Summer Reading

Essays

■ Iris Derzelle, Françoise d’Eaubonne’s Ecofeminism.
An Overlooked Left Wing Perspective
Rediscovering an activist thinker who was at the origins of eco-feminism, but remains unknown. Her work inspired an extremely heterogeneous movement, but has her ambition to concretely transform the social, economic and political organisation of society been pursued?

■ Eric Monnet, Why Central Bankers Should Read Economic History
How can economic policy-makers use economic history as a guide for their deliberations and decisions? Focusing on the case of central banking, this essay argues that the virtue of history is not only to improve economic models and quantitative studies, but to provide a perspective distinct from standard economic reasoning.

■ Bertrand Valliorgue, The Anthropocene: a Challenge for Agriculture
What will farming look like in the future? Will there still be room for agriculture? What is certain is that the time has come for a complete overhaul of a model that is now obsolete. This essay considers the possible scenarios.

Reviews

■ Cécile Thomé, Organs and Orgasms
From personal accounts to anthropological analyses, from emancipatory discourses to debates on mutilation: having long been ignored, female pleasure is now being put into the spotlight.

■ Enrique Utria, Are Plants Animals Like Any Other?
Through a phenomenology of plant life, the philosopher Florence Burgat reminds us that plants are defined above all by what they do not have: Lacking an intentional consciousness or a lived world, how could they lead the secret life that certain popular books ascribe to them?

■ Juliette Tran, Contact and Dispossession
Interactions between Native Americans and Europeans in the Great Lakes Region have been the subject of groundbreaking works in American history. But there was more to the story than previously thought, as D. Nichols underlines Lakes Indians’ effective forms of resistance and strategies of survival

Interviews

■ Ophélie Siméon, Utopia, Dystopia.
An Interview With Gregory Claeys
As literary concepts, “utopia” and “dystopia” have functioned as powerful tools of social and political critique, as they propose alternative visions of the future gone good or wrong. Gregory Claeys explores this dual nature, and its potential for imagining social change, while tracing back the historical roots and uses of utopianism.

■ Catherine Guesde, Who Owns the Night? An Interview With Will Straw
The way nightlife has been affected by the recent Covid-19 restrictions invites us to think back on the value and features of the night as we have known it for most of our lives. A pioneer in the burgeoning field of night studies, Will Straw sheds light on the history of the night and the issues related to its loss.

■ Chowra Makaremi, The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. Policy Making in an Era of Alternative Facts
As the European border control agency is being criticized for its violent methods, the European Commission is working on a reform of the European Union migration policy. In this interview, the legal scholar Elspeth Guild explores the relation between decision making and the reality of migrations.