It was a frigid weekend in Boston, and while navigating the frozen city I listened to books and talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Allan Collard-Wexler on oligopsony and collective bargaining in Pennsylvania teachers at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Not only is my dad in this data as a public school teacher (also former union negotiator!), but Aviv Nevo explicitly calls out my high school alma mater in the discussion! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIH42ZMXOyI

Next was "Race and Migration in the Transpacific," edited by Yasuko Takezawa and Akio Tanabe. This is an incredibly wide-ranging volume of academic chapters on vaguely related topics, with a particular emphasis on Japan-related experiences. While some of the chapters go back a few hundred years in history (including the can't miss chapter by Katsuya Hirano on racialization and labor power in the dispossession of Ainu lands), much of it is concerned with 20th century history. Besides the Ainu chapter the essay on burakumin emigrants to America by Hiroshi Sekiguchi was eye-opening, as was the chapter on policing in colonial Singapore by Takeshi Onimaru. If you're at all interested in race and migration between Asia and the Americas this is a can't miss book. Highly recommend https://www.routledge.com/Race-and-Migration-in-the-Transpacific/Takezawa-Tanabe/p/book/9781032210209

Last was "Migrant Ecologies," edited by James Beattie, Ryan Jones, and Edward Melillo. I could've saved myself so much time hunting down the few English-language academic volumes on Pacific Island history by picking up this book. It not only covers many regional histories in its different chapters written by academics, but also includes excellent reference sections for further reading. So many chapters deserve a call out: colonial Samoa (Holger Droessler), citrus schemes and land use in the Cook Islands (Hannah Cutting-Jones), expropriation of Ainu Mosir (Katsuya Hirano), the Tuamotu Archipelago (Will Cavert), Kona Coffee (Edward Melillo), shifting nomenclatures and spatial reconfiguration in Hawaii Kai (N. Ha’alilio Solomon), and nuclear testing in the Pacific (Frank Zelko). Highly recommend the whole book https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/migrant-ecologies-environmental-histories-of-the-pacific-world/