Howard Becker's 2007 "Telling About Society" is a collection on a diverse ways to tell a story. This book is about the art of storytelling for social scientists, drawing on sociological roots. Useful reference book for thinking about communication, and in parts potentially manipulation and propaganda. A few notes:

"If you know the audience the makers want to reach, you can understand the features of any particular representations as the result of the makers' attempt to produce something that will reach those people in a form they will understand and approve. They will understand it because they have learned how to understand things like that, and they will approve it because it meets the standards they have acquired as part of that learning." (p. 67)

"When I taught field work, I made students crazy in the first weeks of the class by insisting that they write "more". A student who spent four hours in an auto repair shop would give me one page of notes, and I'd say it wasn't enough. It took weeks for them to see that I really meant they should write "everything," at least try to do it, and many more weeks for them to see that they couldn't do that and that what I wanted them to do was think through what they really wanted to know and write down as much as they could about that. And that only delayed the hard question, which was, what did they want to know? Because the trick in observing is to get curious about things you hadn't noticed before." (p. 98-99)

"I'm convinced that there is no best way to tell a story about society. Many genres, many methods, many formats – they can all do the trick. Instead of ideal ways to do it, the world gives us possibilities among which we can choose. Every way of telling about society does some of the job superbly, but other parts not so well. You can't maximize everything. Grownups have already learned this, but a lot of us forget it and get very righteous when it comes to methods of telling the story. That's not to say that no differences exist between ways of telling about society. Defenders of science will want to ask, whose map would you rather have: a trained cartographer's or one made by you friend who lives in the next county? Depends on what I need the map for…" (p. 285) 

The book "Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity" is authored by one the leading scholars of ideas relating to decolonization and coloniality. In this 2013 book, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni draws out the meaning and implications of coloniality, and sets the foundation for his widely cited 2018 book (Epistemic Freedom in Africa). There are chapters on South Africa and Zimbabwe as cases. A few notes:

"What is emphasized here is one of the core ideological life-springs of colonel conquest and colonial violence was the questioning of the very humanity of colonized people. Questioning the humanity of the colonized people authorized even slavery and other forms of abuse, repression, exploitation, and domination..." (p. 35)

"Global imperial designs refer to the core technologies of modernity that underpinned its expansion into the non-Western parts of the world from the fifteenth century onwards. Race and Euro-American epistemology, particularly its techno-scientific knowledge claims, were used to classify and name the world according to a Euro-Christian Modernist imaginary. African peoples, and others whose cultures and ways of life were not informed by imperatives of Euro-Christian modernity, were deemed to be barbarians - a people who did not belong to history and had no history." (p. 49)

"The field of development studies is terribly affected by what Žižek terms 'weak thought' as opposed to 'strong thought' privileging what he described as 'large-scale expansions' and 'true ideas' which are 'indestructible' and have the capability to 'always return every time they are 'proclaimed dead'. Weak thought has even blinded some academics and intellectuals to such an extent that they continue to uncritically believe in the innocence of development discourses and to defend wrong causes when they masquerade as possessive and developmental and operate under such acceptable terms as democracy, reform development, good governance, and humanitarian intervention without recognising and sifting out the dangerous colonial matrices embedded in them." (p. 82)

"What is wanted is a higher education that does not lead to alteration of African people from their societies and communities. But cultural transformation does not mean the disconnection of Africans from the ambit of global human society and broader human problems. it only implies that a confident African is one rooted in his or her society and whose locus of enunciation is African, Such an African would be able to formulate culturally friendly resolutions of the challenges facing the continent. Particularly speaking, cultural transformation, when creative, seeks a way of blending African and Euro-American epistemologies in an endeavour to advance and enrich the understanding of African experience, problems, and challenges. But it also entails a drive to decolonize knowledge, curriculum, epistemology, pedagogies, power, and institutional cultures" (p.180) 

Taking its cue from another book, The Idea of Africa, this book presents the idea of the idea of development with a focus on Africa – its emergence, meanings, and connotations – and how its conceptualization is deeply rooted in colonialism. "The Idea of Development: A History" (2021) is written by Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon, both historians, and is published by Cambridge University Press. This is a great introductory book, particularly for an undergraduate course on critical development studies or historical courses related to colonialism. Each chapter concludes with additional reading lists and each chapter is evenly suited to a weekly reading (with 12 chapters, the book might have been designed to align more-or-less with a semester length). Lots of notes:

"Rennel extrapolated from Mungo Park's declaration that the Niger River follow flowed from west to east. According to nineteenth-century European understanding of geography, a river the size of the Niger needed to have a significantly large geographic source such as a lake or a mountain range. James Rennel literally drew Park's speculation about the mountain and assertion about the directional flow of the river onto the map of West Africa. This was how the European "scientific" imagination gave birth to the nonexistent Kong Mountains in western Africa. Although Rennel had no firsthand knowledge of the mountains and no evidence they existed, his position as a leading cartographer, combined with Park's apparent expertise in geography, lent scientific legitimacy to the Kong Mountains, which the Europeans believed were real for almost 100 years." (p. 39-41)

"Linnaeus eventually refined his system of classification and organized humans into four "races" based on their skin tone and continental origins. These four "races" were European, American, Asian, and African. Linnaeus's secularization of knowledge classification built the foundation for scientific constructs of race." (p. 60)

"Most of Broca's peers in the scientific community, predominantly white men themselves, were easily convinced that women, people of colour, the elderly, and the poor were "naturally" less intelligent than wealthy and healthy white men. As long as he provided "scientific" arguments about racial and gender differences, Broca and his colleagues believed their work was without bias and based in sound evidence, they were convinced their work was "objective"." (p. 67-68)

"The underlying arguments of eugenics, that elite Europeans were racially superior to the rest of humanity, was used to justify settlers' claims over land and right to rule. Campbell explained, "as well as expressing the cultural fears of colonialism, eugenics also expressed the modernity of the colonial project in Africa, the newness of settler society and the perceived wrongness of African development presented an ideal opportunity to create a society modeled on eugenic insights." In colonial Africa eugenic development policies became cultural practices as much as scientific programs. As occurred with physical anthropological theories of race, eugenicists masked cultural assumptions as scientific evidence designed to make the case for European racial superiority." (p. 71-72)

"Julian Huxley, the first director general of UNESCO, took the reins in 1946 determined to bring his ideas of evolutionary humanism to this new international organization. Huxley had been a well-known eugenicist before the Second World War... Huxley gradually abandoned references to "race" and "tribe" in favor of "culture," but he maintained a strong belief in social evolutionary theory. Before World War II Huxley was both an avowed eugenicist and anti-Nazi. Huxley renounced the overtly racialist ideas of many eugenicists of his time and argued that the improvement of humanity was an issue of culture rather than skin tone Huxley promoted evolutionary humanism, which was the theory that "more evolved" societies in the West could and should facilitate the development of "less evolved" societies through a combination of cultural, economic, and social interventions." (p. 74)

"For far too long, forced and coercive sterilization has been used to control population growth among "undesirable" groups in Africa and elsewhere, most recently among HIV-positive women in South Africa during the height of the HIV crisis in the 1990s. Many women around the world find access to birth control liberating, but the "right" to birth control also includes the "right" to have children. Awareness of these rights and of reproductive justice debates generally is crucial for understanding the family planning policies that continue to be foundational in contemporary International Development discourses." (p. 77)

"The organization of Africans into "tribes" was also part of the divide-and-rule approach of indirect rule. Colonial officials often privileged some ethnic groups over others. In British colonial Kenya, educated Kikuyu men (and some women) had greater access to colonial education and thus occupied many of the intermediary positions, or government jobs, in greater proportion than other Kenyans, the effect of which is still perceptible in Kenya today. Similarly, Belgian colonial discourses about the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis helped to fuel the conflict that led to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The Belgians incorporated Tutsis into the colonial administration based on their claim that the racial stock of Tutsis was more evolved than that of neighboring Hutus." (p. 89)

"Many European and American women came to Africa in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to work in anthropology, nutrition, hygiene, child and maternal health, and education. In the Belgian Congo, for example, this work began when the Ligue pour la Protection de l'Enfance Noire (League for the Protection of Black Children) took up the issues of breastfeeding and birth spacing. However, metropolitan development funding was only available for such endeavors when direct economic benefits were evident. Investment in the health of wives and mothers, for instance, flowed only after officials recognized that this would increase the productivity of laborers, generate wealth for colonial industries, and reinforce the racialized colonial economy. In one way or another, the science of development always served interests in profit." (p. 111-112) 

Media personality and journalist Marc Lamont Hill wrote "Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyon" (2016). The book aims for a broad audience. Several chapters detail the histories and people who were killed by police or racially motivated murders. Others zoom out to the systems of mass incarceration and the judicial system. Particularly for readers seeking to better understand racism in the contemporary United States, this is an important book.  

Tobias Zumbraegel completed a PhD with a focus on politics and sustainability in Qatar, Saudi and Kuwait, which was revised / expanded and published as "Political Power and Environmental Sustainability in Gulf Monarchies" in 2022 with Palgrave. The basis of the study is existing literature and 53 interviews. Given it is a doctoral dissertation at its basis, a lot of the text is basic context of the GCC (not written for an expert audience or someone already familiar with the region). The chapters are useful in tracking change, but also quite descriptive of history, such as organizations establishment and change over time. The book does develop some interesting political-economic-power layers to sustainability in the GCC. One downside is a heavily reliance on a few key sources, but this is a useful summary for someone new to the topic and/or region. A couple of notes:

"… the high number of various actors and agencies results in a loss of efficiency that is also a major explanation for countries' poor records on environmental policymaking, which became apparent in the second part of this chapter. Typically, state-owned or semi state-owned bodies do not cooperate with each other or exchange information. This has even created 'turf wars' in some instances, as the Saudi case shows. In addition to the lack of reporting, professionalism and coordination, ill-defined competencies, overlapping responsibilities and insufficient supervision have exacerbated the problem." (p. 128)

"Ultimately, the field of environmental sustainability offers insights on the highly porous and complex boundaries between what is private, public or state owned. This allows for completely new yet often highly under-researched forms of public–private assemblages that resemble neopatrimonial networks. It makes a case for how the economic context and various actors often operate as a prolonged 'arm of the state'." (p. 168) 

Paul Gilroy is a celebrated author but the 2002 Wellek Library Lectures published as a book in "Postcolonial Melancholia" (2004) may not be the best way to access his ideas. The lecture format might make the content more time bound and also geographically tied (to the British context). I will seek other avenues to Gilroy, and suggest others probably do likewise. A few quotes:

"The world becomes a different place once the history of black resistance in the Western Hemisphere has been added to our understanding of it , and an acknowledgement of the protracted suffering of African-descended peoples outside of Africa has contributed to the overdue redefinition of its fluctuating moral conscience." (p. 36)

"Once the history of the empire became a source of discomfort, shame and perplexity, its complexities and ambiguities were readily set aside. Rather than work through those feelings, that unsettling history was diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten. The resulting silence feeds an additional catastrophe: the error of imagining that postcolonial people are only unwanted alien intruders, without any substantive historical, political, or cultural connections to the collective life of their fellow subjects." (p. 90)

"Because "race" ought (according to the tenets of liberalism) to be nothing, it is prematurely pronounced to be of no consequence whatsoever. Racism either disappears at this point or lingers on as a marginal issue, an essentially prepolitical event that should not be addressed by any government worthy of the name. To even suggest that it might be worthwhile to approach racism politically threatens a debasement of government and a travesty of justice. There is, in fact, no substantive problem here because racism requires no specific intervention beyond worn-out rubrics of generic liberalism." (p. 144) 

Originating at a 2016 conference, the edited book "The Art of Emergency: Aesthetics and Aid in African Crisis" edited by Ndaliko and Andreson (2020) is a unique contribution. Admittedly this is not an area I've followed closely. Published by Oxford University Press, the book has a companion artistic website and covers a wide range of artistic expression amidst or related to emergency - the NGO gaze, art as resistance, art as NGO activity and communication, art as healing, art as reconciliation. The editors summarize the book as: "The Art of Emergency confronts the combustive force of creativity erupting in the wake of material crises across the African continent. Art produced in the context of emergency not only directly implicates local politics but moreover provides a map of the often illusive relationships between power and aesthetics. Through ethnographic and historical case studies, the scholars, artists, and activists in this book explore how actors on the ground employ creativity as a currency with which to regulate the forms and forces laid bare by catastrophe" (p. 1).  

There was a time when basic science research projects took years to prepare for, even more years to undertake, and with high risks of injury of death. "Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767" by Thorkild Hansen (1962 Danish, 1964 English) documents one such journey, apparently Europe's first to the south of Arabia. The journey was driven by, amongst other interests, an interest to find empirical data regarding the Bible. The book itself is a detailed history, the author went through immense efforts to document this journey – for example, there are 57 pages on the events that preceded the departure (e.g., this is a detailed historical account). Largely a book about those who undertook the journey, I found the notes about the people and places they went to of greater interest (although the author seems to have the opposite aim, to bring forth the history of these men and their journey). Notes:

On Yemen: "this country was something unusual. Nowhere else on their long journey had they met goodwill to compare with it. Every single one of the expedition's members, as they sat outside in the little courtyard in the mild winter evening which was warmer than the Scandinavian summer, could quote new examples of the kindness and helpfulness of the natives." (p. 220)

Compiling five years of weekly essays, "Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World" (2020) is one of Vaclav Smil's many books. The author is prolific and influential (apparently Bill Gates has read all of his nearly 40 books, and Gates promoted this book in particular). He is also the academic many dream to be - apparently attending only one faculty meeting over decades of being a professor - his "reclusive" approach was tolerated by the University of Manitoba so long as he kept publishing popular books and taught classes. That is more on the author as usual because this book is disappointing, with a wide ranging / sometimes random set of topics handled with OpEd level of detail. The value of this collection, of already published short articles, is unclear (but Vaclav sells far more books than I do...). If you are new to Vaclac Smil, I'd probably start elsewhere.  

From his doctoral work, Yahia Baiza wrote "Education in Afghanistan: Development, Influences and Legacies since 1901" (2013), published by Routledge. The book covers more than a century (1901-2012), structured around the political eras of the period. As much as this book is about education, it is equally about the context of each time period. This partly to help us as readers have context and probably also partly due to the scarcity of available research specific to education during the period of study. In that sense, a parts readers are left wanting more about the actual education systems. This is a niche book of which there are few comparable options, so for anyone interested in this specific area of study this is worth picking up. A few quotes:

"There has often been a misconception about the nature of modern as well as madrasa education in Afghanistan. Since the latter is understood to be an exclusively or predominantly religious-oriented form of education, it has been often described as 'Islamic school' or 'religious school', although madrasas do also teach non-religious subjects. By contrast, as modern education has been adopted from the European model of education and many of its subjects are different from the traditional madrasa education, modern education has too often been mistakenly described as 'secular' education. As shall be discussed in this book, the modern education system not only includes both religious and non-religious subjects, but religious subjects for a very long time occupied an important position. In addition, the so-called 'secular' education had to rely on teachers from the madrasa system, who would teach language, literature, religion, Arabic language and grammar, mathematical sciences, etc. Furthermore, the modern education system has been borrowing terms and concepts from the traditional madrasa system. For instance, terms such as maktab (an elementary level of education), talib (seeker) or talibul Ilm (the seeker of knowledge) for student, mudaris (teacher), talim (education) and tarbiyah (upbringing for education) etc are rooted in the so-called 'Islamic' education system. Equally, the madrasa, maktab, and makatib-e asri for a long time were used interchangeably, and meant 'modern school'." (p. 44-45)

"The curriculum, which was an important characteristic of the 'modernness' of the schools, was a combination of aspects of religious education and aspects of western education. In civil schools, the curriculum for primary level education consisted of religious education (reading and reciting the Quran), Persian, mathematics, geography, and calligraphy. The lower secondary level curriculum included religious education, history, geography, painting, health care, Persian, Afghani or Pashto, and foreign languages, specifically English, Urdu, or Turkish. The curriculum at the upper secondary level consisted of subjects such as religious education (recitation of the Quran, Tradition (hadiths), Arabic language and grammar, Persian, history, geography, algebra, geometry, analytical geometry, natural sciences, alchemy, and English." (p. 51-52)

"Education became a key catalyst as well as victim on both sides of the war. The PDPA, under the Soviet Union's advisers, integrated socialist ideology in school textbooks, and teacher education programmes. Similarly, the resistance parties, under the United States' and other Western educational experts, used schools in refugee camps and in the areas outside the state's control in Afghanistan as recruitment and propaganda centres for the Islamist parties. They developed their textbooks for disseminating anti-Soviet and anti-PDPA messages of violence, aggression, killing, and use of firearms, etc. As a result, this period experienced two key parallel education streams: the state's education system under the control of the PDPA, and the refugees' education, under the control of resistance parties." (p. 131)

"When the University of Nebraska programme staff developed these textbooks, international organizations chose to ignore the images of Islamic militancy in them for the first five years of the programme (Davis 2002: 93). Later on, when the United Nations and various NGOs lobbied against such teaching and learning materials, some images and messages that promoted violence and killing were removed from the text- books, but the religious content remained unchanged (Pourzand 2004: 24–25). However, it is also worth noting that none of the NGOs or the UN agencies criticized these textbooks as long as the Soviet Union's army was present in Afghanistan." (p. 155)