Yamini Narayanan, "Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Yamini Narayanan, "Mother Cow, Mother India: ...

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Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ...  Show more

Katie Barclay, "The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Katie Barclay tells the surprising history of our most intimate gesture: the kiss. Richly illustrated, it explores a millennium of kisses, asking how and why the kiss has retained its power over the centuries, ...  Show more

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James Staples, "Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India" (U Washington Press, 2020)
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Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu nationalism has further polariz ...  Show more

Cattle lines are drawn: cows in India
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Cows are venerated in India, but precisely how intensely often <a href="https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2022/12/20/indias-movement-to-protect-cows-is-rooted-in-politics-not-religion?utm_campaign=a.io&utm_medium=audio.podcast.np&utm_source=theintelligence&utm_conte ...

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How secular is India 70 years after Partition?
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In 2014 Narendra Modi's BJP returned to power winning a majority in India's parliament. He offered a billion Indians a blend of pro-business economics and a vision of India as primarily a Hindu state. In recent months, Muslims and Dalits - formerly known as untouchables - have be ...  Show more

Sandhya Fuchs, "Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India" (Stanford UP, 2024)
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Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Stanford University Press, 2024). Against the backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement, debates around the social impact of hate crime legislation have come to the political fore. In 2019, the UN Commission on Crim ...  Show more