AI, Algocracy, and Democracy's Challenging Road Ahead with Andrew Sorota

Fredrik Saxegaard, Mia Lövheim, and Geir Afdal eds. "Doctoral Supervision Across Boundaries" (Scandinavian UP, 2026)

What does doctoral supervision actually look like in contemporary academia? In this NBN episode, Fredrik Saxegaard discusses the open-access book Doctoral Supervision Across Boundaries: Interdisciplinarity as Process and Practice [https://www.scup.com/doi/book/10.18261/9788215074818-26] (Scandinavian UP, 2026), co-edited with Mia Lövheim, and Geir Afdal. The conversation challenges the traditional image of supervision as a private relationship between a supervisor and a PhD candidate. Instead, the book argues that supervision today is distributed across networks, institutions, peers, reviewers, research schools, and academic cultures. We discuss: * Why interdisciplinarity complicates doctoral identity formation, * How Accountability Pressures Reshape Supervision, * The hidden curricula of doctoral education, * Writing and evaluation across disciplinary boundaries Drawing on experiences from the Scandinavian RVS research school, the book offers a critical rethinking of supervision as a relational, collective, and institutionally embedded practice. This episode will be particularly relevant to supervisors, doctoral candidates, academic developers, and anyone interested in the future of higher education. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is [https://vu.nl/en/research/scientists/amisah-bakuri] an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network]

Emily Doucet, "Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts" (Duke UP, 2026)

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781478038634] (Duke UP, 2026), Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network]

Robert Suits, "The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants" (Princeton UP, 2026)

From the mid-nineteenth century through the dust bowl years of the Great Depression, a new kind of migrant worker became a familiar sight in communities across America. The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants  [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780691287942](Princeton UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Suits traces the journeys of these homeless men and women, showing how hobo work was an adaptation to energy transitions and a harsh and unpredictable climate, and how the hobo played a central role in the histories of industrialization and westward expansion. Challenging common depictions of the hobo as a world-weary, bearded man in ragged clothes, Dr. Suits reveals how these wandering laborers were often fastidious and heartbreakingly young. Forever on the move due to economic hardship and climate disaster, they chased harvests and took seasonal jobs in industries like logging and mining. Too often they couldn’t find employment at all. Suits describes the difficult, dangerous, and highly unstable jobs they worked while shedding light on the hobo life and philosophy, from their techniques for stowing away on railroads to their unique blend of socialist, anarchist, and anti-work thought. He traces the emergence of the hobo to the advent of steam and the need for manual laborers in places where this new technology couldn’t reach and describes how a growing reliance on the internal combustion engine brought an end to hobo work. Drawing on oral histories, environmental data, and cutting-edge digital methods, The Hobo paints an unforgettable portrait of an eclectic group of wandering radicals, troublemakers, poets, and writers, demonstrating how their experiences upend some of our basic assumptions about how environments and technologies shape society. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book [https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/securing-peace-in-angola-and-mozambique-9781350407930/] focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher [https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/special-series/new-books-with-miranda-melcher], wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network]

Jewish Identity in Lithuania Today

Join YIVO for a conversation about the resurgence of interest in Jewish identity and history in Lithuania today. Jonathan Brent will moderate a conversation among Miglė Anušauskaitė, a Lithuanian cartoonist and archivist working on the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project, Anna Avidan, Managing Director of LitvakWorld, Kęstas Pikūnas, publisher of Passport, and former Lithuanian Minister of Culture, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas. Together they will explore topics such as the historical and social realities of Jewish-Lithuanian relations, and the challenges of building a multi-cultural, democratic society in Lithuania today. This panel originally took place on December 7, 2021 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network]

Jesse Montgomery, "It Is Not Enough to Survive: The Young Patriots Story" (UNC Press, 2026)

Jesse Montgomery joins Michael Stauch to discuss It Is Not Enough to Survive: The Young Patriots Story  [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781469693965](UNC Press, 2026). They examine how young white migrants from Appalachia and the South fought police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, and displacement through community organizing, and even joined forces with Fred Hampton’s Black Panther Party and the Young Lords to create the original Rainbow Coalition in the streets of Chicago in the 1960s and ‘70s. Highlights include: * How the Young Patriots evolved from street gang to political organizers active in Chicago’s “Hillbilly Harlem,” the Uptown neighborhood; * A reminder that poor white workers made up the large majority of migrants from the South during the Great Migrations of the 20th century; * How the Young Patriots attempted to “re-signify” the Confederate flag, paralleling efforts by “race traitors” like Noel Ignatiev to reframe white workers in a context of interracial class solidarity; * How the story of the Young Patriots is also a story of urban renewal, and the fight against it, in Chicago; * A discussion of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and the role of country music in the culture wars of the 1960s. Guest: Jesse Montgomery [https://www.berea.edu/academics/departments-programs/english/faculty-staff/jesse-montgomery] is a visiting assistant professor of English at Berea College who works on American literature after 1945, Appalachian outmigration, and radical culture. Jesse holds a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. His writing has appeared in n+1, Popula, Full Stop, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Host: Michael Stauch [https://www.michaelstauch.com/] is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing [https://www.pennpress.org/9781512827996/wildcat-of-the-streets/], published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network]