Only Fans Can Ban Racism Among European Soccer Spectators

This blog entry reprints Sportista co-author Andy Markovits’ January 9 column from The Huffington Post about racism and sports.

Perhaps the most promising factor in the recent incident involving Kevin-Prince Boateng — the Ghanaian-German midfielder for the venerable Italian soccer club AC Milan, kicked the ball into the stands and walked off the field in the middle of the game after having reached his limit of being subjected to the vile racial abuse by some fans of Milan’s opponent Pro Patria — was the loud and demonstrative cheer that other Pro Patria fans accorded the Milan players when they joined Boateng in solidarity thus ending the game.

One thing is quite clear: The open — even prideful — use of the ugliest racist invectives imaginable that has become a ubiquitous staple of Europe’s soccer grounds will not disappear via legal steps and institutional interventions by the relevant authorities such as teams, leagues and federations. Rather, they will only do so if and when the fans themselves will find such language and behavior unacceptable. Only the fans can raise the threshold of shame which will eliminate this scourge and make the public expression of racism an iron-clad taboo. What European soccer needs is a “London, Ontario” moment in which a racist fan who had abused Wayne Simmonds, a black Canadian hockey player for the Philadelphia Flyers, by, among others, throwing a banana on the ice was turned in by other fans which subsequently led to the racist fan’s prosecution by the authorities. As long as a majority of fans tacitly tolerates racist invectives towards players (and opposing fans) by a vocal and assertive minority that often enjoys legitimacy for being viewed as the team’s only true and most loyal fans, this scourge will not disappear from Europe’s soccer stadia.

Taking pride in racist chants and behavior is, after all, not part of general European culture and discourse. Indeed it barely exists in any other European sports besides soccer. Why there? Because winning in this most important cultural icon attains a special importance, especially for men. And this constitutes the toxic brew.

Since sports are almost always adversarial, and since they are competitive contests, winning plays a crucial role. The importance accorded to winning creates an atmosphere in which contestants and their supporters will do everything to achieve victory. This includes deriding the opponent, taunting him, making him uncomfortable and insecure, trash talking and “getting into his head”. After all, these are among the most powerful components of what is “home field advantage,” “the 12th man” to stay with football (of the American or Association variety). And who is to decree what constitutes permissible language and behavior in the act of exercising partisanship? If fans can make fun of a contestant’s looks or the colors of his uniform, who is to say that they cannot deride his race? Who is to draw the line of properness and with what logic?

The more important the sport’s cultural standing is in a society, the more important winning in it becomes. With soccer being by far the most culturally dominant sport in Europe (and Latin America as well, where European-style fan behavior is also commonplace) winning in it becomes paramount and non-negotiable. As to the role of men: they have been massively overrepresented in the production and consumption of soccer (and similar culturally dominant team sports) since its modern incarnation in the late 19th century. Women remained excluded from the sports world on both sides of the Atlantic until the major changes wrought by the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s which, in the meantime, have rendered women close to men’s equivalents in terms of their numerical presence as athletes. However, women’s involvement as fans has thus far assumed a different trajectory in that their following of sports varies both in its quantity and texture from that of their typical male counterpart.

Moreover, it is on this dimension that there exists a major difference between the venues in American team sports and European soccer with the former featuring a much larger presence of female spectators compared to the latter’s continued paucity, especially on the grounds of lesser pedigreed teams. And even though the ugliest expressions of racism, xenophobia and homophobia have been subdued — though far from eliminated — at Europe’s top-tier leagues where appearances do matter for the global product that these leagues are hawking to a global audience, the event from Pro Patria’s ground which caused Kevin-Prince Boateng to exit from his torment remains quite the norm in the venues of European soccer’s lesser leagues. Not coincidentally, there are far fewer female spectators attending matches in these leagues as there are in the fancy stadia of the top leagues. There is no question that a larger percentage of female spectators in European soccer would help diminish, if not eliminate, the abominable behavior and language that have continued to mar “the beautiful game” as soccer fans so proudly — and quite plausibly — like to tout this sport. It would not be the first time that women would assume the role of men’s civilizing agents in human history.

Andrei S. Markovits teaches at the University of Michigan. His latest book is SPORTISTA: FEMALE FANDOM IN THE UNITED STATES co-authored with Emily Albertson and published by Temple University Press.

Mourning the loss of a pioneer of women’s history

Temple University Press is saddened to learn of the passing of women’s historian Gerda Lerner. In honor of Dr. Lerner, we are re-posting this interview from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Political Engagement as Therapy for the Intellect

By Danny Postel for The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 May 2002

The writing of one’s life can offer an “explanatory myth” at worst and an “entertaining tale” at best, says Gerda Lerner, a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

In Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Temple University Press), she recounts the prehistory of her career in what she calls the “intellectual revolution” of women’s history, a field on which she left a pioneering mark with such works as The Woman in American History (1971), The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993).

Q: You grew up in Austria in the 1920s and ’30s. How did that experience influence the development of your political consciousness?
A: From an early age, I experienced revolution, counterrevolution, military occupation, and fascism. I was imprisoned, I was a hostage—I lived in great danger. I was essentially struggling for my life. Living through this makes you very much aware of politics as a force in life and of the need to struggle for human rights.

Q: After the war, in America, you were active in the Communist Party for a time and then left. You write that it took you some years “to think [your] way out, not of one political movement only, but out of Marxism, the theory.”
A: There was a period when, though I was disillusioned with the Communist Party, I was still a Marxist. Then, after 1958, when I began to study academically, I began to have serious problems with the doctrine in regard to women. It was my feminism that made me realize that Marxism was wrong.

Q: You went many decades without publicly discussing this chapter in your life, the Communist years. Why now?
A: Well, I’m 81 years old—when am I going to do it if not now? I felt uneasy about evading the issue based on fear. I felt that I owed it to myself and to the people who have learned from me and respect me to tell them the whole story. And I feel that there is something to be learned from my story.

Q: What, exactly, would you say that is?
A: That active political engagement is good for thinking. If you are engaged in the world, you have a way of testing your thinking. I tested Marxist thought. It didn’t work.

Q: At the very end of the book, you say that for many years you felt that you had nothing to apologize for, but you go on to say that you feel differently about this now. Why the change?
A: We learned things that we did not know at the time. I defended the Hitler-Stalin pact [over which thousands of Communists left the party] at the time, and I’m sorry I did. The decisions I made in my life seemed to have a good logic then, even if 60 years later, that logic may not stand up.

 

Happy Holidays from Temple University Press

This week, the staff of Temple University Press offers what books they would like to give, read, and get for the holidays.

Janet Francendese, Editor-in-Chief

WHAT I WILL GIVE:  Envisioning Emancipation by Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, a book whose originality and poignancy will add a very different dimension to the spate of Civil War and Emancipation coverage that’s sure to come in the next two months.

WHAT I WILL READ: I do not plan to read anything but cookbooks over the break. If someone wants to give me the new Thomas Keller, I will cook something from it for them.

Alex Holzman, Director

WHAT I WILL GIVE: Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer’s Envisioning Emancipation. It restores African Americans to the discussion stimulated by the 150th anniversary of that epic document.  In photos and texts they remind us that African Americans were not passive recipients of freedom, but active participants in making it happen and in responding to it.  We are so very proud to publish this much-needed study, which is both a joy to read and a joy to view.

WHAT I HOPE TO READ: My most ambitious reading hope over the break is to make a serious dent in War and Peace, which my book group–a collection of slow readers–has chosen as our selection for May 2013.  If I don’t make a dent now, I’ll never finish on time!

WHAT I HOPE TO GET: Two books I want with equal fervor–NW by Zadie Smith and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

Charles Ault, Production Director

WHAT I WILL READ: Dear Life, Alice Munro’s latest collection of short stories, which is my book club’s current selection, and Designing Information, Joel Katz’s just-released book.

Karen Baker, Operations Manager

WHAT I WANT TO GET: I Could Pee on This and Other Poems by Cats by Francesco Marciuliano.

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager

WHAT I WILL GIVE: Hapa Girl by May-lee Chai. This beautifully written, heartbreaking memoir about a mixed-race family struggling against racism in South Dakota proves how deep the bonds of family can be.

WHAT I WANT TO GET: Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. I’ve been meaning to get/read this along with Head in Beds and Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her. Maybe someone will save me the trouble?

WHAT I WILL READ: Big Sur by Jack Kerouac, since I’m just finishing On the Road: The Original Scroll. And I hope to read The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa. I started this fantastic novel a few months ago but had to put it down because of review commitments. I just want to lie in a hammock and read.

Ann-Marie Anderson, Marketing Director

WHAT I WOULD GIVE:   Envisioning Emancipation by Deb Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, as it’ll make the perfect holiday gift! I Walked with Giants, jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath’s autobiography that recalls his early years in Philadelphia and his musical training that extended his career to the present.

WHAT I WANT TO GETt: NW by Zadie Smith has been on my to-read list since it came out this year. And cookbooks!!  Yummy.

Joan Vidal, Senior Production Editor

WHAT I WILL GIVE: Elements of Discipline, by Stephen Greenspan. This is an excellent resource for my niece, a caring and dedicated teacher.

WHAT I WANT TO GET: The next alphabet mystery by Sue Grafton. I was thoroughly enjoying the series until I got sidetracked a few years ago. But now I need to figure out where I left off.

WHAT I WILL READ: The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver. This author’s novels never disappoint me.

Brian Murray, Marketing Assistant

WHAT I WOULD GIVE:  Elements of Discipline by Stephen Greenspan. The perfect gift to my friends who are just beginning their teaching careers or to my mother, a seasoned teacher who may find something she did not know.

WHAT I WANT TO GET: Customizing the Body by Clinton R. Sanders and D. Angus Vail.  The culture surrounding tattoos has always interested me and after hearing an interview with the author I’ve been waiting for my chance to read it.

The End of Backlash Politics?

In this blog entry, Jocelyn Boryczka, author of Suspect Citizens,looks at the broader issue of women’s citizenship and how it helps explain why backlash politics does not end with the 2012 elections.

Women played a decisive role in the 2012 elections. They voted for President Obama in much greater numbers than men. Single women and mothers stood out as voting for Obama and against Republicans running for House and Senate seats.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, among others, see this election as marking the American people’s clear rejection of prolife Republican candidates who took extreme positions on banning abortion even in cases of rape, identifying legitimate rape, and supporting a ban on contraceptives. Politicians such as Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney lost because they held positions with which nearly 60% of Americans disagree.

Do the 2012 election results mean an end to the endless cycles of backlash politics against women?

Around 1990, people asked similar questions about feminism, wondering if it was “dead.”  Susan Faludi in 1991 wrote Backlash:  The Undeclared War against Women.  In this book, she coined the term “backlash” to refer to the cycles of political reactions against advances made by women toward equality. Feminism, for “backlashers,” serves as the real source of women’s continued discontent with their jobs, education, and political status. For women to be happy, they must abandon the women’s movement and return to their traditional roles as mothers, wives, and obedient daughters.

The fact that we keep asking the same questions indicates that neither the backlash nor feminism is dead.

Taking a step back to look at the broader issue of women’s citizenship helps to explain why backlash politics does not end with the 2012 elections.

The number of female representatives in the U.S. House and Senate is a common way to measure women’s citizenship, or membership in the political community. Voting for women to represent the interests of the people living in their state or congressional district involves trust. Such trust in politics gives the representative the legitimacy necessary to vote on behalf of their constituency. Getting elected to the House or Senate indicates that more Americans trust women as citizens with the legitimacy and authority to represent other citizens.

Women in the 2012 elections still only hold about 17% of the seats in the House and Senate. This number has basically stayed the same since 1992, the “Year of the Woman” when we saw a jump in these female office holders from 6 to 10%. Globally, the U.S. remains on par with the average number of female representatives in legislative bodies at 19%. In comparison to fledgling democracies in the developing world, however, the U.S. is far behind. 56% of Rwanda’s legislature are women, the largest proportion in the world, surpassing even Sweden. A major reason for such higher numbers is that these nations build proportional representation of men and women into their constitutions.

Needless to say, the U.S. has not amended its constitution in this way and, indeed, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) failed in large measure due to an intense backlash led by women such as Phyllis Schlafly. While some feminists still fight for the ERA, its political future remains quite bleak.

Beneath these numbers, however, a deeper issue exists within the American political culture that helps to explain why the 2012 elections do not mark the end of backlash politics. Women who run for and hold office, much less protest against war or for reproductive freedoms abandon the way Americans traditionally understand women’s relationship to politics – as mothers and wives. These female roles historically grant women the power to socialize future male citizens. Women’s domain in the private sphere of the home also serves as an anchor of social stability amid the disorder of democracy and capitalism.

“Backlashers” remind Americans of this traditional view. Doing so raises the specter of distrust and suspicion of women representatives and activists who claim an active, engaged part in the political community. That part dramatically breaks with the conventional role of women in politics.

As long as Americans hold onto this view of women, they will remain suspect citizens who lack the level of trust necessary for full membership in the political community.  People will sustain doubts about their legitimacy. Such societal doubts about women are the fuel for backlash politics.

The 2012 elections then may be a backlash against backlash politics, but not an end to its endless cycles.

Lamp Lighters and Seed Sowers: Tomorrow’s YA

In this blog entry, Beth Kephart, author of Flow and the forthcoming Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent, provides the keynote address she gave at the Publishing Perspectives Conference, “YA: What’s Next” held recently at the Scholastic auditorium in New York City.

Illustrations by William R. Sulit

In the days following the colossal storm called Sandy, stories held us captive, terrifying aerial views, the news that began to leak in from friends. Trash bags strapped on like shiny boots, brand-new adults walked through rising fumes and fresh flotsam, looking for signs of ordinary life. Heartbroken by saturated eggplants and devastated garden fruits, they crouched to gather seeds.

Asking What can we do?, they collected blankets, baked tins of lasagna, emptied their personal libraries of books and took their spontaneous gifts into darkened neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the 19-year-old Rutgers student who lost both her parents to a capsized tree and will now raise three younger siblings on her own, was reaching into some impossible well of suddenly-now-adultness to help others suffering the ravages of weather.

We live in a new world, a Sandy-Irene-Katrina world. A world of fiscal cliffs and residual recessions. A world in which the College Board advocates for a Common Core curriculum that asks that 70% of the 12th grade reading list feature nonfiction titles. A world in which the kids who were raised to win are now making their way among winnowing resources, and singing, top of their lungs, We’re gonna die young.

What happened to the promises we made, and to the promises we ourselves believed? What happened to the perceived value of stories? What can we still give to those whose lives haven’t fully begun?

I don’t mean to politicize stories, but I am going to argue for their radical significance in this fragile stretch of time. I’m going to argue, specifically, on behalf of stories written for young adults and Generation Y. What is the future of Young Adult literature? That is the question. We can adopt the pose of forecasters here—pick and choose among genres, speculate, place bets—or we can build the scaffolding for the kind of stories good sense demands we leave behind.

I am biased and fervent. I have opinions and needs. There are kids I happen to love. Kids who follow my blog and profess their dreams with enviable certitude. Kids who crowd into my too-small memoir classroom at the University of Pennsylvania to learn the power of telling, and reading, the truth. Kids who travel far and inconveniently to meet other kids just like themselves — reader/writer kids taking rare advantage of a hodgepodge workshop.

I feel a personal responsibility to these kids when I write my own YA novels—to make room for them inside my landscapes, to instill in them compassion and empathy, to entertain them not just with plot but with ideas, to teach them something of the past, to suggest wisdom and value difference, to introduce places they’ve not yet seen, to invite them to declare themselves. Nothing is altogether black and little is crystalline.

The stories we write for young adults must, I think, be enlivened and also tested by all that percolates and yearns in between. They must come from a moral place, from writers who seek to do more than self-indulgently dazzle their Crayola-hued imaginations on a wavering literary line. They must, ultimately, be perceived as powerfully relevant and life-shaping as anything we might call fact.

We are a globe on the verge, I’m saying, and because we are, mere entertainment for mere entertainment’s sake — for mere (forgive me) profit — strikes me as an increasingly unviable platform. Literature as easy distraction, literature as untempered horror, literature as gossip, literature as desolation, literature as isolation, literature as sensationalism, literature that leaves us stooped, numb, incinerated, angry, distracted, glassy-eyed, New Jersey Shored (and I am referring the show), and emotionally paralyzed: Do we honestly have time for this now? The future of Young Adult literature, I believe, is directly and profoundly tied to the future of young adults. It is bound, to borrow from Jay Asher and Carolyn Macker, to the future of us.

There’s a reason why Patricia McCormick, with her riveting, poetic novels Cut, Sold, Purple Heart, and Never Fall Down, is not just an award-winner but an iconic force in YA today. It’s not because her books are well-meaning. It’s because they have actual meaning. It’s not because they didactically teach — about self-abuse, about child sex slavery, about Cambodian genocide, say — it’s that they engage, they make us care, they make us want to step up or step in.

They galvanize.

There’s a reason, likewise, that John Corey Whaley’s debut novel, Where Things Come Back, won so many awards and turned its young author into an insta-star. Because it’s brilliantly odd. Because it’s fantastically germane. Because it is about a search to know and overcome in a woodpeckers-are-going-extinct-and-parents-are-losing-their-way world.

Eliot Schrefer is winning accolades with his new novel Endangered because it is a novel elevated — concerned with a ravaged Congo and the helpless beasts caught in the war, brave enough to depict a young girl who learns what happens when she chooses to save something bigger than herself, when she understands herself to be larger and more capable than she might have thought. Eliot’s Sophie is navigating the world we’ve made, the world we wish we weren’t leaving behind. She has the opportunity to turn the tides with a singular act of courage. And so Endangered both alerts and moves us.

Ruta Sepetys’ new book, Out of the Easy (due out in February) is destined to soar because it takes us on a journey with a prostitute’s daughter in 1950s New Orleans who sure as hell wants a better life for herself, a girl who knows that better means books and education and learning tapped out of unexpected places.

A.S. King’s Ask the Passengers is getting named to this year’s best of lists because it asks readers to forswear boxes and labels and to see what happens when you catapult love into the world. Elizabeth Wein with her plucky, smart, history-saturated, we-will-defy-the-odds-or-at-least-go-down-vividly-trying Code Name Verity is a celebration of truth in friendship. It’s a World War II story that feels entirely right now. It gives its heroines opportunities to decide who they will be at the very worst of times.

And why is Lois Lowry still as relevant today as she was when she first created a type of story that has now been branded dystopian? Because Lowry’s dystopian landscapes teach us about the world in which we live. They teach us about the responsibility of knowing and the salve of empathy, something she calls veering. They suggest that teens abandon familiar places and established rules in search not only of what could be better, but of what could be made better. Lowry’s teens don’t simply harness power. They find it within themselves.

William Alexander’s Goblin Secrets — not, strictly speaking, a YA book but the winner of this year’s National Book Awards prize for young people’s literature — may be viewed as a particularly prescient precursor of the future as well — a magical, fantastical, steampunk story that, for all its revving inventions, for all its brilliant hues, is a story about a civilization working to stem off both evil and the obliterating force of floods. It’s about Staten Island, Long Beach Island, Queens, if we think about it. Desolation is on its way. What can, and will, young Rownie do?

Finally, let’s face the facts about Mr. John Green and Mr. David Levithan, as close to a YA Lit Rock Stars as they come. We don’t have to wonder why they’re loved; we know. John Green and David Levithan are loved because they are writing about love, and because they show their couple zillion vocal fans that love is the smartest version of cool.

These books—and of course there are others, for we are talent blessed in our lit world—are the books of right now, but they are also, I believe, the books of our future. They’re the books that transcend genres, age groups, and socio-economic lines, the books that have not been label-reduced or ghetto-ized, the books whose people and landscapes—real or imagined, historical or fantastical — have been rendered alive, authentic, urgent. They’re the books that, ten or twenty years from now, will take their place alongside The Book Thief, The Giver, The House on Mango Street, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Call of the Wild, The Outsiders — on a bookshelf, in a Kindle, on a smartphone — as classics. They’re the books that have something to say, in other words, and not simply a story to tell.

The YA books of the future will — if we’re smart, if we harness our resources, if fiction still has a central place in public school curricula, if we are still free to want and free to read—be like the best of what is being written and published today. Which is to say intelligent and searching. Original and impassioned. Lit from within and motivated by a desire to start a conversation about what it means to be alive, what it means to choose, what it means to controvert the status quo, what it means to lead, what it means to yearn, what it means to be different, what it means to get along, what it means to take a stand, what it means to hope.

The YA books of the future will give rise and shape to the generation whose job it has become to fix the mess we’re in.

Call me naïve. Call me idealistic. Call me helplessly immune to the ways of commerce, to the power of trends, to the rules and regulations of the 140-character Tweet. You will not, I promise, be the first to accuse.

But I’m looking out my window these days, and I’m thinking about my kids. I’m thinking about dying woodpeckers, sick-making wars, wrung-out-eco-systems, the ceaseless battles of self-interested legislators, the jobs that aren’t, the families that are suffering. I’m thinking about a 19-year-old Rutgers student who is suddenly mom, dad, provider.

I’m thinking that politics aren’t working so well, and that our planet and our children need us, and that our stories, meticulously made, can still be the cure.

Beth Kephart’s fourteenth novel, Small Damages (Philomel), takes place in southern Spain and received starred rePreviewviews. She blogs daily at www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com and is at work on a novel set in Florence.

Remembering Harold Washington

Gary Rivlin, author of Fire on the Prairie: Harold Washington, Chicago Politics, and the Roots of the Obama Presidency, reflects back on Chicago’s first black mayor on the anniversary of his passing.

He was the first black mayor of Chicago, a city whose black populace had endured innumerable indignities at the hands of its fabled political machine. Yet to sum up Harold Washington as a racial pioneer and little more is to diminish the man and all that he accomplished. Behind him amassed a multiracial coalition consisting of blacks of all political stripes along with white progressives, Latinos, Asians, and gays, all organized around progressive totems like affordable housing and a more equitable distribution of city resources. Jesse Jackson would get his political start in Chicago; so, too, would a young community organizer named Barack Obama, who found inspiration in Washington. For decades anti-machine crusaders had tried but failed to reform. But even today Washington, who served during the 1980s, still looms as a before-and-after figure in the city’s history. Under Washington, Chicago saw the implementation of any number of good-government reforms, from the freedom-of-information act he signed to the steps he took to tame a bloated, inefficient city budget. He opened up the contracting process to women- and minority-owned businesses, shifted the focus of economic development from downtown to the neighborhoods, and gave voice to Latinos, gays, and other Chicagoans long locked out of City Hall.

Harold Washington died 25 years ago yesterday. His death represents one of those where-were-you-when-you-heard the news moments, at least for Chicagoans of a certain age.  Me, I was in my car, listening to NPR on my way home from some last minute Thanksgiving shopping. There was something strange about how the world learned the news: from Tom Bradley’s office, in Los Angeles, which had sent out a press release offering the mayor’s condolences. I was a staff writer for the city’s alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, and I nosed around in search of an explanation. It turns out that allies of Washington were keeping the lid on the news of the mayor’s death until their preferred successor could make it to the hospital, where he would appear with the doctors in a press conference. Meanwhile, word of Washington’s passing had spread among a small fraternity of black mayors of large cities. Putting the kibosh on tragic news for political reasons; It was quintessential Chicago.

Like a lot of Chicagoans, I was crushed by the news of Washington’s death. I was sad for myself, no doubt. I had just done the first of what was supposed to be a series of interviews with him: about his life and his time as mayor for the book that eventually would be called Fire on the Prairie. From my narrow perspective, I’d be denied the pleasure of spending time with an interesting and larger-than-life figure. But mainly I was crushed by what it meant for the city and the movement I believed in. Imagine the fierceness of the legislative opposition Barack Obama faced in the last two years of his first term: that was nothing compared to the nastiness and resistance that confronted Washington at every turn through his first few years in office.  Finally, he consolidated his power with his election to a second term. But then six months later, he would be dead and the multiracial progressive coalition that had assembled behind him fell apart.  Within a few years, again Chicago would be run by a Daley.

Celebrating University Press Week and Temple University Press’ worldwide influence

Temple University Press is proud to be celebrating University Press Week. Initiated by the American Association of University Presses (AAUP), University Press Week highlights the extraordinary work of university presses and their many contributions to culture, the academy, and society.

Temple University Press  Influence Map

takes you around the globe by showing where our influence is felt in the 2012 seasons.

• Red pins illustrate the broad geographic areas covered in just our 2012 books, ranging across four continents and fourteen countries.
• Green pins represent countries where local publishers have licensed the rights to TUP books in their particular languages.
• Yellow pins represent cities where 2012 Temple University Press authors work.
• Light Blue pins represent the countries that have purchased Temple University Press books.

Temple University Press used its Spring and Fall 2012 catalogs to determine what titles/authors and countries to feature for this map. One we started plotting we were happily amazed at the extent of what we were able to cover with just this one year of data. We did have to make decisions on how to represent things–e.g., using a capital city to represent a country/geographic region–we also reviewed the complete information carefully to make sure it did accurately represent the influence/coverage of Temple University Press books.  As the University’s slogan boasts “Temple Owls Are Everywhere” so too are Temple University Press books!

The AAUP just published a post about University Press influence maps on its website Digital Digest