University of Michigan Press Blog

Michigan Spring 2010 eCatalog: Perfect for Your iPhone

In addition to it's regular seasonal print and electronic catalogs, Director Phil Pochoda and the University of Michigan Press today launched the subject-based Michigan Spring 2010: eCATALOG, a "University Press 2.0" subject catalog design reflecting a digital transition that embraces new technologies, expanding social media networks, and immediate global searchability, accessibility, and connectivity.

Subscribe to the eCatalog HERE.


 

Inside Higher Ed: Eszter Hargittai and "Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have"

Originally published in INSIDE HIGHER ED, Oct. 30, 2009

For social scientists starting their careers, creating research models that work is crucial. A new book suggests that they may be unaware of problems they face in part because scholars don't share stories of what didn't work on their projects, and how to deal with particular challenges. Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have has just been published by the University of Michigan Press. The essays in the collection are all by younger scholars, including the volume's editor, Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, a fellow at the Berman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a career advice columnist for Inside Higher Ed. Hargittai responded to questions about the book.

Q: I was struck by the part of your subtitle where you say "pretend they never have." Why do you think social scientists don't recognize or hide from problems with their research methods?

A: This title refers less to what social scientists recognize and more to what shows up in the final write-up of their projects. When one reads journal articles, the methodological sections tend to make the projects sound rather straight-forward. In books, details about methods are usually relegated to an appendix, at best, and do not tell the reader the reality of data collection. Instead, they are pretty, cleaned-up versions of what happened. For example, they will include the number of final interviews the researcher conducted, but they won't include details about how many attempts it took to get a person to come to an interview.

The Colbert Report | The Information Master

by David Bell, originally appeared in The New Republic on October 7th, 2009

The Information Master by Jacob Soll

Soll is also the author of Publishing The Prince (2005)

"That resonant piece of verbal shorthand, TMI--or Too Much Information--would make a fine epigraph for our age. Anyone with an Internet connection today has access to exponentially greater quantities of writing, images, sound, and video than anyone on earth could have imagined just twenty years ago. Small wonder that we have become obsessed with the idea of "information" as an abstract substance independent of its content--something that we accumulate, measure, and "process," rather than ponder and understand. And small wonder that the management and control of information, whether by its "producers," by governments, or by corporations such as Google, has emerged as an increasingly important political concern, and as a subject of scholarship."

One Big (Straight, Gay, Multi-cultural, Traditional) Happy Family

by John Kenneth White, author of Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era

ALSO READ: John Kenneth White on:

MICHEAL JACKSON       SARAH PALIN

AT LEFT: Photo from MODERN FAMILY on ABC, a new show about a single family that must bridge generational, cultural, and social gaps.

"In 1970, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg famously defined the Real Majority of the U.S. electorate as being “un-young, un-poor, and un-black.” Today, Scammon and Wattenberg’s Real Majority is increasingly an historical artifact. Certainly, George W. Bush helped hasten the end of this Republican-leaning coalition by his poor performance. But Ronald Reagan also helped by getting much of his conservative agenda enacted into law. Redefining what is means to be a conservative is a central problem for the Republican Party in the Barack
Obama era.

But other factors are working to create a new majority poised to elect more Democrats. Since 1970, the U.S. has had four revolutions: (1) a racial revolution where whites will be a minority of the US population by mid-century; (2) a family revolution where having a mom, dad,
and kids living at home with their biological parents is no longer the norm; (3) a gay rights revolution where greater tolerance toward homosexuals is prevalent; and (4) a religious revolution where the location of faith is not necessarily in a church building, but in the heart of
the individual.

Getting to Grassroots: Author Clarence Lang

by Clarence Lang, author of new release GRASSROOTS AT THE GATEWAY: CLASS POLITICS AND BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLE IN ST. LOUIS, 1936-1975

"All scholarship is autobiographical.  I often wonder, then, whether my scholarly interest in the dynamics of class among African Americans stems from a desire to grapple with my own contradictions as someone from a working-class background who grabbed certain opportunities, squandered others, and in the process became a black middle-class professional who lives and works very differently from most African Americans.       

When I think of the experiences that may have contributed to my research, I can pull from the fragments of my memory moments from my childhood when I gazed at manifestations of race and class, long before I developed the language to interpret what I was seeing.  It is significant that I grew up in an apartment building in a declining commercial district of Chicago’s South Loop, in a transition point between downtown and the South Side.  I remember that many of the people who constituted the high rise’s community were, like my mother, strivers who worked downtown and considered the building a stepping-stone to greater respectability. 

Toronto, Ontario - American Political Science Association 2009 Recap

Michigan Press staff went lake-jumping this past week to display our latest political science titles at the American Political Science Association's 2009 Annual Exhibit in Toronto, Ontario. We had great booth traffic, lots of sales, and some great face-to-face conversations with interested professors and authors, especially regarding Michigan's new Digital Transition (click for more info)--not to mention some great weather!

See below for just a few of the authors who stopped by to say hi, and some Toronto-area staff photos:

   
Seth Masket (left), author of No Middle Ground: How Informal Parties Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures, and Michael Brecher (right), author of International Political Earthquakes.

Andy Karch (left), author of Democratic Laboratories: Policy Diffusion Among the American States and Steven Lobell (right), author of The Challenge of Hegemony: Grand Strategy, Trade, and Domestic Politics

Q&A with John Kenneth White, author of Barack Obama's America

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency marks a conclusive end to the Reagan era, writes John Kenneth White in Barack Obama's America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era. Reagan symbolized a 1950s and 1960s America, largely white and suburban, with married couples and kids at home, who attended church more often than not.  The demographics, however, have shifted: Marriage is at an all-time low. Cohabitation has increased from a half-million couples in 1960 to more than 5 million in 2000 to even more this year. Gay marriages and civil unions are redefining what it means to be a family. And organized religions are suffering, even as Americans continue to think of themselves as a religious people.

John Kenneth White is Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

  Listen to the podcast

If Bricks Could Talk

by Mardi Link, author of the forthcoming Isadore's Secret and bestseller When Evil Came to Good Hart

On Wednesday, July 29, the "Murder Takes a Road Trip" book tour made a stop in Benzonia at the Mills Community House, a stately and historic Northern Michigan landmark celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.

What a setting in which to discuss our state's literary history and our own contributions to it!

For a complete schedule of Mardi's upcoming events, visit the UMP Author Events page.

Q&A with Susan Messer, author of Grand River and Joy

Grand River and Joy, named after a landmark intersection in Detroit, follows Harry Levine through the intersections of his life and the history of his city. It's a work of fiction set in a world that is anything but fictional, a novel about the intersections between races, classes and religions exploding in the long, hot summers of Detroit in the 1960s. Grand River and Joy is a powerful and moving exploration of one of the most difficult chapters of Michigan history.

Susan Messer's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications. She received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in prose, an Illinois Arts Council literary award for creative nonfiction, and a prize in the Jewish Cultural Writing Competition of the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture. Her story "Remnants, Like Dust in Pocket Seams," which is the basis for her novel, won Moment magazine's 2005 short fiction competition.

  Listen to the podcast

"Guns and Liberty" University of Hartford Event on C-SPAN

Joshua Horowitz and Casey Anderson are the authors of Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea

Robert H. Churchill is the author of To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement 

About the Program

CLICK TO WATCH: C-SPAN Event at Hartford University, June 17, 2009

(if pop-up blocked, click red "f" button under "Watch")

Left-of-center authors argue that the belief that guns are needed to stave off government tyranny is fundamentally incorrect and that insurrectionists are the real threat to freedom. Conversely, a libertarian examines the origins and growth of the militia movement. The two books were presented together in Hartford.