New Books Network

Erica Bornstein, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon (and Divisional Associate Dean), has a new book that delves into the regulatory reforms within the nonprofit sector in India. These reforms transpired over more than a decade, and Bornstein spent extended time developing this ethnographic study of not only the changes, but the institutional structures that manage nonprofit organizations and how the various regulatory decisions are made. The research explores the ways in which these changes happened, exploring the various actors within the discussions, and evaluating the process of change within the nonprofit sector in India. A Revolution of Rules: The Regulatory Reform of India’s Nonprofit Sector (Stanford UP, 2025) is a deeply researched undertaking, paying attention not only to the shifts and changes that were happening in New Delhi, at the seat of the national government, but also in towns and communities in other parts of India, where similar dialogue and processes were also happening, and where the results of so many of these changes could be seen as they moved into implementation. In order to think through the analysis in A Revolution of Rules we must also think about the nonprofit sector as a significant part of political structure in India (and elsewhere). As we discuss in our conversation, there are essentially three sectors, the government or the public sector, the private sector, and the nonprofit sector. Each sector is managed differently and operates towards different ends. But part of the role of the nonprofit sector is to provide capacity where the public sector may not be able to or is not able to fulfill demands.

This space, where the rules and regulations are being revised, reformed, and rewritten is where, in a very interesting way, democracy is happening. These are civil society organizations, embedded within the structure of political and economic outcomes, but distinct from both sectors. Since these groups are not aiming at making a profit, the regulatory regime is in a kind of counterpoint to capitalism, and thus in need of different kinds of rules regimes. This is where various stakeholders are coming together to negotiate with each as to how best to manage nonprofits, which are not all the same by any measure, and have different goals, different funding streams, different processes, and different policy formats. This makes the process of regulation complex, since there are constellations of parts that fall under differing kinds of management.

This undertaking, designing modes of regulation and policy processes, is not an exercise in creating red tape as much as it is designing processes to achieve important goals and capacities. Bornstein explains that writing policy of this kind, that writing laws is actually writing the future, or as she notes in the book, “writing the horizon”—writing what will happen. With this in mind, A Revolution of Rules: The Regulatory Reform of India’s Nonprofit Sector provides the reader with a fascinating exploration of how these organizations operate and how they can best be managed, especially with the aim of achieving benefits for individuals and society as a whole.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
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Codex Vaticanus is often regarded as a pillar of New Testament scholarship, ancient, authoritative, and decisive. In From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New Testament Textual Scholarship (de Gruyter, 2024) published by De Gruyter in 2024, Dr An-Ting Yi shows that this status was anything but inevitable.Rather than focusing on the manuscript’s text, Dr Yi traces how Vaticanus gradually became authoritative. For centuries, it was known but rarely usable, constrained by restricted access, archival control, and scholarly methods that could not yet make sense of it. Only with nineteenth-century methodological shifts and, crucially, with its first printed edition did Vaticanus acquire the authority it now seems always to have had.

The book’s core insight is simple and powerful. Manuscripts do not possess fixed authority. They gain it through methods, institutions, and infrastructures. Well argued and meticulously researched, Dr Yi’s study is less about a single manuscript than about how scholarly canons are formed, stabilised, and remembered. From Erasmus to Maius invites readers to rethink not only textual criticism but also the construction of academic authority.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.
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Why do we build our sense of self around our academic work? What does it mean to pivot away from campus jobs to the alt-ac world? How does increasing academic fragility affect our opportunities both on campus and after graduation? In this episode we explore how the precarity of the academic job market changes our career trajectories, and the new paths we forge.

Guest: Dr. Fidan Cheikosman is the author of The End of an Academic Dream. She has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Edinburgh. She is a neuroscience editor with Springer Nature.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Chasing Chickens

Is Grad School For Me?

The Entrepreneurial Scholar

Decoding The Academic Job Market

Making a "Junk Drawer" CV

Pursuing Life Abroad

Hope for the Humanities PhD

A Field Guide to Grad School

Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD

Leaving Academia

The Emotional Arc of Turning A Dissertation Into A Book

Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education

The Burnout Workbook

Graduate School Myths and Misconceptions

Understanding Career Services

You Will Get Through This

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Why have moral philosophers largely ignored colonialism? In Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), Shyam Ranganathan tells the story of moral philosophy and colonialism and reveals the benefits of drawing from a colonized tradition to a create a rigorous logic-based ethics. This is a timely exploration of the the ways in which Western colonialism has structured moral theorizing to insulate itself from criticism. In his account of the domination of the European tradition and the suppression of questions of its colonialism, Ranganathan covers the evolution of metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics in ancient European, Chinese, and Indian traditions of philosophy. We see the presence of white supremacy in the writings of J.S. Mill, Marx and Engels, and the importance placed on autonomy and sovereignty in Hobbes and Kant. The European influence of interpretation on our peer review of historical philosophy is evident throughout. Using South Asia as an example Ranganathan examines how colonizers are able to erase moral philosophical history and redefine cultures as religions, judged in terms of their conformity to, or deviation from, the Western tradition, which is treated as secular. His acknowledgment of Yoga as a basic ethical theory introduces us to thinking that recognizes persons as a diverse group, traversing sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, and species. Through this analysis of colonized traditions and ethics, Ranganathan is able to de-colonize moral philosophy by looking outside the colonizing tradition. If we want sophisticated and inclusive ways of thinking about how to live we must turn towards indigenous thought.

Shyam Ranganathan is a member of the Department of Philosophy and York Center for Asian Research at York University, Toronto, Canada, and founder of the Yoga Philosophy Institute.

Dr. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Indian mythology and seasoned online educator. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom where he delivers original courses applying Indian wisdom teachings to modern life.
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In October 1943, the Gripsholm—a Swedish ocean liner—and the Teia Maru—a Japanese troop ship—sat in Mormugao, a port in Portuguese India. There, the two ships exchanged their passengers: Allied civilians stuck in Japanese territory after Pearl Harbor , and an assortment of Japanese, Japanese-American, and other Japanese-ethnic people from the Americas.The trade capped a long and fraught diplomatic exchange between the U.S. and Japan, two countries at war. Evelyn Iritani’s book Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026) tells the story of how this exchange came about: How U.S. civilians tried to survive in Japan or occupied Hong Kong, or how the U.S. government pressured Japanese Americans, housed in internment camps, to accept repatriation to Japan, a country many had never known.

Evelyn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Her previous book, An Ocean Between Us: The Changing Relationship of Japan and the United States Told in Four Stories From the Life of An American Town (William Morrow and Company: 1994), won a Washington Governor’s Writers Day Award. Evelyn began her career at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1995 to cover international economics. Her reporting garnered numerous awards, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and the George Polk Award for Economics Reporting for a series she co-authored on Wal-Mart.She can be found on her website, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Safe Passage. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

 Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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