Elena Aydarova  0:00
Elena Aydarova, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison. I think one of my favorite writers is actually Mikhail Bakhtin. He is a Russian philosopher, central in sociocultural theory, who developed this theory of dialogic engagement and cultural change. And what I love about his work is not only sophistication of his ideas that I like to reread and think with, but also the fact that he had a really tragic and difficult life. He escaped persecution in the Soviet Union, and he lived with a disability, and he struggled with not being recognized for the power of his work. Actually, one of the central pieces that he developed, “Rabelais and His World” was his doctoral dissertation, and when he went to defend it, it was actually denied. His intellectual contribution was questioned, he was called, you know, a fake that he did not understand the work that he was engaging with, and he never received the advanced degree for that work. So, if you think about the intellectual impact of that book, how it has revolutionized how we think about cultural change, how we think about carnival, how we think about how people from underserved communities make their voices heard. You know, all of that was powerful work that in the moment of creation was actually denied any kind of recognition. And yet he overcame, right? He continued writing, he continued creating, he continued committed to the cause of the idea, and I admire that in him, and I always look to his story as this reminder to keep going. No matter what, keep going.

Dave Cormier  3:07
My name’s Dave Cormier, I’m a learning specialist at the University of Windsor. I’m responsible for digital learning strategy and special projects. There is a book from the 19th century called “Three Men in a Boat”. It’s by Jerome K. Jerome, and it’s a story of a bunch of people who have come to medical school and are trying to discover themselves, and in the process of trying to do so, they slowly start to realize that they’re just caught in the fabric of their society. And there’s something about it that’s so human. It’s something about it that stretches across those 150 intervening years in that way that makes us realize that we’re always just kind of confronting ourselves. Plus, it talks great things about cheese.

Jessica Oddy  3:47
My name is Jessica Oddy, and I am a researcher at the University of Bristol. As a graduate student, my favorite book was by Professor Michelle Fine, and it’s called “Just Research in Contentious Times”. For me, it was, yeah, it blew my mind. I’d been doing participatory research before that, it took me to a whole new level, and gave me a whole new perspective around the way we find out knowledge.

Greg Skutches  4:13
I’m Greg Skutches, I am director of Writing across Curriculum at Lehigh University. Well, that rotates from time to time. Like right now, I’m back on a Kurt Vonnegut kick. I just love Kurt Vonnegut. I mean, that’s such a cliche. But you know, I also love Louise Erdrich. Do you know Louise Erdrich? A Native American woman writer, just beautiful. Her book, “Love Story”, I just need to reread that every year or so. It’s beautiful. I love James Baldwin. But also, you know, I love Yuval Noah Harari, right, the nonfiction writers of today. I enjoy Malcolm Gladwell, I mentioned Katherine Schulz. She writes wonderful books, but also, you know, beautiful articles. So, that’s a list, but it could be someone else next week.

Joshua Ehrlich  4:49
I’m Joshua Ehrlich. I’m an assistant professor at the University of Macau. At the moment, my favorite writer is Wilfred Thesiger, who wrote “Arabian Sands”. It’s this amazing account of living with the Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. I think the writing style is extraordinary. It’s very direct and unschooled. It’s fascinating because it’s ultimately not an outsider’s perspective. Thesiger lives for so long with the Bedouin and has such an openness to their way of life, that he ultimately is something of a hybrid. He is an Englishman who feels like he’s a Bedouin, and feels like one of them, and is, to some extent, at least, according to him, accepted by them as such. And so, you get this very interesting reflection on life, not from the outside, but to a large extent from the inside, and a way of life that is disappearing even as he’s writing in the 1940s. This is before the oil boom and the post-colonial reconfiguration of the Middle East. And so, he’s talking about a vanishing way of life from a very sympathetic insider perspective.

Patricia Bromley  5:59
Patricia Bromley, I’m an Associate Professor of Education and Environmental Social Science at Stanford. For academics or work books, I have two favorites. One is “The Audit Society” by Michael Power, an accountant at London School of Economics. And the other is called “An Engine, Not a Camera”, by Donald Mackenzie. It’s about how models of financial markets shape the way the markets actually work. So, both of these I love because they really powerfully illustrate in sort of hard areas of finance and accounting, how theories and discourse about how the world works shape how it actually comes to work. So, I find these really sort of powerful illustrations of how discourse and conceptions of the world build everything around us in terms of social structures and social constructs.

Neal Hutchins  6:53
Neal Hutchins and I am a Professor at the University of Kentucky. For this answer, I’m going to refer to a historian of higher education, John Thielen. So, John Thielen was an author that I read early in my studies, actually during law school and before I even understood that really higher education was a field of study. So, John wrote a very influential book called History of American Higher Education. Then lo and behold, I was fortunate in my career to later work with John as a colleague and to have him as a mentor. He is now an emeritus faculty, but I get to see John a lot, and his scholarship is so very special to me for what it meant to me personally. And then I’ve had the thrill of a career that I get to sit and have coffee with this individual who has forgotten more about higher education than I will probably ever learn.

Steven Lewis  7:48
Steven Lewis, Associate Professor at Australian Catholic University. Look probably the book that changed my academic life and my entire life trajectory was Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”. From the opening few pages talking about the punishment of the regicide to the very, very mundane timetabling of the French prisons, you know, in the 1800s. It really changed everything about how I see and view and engage with the world. So, you know, to my supervisors who encouraged me to read Discipline and Punish. I am forever grateful.

Audrey Bryan  8:22
My name is Audrey Bryan, I’m an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Dublin City University Institute of Education. Well, I suppose you know, in terms of academically, I think about, you know, books that I’ve read that really kind of radically shifted my understanding of something. So, I really like the work of Elizabeth Ellsworth, and she has a book called “Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address”. And another text, “Places of Learning”. These books really spoke to me, because they really enabled me to come to a much deeper understanding of the complexities and the limits of pedagogy. I found them very, very beneficial to me when I was starting out as a professor, they helped me enormously. In terms of non-academic texts, I’m gonna have to say Kazu Ishiguro is my favorite author because he’s addressing these really profound questions about the human condition. And there’s a real emotional intensity to the novels, but it’s done in a really deceptively simple way, such that, you know, a child could read some of the novels, you know, and have one sort of interpretation and reading of it. They’re just, to me, they’re so -they make these really complex questions about humanity accessible. So, I love those works.

Michael Rumbelow  9:46
I’m Michael Rumbelow, and I’m a PhD student at University of Bristol, School of Education. I think the writers -I mean, I have become quite interested in Deleuze and Guattari, I must say over the last years, I’ve become a bit sort of bewitched by which I think can happen a little bit with that. And so, I would say, although I wouldn’t claim to understand hardly any of it, still, I just find that style one that I keep coming back to. And then also the commentators on Deleuze and Guattari, I found really helpful, like Ian Buchanan and John Protevi and Ronald Bogue in particular, I think, on Deleuze and Guitarri, I found really insightful.

Amy Shuffelton  10:35
I’m Amy Shuffelton, I’m a professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. I think I have to say Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. My latest rabbit hole is the ideas of Mary Shelley. Frankenstein is definitely her best book. I’ve been reading some of her other novels which are definitely less works of genius than Frankenstein. I mean, Frankenstein is just a work of sheer genius, but the other ones are also really interesting.

Kehaulani Vaughn  11:00
Kehaulani Vaughn, Assistant Professor of Pacific Island education and Education, Culture, Society at the University of Utah. I love Haunani-Kay Trask -the late Haunani-Kay Trask. I love Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Decolonizing Methodologies”, of course. And another favorite is Manulani Meyer, who writes about “Holographic Epistemology”, so the connection between the mind, body and spirit.

Jamie Martin  11:28
My name is Jamie Martin, I’m an Assistant Professor of History and Social Studies at Harvard University. So, I love writers that can kind of subtly and in simple terms bring out the strangeness of the world, and that can, kind of, you know, help us to see how what we take for granted as natural or as a kind of, you know, way things are is actually quite bizarre. And so, often I actually find novelists quite helpful for this. So, novelists like, you know, Olga Tokarczuk or W.G. Sebald, I think, in many ways, have informed how I approach history, you know, as much as any actual academic historian.

Rebecca Spratt  12:04
I’m Rebecca Spratt, and I’m just finishing my PhD at Australian Catholic University. That is way too hard of a question to answer, so instead, I’ll just recommend a book that I’ve recently read about policy, and that’s Tess Lea’s book called Wild Policy, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in thinking differently about policy, and also anyone interested in looking particularly at policy around Indigenous peoples within settler colonial situations.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  12:33
My name is Prem Kumar Rajaram, I work at the Central European University. If it’s an academic book, it would be Raymond Williams’, “Marxism and Literature”. If it’s a non-academic book, it would be maybe it’s a book called “The Hidden Words”, which is a Baha’i text. And then the fiction, it would be a book that I always read every few months, is “A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth.

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  12:57
My name is Nidal Al Hajj Sleiman, I’m a postdoctoral research fellow at Ulster University, School of Education. A favorite book is Shehla Burney’s “Pedagogy of the Other”. And favorite writer is Anthony Giddens. Shehla Burney’s Pedagogy of the Other has personally touched my own style of work as a former teacher and a school leader. She speaks about -she uses Edward Said’s Orientalism and ideas to kind of analyze and develop a more critical understanding of the role of pedagogy in educational context. And favorite writer, I chose Anthony Giddens because, as a sociologist, I found his style quite comprehensive, and he kind of guides the reader into what he’s saying before he says it, and I thought that’s really interesting.

Liz Shchepetylnykova  13:51
My name is Liz Shchepetylnykova, and I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong. I’m struggling to say who is my favorite writer, but I will say that the most read author for me is a Ukrainian historian, Serhii Plokhy of Harvard University. The book of has that I like the most is called “Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire”. It’s about how the Russian Empire could not really forge itself as an empire compared to other Western empires at the time. The reason that I like it a lot is because he really provides a good insight into how and what is the role of the intellectuals, and how the way we shape what much of our governments and fellow citizens think about the states that we live in.

Leonardo Garnier  14:47
My name is Leonardo Garnier, and I’ve been a Professor of Economics at the University of Costa Rica for quite a long time. I was a minister of education in Costa Rica, and I was the Special Advisor for the Transforming Education Summit at the UN. There are many, but there is one that it’s my favorite; it’s Marguerite Yourcenar’s, “Memoirs of Hadrian”. I think it’s a wonderful book. And at the end of the book, when she writes a lot of notes, she mentions a quote by Flaubert that says, “When the gods no longer existed and Christ had not yet appeared, there was a unique moment from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, where there was only man”. And she says that she, in the novel, she wanted to write about such a person, alone and at the same time, related to everything. I think that when you write a book about that, and you spend like 28 years writing the book, she nailed it.

Irv Epstein  15:37
So, my name is Irv Epstein, I’m an Emeritus Professor of Peace and Social Justice at Illinois Wesleyan University. Okay, so I have a couple of suggestions. One book that I have read, which I like a great deal; her name is Nona Fernandez, and her book is “The Twilight Zone”, and she looks at life in Pinochet’s Chile as a surreal kind of experience. Going to school, being taken to school in a car, and then you find out that the father driving the car has murdered a classmate’s parent for ideological reasons. And the Twilight Zone, the TV show, was shown in Chile at that time, and it’s a kind of metaphor for the horrors of the period. So, that’s one book I like. Another one that I’ve read which I really like is called “Ninth Street Women”, and that is a book by Mary Gabriel about the five women artists who really were pioneers in abstract expressionism. And what I love about the book -it’s a lengthy book, but it talks about the sacrifices artists had to make in order to move the art world from Europe to New York in the 1940s and 50s. So, that was a great book. And right now, I’m reading Adam Schatz’s, “The Rebel Clinic: The Biography of Frantz Fanon”, which is interesting in a number of different ways. So, those are some suggestions.

Kirsi Yliniva  17:04
So, I’m Kirsi Yliniva, I work in University of Oulu Finland, and I’m a PhD researcher there, and I also affiliate in the University of Helsinki Finland, and I am also a part time university teacher in the University of Oulu. So, Michel Foucault has been so far my favorite scholar, and all his books are my favorite. I don’t necessarily love the language or the way his books are written. They are not very poetic or so on, but I think Foucault was able to foresee so much of our modern world and explain, in very interesting way how power forces circulate and work in our societies and how social structures have effects on our understanding of the human condition.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi  17:53
I’m Gita Steiner-Khamsi, and I have been appointed the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Comparative Education at Teachers College Columbia University, and at the same time, by courtesy of the Geneva Graduate Institute, I’m also the UNESCO Chair of Comparative Education Policy. It is the book by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, it’s called “The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies”. It came out in 2023. Because it deals with that reform area, the 1980s and 90s that I’m working on right now.

Sirojuddin Arif  18:36
So, my name is Sirojuddin Arif, now I’m the head of MA in the Political Science program at Universitas Islam international Indonesia. I’ve read so many books, Will, and certainly you do. But I still remember if somebody asked me the most memorable book I’ve had, actually, it’s not from the social sciences, actually it’s from a novelist. I really like the books by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. So, there are two things that I really like from the novelist. One is the way they describe the social and political reality -very lively, very rich in the description. That’s one thing. The second thing is the way they make the assessment of the political and social reality in the sense of who these actors are, what are their intentions, the extent to which the action then they make is certainly according to certain parameters are right or wrong. So, that’s what I remember from the way Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote his novel back to years, years, years ago. But certainly now, if you ask me, my favorite book from the social sciences, I’m from political science, so this is from political science books. I really like the newer generation political scientists, people like Dan Slater, Tom Pepinsky, Benjamin Smith, David Warner. The differences between these books and the old one is if people like Pramoedya was very rich in the description, was very sharp in defining the actors, now this new generation of scholars, the way they are so creative in identifying the patterns, the social regularity. They could identify this is the patterns, despite the messy -certainly in the social political realities are so messy. When you compare more than two entities, even a district, you will find that the reality seems too messy, right? But this new generation of social scientists, they could identify very sharply the patterns that underline the similarities and differences across the cases.

Jusso Nieminen  20:35
I’m Jusso Nieminen, I’m an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and an Honorary Fellow at Deakin University of Australia. I am going to give you two names that write about very similar topics in a very different kind of way. The first name I’m going to say is Thomas Popkewitz, whose work has extremely affected my own thinking about education, but so he would be one of my favorite writers because his work always makes me extremely annoyed. It’s very hard to read. It always challenges my thinking, but I never feel very good after reading that. But this is a compliment. This is a compliment. And the other name I would give you is Paula Varela, whose work actually often draws on the ideas by Popkewitz. So, Paula is one of the most brilliant writers in the world in terms of how she puts very abstract ideas about social political approaches to education, deep conceptual theories, into very, very beautiful sentences that are accessible for everyone. One day I will learn to write like her.

You Yun  21:40
My name is You Yun, and You is my family name, and I’m now an Associate Professor in the Department of Education in East China Normal University. Zhang Zhi, if I may say. He, as a writer, because I’m just like, fascinated about all these beautiful metaphors and stories and how he can use the concise words to illuminate deep wisdom. I feel like every time I read, if I make efficient efforts, I’d go deeper. So, it’s always surprising me how deeper it can be. And even if he wrote those things like 1,000’s of years ago, you can still resonate with him in spiritual ways. Yeah.

Seu’ula Johansson-Fua  22:23
Seu’ula Johansson-Fua, I’m at the Institute of Education at the University of the South Pacific. I have many. I don’t have one particular favorite writer, but I think if I could speak from a comparative ed perspective, it will be Michael Crossley and Keith Watson, because that, to me, opened up the conversation about the context and allowed me to push forward, to say, this is what the context is saying.

Nazmi Anuar  22:54
My name is Nazmi Anuar, I teach architecture in Taylor’s University. I tend to gravitate towards writers who are able to express really complex things in very simple ways. For example, there’s an architectural historian called [Laiki Kian?], who’s based in Singapore, who writes about the history of architecture in this region, but he writes it in a way as if he’s telling you stories. And I think the way that he writes makes the most obscure topic interesting. Like he would be writing about, like fruit orchids, you know, but he would write it in such a way that draws you into the stories, and then he gives you the kind of all the findings and all the facts. So, I think he has that way of making complex and very academic things very, very accessible to the general public, I guess, while not kind of sacrificing the intellectual integrity of those pieces. I mean in a literary sense, I like Murakami, for example. I feel he’s an author who always writes the same book again and again and again. There’s like a sense of familiarity in his sentences. Like if you read any of his books, it would be instantly related to another book, you know? It’s like there’s this kind of inbuilt world or something. Even though they are different stories, it feels like they come from the same source and they are addressing the same kind of emotional state. So, I really like his work because, you know, it’s very complex, but at the same time, you can digest it on like a surface level as a wonderful story, or you can go deeper and address your own thoughts in parallel with what he’s writing about. So, I like those kind of works -accessibility on very complex topics.

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Mentioned

Mikhail Bakhtin

Three men and a boat – Jerome K. Jerome

Just research in contentious times – Michelle Fine

Louise Eldrich

James Baldwin

Malcolm Gladwell

 Kathryn Schulz

Arabian Sands

The audit society  – Michael Power

An engine, not a camera? – Donald McKenzie

John Thelin

Discipline and punish – Michel Foucault

Teaching positions – Elizabeth Ellsworth

Places of learning

Deleuze and Guattari  

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

Haunani-Kay Trask

Linda T. Smith

Holographic epistemology

Robert Okaji

G. Sebald

Wild Policy

Marxism and Literature – Raymond Williams

The hidden words

A suitable boy – Vikram Seth

Pedagogy of the Other

Anthony Giddens

Lost Kingdom

The twilight zone – Nona Fernandez

Ninth Street Women – Mary Gabriel

The rebel clinic

Michel Foucault

The big con

Dan Slater

Michael Crosby

Haruki Murakami

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