Like my dog, I also needed to collapse after a back-to-back day. But during my various comings and goings I was able to listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a thought-provoking conversation with Nedah Nemati on bringing qualitative tools to bear on neuroscience on the Brain Inspired podcast. The discussion gets into the importance of interrogating the developmental background of tools in neuroscience (and science more broadly), accounting for how the meaning of scientific terms and measurement practices change over time, and more. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCl5r-NoPA8

Next was an intriguing discussion with Robert Phillips on changes in business ethics scholarship over the decades on the Stakeholder Podcast https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/show/stakeholdermedia/id/41525610

Next was "The Self Delusion" by Tom Oliver. This is a decent but overly broad examination of how the concept of the human individual is a delusion given how enmeshed we are with the environment. Things start off well when examining the inherent interconnections of our bodies with other organisms, and of course the rapidly changing nature of our cells themselves. The book is overly simplistic to the point of near scientific invalidity when discussing cognition, and the sections on the natural world, while extending the point of the book, don't add much beyond what you would read in an average newspaper article https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-self-delusion-the-surprising-science-of-our-connection-to-each-other-and-the-natural-world-tom-oliver/eadd6cefd331b93a

Next was "Feminist Futures of Work," edited by Payal Arora, Usha Raman, and René König. This is a great collection of essays and papers that takes a gendered lens to the future of work, with contributions from academia, industry, and non profits. As with any collection, the different essays are fairly different and have varying levels of quality, but they're pretty much all good entries in their own right. I especially liked the chapters on women resellers (Achyutha Sharma), home bangle production (Raman), and disability and work (Soumita Basu). Highly recommend the whole volume https://www.routledge.com/Feminist-Futures-of-Work-Reimagining-Labour-in-the-Digital-Economy/Arora-Raman-Konig/p/book/9781041179221

Last was "Precarious Claims" by Shannon Gleeson. Gleeson delivers a masterful, vital examination of workplace protections in the US, with a focus on precarious workers in the Bay Area. By combining qualitative surveys and interviews with macro quantitative data, she not only demonstrates the scale of different issues but powerfully illustrates how problems manifest in the lives of these workers. While much of the legal review is unfortunately dated, it nonetheless provides deep insight into what workplace protections are necessary and how previous frameworks have fallen short. Highly recommend https://www.ucpress.edu/books/precarious-claims/paper