notably in the Ralahine Utopian Studies series (Peter Lang), the Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st century series (Bristol University Press), and the Antipode Book Series (Wiley). Dedicated to sharing the outcomes of her research to various audiences, she lectures internationally in both academic and activist settings.

The EWP Podcast credits

Connect with EWP: Website • Youtube • Facebook

Hosted by Stephen Julich (EWP Core Faculty) and Jonathan Kay (EWP Phd, Adjunct Faculty)

Produced by: Stephen Julich and Jonathan Kay

Edited and Mixed by: Jonathan Kay

Music: Mosaic, by Monsoon on the album Mandala

Introduction Voiceover: Roche Wadehra

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More than a century ago, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, dubbed the "Einstein of Sex," grew famous (and infamous) for his liberating theory of sexual relativity. Today, he's been largely forgotten.

In The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (W. W. Norton & Co, 2025)journalist Daniel Brook retraces Hirschfeld's rollicking life and reinvigorates his legacy, recovering one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In an era when gay sex was a crime and gender roles rigid, Hirschfeld taught that each of us is their own unique mixture of masculinity and femininity. Through his public advocacy for gay rights and his private counseling of patients toward self-acceptance, he became the intellectual impresario of Berlin's cabaret scene and helped turn his hometown into the world's queer capital. But he also enraged the Nazis, who ransacked his Institute for Sexual Science and burned his books.

Driven from his homeland, Hirschfeld traveled to America, Asia, and the Middle East to research sexuality on a global scale. Through his harrowing lived experience of antisemitic persecution and a pivotal late-in-life interracial romance, he came to see that race, like gender, was a human invention. Hirschfeld spent his final years in exile trying to warn the world of the genocidal dangers of racism.

Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany.
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