Tag Archives: UP Week

#ReadUP on Global Citizenship

For University Press Week 2019, we are highlighting a collection of books and journal articles that provide insight and comprehensive perspectives on global topics. Whether challenging the conversation around the representations of women in Africa, addressing the role of public presentation in papering over an unchanging power dynamic, or working for social justice by documenting the considerable benefits of early life Medicaid coverage, these authors are helping to shift the conversation towards more equitable and sustainable policies for all.

In Holding the World Together, edited by Nwando Achebe and Claire Robertson, contributions from leading scholars focus on agency and avoid stereotypical depictions of African women, reframing the way we think about what we know and how we know it. Essays provide critical perspectives on representation, women’s roles in national liberation movements, and their unique challenges in the areas of health and disease.

“The field of African women’s and gender studies is more than abstractly engaged in the daily lives of those it studies, delineating contemporary political, economic, and social implications of African realities. Thus, our changing perspectives are driven not just by, for instance, the desire to contest ongoing negative stereotypes, but also by contemporary history. Recent African women’s and gender scholarship has emphasized political activism and women’s empowerment, in line with rising political power by women in some countries. Researchers join the subjects of their studies in seeking improvements in the situations of ordinary African women in a variety of contexts. Driving this activist impulse is the perception (and reality) that many African women face increasing threats to their well-being with respect to legal, political, economic, and social factors. Decisions made elsewhere in the world capitalist economy often distort African local economies, and political agency and choices are curtailed by outside pressures, corruption, and an electorate often with little formal education. Economies falter in the face of man-made and natural disasters and political corruption, while a rapid pace of social change involving urbanization, social and geographical dislocations, and religious movements fosters innovations in forms of organization. Contributors engage these issues as they relate to women and gender in Africa, paying particular attention to changing notions of gender identity and African women’s perceptions.” (Achebe & Robertson, 8)

How do you motivate parents to spend more time reading to their children? In the article “Using Behavioral Insights to Increase Parental Engagement: The Parents and Children Together Intervention” from the Journal of Human Resources, Susan E. Mayer, Ariel Kalil, Philip Oreopoulos, and Sebastian Gallegos designed an experiment using a digital library on an electronic tablet. The program used behavioral tools (“reminders, goal-setting, and social rewards”) to more than double the amount of time parents spent reading to their children over a six-week period. If such interventions can increase parental engagement in disadvantaged families, they could go a long way toward bridging the skills gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children, a gap that can be observed even before children start school, and which persists throughout school years.

Joanna Allan reveals how authoritarian regimes in Equatorial Guinea and Morocco, in partnership with Western states and corporations, create a public perception of promoting equality while simultaneously undermining women’s rights in order to cash in on natural resources. Silenced Resistance brings awareness to this genderwashing, and how it plays an integral role in determining the composition of public resistance to authoritarian regimes.

A Saharawi woman sits beside a building adorned with paint-smothered proindependence graffiti, El Aaiún, 2014. Photo by Bartek Sabela.
Women in Semu market, Malabo, 2012. Photo by Guillaume Darribau/Fractures Collective.

“Sultana could hear the tourists outside chattering and laughing, spectators to Marrakesh’s most famous square. . . . It is easy to miss the architectural understatement of the low-rise, beige Police Commission that sits anemically in one corner of the Djemaa el Fna square. The building’s ability to merge blandly into the background is opportune for the Moroccan regime, which shows a heavily made-up face to the country’s visitors. The Anglophone guidebooks are an ally to Morocco. They make the best of the story of how the Djemaa el Fna (Assembly of the Dead) got its name: ‘heretics’ and ‘criminals’ were tortured here centuries ago, says Lonely Planet. Centuries ago. If the hint of a scream was today to escape from the commission, it would have to fight for attention with the hammers of souq ironmongers, the clashing brass cups of the water carriers, the squeals of dancing monkeys, or the supernatural drone of the snake charmers hypnotizing the guidebook writers. Incidentally, the mouths of many charmed cobras are sewn shut.” (Allan, 3-4)

The United States’ current energy policy attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enforcing standards on the transportation and electricity sectors, promoting the use of renewable fuels. Another possible approach is a carbon tax, which would impose a fee for burning carbon-based fuels. In their article “What Is the Cost of a Renewable Energy–Based Approach to Greenhouse Gas Mitigation?” from Land Economics, Anthony Oliver and Madhu Khanna compare the existing regulations with this alternative, determining that the global emissions reduction achieved by a carbon tax is more than 50% higher than the current policy.

This month, we publish Elusive Justice, Donny Meertens’s new book on the restoration of land rights in Colombia during its transition to peace. There were significant challenges in making the promise of the Victims and Land Restitution Law real for rural women. Meertens contends that women’s advocacy organizations must have a prominent role in overseeing transitional policies in order to create a more just society.

Women drawing the local history of violence and land dispossession. Historical Memory Workshop, Sucre, 2009. Photograph by Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. Reproduced in CNMH 2010, 291

“The three themes of this book—land restitution, gender equity, and reparations—are part of the historical roots of the conflict and core elements of the peace process. . . . Gender equity and redress for the specific forms of violence inflicted on women have been recognized by government and rebels as necessary for building a more inclusive democracy in a postconflict society. Justice, in its multiple forms and interpretations (from criminal to social, from official system to subjective experience), constitutes the backbone of a lasting peace.” (Meertens, 6)

In “The Long-Term Effects of Early Life Medicaid Coverage” from the Journal of Human Resources, Sarah Miller and Laura R. Wherry study individuals who gained access to Medicaid coverage while in utero and during the first year of life through an expansion of Medicaid that occurred from 1979 to 1993. Because this early period is crucial to development, the authors found that the impacts of this policy shift continued into adulthood, with the cohort experiencing “lower rates of chronic conditions…and fewer hospitalizations related to diabetes and obesity,” as well as increased high school graduation rates.

Reclaiming the “unknowable” history of Africa

It’s University Press Week! We’ve just launched our blog, and we’re excited to be participating in the UP Week Blog Tour, where presses will be blogging each day about a different theme that relates to scholarly publishing. For the full Blog Tour schedule, click here.

For today’s theme of The Global Reach of University Presses, Sheila Leary, director of the University of Wisconsin Press, interviews Jan Vansina.

Jan Vansina, one of the world’s foremost historians of Africa who literally wrote the book on using Oral Tradition as History, is about to publish his eighth book with the University of Wisconsin Press. He recently had occasion to look back at how, over nearly fifty years, his seven prior books published by UWP have influenced the study of Africa’s history, both within Africa and around the world.

“My own case shows that the kind of specialized scholarly books published by university presses typically lead to further research by others and do so for a whole generation or longer. In a field that is new, such as African history was when I began, university presses publish specialized works of scholarship that commercial publishers take no interest in. And I have found that just placing research findings in archives is not enough: publication is absolutely essential to the advancement of research. Indeed, I would argue that university presses are as essential for research in the humanities and social sciences around the globe as are laboratories for research scientists.”

Vansina is considered one of the founders of the field of African history in the 1950s and 1960s, a time not so long ago when there was still a widely held view that cultures without written texts had no history, or that their history was unknowable. Up to that point, “African” historiography focused entirely on the history of European colonizers in Africa, not on the history of Africans.

As a young employee of a Belgian research agency sent to the Congo in 1952, Vansina discovered that he could analyze the oral tradition stories he heard from Kuba informants by using the same methods he had learned for extracting historical information from European medieval dirges. This was a historiographical breakthrough that gave the study of pre-colonial African history both the scholarly justification and the self-confidence it had been lacking.

Vansina recalls the impact of his first book with UW Press in 1966, Kingdoms of the Savanna.

“It was a preliminary historical overview of an area and period in Africa that was little known in academic circles at that point. It was quickly translated into French and published in Kinshasa, and it won the Herskovits Prize for best book from the African Studies Association.” Although historians at the time were accustomed to studying kingdoms, the book used a very innovative mix of oral and written sources to provide a history of pre-colonial kingdoms in central Africa.

“Over the next twenty-five years or so,” Vansina remembers, “several scholars were inspired by the book to pursue their own research in the past of the various kingdoms I wrote about, so that by the year 2000 individual monographs had been written about nearly all the major kingdoms of the southern savannas (at least five in RD Congo, three in Zambia, and three in Angola).

The impact of Kingdoms outside academia was rather colorful, Vansina recalls. “In Central Africa many in the Congo read it, and it became coveted underground reading for those in the Angolan insurrection against their Portuguese overlords. Its popular impact was especially strong in the lower Democratic Republic of Congo (or RD Congo), where local demand has been strong enough to produce a translation in Kikongo around 1990 and another one in Lingala. In the 1970s there was even a local church calling itself ‘The Church of the Kingdoms of the Savanna.’ ”

In 1978, Vansina published a scholarly monograph, Children of Woot, on the history of a single kingdom in RD Congo. He comments, “The one completely new feature for a history book was the inclusion of its long lexical appendix, as essential to the argument. A monograph like this is not expected to have a host of readers when it is published but it is expected to attract small numbers of researchers for many years thereafter. Thus even today this book and especially its data have not been superseded by anything else.”

Oral Tradition as History, a methodological work published in 1985, is Vansina’s book that is most widely known and used in other scholarly disciplines and area studies beyond African history. “It is a manual about how to handle a certain kind of oral history worldwide, not just in Africa. Some twenty-five years earlier as a young man, what I had written about oral tradition had made a splash and led to extensive debates. This new book was a complete reworking that took into account valid observations made by critics, but still showed the extent to which oral histories of this sort could be relied upon. It has had an active life. For example, just this year it was translated into Indonesian Malay.”

Vansina continued to innovate with his book Paths in the Rainforests (1990), a historical overview built primarily on linguistic and archaeological data reaching more than two thousand years into the past. It attempted a history of the peoples in the Central African rainforests, a large area that had been written off as “without history.”

“But I wrote it as history, introducing new concepts, and included a very large appendix showing the results of comparative linguistic data. No one had ever attempted anything similar, certainly not on that scale, and this book was therefore a bit of a gamble, but it convinced most social anthropologists and archaeologists. I am gratified that from that time onward it has served as an incentive for much further research by others. This year an archaeologist wrote me to say that his discoveries conformed to the predictions the book had made. The most important results of Paths in the Rainforests, though, have been in the field of history, where others have now used similar techniques in their own work, including very deep historical research on the Great Lakes region of East Africa.”

As the field of African history matured, Vansina was one of the first to look back at it in a combination historiography and memoir, 1994’s Living with Africa. That same year, the horrific violence and mass killings in Rwanda returned Vansina’s attention to research he had done in Rwanda from 1957 to 1961. The rich and extensive documentation he had collected was available in an archive there, but no one had made use of it for publications.

“I knew from that research that Rwanda’s past, and historical memories of that past, were quite relevant to a fuller understanding of the genocide and people’s motivations. I also felt that knowledge of Rwanda’s pre-colonial history could contribute to political choices about its future. So, I first wrote a book in French about the main social and political developments of the country, directed as much towards Rwanda’s governing elite as towards historians. But the new elite came mostly from Uganda and used English, not French. So I translated the work into English and UW Press published it as Antecedents to Modern Rwanda in 2004.”

“Though its narrative and its major interpretations have been accepted by most academics, and also led to the publication of two academic debates about its significance, in Rwanda there is official silence about the book. It has not been formally banned in Rwanda, but the history I present runs counter to the official ideology and now also to the official history the government promulgates. But I know that actually the book has been widely read in Rwanda, even discussed, but no one will publicly admit to this. I hope that it will eventually be recognized and lead to further research in Rwanda.”

Most recently, in 2010, Vansina experimented with another new approach to African history. “Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960, was my deliberate attempt to write a book for undergraduates. It presents the history of a colony through the eyes of a colonized people. I used sidebars and illustrations, a format still rather uncommon in works of African history. I resisted reducing the historical complexity of the period to simple formulas. The anecdotal evidence so far has it that while most students like it, many find all those names and the very complexity of the history a bit overwhelming as well. But I hope it will inspire others to experiment further with approaches for undergraduates that will open new perspectives to them.”

Jan Vansina’s legacy also includes an extraordinary impact beyond academia. When the journalist Alex Haley was researching the family history that would become his famous book Roots, a powerful and groundbreaking story of enslaved African Americans, he could find no written documents that directed him to a point of origin in Africa. Eventually, someone suggested that he contact Jan Vansina, who had been doing innovative research on African oral traditions. Vansina suggested that the few words, names, and stories that had been passed down to Haley from an enslaved African ancestor named Kunta Kinte might be from the Mandingo people in Gambia, a culture with a very rich oral tradition recited by trained griots. Eventually Haley’s quest led him to a griot in a remote Gambian village who had memorized the history of a large, extended Kinte family. Two hours into the recitation, the griot mentioned a young man, Kunta, who went away from his village to chop wood and was never seen again. This astonishing connection was the beginning of a great movement of reclamation of African heritage by African Americans.

Jan Vansina. Photo by Catherine A. Reiland / African Studies Program, UW-Madison. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Now 84 years old and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Jan Vansina was an early recipient of the “Distinguished Africanist” award by the African Studies Association of the United States and in 2000 was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. His next book, to be published in Spring 2014 by the University of Wisconsin Press, is a memoir of his youth: Through the Day, Through the Night: A Flemish Belgian Boyhood and World War II.

Continue today’s blog tour and Meet these Presses:

Enjoy the rest of University Press Week! And be sure to keep a lookout for #UPWeek on Twitter.

UP Week Blog Tour: The Importance of Regional Publishing

We’re excited to be participating in the UP Week Blog Tour, where presses will be blogging each day about a different theme that relates to scholarly publishing. For today’s theme of The Importance of Regional Publishing, visit the following University Presses:

Syracuse University Press features regional author, Chuck D’Imperio who will discuss the roots of regional writing in many of the “classics.” From oral testimonies to local guidebooks, these stories contribute to the culture and history of the region.

Fordham University Press Press Director Fredric Nachbaur, writes about establishing the Empires State Editions imprint to better brand and market the regional books, reflect the mission of the university, and co-publish books with local institutions.

UNC Press Editorial Director Mark Simpson-Vos highlights the special value of regional university press publishing at a time when the scale for much of what university presses do emphasizes the global.

University Press of Mississippi Marketing Manager and author of two books, Steve Yates, gives his thoughts on the scale of regional publishing and shares the sage advice of businessmen.

University of Nebraska Press’s Editor-in-Chief Derek Krissoff defines the meaning of place in University Press publishing.

University of Alabama Press will have a post for us, and University Press of Kentucky Regional editor, Ashley Runyon, writes on her unique editorial perspective as a born-and-bred Kentuckian as well as on preserving Kentucky’s cultural heritage. She’ll also talk about some of the fun things that make KY (and KY books) unique.

Louisiana State University Press will discuss the challenge of capturing an authentic representation of Louisiana’s culture, especially when it is an outsider looking in, as many authors (scholars or not) are. They’ll discuss how it takes more than just a well-written, thoroughly researched book to succeed in depicting the nuances of Louisiana’s food, music, and art.

Rounding out the day, Oregon State University Press will give an overview of regional publishing with specifics from the Oregon State University Press list.

Enjoy the rest of University Press Week! And be sure to keep a lookout for #UPWeek on Twitter.

UP Week Blog Tour: Wednesday

We’re excited to be participating in the UP Week Blog Tour, where presses will be blogging each day about a different theme that relates to scholarly publishing. For today’s theme of Spotlight on Subject Area(s) Your Press is Known For, visit the following University Presses:

Wilfrid Laurier University Press starts things off with a post by Cheryl Lousley, editor of the Environmental Humanities series, about the engagement of environmental issues through the humanities disciplines, such as literature, film, and media studies.

University of Georgia Press series co-editor Nik Heynen will discuss the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series and how it relates to UGA Press.

Texas A&M University Press will have a post, and MIT Press has a post from Gita Manaktala, Editorial Director, who writes about the possibilities of the web MIT Press authors are using for scholarship, finding newly mediated ways to teach, conduct research, present data, and engage with various publics.

University of Pennsylvania Press acquisitions editors discuss the foundations and future of some of their press’s key subject areas.

And at University of Toronto Press they discuss the Medieval and Renaissance Studies lists at University of Toronto Press.

Enjoy the rest of University Press Week! And be sure to keep a lookout for #UPWeek on Twitter.

UP Week Blog Tour: The Future of Scholarly Communication

We’re excited to be participating in the UP Week Blog Tour, where presses will be blogging each day about a different theme that relates to scholarly publishing. For the full Blog Tour schedule, click here.

For Tuesday’s theme of Future of Scholarly Communication, please visit the following University Presses:

Harvard University Press talks with Jeffrey Schnapp, faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard and editor of the new metaLABprojects book series, on the emerging currents of experimental scholarship for which the series provides a platform.

Stanford University Press’s Director Alan Harvey discusses the challenges presented by new technologies in publishing, and how the industry model is adapting to new reading-consumption habits.

University of Virginia Press interviews historian Holly Shulman, editor of The Dolley Madison Digital Edition and the forthcoming People of the Founding Era, looks at the need for university presses to adapt to new technologies, while acknowledging the difficulties of doing so.

University of Texas Press’s post is from Robert Devens, Assistant Editor-in-Chief for the University of Texas Press, on the future of scholarly communication.

Duke University Press has a post from Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University, on the slow future of scholarly communication.

University of Minnesota Press Editor Dani Kasprzak discusses a new UMP initiative.

And finally, Alex Holzman of Temple University Press explores the partnerships university presses and libraries can forge as the means of communicating scholarship evolves.

Enjoy the rest of University Press Week! And be sure to keep a lookout for #UPWeek on Twitter.

It’s University Press Week!

We’re a bit late, but for Monday’s theme of Meet the Press, visit the following University Presses:

University Press of Colorado starts the tour off with a post featuring Laura Furney, managing editor, who has been at the press for 20 years, and is playing an integral role in two recent developments at UPC.

University of Missouri Press profiles David Rosenbaum, their new director who began Nov. 1, talking about his plans for the UM Press’s future and David’s transition back to a university press.

The University of Hawai‘i Press features the peripatetic academic publishing career of UHP’s soon-to-retire journals manager Joel Bradshaw.

McGill-Queen’s University Press’s Jonathan Crago and Kyla Madden, key members of the Editorial Department, discuss their experiences in scholarly publishing and their vision for MQUP.

Penn State Press speaks with their “Invisible” manuscript editor, John Morris.

University Press of Florida features acquisitions editor, Sian Hunter, who is working to develop and grow innovative new subject areas.

Enjoy the rest of University Press Week! And be sure to keep a lookout for #UPWeek on Twitter.