New Books in Sociology: Recent Episodes
New Books Network
Interviews with Sociologists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we challenge and change inequalities? In Seeing Others: How Recognition Works— and How It Can Heal a Divided World (Atria, 2023), Michele Lamont, Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, at Harvard University, explores this question by empirically substantiating the concept of recognition. Using a huge range of case studies, interview data, as well as wealth of cross-disciplinary research, the book shows the problems of our unequal societies and the people, and ideas, that can contribute to solving them. It looks at art, politics, media and culture, as well as social policy and generational conflicts, all of which show how individuals and social groups need and can give recognition to each other. An accessible as well as detailed analysis, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone who wants to make a better world. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there. This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the “internal colonies” in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America (Mariner Books, 2023) is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Parents, educators, and activists are passionately fighting to improve public schools around the country. In This Is Our School!: Race and Community Resistance to School Reform (NYU Press, 2021), Hava Rachel Gordon takes us inside these fascinating school reform movements, exploring their origins, aims, and victories as they work to build a better future for our education system. Focusing on a school district in Denver, Colorado, Gordon takes a look at different coalitions within the school reform movement, as well as the surprising competition that arises between them. Drawing on over eighty interviews and ethnographic research, she explores how these groups vie for power, as well as the role that race, class, and gentrification play in shaping their successes and failures, strategies and structures. Gordon shows us what happens when people mobilize from the ground up and advocate for educational change. This Is Our School! gives us an inside look at the diverse voices within the school reform movement, each of which plays an important role in the fight to improve public education. Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Commemorative Literacies and Labors of Justice: Resistance, Reconciliation, and Recovery in Buenos Aires and Beyond (Routledge, 2021) examines literacy practices of commemoration marking the 40th anniversary of the March 24, 1976 coup in Argentina. Drawing on research conducted across three distinct sites in Buenos Aires in March 2016—a public university, a Catholic church, and a former naval base and clandestine detention center transformed into a museum space for memory and justice—this book sheds light on the ways commemorative literacies at these locations work spatially to mobilize memory of the past to address and advance justice concerns in the present. These labors of justice manifest in three ways: as resistance, reconciliation, and recovery. Damico, Lybarger, and Brudney also demonstrate how these particular kinds of commemorative literacies resonate transnationally in ways that necessitate a commitment to commemorative ethics. This book is ideal not only for researchers, graduate students, and scholars in literacy studies but also for all those working in related fields, including memory studies, religious studies, area studies, and Latin American studies, to address issues pertaining to memory, testimony, transitional justice, state repression, and human rights in Argentina, Latin America, or the Global South, more generally. Madden Gilhooly is a public high school geography/social science teacher, writer, poet and casual academic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Grateful Dead were one of the most successful live acts of the rock era. Performing over 2300 shows between 1965 and 1995, the Grateful Dead’s reputation as a “live band” was—and continues to be—sustained by thousands of live concert recordings from every era of the group’s long and colorful career. In Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness (Duke UP, 2023), musicologist John Brackett examines how live recordings—from the group’s official releases to fan-produced tapes, bootlegs to “Betty Boards,” and Dick’s Picks to From the Vault—have shaped the general history and popular mythology of the Grateful Dead for over fifty years. Drawing on a diverse array of materials and documents contained in the Grateful Dead Archive, Live Dead details how live recordings became meaningful among the band and their fans not only as sonic souvenirs of past musical performances but also as expressions of assorted ideals, including notions of “liveness,” authenticity, and the power of recorded sound. John Brackett is Instructor of Music at Vance-Granville Community College, the author of John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression and a coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. Emilia Bachrach's Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2022) considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. Through hagiographies that narrate the relationships between the deity Krishna and the Pushtimarg's early leaders and their disciples, these hagiographies provide community history, theology, vicarious epiphany, and models of devotion. While steeped in the social world of early-modern north India, these texts have continued to be immensely popular among generations of modern devotees, whose techniques of reading and exegesis allow them to maintain the narratives as primary guides for devotional living in Gujarat-the western state of India where the Pushtimarg thrives today. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of Hindi and Gujarati texts, the book examines how members of the community engage with the hagiographies through recitation and dialogue in temples and homes, through commentary and translation in print publications and on the Internet, and even through debates in courts of law. The book argues that these acts of "reading" inform and are informed by both intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and also by politically potent disputes over matters such as temple governance. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning. This book considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO (Duke UP, 2023), Jenna N. Hanchey examines the decolonial potential emerging from processes of ruination and collapse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tanzania at an internationally funded NGO as it underwent dissolution, Hanchey traces the conflicts between local leadership and Western paternalism as well as the unstable subjectivity of Western volunteers—including the author—who are unable to withstand the contradictions of playing the dual roles of decolonializing ally and white savior. She argues that Western institutional and mental structures must be allowed to fall apart to make possible the emergence of decolonial justice. Hanchey shows how, through ruination, privileged subjects come to critical awareness through repeated encounters with their own complicity, providing an opportunity to delink from and oppose epistemologies of coloniality. After things fall apart, Hanchey posits, the creation of decolonial futures depends on the labor required to imagine impossible futures into being. Anna E. Lindner received her doctorate in Communication from Wayne State University. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Pothiti Hantzaroula about her book Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Greece: Memory, Testimony and Subjectivity (Routledge, 2020). Age, generation, and geographic context all influenced postwar Jewish identities, according to Pothiti Hantzaroula's breakthrough historical study of children's Holocaust memories in Greece. Thanks to this study, it is now possible to understand how the memory of genocide is constructed according to an individual's age through the lens of children's narratives. By framing the richness and diversity of written and oral testimonies in the political discourses and public memory of the aftermath of the Second World War, Hantzaroula's research constructs a genealogy of the testimonial culture in Greece within the context of a global Holocaust memory established through testimony archives. The accounts of former hidden children and young concentration camp survivors presented here challenge out-of-date assumptions about how the Holocaust is remembered. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media (Routledge, 2022) is about K-pop dance and the evolution and presence of its dance fandom on social media. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, choreography, and participation-observation with 40 amateur and professional K-pop dancers in New York, California, and Seoul, the book traces the evolution of K-pop dance from the 1980s to the 2020s and explains its distinctive feature called ‘gestural point choreography’ – front-driven, two-dimensional, decorative and charming movements of the upper body and face – as an example of what the author theorizes as ‘social media dance.’ It also explores K-pop cover dance as a form of intercultural performance, suggesting that, by imitating and idolizing K-pop dance, fans are eventually ‘fandoming’ themselves and their bodies. Presenting an ethnographic study of K-pop dance and its fandom, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Media Studies, Korean Studies, Performance Studies, and Dance. Chuyun Oh is an Assistant Professor of Dance at San Diego State University. As a Fulbright scholar and former professional dancer, she studies racial and gender identities in performance. She is a co-author of Candlelight Movement, Democracy and Communication in Korea (Routledge 2021). Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer who earned her MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Robert Eberhart, Associate Professor of Management and Faculty Director of International Business at the University of San Diego, talks about his work on the ideology of entrepreneurship with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Eberhart's work is partly motivated by his own work as a businessman and successful entrepreneur and finding that academic publications from business schools significantly diverged from his and others' experiences in actual businesses. Eberhart and Vinsel also talk about how Eberhart has drawn together teams of researchers, including at the Reversing the Arrow conference, to study the ideological dimensions of entrepreneurship and how it has spread around the globe. Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Because immigration is such a recurring-and divisive-topic in the United States, it is easy to assume that we understand what it means for an immigrant to live under the specter of surveillance and punishment. It is easy to assume, as many scholars and journalists do, that undocumented immigrants live on the run from the authorities, constantly fleeing to the margins of daily life, staying in the shadows beneath the eyes of the law. And yet, while it is certainly true that immigrants are constantly faced with mechanisms of surveillance that function as tools of societal exclusion, this only tells part of the story. In Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023), Asad L. Asad show, many people with a sanctionable status cannot-and, in some cases, do not want to-evade surveilling institutions or the formal records they generate: evading the institutions that keep formal records is a luxury that most immigrants (especially those with children) cannot afford. In Engage and Evade, Asad uses a wealth of interviews and ethnographic observations collected in Dallas County, Texas, bolstered and contextualized by original analyses of national survey data, to explore whether, how, and why immigrants engage with surveilling institutions. Presenting the stories of immigrants living in mixed-status families in which at least two members of the household have different legal statuses, and focusing especially on the experiences of immigrant parents, Asad argues that engagement with such institutions stems as much from hope for societal inclusion as it does from fear of exclusion. By paying attention to the ways in which immigrants make sense of, pursue, and use the records that result from these engagements, Asad reveals a variety of ways these individuals reinforce or resist their sanctionable status through the state's own surveillance. Kendall Dinniene is a PhD candidate in English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their dissertation will examine how American fiction variously affirms, complicates, and resists dominant notions of fatness, and reveals how these notions are intertwined with and produce ideas about race, gender, sexuality, health, (dis)ability, criminality, and national identity. Their work relies upon queer theory, crip theory, Black feminism, and fat studies scholarship alongside literary criticism to argue that how we understand fatness is crucial to the way we understand (and make) our world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized. Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New York City, aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive. In doing so, she reveals how the movement was organized in practice, which experiments were most successful, and what future generations can learn. Marisa Holmes is an organizer, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of two non-fiction feature films, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story, which captures the occupation at Zuccotti Park, and After the Revolution, a non-linear narrative of the post-2011 context in North Africa. In addition, she has authored numerous short films and articles. Her work has appeared in Truthout, Paris-Luttes, Nawaat, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. She teaches courses on social movements and media at Rutgers University and Fordham University. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Dhufar Revolution was fought between 1965–1976, in an attempt to depose Oman's British-backed Sultan and advance social ideals of egalitarianism and gender equality. Dhufar, the southernmost governorate in today's Sultanate, captured global attention for its revolutionaries and their liberation movement's Marxist-inspired social change. But following counterinsurgency victory, Oman's government expunged the revolution from sanctioned historical narratives. Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Alice Wilson offers a groundbreaking study of the legacies of officially silenced revolutionaries. How do their underlying convictions survive and inspire platforms for progressive politics in the wake of disappointment, defeat, and repression? Dr. Wilson considers the "social afterlives" of revolutionary values and networks. Veteran militants have used kinship and daily socializing to reproduce networks of social egalitarianism and commemorate the revolution in unofficial ways. These afterlives revise conventional wartime and postwar histories. They highlight lasting engagement with revolutionary values, the agency of former militants in postwar modernization, and the limitations of government patronage for eliciting conformity. Recognizing that those typically depicted as coopted can still reproduce counterhegemonic values, this book considers a condition all too common across Southwest Asia and North Africa: the experience of defeated revolutionaries living under the authoritarian state they once contested. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Lit Hub's Most Anticipated of 2021. Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Award. A year in the life of a Chicago high school that has one of the highest proportions of refugees of any school in the nation. “A wondrous tapestry of stories, of young people looking for a home. With deep, immersive reporting, Elly Fishman pulls off a triumph of empathy. Their tales and their school speak to the best of who we are as a nation—and their struggles, their joys, their journeys will stay with you.” —Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here. For a century, Chicago’s Roger C. Sullivan High School has been a home to immigrant and refugee students. In 2017, during the worst global refugee crisis in history, its immigrant population numbered close to three hundred—or nearly half the school—and many were refugees new to the country. These young people came from thirty-five different countries, speaking among themselves more than thirty-eight different languages. For these refugee teens, life in Chicago is hardly easy. They have experienced the world at its worst and carry the trauma of the horrific violence they fled. In America, they face poverty, racism, and xenophobia, but they are still teenagers—flirting, dreaming, and working as they navigate their new life in America. Elly Fishman's book Refugee High: Coming of Age in America (The New Press, 2021) is a riveting chronicle of the 2017–8 school year at Sullivan High, a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric was at its height in the White House. Even as we follow teachers and administrators grappling with the everyday challenges facing many urban schools, we witness the complicated circumstances and unique education needs of refugee and immigrant children: Alejandro may be deported just days before he is scheduled to graduate; Shahina narrowly escapes an arranged marriage; and Belenge encounters gang turf wars he doesn’t understand. Equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring, Refugee High raises vital questions about the priorities and values of a public school and offers an eye-opening and captivating window into the present-day American immigration and education systems. Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For the past five years, American public schools have enrolled more students identified as Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian than white. At the same time, more than half of US school children now qualify for federally subsidized meals, a marker of poverty. The makeup of schools is rapidly changing, and many districts and school boards are at a loss as to how they can effectively and equitably handle these shifts. Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality (U Chicago Press, 2020) is an ethnographic account of two school districts in the Midwest responding to rapidly changing demographics at their schools. It is based on observations and in-depth interviews with school board members and superintendents, as well as staff, community members, and other stakeholders in each district: one serving “Lakeside,” a predominately working class, conservative community and the other serving “Fairview,” a more affluent, liberal community. Erica O. Turner looks at district leaders’ adoption of business-inspired policy tools and the ultimate successes and failures of such responses. Turner’s findings demonstrate that, despite their intentions to promote “diversity” or eliminate “achievement gaps,” district leaders adopted policies and practices that ultimately perpetuated existing inequalities and advanced new forms of racism. While suggesting some ways forward, Suddenly Diverse shows that, without changes to these managerial policies and practices and larger transformations to the whole system, even district leaders’ best efforts will continue to undermine the promise of educational equity and the realization of more robust public schools. Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do individuals move from being homeless to finding safe, stable, and secure places to live? Can we recreate the conditions that helped them most? What policies are needed to support what worked―and to remove common obstacles? Addressing these questions, Jamie Rife and Donald Burnes start from the premise that the most important voices in efforts to end homelessness are the ones most often missing from the discussion: the voices of those with lived experience. In Journeys Out of Homelessness: The Voices of Lived Experience (Lynne Rienner, 2020), they gather the first-person stories of some who have not only survived, but thrived, going on to find positive home situations. Highlighting what we can learn from these personal stories, Rife and Burnes combine them with in-depth discussions of key themes and issues and point to the shifts necessary in current policy and practice that are essential if we are to effectively respond to a problem that has reached epic proportions. Jamie Rife is executive director of the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative. Donald W. Burnes is founder of and senior adviser to the Burnes Center on Poverty and Homelessness at the Colorado Center on Law and Poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
I am joined on “America and Beyond” by historian Peter Fritzsche for an appreciation of The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books), the landmark book published by the late Svetlana Boym in 2001. I do not use the word “landmark” lightly. The Future of Nostalgia is, first, impressively prescient. Pages, as in Boym’s chapter on “Restorative Nostalgia: Conspiracies and Return to Origins,” sound eerily present day. But even more than that, Boym, who died in 2015 from cancer, at the age of 56, bequeathed a rich vocabulary for plumbing the contemporary meanings of nostalgia. Her essential distinction between restorative nostalgia, the politically-toxic desire to “rebuild the lost home,” and reflective nostalgia, the often-sentimental longing for shards of the personal past, endures. In these terms, nostalgia can be a poison—or a cure. My conversation with Peter Fritzsche, author of the 2004 book Stranded in the Present, revisits Boym’s wonderful work and meanders its way into topics like nostalgia as a frame for grasping Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. Enjoy. Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? How do men adjudicate between good and bad conduct in urban spaces? Through ethnographic descriptions of copresence on public transport in Kolkata, India, Romit Chowdhury's City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport (Rutgers UP, 2023) brings into sight the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities. It follows the labour geographies of auto-rickshaw and taxi operators and their interactions with traffic police and commuters to argue that the gendered fabric of urban life needs to be understood as a product of situational forms of cooperation between different social groups. Such an orientation sheds light on the part played by everyday morality and provisional support in upholding male privilege in the city. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Does it matter if judges are nice to each other? The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary (Oxford UP, 2023)argues that how judges interact with each other has an important effect at every stage of their judicial process. Previously, scholars have explained judicial behavior in terms of the law, the ideological attitudes of the judges, external and internal constraints, and the background characteristics of the judges, such as gender, race, or prior professional experiences. The Elevator Effect builds on previous research in political science, political psychology, and linguistics to present the first comprehensive examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among the judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Hazelton, Hinkle, and Nelson argue that collegiality affects nearly every aspect of judicial behavior. More frequent interpersonal contact among judges diminishes the role of ideology to the point where it is both “substantively and statistically imperceptible.” The book also shows that collegiality affects both the language judges use when they disagree with each other and the precedents that they choose to support their arguments. The podcast covers the rich findings of the book – and also provides some interesting insights for graduate students who are thinking about collaborative research
Dr. Morgan L.W. Hazelton, J.D. and Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Law (by courtesy) at Saint Louis University. She studies how features of court systems influence the decisions that both litigants and judges make.
Dr. Rachael K. Hinkle, J.D. and Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo. Her research agenda focuses on judicial politics with particular attention to gleaning insights into legal development from the content of judicial opinions through the use of computational text analytic techniques.
Dr. Michael J. Nelson, PhD, is a professor of Political Science at Penn State University. Michael Nelson is Professor of Political Science at Penn State University. He studies judicial politics, especially public attitudes toward law and courts, judicial behavior, and the politics of court reform.
Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The weather governs our lives. It fills gaps in conversations, determines our dress, and influences our architecture. No matter how much our lives may have moved indoors, no matter how much we may rely on technology, we still monitor the weather. Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-First Century (UP of Mississippi, 2023) draws from folkloric, literary, and scientific theory to offer up new ways of thinking about this most ancient of phenomena. Weatherlore is a concept that describes the folk beliefs and traditions about the weather that are passed down casually among groups of people. Weatherlore can be predictive, such as the belief that more black than brown fuzz on a woolly bear caterpillar signals a harsh winter. It can be the familiar commentary that eases daily social interactions, such as asking, "Is it hot (or cold) enough for you?" Other times, it is simply ubiquitous: "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes and it will change." From detailing personal experiences at picnics and suburban lawns to critically analyzing storm stories, novels, and flood legends, contributors offer engaging multidisciplinary perspectives on weatherlore. As we move further into the twenty-first century, an increasing awareness of climate change and its impacts on daily life calls for a folkloristic reckoning with the weather and a rising need to examine vernacular understandings of weather and climate. Weatherlore helps us understand and shape global political conversations about climate change and biopolitics at the same time that it influences individual, group, and regional lives and identities. We use weather, and thus its folklore, to make meaning of ourselves, our groups, and, quite literally, our world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes hard work and ingenuity. Granulated sugar was first produced in India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way? The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (Harvard UP, 2023) begins with the earliest evidence of sugar production. Through the Middle Ages, traders brought small quantities of the precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and caliphs. But after sugar crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, where cane could not be cultivated, demand spawned a brutal quest for supply. European cravings were satisfied by enslaved labour; two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century, sugar was a major source of calories in diets across Europe and North America. Sugar transformed life on every continent, creating and destroying whole cultures through industrialization, labour migration, and changes in diet. Sugar made fortunes, corrupted governments, and shaped the policies of technocrats. And it provoked freedom cries that rang with world-changing consequences. In Ulbe Bosma’s definitive telling, to understand sugar’s past is to glimpse the origins of our own world of corn syrup and ethanol and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple commodity poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“In this subtle and beautifully crafted ethnography, Cearns invites us to travel through the many Cuban circuits of exchange that give shape to mutating histories of connection within and between Havana and Miami. The result is an exhilarating and illuminating journey into the changing contours and expansive terrain of contemporary cubanidad.”—Jeffrey S. Kahn, author of Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire Despite decades of diplomatic hostilities and economic sanctions, the border between Cuba and the United States—arguably one of the most politicized in the world—is in a state of constant flux. Tracing the flows of people, material items, and digital content between Havana and Miami, as well as between Cuba and Panama, Guyana, and Mexico, Circulating Culture: Transnational Cuban Networks of Exchange (UP of Florida, 2023) explores how and why these circuits are a part of everyday life for millions of Cubans who negotiate extraordinary circumstances daily. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in these locations, Jennifer Cearns highlights groups of Cuban society that are often overlooked, considering what Cuban culture and identity mean in a transnational setting. Weaving evocative vignettes into her discussion of these larger questions, Cearns pieces together the story of the creators of an emerging and dynamic network that punctures geopolitical boundaries and has outlasted a period of rapid social change—from the Obama administration through the death of Fidel Castro and into the Trump administration. Ultimately, by focusing on everyday objects and the strategies used to move them across borders, this book reveals how new cultural forms can develop from the cracks in societies often seen as “broken.” It demonstrates the worldmaking of marginalized Cuban communities who have long been building their own infrastructures of possibility. Jennifer Cearns is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University College London and an associate research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Katie Coldiron is based at Florida International University. She is Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean at FIU Libraries and doctoral student in the FIU Department of History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The United States is currently home to six generations of people:
-the Silents, born 1925-1945
-Baby Boomers, born 1946-1964
-Gen X, born 1965-1979
-Millennials, born 1980-1994
-Gen Z, born 1995-2012
-and the still-to-be-named cohorts born after 2012.
They have had vastly different life experiences and thus, one assumes, they must have vastly diverging beliefs and behaviors. But what are those differences, what causes them, and how deep do they actually run? Professor of psychology and "reigning expert on generational change" (Lisa Wade, PhD, author of American Hookup), Jean Twenge does a deep dive into a treasure trove of long-running, government-funded surveys and databases to answer these questions. Are we truly defined by major historical events, such as the Great Depression for the Silents and September 11 for Millennials? Or, as Twenge argues, is it the rapid evolution of technology that differentiates the generations? With her clear-eyed and insightful voice, Twenge explores what the Silents and Boomers want out of the rest of their lives; how Gen X-ers are facing middle age; the ideals of Millennials as parents and in the workplace; and how Gen Z has been changed by COVID, among other fascinating topics. Surprising, engaging, and informative, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future (Atria, 2023) will forever change the way you view your parents, peers, coworkers, and children, no matter which generation you call your own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Passionate Work: Endurance after the Good Life (Duke UP, 2022), Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affective project that encourages people to endure economically trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong demonstrates how passion can emerge in instances that would not typically be understood as passionate. Gamification numbs crippling boredom by keeping call center workers in an unthinking, suspensive state, pursuing even the most banal tasks in hope of career advancement. Coworking spaces marketed toward freelancers combat loneliness and disconnection at the precise moment when middle-class sureties are profoundly threatened. Ultimately, Hong argues, the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism in which passion is offered as the solution for the injustices of contemporary capitalism. Hong is assistant professor in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. He is interested in labor and its relationships with affect, technology and capitalism. His works can be found in Social Text, New Media & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, among others. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is a Whisper Network? What can you gain from being in one, and what is expected of the network members? Not everybody is invited is into a Whisper Network—which is part of how they keep members safe. But it’s also how many of the vulnerable are further left out. Today, Dr. Carrie Ann Johnson joins us to share her research on Whisper Networks, and their role in bridging the safety gap for vulnerable people. This episode explores:
Why formal reporting systems fail.
How whisper networks can offer safeguards.
Why some people who need to be in a whisper network aren’t in one.
Who gets left out, and why.
A discussion of the article “Whisper Networks Thrive When Women Lose Faith in Formal Systems of Reporting Sexual Harassment,” which you can access here.
CW: Examples of harassment (including sexual harassment) are included throughout this episode. Our guest is: Dr. Carrie Ann Johnson, who earned a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Professional communication from Iowa State University and received the Iowa State Research Excellence Award for her dissertation, "Whisper Networks: Sexual Harassment Protection Through Informal Networks." She earned a master’s degree in American Studies and a bachelor’s degree in journalism and public relations, both from Utah State University. She loves digging into difficult topics and opening doors for deeper contemplation about our lived realities. She is the Research and Outreach Coordinator for the Catt Center for Women in Politics, Iowa State University, and is on the editorial board of BONDS, where you can read more her work on whisper networks in organizations. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in history. She is a freelance book editor. She has served as content director and producer of the Academic Life podcast since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of the New Books Network. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
This conversation on Who Gets Believed
This conversation with Rebekah Tausig on Sitting Pretty
This conversation on feminist communication strategies
This conversation on Black Boy Out of Time
This conversation with Virgie Tovar on The Right to Remain Fat
This conversation with Jessica McCrory Calarco on The Field Guide to Grad School
This conversation on structural inequality and barriers to tenure for women of color
This conversation about quitting a PhD program
This conversation on community-building and How We Show Up
Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re in the studio preparing more episodes for your academic journey—and beyond! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Early childhood can be a time of rich discovery, a period when educators have an opportunity to harness their students’ fascination to create unique learning opportunities. Some teachers engage with their students’ ideas in ways that make learning collaborative--but not all students have access to these kinds of learning environments. In Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades (U Chicago Press, 2021), the authors filmed and studied a a first-grade classroom led by a Black immigrant teacher who encouraged her diverse group of students to exercise their agency. When the researchers showed the film to other schools, everyone struggled. Educators admired the teacher but didn’t think her practices would work with their own Black and brown students. Parents of color—many of them immigrants—liked many of the practices, but worried that they would compromise their children. And the young children who viewed the film thought that the kids in the film were terrible, loud, and badly behaved; they told the authors that learning was supposed to be quiet, still, and obedient. In Segregation by Experience Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove show us just how much our expectations of children of color affect what and how they learn at school, and they ask us to consider which children get to have sophisticated, dynamic learning experiences at school and which children are denied such experiences because of our continued racist assumptions about them. Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sharada Sugirtharajah's edited volume Religious and Non-Religious Perspectives on Happiness and Wellbeing (Routledge, 2022) explores the theme of happiness and well-being from religious, spiritual, philosophical, psychological, humanistic, and health perspectives. Taking a non-binary approach, it considers how happiness in particular has been understood and appropriated in religious and non-religious strands of thought. The chapters offer incisive insight from a variety of perspectives, including humanism, atheism and major religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism. Together they demonstrate that although worldviews might vary substantially, there are concurrences across religious and non-religious perspectives on happiness that provide a common ground for further cross-cultural and interreligious exploration. What the book makes clear is that happiness is not a static or monolithic category. It is an ongoing process of being and becoming, striving and seeking, living ethically and meaningfully, as well as arriving at a tranquil state of being. This multifaceted volume makes a fresh contribution to the contemporary study of happiness and is valuable reading for scholars and students from religious studies and theology, including those interested in interreligious dialogue and the psychology of religion, as well as positive psychology. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Pentecostal Christianity is flourishing inside the prisons of Rio de Janeiro. To find out why, Andrew Johnson dug deep into the prisons themselves. He began by spending two weeks living in a Brazilian prison as if he were an inmate: sleeping in the same cells as the inmates, eating the same food, and participating in the men's daily routines as if he were incarcerated. And he returned many times afterward to observe prison churches' worship services, which were led by inmates who had been voted into positions of leadership by their fellow prisoners. He accompanied Pentecostal volunteers when they visited cells that were controlled by Rio's most dominant criminal gang to lead worship services, provide health care, and deliver other social services to the inmates. Why does this faith resonate so profoundly with the incarcerated? Pentecostalism, argues Johnson, is the "faith of the killable people" and offers ex-criminals and gang members the opportunity to positively reinvent their public personas. If I Give My Soul: Faith Behind Bars in Rio de Janeiro (Oxford UP, 2017) provides a deeply personal look at the relationship between the margins of Brazilian society and the Pentecostal faith, both behind bars and in the favelas, Rio de Janeiro's peripheral neighborhoods. Based on his intimate relationships with the figures in this book, Johnson makes a passionate case that Pentecostal practice behind bars is an act of political radicalism as much as a spiritual experience. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Jieun Kiaer provides an in-depth discussion of emoji use in a global context, this volume presents the use of emoji as a hugely important facet of computer-mediated communication, leading Dr. Kiaer to coin the term 'emoji speak'. Exploring why and how emojis are born, and the different ways in which people use them, this book highlights the diversity of emoji speak. Presenting the results of empirical investigations with participants of British, Belgian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Jordanian, Korean, Singaporean, and Spanish backgrounds, it raises important questions around the complexity of emoji use. Though emojis have become ubiquitous, their interpretation can be more challenging. What is humorous in one region, for example, might be considered inappropriate or insulting in another. Whilst emoji use can speed up our communication, we might also question whether they convey our emotions sufficiently. Moreover, far from belonging to the youth, people of all ages now use emoji speak, prompting Kiaer to consider the future of our communication in an increasingly digital world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This remarkable and timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with state and religious authorities as well as their farmer neighbors – even while handling new geopolitical challenges. The focus is mainly on marginal people and their navigation between competing forces over the decades of massive change since their incorporation into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975. The sea, however, plays a major role in this study as does the location: a once-peripheral area now at the center of a global struggle for sovereignty, influence and control in the South China Sea. The coastal fishing communities at the heart of this study are peripheral not so much because of geographical remoteness as their presumed social ‘backwardness’; they only partially fit into the social imaginary of Vietnam’s territory and nation. The state thus tries to incorporate them through various cultural agendas while religious reformers seek to purify their religious practices. Yet, recently, these communities have also come to be seen as guardians of an ancient fishing culture, important in Vietnam’s resistance to Chinese claims over the South China Sea. The fishers have responded to their situation with a blend of conformity, co-option and subtle indiscipline. A complex, triadic relationship is at play here. Within it are various shifting binaries – e.g. secular/religious, fishers/farmers, local ritual/Buddhist doctrine, etc. – and different protagonists (state officials, religious figures, fishermen and -women) who construct, enact, and deconstruct these relations in shifting alliances and changing contexts. Edyta Roszko's Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam (NIAS/University of Hawaii Press, 2021) is a significant new work. Its vivid portrait of local beliefs and practices makes a powerful argument for looking beyond monolithic religious traditions. Its triadic analysis and subtle use of binaries offer startlingly fresh ways to view Vietnamese society and local political power. The book demonstrates Vietnam is more than urban and agrarian society in the Red River Basin and Mekong Delta. Finally, the author builds on intensive, long-term research to portray a region at the forefront of geopolitical struggle, offering insights that will be fascinating and revealing to a much broader readership. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Daily life is connected life, its rhythms driven by endless email pings and responses, the chimes and beeps of continually arriving text messages, tweets and retweets, Facebook updates, pictures and videos to post and discuss. Our perpetual connectedness gives us endless opportunities to be part of the give-and-take of networking. Some worry that this new environment makes us isolated and lonely. But in Networked, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman show how the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand opportunities for learning, problem solving, decision making, and personal interaction. The new social operating system of “networked individualism” liberates us from the restrictions of tightly knit groups; it also requires us to develop networking skills and strategies, work on maintaining ties, and balance multiple overlapping networks. Rainie and Wellman outline the “triple revolution” that has brought on this transformation: the rise of social networking, the capacity of the Internet to empower individuals, and the always-on connectivity of mobile devices. Drawing on extensive evidence, they examine how the move to networked individualism has expanded personal relationships beyond households and neighborhoods; transformed work into less hierarchical, more team-driven enterprises; encouraged individuals to create and share content; and changed the way people obtain information. Rainie and Wellman guide us through the challenges and opportunities of living in the evolving world of networked individuals. Lee Rainie is Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and former managing editor of U.S. News and World Report. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Hello Avatar Or, {llSay(0, Hello, Avatar ); is a tiny piece of user-friendly code that allows us to program our virtual selves. In Hello Avatar, B. Coleman examines a crucial aspect of our cultural shift from analog to digital: the continuum between online and off-, what she calls the "x-reality" that crosses between the virtual and the real. She looks at the emergence of a world that is neither virtual nor real but encompasses a multiplicity of network combinations. And she argues that it is the role of the avatar to help us express our new agency--our new power to customize our networked life. By avatar, Coleman means not just the animated figures that populate our screens but the gestalt of images, text, and multimedia that make up our online identities--in virtual worlds like Second Life and in the form of email, video chat, and other digital artifacts. Exploring such network activities as embodiment, extreme (virtual) violence, and the work in virtual reality labs, and offering sidebar interviews with designers and practitioners, she argues that what is new is real-time collaboration and copresence, the way we make connections using networked media and the cultures we have created around this. The star of this drama of expanded horizons is the networked subject--all of us who represent aspects of ourselves and our work across the mediascape. B. Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. She is Faculty Director of the C3 Game Culture and Mobile Media initiative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Karen E. Rignall's book An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis (Cornell UP, 2021) details the fraught dynamics of rural life in the arid periphery of southeastern Morocco. Karen Rignall considers whether agrarian livelihoods can survive in the context of globalized capitalism and proposes a new way of thinking about agrarian practice, politics, and land in North Africa and the Middle East. Her book questions many of the assumptions underlying movements for land and food sovereignty, theories of the commons, and environmental governance. Global market forces, government disinvestment, political marginalization, and climate change are putting unprecedented pressures on contemporary rural life. At the same time, rural peoples are defying their exclusion by forging new economic and political possibilities. In southern Morocco, the vibrancy of rural life was sustained by creative and often contested efforts to sustain communal governance, especially of land, as a basis for agrarian livelihoods and a changing wage labor economy. An Elusive Common follows these diverse strategies ethnographically to show how land became a site for conflicts over community, political authority, and social hierarchy. Rignall makes the provocative argument that land enclosures can be an essential part of communal governance and the fight for autonomy against intrusive state power and historical inequalities. Karen E. Rignall is a Community and Leadership Development Professor at the University of Kentucky. Her research has appeared in numerous journals, including, The Journal of Peasant Studies, and Migration and Development. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family. The consequences of this theology are both personal suffering for individuals who cannot measure up to prescribed gender and sexual roles, and political support for conservative government policies. Exposure to experiences that undermine the idea that an emphasis on the family is the solution to all social problems is causing a younger generation of white evangelicals to shift away from this narrow theological emphasis and toward a more social justice-oriented theology. The material and political effects of this shift remain to be seen. Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers 2021, winner of the the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize from the Human Sexuality and Anthropology Interest Group (HSAIG)) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020). Her work has appeared recently in American Anthropologist, Oxford Bibliographies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Feminist Anthropology, and Transforming Anthropology. She has been interviewed on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the New York Times. She has published op-eds in the LA Times, Religious Dispatches, and the Conversation among others. She is a senior fellow with the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right and a fellow with the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism and a board member for the Society for the Anthropology of Religion.
Joseph Gaines can be reached at jgaines1091@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Both before and after the 2011 "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, anthropologist Satsuki Takahashi visited nearby communities, collecting accounts of life and livelihoods along the industrialized seascape. The resulting environmental ethnography examines the complex relationship between commercial fishing families and the Joban Sea--once known for premium-quality fish and now notorious as the location of the world's worst nuclear catastrophe. Satsuki Takahashi's book Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape (U Washington Press, 2023) follows postwar Japan's maritime modernization from the perspectives of those most entangled with its successes and failures. In response to unrelenting setbacks, including an earlier nuclear accident at neighboring Tokaimura and the oil spills of stranded tankers during typhoons, these communities have developed survival strategies shaped by the precarity they share with their marine ecosystem. The collaborative resilience that emerges against this backdrop of vulnerability and uncertainty challenges the progress-bound logic of futurism, bringing more hopeful possibilities for the future into sharper focus. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, Kris Marsh's The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class (Cambridge UP, 2023) centers on the voices and lifestyles of members of the Black middle class who are single and living alone (SALA). While much has been written about both the Black middle class and the rise of singlehood, this book represents a first foray into bridging these two concepts. In studying these intersections, The Love Jones Cohort provides a more nuanced understanding of how race, gender, and class, coupled with social structures, shape five central lifestyle factors of Black middle-class adults who are SALA. The book explores how these Black adults define family and friends and decide on whether and how to pursue romantic relationships, articulate the ebbs and flows of being Black and middle class, select where to live and why, accumulate and disseminate wealth, and maintain overall health, well-being, and coping mechanisms. Blyss Cleveland is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion. Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Argentina, once heralded as the future of capitalist progress, has a long history of economic volatility. In 2001–2002, a financial crisis led to its worst economic collapse, precipitating a dramatic currency devaluation, the largest sovereign default in world history, and the flight of foreign capital. Protests and street blockades punctuated a moment of profound political uncertainty, epitomized by the rapid succession of five presidents in four months. Since then, Argentina has fought economic fires on every front, from inflation to the cost of utilities and depressed industrial output. When things clearly aren’t working, when the constant churning of booms and busts makes life almost unlivable, how does our deeply compromised order come to seem so inescapable? How does critique come to seem so blunt, even as crisis after crisis appears on the horizon? What are the lived effects of that sense of inescapability? Anthropologist Sarah Muir offers a cogent meditation on the limits of critique at this historical moment, drawing on deep experience in Argentina but reflecting on a truly global condition. If we feel things are being upended in a manner that is ongoing, tumultuous, and harmful, what would we need to do—and what would we need to give up—to usher in a revitalized critique for today’s world? Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an original provocation and a challenge to think beyond the limits of exhaustion and reimagine a form of criticism for the twenty-first century. Sarah Muir is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The coronavirus pandemic forces us to rethink our contemporaneity. It has brought to the surface dimensions of human fragility that partially contradict the euphoria and human hubris of the fourth industrial revolution (artificial intelligence). It has also aggravated the social inequality and racial discrimination that characterize our societies. In From the Pandemic to Utopia: The Future Begins Now (Routledge, 2023) by Dr. Boaventura De Sousa Santos argues that the virus, rather than an enemy, must be viewed as a pedagogue. It is trying to teach us that the deep causes of the pandemic lie in our dominant mode of production and consumption. The systemic overload of natural resources creates a metabolic rift between society and nature that destabilizes the habitat of wild animals and the vital cycles of natural regeneration whereby pandemics become an increasingly recurrent phenomenon. In trying to take seriously this lesson the book proposes a paradigmatic shift from the current civilizatory model to a new one guided by a more equitable relationship between nature and society and the priority of life, both human and non-human. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2022) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists' religious life and practices, and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of 'conflict' and 'complementarity'. By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Afterlives of War: A Descendants' History (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Michael Roper documents the lives and historical pursuits of the generations who grew up in Australia, Britain and Germany after the First World War. Although they were not direct witnesses to the conflict, they experienced its effects from their earliest years. Based on ninety oral history interviews and observation during the First World War Centenary, this pioneering study reveals the contribution of descendants to the contemporary memory of the First World War, and the intimate personal legacies of the conflict that animate their history-making. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory can help to better understand and describe developments of the 21st century. The contributors of Wallerstein 2.0: Thinking and Applying World-Systems Theory in the 21st Century (Transcript Publishing, 2023) address ways to reread Wallerstein's theoretical thoughts in the humanities and social sciences. The presented interdisciplinary approach of this anthology intends to highlight the broader value of Wallerstein's ideas, even almost five decades after the famous sociologist and economic historian first expressed them. Frank Jacob is a professor of global history at Nord Universitet, Norway. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Housing and neighborhoods have an important contribution to make to our wellbeing and our sense of our place in the world. Housing for Hope and Wellbeing (Routledge, 2023), written for a lay audience (with policy makers firmly in mind) offers a useful and intelligible overview of our housing system and why it is in ‘crisis’ while acting as an important reminder of how housing contributes to social value, defined as community, health, self development and identity. It argues for a holistic digital map-based planning system that allows for the sensitive balancing of the triple bottom line of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic value. It sets out a vision of what our housing system could look like if we really put the wellbeing of people and planet first, as well as a route map on how to get there. Written primarily from the point of view of an architect, the account weaves across industry, practice, and academia cross-cutting disciplines to provide an integrated view of the field. The book focuses on the UK housing scene but draws on and provides lessons for housing cultures across the globe. Illustrated throughout with case studies, this is the go-to book for anyone who wants to look at housing in a holistic way. Flora Samuel is Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. She helped set up the new School of Architecture at the University of Reading and is former Head of the University of Sheffield School of Architecture and the first RIBA Vice President for Research. The author of Why Architects Matter: Evidencing and Communicating the Value of Architects (Routledge, 2018) she has spent the last decade researching the positive impact of good design on people. Her interests are now moving to land use and social justice, both key to addressing climate change. She is well known as an industry advisor on the social value of the design of housing and places and a strong advocate of social value mapping. She is also known for her unorthodox writings on Le Corbusier, about whom she has published extensively. A mother of three daughters, she is based in Wales. Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
An ethnography of advertising in postmillennial South Korea, Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads (U Hawaii Press, 2022) details contests over advertising freedoms and obligations among divergent vested interests while positing far-reaching questions about the social contract that governs advertising in late-capitalist societies. The term "flower of capitalism" is a clichéd metaphor for advertising in South Korea, bringing resolutely positive connotations, which downplay the commercial purposes of advertising and give prominence to its potential for public service. Historically, South Korean advertising was tasked to promote virtue with its messages, while allocation of advertising expenditures among the mass media was monitored and regulated to curb advertisers' influence in the name of public interest. Though this ideal was often sacrificed to situational considerations, South Korean advertising had been remarkably accountable to public scrutiny and popular demands. This beneficent role of advertising, however, came under attack as a neoliberal hegemony consolidated in South Korea in the twenty-first century. Flower of Capitalism examines the clash of advertising's old obligations and new freedoms, as it was navigated by advertising practitioners, censors, audiences, and activists. It weaves together a rich multi-sited ethnography--at an advertising agency and at an advertising censorship board--with an in-depth exploration of advertising-related controversies--from provocative advertising campaigns to advertising boycotts. Advertising emerges as a contested social institution whose connections to business, mass media, and government are continuously tested and revised. Olga Fedorenko challenges the mainstream notions of advertising, which universalize the ways it developed in Transatlantic countries, and offers a glimpse of what advertising could look like if its public effects were taken as seriously as its marketing goals. A critical and innovative intervention into the studies of advertising, Flower of Capitalism breaks new ground in current debates on the intersection of media, culture, and politics. Dr. Fedorenko is an associate professor of anthropology at the Seoul National University. She received her MA and Ph.D. from the East Asian Studies Department at the University of Toronto, and her BA in Korean studies from the Institute of Asian and African Countries at Lomonosov Moscow State University. She has published a number of articles on advertising, popular culture, and the sharing economy in South Korea. You can find her on Research Gate here. To view the commercials mentioned in “Flower of Capitalism,” go here. Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer with an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University. You can follow her on X at https://twitter.com/AJuseyo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Bianca Vienni-Baptista, Isabel Fletcher, and Catherine Lyall's Foundations of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Research (Bristol University Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking reader designed to lower the barriers to interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in research. Edited by experienced researchers from a range of different fields whose work grows out of the SHAPE-ID consortium, it paves the way for future scholarship and effective research collaborations across disciplines. For more on the SHAPE-ID project, including the toolkit and annotated bibliography referenced in this podcast episode, visit https://www.shapeid.eu. Chapters in this book offer extracts from key academic texts on topics such as the design, funding, evaluation and communication of research, providing a thorough grounding for newcomers to the field as well as experienced practitioners. Content included highlights examples of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary triumphs as well as challenges. Each chapter concludes with a commentary provided by practitioners from diverse backgrounds, many of whom are themselves developing new approaches to inter- and transdisciplinarity; these commentaries serve to model the types of dialogue this book hopes to inspire. This is a much-needed primer that improves our understanding of the characteristics of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, unlocking their exciting potential in research and teaching within and beyond academia. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
An intimate account of rural New England families living on the edge of homelessness, as well as the practices and policies of care that fail them. Families on the Edge: Experiences of Homelessness and Care in Rural New England (MIT Press, 2023) is an ethnographic portrait of families in rural and small-town New England who are often undercut by the very systems that are set up to help them. In this book, author and medical anthropologist Elizabeth Carpenter-Song draws on a decade of ethnographic research to chart the struggles of a cohort of families she met in a Vermont family shelter in 2009, as they contend with housing insecurity, mental illness, and substance use. Few other works have attempted to take such a long-term view of how vulnerability to homelessness unfolds over time or to engage so fully with existing scholarship in the fields of anthropology and health services. Research on homelessness in the United States has been overwhelmingly conducted in urban settings, so much less is known about its trajectory in rural areas and small towns. Carpenter-Song’s book identifies how specific aspects of rural New England—including scarce affordable housing stock, extremely limited transportation, and cultural expectations of self-reliance—come together to thwart opportunities for families despite their continual striving to “make it” in this environment. Carpenter-Song shines a light on the many high-stakes consequences that occur when systems of care fail and offers a way forward for clinicians, health researchers, and policymakers seeking practical solutions. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America (UNC Press, 2023) examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the healthcare system in the United States. Since 1990, immigration to the United States has risen sharply, and rural areas have seen the highest increases. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals that the corporatization of healthcare delivery and immigration policies are deeply connected in rural America. Drawing from fieldwork that centers on Maryland's sparsely populated Eastern Shore, Sangaramoorthy shows how longstanding issues of precarity among rural health systems along with the exclusionary logics of immigration have mutually fashioned a "landscape of care" in which shared conditions of physical suffering and emotional anxiety among immigrants and rural residents generate powerful forms of regional vitality and social inclusion. Sangaramoorthy connects the Eastern Shore and its immigrant populations to many other places around the world that are struggling with the challenges of global migration, rural precarity, and health governance. Her extensive ethnographic and policy research shows the personal stories behind health inequity data and helps to give readers a human entry point into the enormous challenges of immigration and rural health. This book is open access, courtesy of the TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) project. You can learn more about open-access books published by the University of North Carolina Press here. Thurka Sangaramoorthy is professor of anthropology at American University. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Childfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Womens' Reproductive Choices (Utah State University Press, 2023) examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have children, Courtney Adams Wooten offers a new theoretical lens to feminist rhetorical scholars’ examinations of reproductive rhetorics and how they circulate through women’s lives by paying attention not just to spoken or written beliefs but also to affectual circulations of reproductive doxa. Through interviews with thirty-four childfree women and analysis of childfree rhetorics circulating in historical and contemporary texts and events, this book demonstrates how childfree women individually and collectively try to speak back to common beliefs about their reproductive experiences, even as they struggle to make their identities legible in a sociocultural context that centers motherhood. Childfree and Happy theorizes how affect and rhetoric work together to circulate reproductive doxa by using Sara Ahmed’s theories of gendered happiness scripts to analyze what reproductive doxa is embedded in those scripts and how they influence rhetoric by, about, and around childfree women. Delving into how childfree women position their decision not to have children and the different types of interactions they have with others about this choice, including family members, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals, Childfree and Happy also explores how communities that make space for alternative happiness scripts form between childfree women and those who support them. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of the rhetoric of motherhood/mothering, as well as feminist rhetorical studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Jae DiBello Takeuchi's Language Ideologies and L2 Speaker Legitimacy: Native Speaker Bias in Japan (Mulitlingual Matters, 2023) examines dilemmas faced by second language (L2) Japanese speakers as a result of persistent challenges to their legitimacy as speakers of Japanese. Based on an ethnographic interview study with L2-Japanese speakers and their L1-Japanese-speaking friends, co-workers and significant others, the book examines ideologies linked to three core speech styles of Japanese – keigo or polite language, gendered language and regional dialects – to show how such ideologies impact L2-Japanese speakers. The author demonstrates that speaker legitimacy is often tenuous for L2 speakers and argues that, despite increasing numbers of Japanese-speaking foreign residents in Japan, native speaker bias remains a persistent issue for L2-Japanese speakers living and working in Japan. This book extends the discussion of native speaker bias beyond educational contexts, and in the process reveals tensions between how L2 speakers aspire to speak and how L1 speakers expect them to speak. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How did the rise of consumerism impact Britain? In In Good Taste: How Britain's Middle Classes Found Their Style (Manchester UP, 2023), Ben Highmore, a Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, explores this question by telling the story of key British institutions and cultural habits. The book uses a wealth of different sources, including newspapers, lifestyle magazines, shopping catalogues, plays, books, and television programmes, as well as architecture and design, in order to think through key forms of social identity and the structures of feeling underpinning social change. The book is a rich, deep, and fascinating examination of how taste patterns and practices made modern Britain, and how modern Britain made tastes. It will be essential reading across the arts humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding the recent history of culture in the UK. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Analyzing Social Narratives (Routledge, 2015) is one of the concise and informative volumes in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods, whose titles we have been featuring on New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science. Its author, Shaul Shenhav, organizes the book’s contents around four concepts: story, text, narration and multiplicity, each of which we discuss in this episode. Reflecting on his early experiences of learning about narrative through the love of literature, he explains why narrative analysis matters as much for political science as it does for the humanities, and talks us through some of the operations that he sets out in the book. He considers the relevance of narrative to other types of textual and discourse analysis, and discusses how interpretive political and social scientists can contribute to research and debates on large language models. Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University where he co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network. He is also a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador (Stanford UP, 2022) builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants—the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants—as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures. Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber is Professor of Anthropology at The City College of New York. She is the author of Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sarah E. Vaughn’s Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation (Duke UP, 2022) examines climate adaptation strategies that upend the neat divisions of linear temporality separate the past, present, and the future, and shows how multiple temporalities co-exist in the pressing sense of crisis that engulfs coastal spaces vulnerable to flooding. Her ethnographic account takes us to Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic floods that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equalities as seen through the lens of ‘apan jaat’ (loosely translated from Hindi/Bhojpuri to for our kind or community), which has been the dominant political ideology creating a divide between the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese diasporas, in the postcolonial independent nation-state, that has been the site of both plantation slavery and indentured labor during the colonial period. Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for the limits of ideologies such as ‘apan jaat’ and demands newer forms of political ideation and action. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through engineering experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources but in their attention to bringing ethical questions to bear on the technoscientific climate adaptation projects. Vaughn offers us a complex and compelling narrative that begins from the local, personal, and deeply material aspects of climate adaptation from the Global South while never losing sight of the stakes for these struggles on the global and planetary stages—showing how questions of environmental justice are inextricably tied to questions of historical racialization. Archit Guha is a PhD researcher in the Duke University History Department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends to be colorblind. In When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age (U California Press, 2023), Rob Eschmann blends rigorous research and engaging personal narrative to examine the effects of online racism on communities of color and society, and the unexpected ways that digital technologies enable innovative everyday tools of antiracist resistance. Drawing on a wealth of data, including interviews with students of Color around the country and analyses of millions of social media posts over the past decade, Eschmann investigates the influence of online communication on face-to-face interactions. When the Hood Comes Off highlights the power of the internet as an organizing tool, and shows that online racism can be a profound wake-up call. How will we respond? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Azraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official humanitarian refugee camps for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp: A Nine-To-Five Emergency (American University of Cairo Press, 2023) by Dr. Melissa Gatter investigates the relationship between time and power in Azraq, asking how a politics of time shapes, limits, or enables everyday life for the displaced and for aid workers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, carried out during 2017–2018, the book challenges the perceptions of Azraq as the ‘ideal’ refugee camp. Dr. Gatter argues that the camp operates as a ‘nine-to-five emergency’ where mundane bureaucratic procedures serve to sustain a power system in which refugees are socialized to endure a cynical wait—both for everyday services and for their return—without expectations for a better outcome. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp also explores how refugees navigate this system, both in the day-to-day and over years, by evaluating various layers of waiting as they affect refugee perceptions of time in the camp—not only in the present, but the past, near future, and far future. Far from an ‘ideal’ camp, Azraq and its politics of time constitute a cruel reality in which a power system meant to aid refugees is one that suppresses, foreclosing futures that it is supposed to preserve. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves? In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract (Routledge, 2018), Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter. Bueskens’ theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women’s duality, drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and ‘rewriting the sexual contract’. Bridging this gap, Bueskens’ interviews ten ‘revolving mothers’ to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disrupts the gendered dynamics of household work. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality is seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging (Berghahn Books, 2022) provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in processes of self-fashioning. Rahil Roodsaz is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For decades, parents across America have asked their kids, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” The answer is, “Duh, yes.” Peers, as parents well know, have a tremendous impact on who their kids are and what they will become. And even while they insist otherwise, parents know that they’re largely powerless to change this. But the effect of peers is not just a story about kids; peers can also affect adult behavior—they affect what we do and who we are well into old age. Noted sociologists Syed Ali and Margaret M. Chin call this “the peer effect.” In their book, The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become (NYU Press, 2023), they take readers on a tour of how our peers, and the peer cultures they create, shape our behavior in schools and the workplace. Ali and Chin begin their look at the peer effect at the high school from which they both graduated: New York City’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School, arguably the best public high school in the nation. Through a fascinating and often humorous narrative, they show how peers can influence each other—in this case, how highly motivated students can create a culture of influence to achieve success in learning and in admission to elite colleges. They also show the many other ways that peers can influence one another beyond school performance, from hookup culture to school bullying and youth suicide. Ali and Chin are also interested in the extent to which the peer effect can last. Through interviews with adult graduates of Stuyvesant, they investigate the long-lasting effects of high school peer culture. They also examine the peer effect in post–high school settings, notably around workplace misconduct, including the steroid culture in baseball and the use of excessive force by the police. The Peer Effect ultimately offers ways to understand the power of peer influence and apply this understanding to resolving issues regarding schools, college graduation rates, workplace culture, and police violence. In the tradition of big idea books like The Tipping Point, The Peer Effect will forever change the way we look at the world of human behavior. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of place in tourist cities and about the people who reside there. He is currently conducting research for his next project on the social construction of tourist cities. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Through historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica (UP of Florida, 2023) delves into the ongoing movement toward recognizing Black Mexicans as a cultural group within a nation that has long viewed the non-Black mestizo as the archetypal citizen. Anthony Jerry focuses on this process in Mexico's Costa Chica region in order to explore the relational aspects of citizenship and the place of Black people in how modern citizenship is imagined. Jerry's study of the Costa Chica shows the political stakes of the national project for Black recognition; the shared but competing interests of the Mexican government, activists, and townspeople; and the ways that the state and NGOs are working to make "Afro-Mexican" an official cultural category. He argues that that the demand for recognition by Black communities calls attention to how the mestizo has become an intuitive point of reference for identifying who qualifies as "other." Jerry also demonstrates that while official recognition can potentially empower African descendants, it can simultaneously reproduce the same logics of difference that have brought about their social and political exclusion. One of few books to center Blackness within a discussion of Mexico or to incorporate a focus on Mexico into Black studies, this book ultimately argues that the official project for recognition is itself a methodology of mestizaje, an opportunity for the government to continue to use Blackness to define the national subject and to further the Mexican national project. Anthony Russell Jerry is Assistant Professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Vincanne Adams's book Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke UP, 2023) is part of a broader trend in anthropology that is developing new methods and techniques to study our increasingly polluted and toxic world. Adams takes Glyphosate as a case study and follows this chemical as it moves from the past to the present, from the lab to the dinner table, from outside our bodies, to within our cells to grapple with what it is to live in such an entangled world. Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate’s invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate’s toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical’s movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals. Prof. Vincanne Adams, is professor Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott's research interests are in capitalism, colonialism, and socio-ecological health in North America. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections (Duke UP, 2023), Lisa Mitchell explores the methods of collective assembly that people in India use to hold elected officials and government administrators accountable, demand inclusion in decision making, and stage informal referendums. Mitchell traces the colonial and postcolonial lineages of collective forms of assembly, in which—rather than rejecting state authority—participants mobilize with expectations that officials will uphold the law and fulfill electoral promises. She shows how assembly, which ranges from sit-ins, hunger strikes, and demands for meetings with officials to massive general strikes and road and rail blockades, is fundamental to the functioning of democracy in India. These techniques are particularly useful for historically marginalized groups and others whose voices may not be easily heard. Moving beyond an exclusive focus on electoral processes, Mitchell argues that to understand democracy—both in India and beyond—we must also pay attention to what occurs between elections, thereby revising understanding of what is possible for democratic action around the world. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In recent years, Israeli state policies have attempted to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families, an objective that flies in the face of traditional practices in their community. As state desires to cultivate a high-income, tech-centered nation come into greater conflict with common Orthodox familial practices, Jewish couples are finding it increasingly difficult to actualize their reproductive aims and communal expectations. In The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land (New York University Press, 2023), Lea Taragin-Zeller provides an intimate examination of the often devastating effects of Israel's steep cutbacks in child benefits, which are aimed at limiting the rapid increase in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. Taragin-Zeller takes the reader beyond Orthodox taboos, capturing how cracks in religious convictions engender a painful process of re-orientating desires to reproduce amidst shrinking public support, feminism, and new ideals of romance, intimacy and parenting. Paying close attention to ethical dilemmas, the book explores not just pro-ceptive but also contraceptive desires around family formation: when to have children, how many, and at what cost. The volume offers a rare look at issues of contraception in the Orthodox context, and notably includes interviews with men, making the case that we cannot continue to study reproductive choice solely through the perspectives of women. The State of Desire is a groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of religion and reproduction, and a remarkably intimate account of the delicate balance between personal desires and those of the state. Lea Taragin-Zeller is Assistant Professor in the Federmann School of Public Policy and Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Mental health is positioned as the cure-all for society’s discontents, from pandemics to terrorism. But psychology and psychiatry are not apolitical, and neither are Muslims. This book unpacks where the politics of the psy-disciplines and the politics of Muslims overlap, demonstrating how psychological theories and practices serve State interests and perpetuate inequality—especially racism and Islamophobia. Viewing the psy-disciplines from the margins, The Muslim, State, and Mind: Psychology in Times of Islamophobia (Sage, 2022) illustrates how these necessarily serve the State in the production of loyal, low-risk and productive citizens, offering a modern discussion of three paradigms underlying the psy-disciplines: neoliberalism, security and the politics of mental health. Dr Tarek Younis is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Middlesex University, and a registered psychologist. He researches and writes on Islamophobia, racism in mental health, the securitisation of clinical settings and the politics of psychology; and teaches on the impact of culture, religion, globalisation and security policies on mental health interventions. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gatherings, gifts, and special outfits. Yet the procedure is a potentially painful and traumatic ordeal. With the expansion of modern medicine, the social position of sünnetçi (male circumcisers) became subject to the institutional arrangements of Turkey’s evolving health care and welfare system. In the transition from traditional itinerant circumcisers to low-ranking health officers in the 1960s and hospital doctors in the 1990s, the medicalization of male circumcision has become entangled with state formation, market fetishism, and class inequalities. Based on Oyman Başaran’s extensive ethnographic and historical research, Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey is a close examination of the socioreligious practice of circumcision in twenty-five cities and their outlying towns and villages in Turkey. By analyzing the changing subjectivity of medical actors who seek to alleviate suffering in male circumcision, Başaran offers a psychoanalytically informed alternate approach to the standard sociological arguments surrounding medicalization and male circumcision. Oyman Başaran is an associate professor of sociology at Bowdoin College. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Disrupting White Mindfulness: Race and Racism in the Wellbeing Industry (Manchester UP, 2023) offers a timely commentary on the dominant narratives that shape the mindfulness industry - whiteness, postracialism and neoliberalism. Its positioning as ‘apolitical’ forges institutions that fit comfortably into increasingly divided societies. The race-gender profile of these institutions reveals a White, middle-class profile of decision-makers, educators and staff that is mirrored in its audiences. Mechanisms that recycle the industry’s whiteness include corporatist pedagogies, edicts of authority, disengagement with difference and inappropriate uses of mindfulness that distance People of the Global Majority. A growing emergent movement focused on a justice-infused mindfulness and liberatory wellbeing decolonises mindfulness and de-centres whiteness. Its premise in indigenous, global South, queer knowledges leverages difference to produce multiple solutions focused on liberation. There is room for White Mindfulness to change. Dr. Cathy-Mae Karelse (she/her) is a scholar-practitioner, changemaker and public speaker on issues of race, difference and belonging. She received a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 2019. Cathy-Mae is trained in numerous transformation approaches with 20+ years of experience in deep systems change that addresses the underlying social norms and narratives that keep institutionalised discrimination in place. Her work addresses all landscapes: the inner, outer and in-between. Cathy-Mae is currently the DEI Lead at The Mindfulness Initiative and holds the position of Systems Change Lead at Resilience Capital Ventures. She works on policy and change programmes globally. Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Clayton is also a host for the Un/Livable Cultures podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Children are considered to be a group of special interest by media scholars and advocates, especially because they are seen as a vulnerable group whose rights must be protected and also because they represent the future of the world, and so their education and socialisation is of particular importance. While there has been global research on children’s media practices, in India, there has been very little critical work in this area. Usha Raman and Sumana Kasturi’s edited book Childscape, Mediascape: Children and Media in India (Orient BlackSwan, 2023) fills this gap by bringing together, for the first time, a variety of perspectives from media researchers, practitioners and those involved in secondary school education, with a focus on children, childhood and media. Questioning what it means to ‘grow up digital’ in twenty-first century India, this collection explores a variety of themes relating to children and the media landscape. The volume contains twelve essays on relevant topics such as digital media literacy among children and their new media practices; mediated childhood and child rights; children as both consumers and producers of social media; digitality and education; children’s entertainment and leisure practices, and issues of identity, representation and community in a mediated world. The book also contains a comprehensive introduction by the volume editors. This volume will be of value to scholars of media and communication studies and cultural studies, while also drawing readers from psychology and journalism. The chapters offer critical insights of relevance to parents, teacher training institutes, child-focused NGOs, and others who work with children. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes-younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise (Stanford UP, 2022). Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese women who are primarily middle-aged, divorced, and proactively seeking spouses to fulfill their material and sexual needs. What they seek in their Western partners is tied to what they believe they've lost in the shifting global economy around them. Ranging from multimillionaire entrepreneurs or ex-wives and mistresses of wealthy Chinese businessmen, to contingent sector workers and struggling single mothers, these women, along with their translators and potential husbands from the US, Canada, and Australia, make up the actors in this multifaceted story. Set against the backdrop of China's global economic ascendance and a relative decline of the West, this book asks: How does this reshape Chinese women's perception of Western masculinity? Through the unique window of global internet dating, this book reveals the shifting relationships of race, class, gender, sex, and intimacy across borders. Dr. Monica Liu is a sociologist whose teaching and research interests include gender, globalization, family, immigration, race/ethnicity, Asia and Asian America, digital technology/media, and qualitative methods. She has explored the phenomenon of global internet dating and cross-border marriage between women from China and men from English-speaking Western countries. She is currently working on a new project that examines institutional racism against Asian women leaders in higher education. Born and raised in China, Dr. Liu immigrated to the U.S. at the age of eight. Before joining the University of St. Thomas, she taught at Colgate University and Carleton College. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In his book, In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda (Duke UP, 2022), António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nation’s capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hemisphere. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research alongside his own experiences growing up in Luanda, Tomás shows how the city’s physical and social boundaries—its skin—constitute porous and shifting interfaces between center and margins, settler and Native, enslaver and enslaved, formal and informal, and the powerful and the powerless. He focuses on Luanda’s “asphalt frontier”—the (colonial) line between the planned urban center and the ad hoc shantytowns that surround it—and the ways squatters are central to Luanda’s historical urban process. In their relationship with the state and their struggle to gain rights to the city, squatters embody the process of negotiating Luanda’s divisions and the sociopolitical forces that shape them. By illustrating how Luanda emerges out of the continual redefinition of its skin, Tomás offers new ways to understand the logic of urbanization in cities across the global South. Comfort Azubuko-Udah is an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto, cross-appointed in the Department of English and the African Studies Centre. Her work engages narrativizations of African spaces and places with ecocritical and geocritical lenses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Violent America: The Dynamics of Identity Politics in a Multiracial Society (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Ariane Chebel d'Appollonia counterintuitively analyses why and how various ethnoracial groups proactively and instrumentally use different forms of violence to achieve their goals. Combining a historical analysis spanning the centuries with an examination of contemporary problems, she considers how and why ethnoracial groups can be both perpetrators and victims of violence, why some minority groups react differently to violence in comparable situations, and what the consequences are today for politics in both America and Europe. Violent America thus explores the effects of physical and discursive violence on the ways in which ethnoracial groups define themselves. Dr. Chebel d'Appollonia argues that the use of ethnoracial violence has been and remains an effective identity strategy by which all ethnoracial groups are able to integrate themselves into the mainstream of American society. She provides an alternative way of understanding the complex relationship between migrant phobia, multiethnic grievances, and intergroup conflicts in America. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Nobody who sits in traffic on Sedona, Arizona's main stretch or stands shoulder-to-shoulder in its many souvenir shops would call it a ghost town. Neither would anyone renting a room for $2,000 a month or buying a house for a half-million dollars. And yet, the people who built the small town and made it a community are being pushed further and further out. Their home is being sold out from under their feet. In studying the impact of short-term rentals, Brendan O'Brien saw something similar happening in places ranging from Bend, Oregon, to Bar Harbor, Maine. But it isn't just short-term rentals, and it's not just tourism towns. Neighborhoods in Austin and Atlanta have become rows of investment properties. Longtime residents in Spokane and Boston have been replaced by new, high-salaried remote workers. Across the country, a level of unaffordable housing which once seemed unique to global cities like New York and San Francisco has become the norm, with nearly a third of all US households considered housing cost-burdened. This situation has been aided by the direct actions of developers, politicians, and existing homeowners who have sought to drive up the cost of housing. But it's mostly happened due to a societal-wide refusal to see housing as anything more than real estate, another product available to the highest bidder. This trend of putting local housing on a global market has worsened in recent years but is nothing new. Housing in the United States has always been marred by racial and income inequality that mocks the country's highest ideals. Deeply researched and deeply felt, Homesick: Why Housing Is Unaffordable and How We Can Change It (Chicago Review Press, 2023) argues that we can be so much better. And we can start where we live. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Jing Wang discusses the book The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia UP, 2023) by Lin Zhang. You’ll hear about:
A history of the book and Zhang’s entry into the fieldwork through family stories;
How to understand entrepreneurialism as a dominant ideology in the global neoliberal labor economy and China’s positionality in the world;
Why and how the book is organized based on three types of spaces – rural, urban, and transnational – across China and beyond;
The similarities and differences between the elite and the grassroot entrepreneurs in Beijing;
The e-commerce entrepreneurship as “platformized family production” in rural China and the roles played by government and large tech companies like Alibaba play in shaping the new rural production model;
The limit and possibility of reinvention through “shanzhai” (copycat) e-commerce production;
The gendered inequalities of entrepreneurial labor in rural and transnational spaces;
What is “daigou” (personal shopping agents) in transnational e-commerce and the structural challenges entrepreneurs – especially women – face across national borders and digital platforms;
What conversations in global studies of media and communication this book engages with.
About the book From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity. Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. You can find more about the book here by the Columbia University Press. Author: Lin Zhang is an associate professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire. Host: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC), Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, with an affiliation at the Center of the Study of Contemporary China (CSCC). Editor & Producer: Jing Wang Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and rising carbon emissions. Several of the most prominent platforms are now faced with existential crises as they prioritize growth over fairness and long-term viability. Nevertheless, the basic model--a peer-to-peer structure augmented by digital tech--holds the potential to meet its original promises. Based on nearly a decade of pioneering research, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back (U California Press, 2021) dives into what went wrong with this contemporary reimagining of labor. The book examines multiple types of data from thirteen cases to identify the unique features and potential of sharing platforms that prior research has failed to pinpoint. Juliet B. Schor presents a compelling argument that we can engineer a reboot: through regulatory reforms and cooperative platforms owned and controlled by users, an equitable and truly shared economy is still possible. Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. She is a New York Times bestselling author and the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Better Future Project. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The uniquely inspiring story of a beloved neighborhood bar that united the communities it served. Coogan’s Bar and Restaurant opened in New York City’s Washington Heights in 1985 and closed its doors for good in the pandemic spring of 2020. Sometimes called Uptown City Hall, it became a staple of neighborhood life during its 35 years in operation—a place of safety and a bulwark against prejudice in a multi-ethnic, majority-immigrant community undergoing rapid change. Last Call at Coogan’s: The Life and Death of a Neighborhood Bar (St. Martin's Press, 2023) by Jon Michaud tells the story of this beloved saloon, from the challenging years of the late 80's and early 90's, when Washington Heights suffered from the highest crime rate in the city, to the 2010’s, when gentrification pushed out longtime residents and nearly closed Coogan's itself; only a massive community mobilization including local politicians and Lin-Manuel Miranda kept the doors open. This book touches on many serious issues facing the country today: race relations, policing, gentrification, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Along the way, readers will meet the bar’s owners and an array of its most colorful regulars, such as an aspiring actor from Kentucky who dreams of bringing a theater company to Washington Heights, a television reporter who loves karaoke, and a Puerto Rican community board manager who falls in love with an Irish cop from the local precinct. At its core, this is the story of one small business, the people who worked there, the customers they served, and the community they all called home. Jon Michaud is the Collection Management Librarian at the Millburn Free Public Library. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do emotions mobilise in politics? How do they frame ideologies? Broadly focusing on these questions, Ajay Gudavarthy's book Politics, Ethics and Emotions in ‘New India’ (Routledge, 2023) explains the role emotions play in Indian politics and the part they played in the aftermath of the 2019 general elections. It traces the consolidation of the Right in India and highlights the reasons for its electoral successes with a focus on the interplay between ethics and emotions such as fear, anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, hatred, betrayal, and violence. At the same time, it traces the changing dynamic in the way we think about politics and analyses the failure of liberal democratic institutions to make space for emotions in politics and political motivations. An accessible and essential guide to understanding contemporary India, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, especially governance and political theory, as well as South Asian studies. Tusharika Deka is a PhD student in International Relations at the University of Nottingham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Roluah Puia's book Nationalism in the Vernacular: State, Tribes, and Politics of Peace in Northeast India (Cambridge UP, 2023) illuminates our understanding of the relationship between orality and nationalist politics. In doing so, it provides a new angle to the understanding of nationalism by looking at the popular support and participation of ordinary people in the construction of Mizo nationalism, in short, the vernacularisation of nationalism. Nationalism in the Vernacular examines this process of vernacularisation at two levels, the first concerns the process of creating a vernacular language to express nationalist ideas and second, the irrepressibility of the oral against state's violent response to the nationalist movement. Drawing from multiple sources, the book through the rich oral narratives, archival materials, including government and media reports shows how Mizos have remained active agents in asserting and claiming their rights to defining ideas of nationalism in their own terms by making it distinctively Mizo. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on Indigenous Religion and Christianity at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Jenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington and author of Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh, published by University of Washington Press in 2022. Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Services have since multiplied, promising diagnostic information and better prenatal and general health care. In Fixing the Image Jenna Grant draws on years of ethnographic and archival research to theorize the force and appeal of medical imaging in the urban landscape of Phnom Penh. Set within long genealogies of technology as tool of postcolonial modernity, and vision as central to skilled diagnosis in medicine and Theravada Buddhism, ultrasound offers stabilizing knowledge and elicits desire and pleasure, particularly for pregnant women. Grant offers the concept of "fixing"--which invokes repair, stabilization, and a dose of something to which one is addicted--to illuminate how ultrasound is entangled with practices of care and neglect across different domains. Fixing the Image thus provides a method for studying technological practice in terms of specific materialities and capacities of technologies--in this case, image production and the permeability of the body--illuminating how images are a material form of engagement between patients, between patients and their doctors, and between patients and their bodies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Meg Bernhard about her new book Wine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory - wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage. While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
First taking hold of the American cultural imagination in the 1990s, the sexual purity movement of contemporary evangelicalism has since received considerable attention from a wide range of media outlets, religious leaders, and feminist critics. Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (Oxford UP, 2015) offers a history of this movement that goes beyond the Religious Right, demonstrating a link between sexual purity rhetoric and fears of national decline that has shaped American ideas about morality since the nineteenth century. Concentrating on two of today's best known purity organizations, True Loves Waits and Silver Ring Thing, Sara Moslener's investigation reveals that purity work over the last two centuries has developed in concert with widespread fears of changing traditional gender roles and sexual norms, national decline, and global apocalypse. Moslener highlights a number of points in U.S. history when evangelical beliefs and values have seemed to provide viable explanations for and solutions to widespread cultural crises, resulting in the growth of their cultural and political influence. By asserting a causal relationship between sexual immorality, national decline, and apocalyptic anticipation, leaders have shaped a purity rhetoric that positions Protestant evangelicalism as the salvation of American civilization. From the purity reformers of the nineteenth century to fundamentalist leaders such as Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry, Moslener illuminates the evolution of a strain of purity rhetoric that runs throughout Protestant evangelicalism. Sara Moslener is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Religion at Central Michigan University, where she teaches courses on the history of religious and racial discrimination in the United States. Sara’s work has been featured in The Revealer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Sojourners Magazine, Jezebel, Religion Dispatches, Religion & Politics, Religion News Service, and The Baffler. She has appeared on numerous podcasts and is a regular contributor to the podcast Straight White American Jesus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Individuals can assume—and be assigned—multiple roles throughout a conflict: perpetrators can be victims, and vice versa; heroes can be reassessed as complicit and compromised. However, accepting this more accurate representation of the narrativized identities of violence presents a conundrum for accountability and justice mechanisms premised on clear roles. This book considers these complex, sometimes overlapping roles, as people respond to mass violence in various contexts, from international tribunals to NGO-based social movements. Bringing the literature on perpetration in conversation with the more recent field of victim studies, it suggests a new, more effective, and reflexive approach to engagement in post-conflict contexts. Long-term positive peace requires understanding the narrative dynamics within and between groups, demonstrating that the blurring of victim-perpetrator boundaries, and acknowledging their overlapping roles, is a crucial part of peacebuilding processes. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Sarah Federman discusses her recent co-edited work, Narratives of Mass Atrocity: Victims and Perpetrators in the Aftermath (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Sarah explains the past and ongoing challenges of restorative justice in cases of genocide and mass atrocity with Christopher Harrison. Sarah's work on issues of corporate complicity during and the attempts of accountability in post-conflict societies, including that of the national railway system active during and long after France's role in the Holocaust, informs their conversation about the book. Sarah offers insights into the research process and how the book materialized as a consequence of an academic conference she attended with a collective of similarly interested researchers and scholars. The interview proceeds by examining the relevance of identity and restorative justice in the context of educating students about such contended narratives. Sarah explains a number of options that can exist and have successfully worked in healing post-conflict societies, most notably within local communities and organizations. The interview includes topics on multiple cases of genocide and mass atrocity including the Holocaust in Europe and the genocide in Rwanda, two diverse populations that have seen tremendous shifts of post-conflict relations over time across multiple generations. Their conversation concludes with an overview of how, even while accepting the emotive and charged circumstances that accompany restoration efforts in response to material, social, and psychological harm in political, educational, and legal processes, it is both possible and important to move beyond the binary idealized identifications of "victim," "perpetrator," and "hero" and begin to address the divisive discourses that dominate both narrative constructs and retributive legal systems. Christopher Harrison teaches at Northern Arizona University. HIs research concerns genocidal warfare and the policies of recruiting perpetrators and capturing victims in both historical and contemporary cases. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
While the popular image of the US military is one of citizen soldiers protecting their country, the reality is that nearly 5 percent of all first-time military recruits are noncitizens. Their reasons for enlisting are myriad, but many are motivated by the hope of gaining citizenship in return for their service. In Green Card Soldier: Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat (MIT Press, 2023), Sofya Aptekar talks to more than seventy noncitizen soldiers from twenty-three countries, including some who were displaced by conflict after the US military entered their homeland. She identifies a disturbing pattern: the US military's intervention in foreign countries drives migration, which in turn supplies the military with a cheap and desperate labor pool—thereby perpetuating the cycle. As Aptekar discovers, serving in the US military is no guarantee against deportation, and yet the promise of citizenship and the threat of deportation are the carrot and stick used to discipline noncitizen soldiers. Viewed at various times as security threats and members of a model minority, immigrant soldiers sometimes face intense discrimination from their native-born colleagues and superiors. Their stories—stitched through with colonial legacies, white supremacy, exploitation, and patriarchy—show how the tensions between deservingness and suspicion shape their enlistment, service, and identities. Giving voice to this little-heard group of immigrants, Green Card Soldier shines a cold light on the complex workings of US empire, globalized militarism, and citizenship. Sofya Aptekar is a Professor at CUNY and the author so several books on the U.S. immigration system. Sidney Michelini is a PhD student at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research with the FutureLab - Security, Ethnic Conflicts and Migration. His work focuses on how climate, climate shocks, and climate change impact conflicts of different types. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do children and adolescents transition to adulthood in today’s America? How have American society’s entrenching economic inequality and increasing financial precarity profoundly shaped their coming-of-age experience? What does it mean to grow up in a diverse society interacting with peers and adults with very different racial and ethnic backgrounds? These are important questions to ask in order to understand young people’s life in the United States. In Diversity and the Transition to Adulthood in America (U California Press, 2022), sociologists Phoebe Ho, Hyunjoon Park, and Grace Kao use large-scale and nationally representative data to address these important questions. The book offers a panoramic view of young people’s life in today’s increasingly diverse America. Through identifying the patterns and trends of when and how youths of different racial and ethnic backgrounds reach their life milestones, the book maps out the varying life paths of young Americans, who will play critical roles in shaping the future of this country. In this episode, you will hear NBN host Pengfei Zhao talked with Phoebe Ho, the lead author of Diversity and the Transition to Adulthood in America. Their conversation ranges from the major findings of the book, to how these findings may inform public debates on issues related to young people, as well as how university instructors may use this book to engage students in their classrooms.
Phoebe Ho is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on family experiences with education and schooling in the United States, with a particular emphasis on race, ethnicity, immigrant status, and social class.
Hyunjoon Park is Korea Foundation Professor of Sociology and Director of the James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include social stratification, education, family, and the transition to adulthood, especially in East Asian societies.
Grace Kao is IBM Professor of Sociology and Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. She is a past vice president of the American Sociological Association. Her research focuses on race, ethnicity, immigration, education, and youth outcomes.
Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming-of-age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Randall Patnode traces the history of the synchronous broadcast experience of the twentieth century and the transition to the asynchronous media that dominate today. Broadcasting grew out of the latent desire by nineteenth-century industrialists, political thinkers, and social reformers to tame an unruly society by controlling how people used their time. The idea manifested itself in the form of the broadcast schedule, a managed flow of information and entertainment that required audiences to be in a particular place – usually the home – at a particular time and helped to create “water cooler” moments, as audiences reflected on their shared media texts. Audiences began disconnecting from the broadcast schedule at the end of the twentieth century, but promoters of social media and television services still kept audiences under control, replacing the schedule with surveillance of media use. Dr. Randall Patnode offers compelling new insights into the intermingled roles of broadcasting and industrial/post-industrial work and how Americans spend their time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Helen Redmond is a Harlem-based documentary filmmaker, journalist, licensed clinical social worker, and professor at NYU. As senior editor and a multimedia journalist at Filter, a website that covers drug news, she’s been documenting America’s addiction crisis and treatment system for years. Her new documentary, Swallow THIS: A Documentary About Methadone & COVID-19, is currently on tour across the United States. We discuss the impacts the pandemic has had on methadone access in America – as well as the changes it hasn’t made – and put addiction treatment into a larger historical perspective. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We understand very little about how elite individuals and families operate in everyday life to maintain their privileged statuses, as many of these status-maintaining activities are conducted out of the sight of the public, in private family settings, exclusive schools, and through privileged services. Yi-Lin Chiang’s new book, Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition (Princeton University Press, 2022), offers a rare look into this issue in the context of contemporary China. Based on solid, long-term ethnographic research, Study Gods documents the educational journeys of elite Chinese adolescents, some of whom were named “study gods” by their peers because of their effortless abilities to achieve high academic performance. Employing vivid descriptions and sophisticated analyses, Chiang has shown how these young people achieve and maintain elite status by absorbing and complying with the rules surrounding status. In this episode, I talked with Yi-Lin Chiang about her new book, Studying Gods. You will hear not only her fascinating findings about the young generation of Chinese elite, but also behind-the-scene stories and reflections from a seasoned ethnographer, from how she interacted with these elite youths to what differs the younger generation of Chinese elites from the older ones, and why she thinks it is important to understand their elite world. Yi-Lin Chiang is assistant professor of sociology at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Chiang’s research focuses on educational stratification and intergenerational status transmission in greater China. About the host: Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming-of-age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Written by a lawyer who works at the intersection between legal education and practice in access to justice and human rights, this book locates, describes and defines a collective identity for social justice lawyering in the UK. Underpinned by theories of cause lawyering and legal mobilisation, the book argues that it is vital to understand the positions that progressive lawyers collectively take in order to frame the connections they make between their personal and professional lives, the tools they use to achieve social change, as well as ethical tensions presented by their work. The book takes a reflexive ethnographic approach to capture the stories of 35 lawyers working to positively transform law and policy in the UK over the last 50 years. It also draws on a wealth of primary sources including case reports, historic campaign materials and media analysis alongside wider ethnographic interviews with academics, students and lawyers and participant observation at social justice conferences, workshops and events. The book explains the way in which lawyers' networks facilitate their collective positioning and influence their strategic decision making, which in turn shapes their interactions with social activists, with other lawyers and with the state itself. Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. Twitter: @batesmith. His latest publication, a chapter in the collection Leading Works on the Legal Profession (edited by Dan Newman, published by Routledge in July 2023) is entitled “Lawyers Who Want to Make the World a Better Place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to investigate the deep-rooted racism in the American financial industry, and that one tip lit the sparkplug for a three-year journey through the shocking yet normalized corruption in our financial institutions. Examining local insurance agencies and corporate titans like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo and reveals the practices that have kept the racial wealth gap practically as wide as it was during the Jim Crow era. Flitter exposes hiring and layoff policies designed to keep Black employees from advancing to high levels; racial profiling of customers in internal emails between bank tellers; major insurers refusing to pay Black policyholders’ claims; and the systematic denial of funding to Black entrepreneurs. She also gives a voice to victims, from single mothers to professional athletes to employees themselves: people who were scammed, lied to, and defrauded by the systems they trusted with their money, and silenced when they attempted to speak out and seek reform. Flitter connects the dots between data, history, legal scholarship, and powerful personal stories to provide a “must-read wake-up call” (Valerie Red-Horse Mohl, president of KNOWN Holdings) about what it means to bank while Black. As America continues to confront systemic racism and pave a path forward, The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2022) is an essential examination of one of its most caustic contributors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Elaborating the history, variety, pervasiveness, and function of the adornments and ornaments with which we beautify ourselves, Stephen Davies's Adornment: What Self-Decoration Tells Us About Who We Are (Bloomsbury, 2020) takes in human prehistory, ancient civilizations, hunter-foragers, and present-day industrial societies to tell a captivating story of hair, skin, and make-up practices across times and cultures. From the decline of the hat, the function of jewelry and popularity of tattooing to the wealth of grave goods found in the Upper Paleolithic burials and body painting of the Nuba, we see that there is no one who does not adorn themselves, their possessions, or their environment. But what messages do these adornments send? Drawing on aesthetics, evolutionary history, archaeology, ethology, anthropology, psychology, cultural history, and gender studies, Stephen Davies brings together African, Australian and North and South American indigenous cultures and unites them around the theme of adornment. He shows us that adorning is one of the few social behaviors that is close to being genuinely universal, more typical and extensive than the high-minded activities we prefer to think of as marking our species - religion, morality, and art. Each chapter shows how modes of decoration send vitally important signals about what we care about, our affiliations and backgrounds, our social status and values. In short, by using the theme of bodily adornment to unify a very diverse set of human practices, this book tells us about who we are. Stephen John Davies is Emeritus Professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He mainly writes on aesthetics, evolution, and particularly the philosophy of art.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Pressing Onward: The Imperative Resilience of Latina Migrant Mothers (U California Press, 2023) centers the stories of mothers who migrated from Latin America, settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and overcame trauma and ongoing adversity to build futures for their children. These migrant mothers enact imperative resilience, engaging cognitive and social strategies to resist racial, economic, and gender-based oppression to seguir adelante, or press onward. Both a contemporary view of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on racially minoritized populations and a timeless account of the ways immigration enforcement and healthcare inequality affect migrant mothers, Pressing Onward uses ethnography to tell a greater story of persistence amid long-standing structural violence. Jessica P. Cerdeña is an anthropologist, family physician-in-training, and mother of two who lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where she advocates for racial justice and health equity (Twitter: @jes_cerdena) Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Over the past several decades, the vibrant, multiethnic borough of Queens has seen growth in the community of Nepali migrants, many of whom are navigating the challenging bureaucratic process of asylum legalization. Surviving the Sanctuary City: Asylum-Seeking Work in Nepali New York (U Washington Press, 2023) follows them through the institutional spaces of asylum offices, law firms, and human rights agencies to document the labor of seeking asylum. As an interpreter and a volunteer at a grassroots community center, anthropologist Tina Shrestha has witnessed how migrants must perform a particular kind of suffering that is legible to immigration judges and asylum officers. She demonstrates the lived contradictions asylum seekers face while producing their "suffering testimonials" and traces their attempts to overcome these contradictions through the Nepali notions of kaagaz banaune (making paper) and dukkha (suffering). Surviving the Sanctuary City asks what everyday survival among migrants and asylum seekers can tell us about the cultural logic of suffering within the confines of US borders. Through rich ethnographic detail and careful nuanced narratives, it puts the lives and perspectives of the Nepali migrant community at the center of the story. In so doing, Shrestha offers a fundamental rethinking of asylum seeking as a form of precarious labor and immigration enforcement in a rapidly changing US society. Tina Shrestha is a researcher at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we build a better social and political settlement? In Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care about Inequality (Policy Press, 2023), Marcos González Hernando an Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL Social Research Institute and Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad Diego Portale, and Gerry Mitchell a freelance policy researcher, combine a wealth of quantitative analysis with detailed fieldwork interviews to understand the top 10% of contemporary society. Broadening the focus of inequality research away from just a focus on the 1%, the book shows how the top 10%’s self-perceptions and views of society, politics, work and of the future are intertwined with our current social crises. Offering a bracing critique, as well as a framework for change, the book is essential reading across academic social science and for anyone interested in creating a better society. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Quinoa's new status as a superfood has altered the economic fortunes of Quechua farmers in the Andean highlands. Linda J. Seligmann journeys to the Huanoquite region of Peru to track the mixed blessings brought about by the surging worldwide popularity of this "exquisite grain." Focusing on how Indigenous communities have confronted globalization, Seligmann examines the influence of food politics, development initiatives, and the region's agrarian history on present-day quinoa production among Huanoquiteños. She also looks at the human stories behind these transformations, from the work of quinoa brokers to the ways Huanoquite's men and women navigate the shifts in place and power occurring in their homes and communities. Finally, Seligmann considers how the consequences of nearby mining may impact Huanoquiteños' ability to farm quinoa and thrive in their environment, and the efforts they are taking to resist these threats to their way of life. The untold story behind the popular health food, Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands (U Illinois Press, 2022) illuminates how Indigenous communities have engaged with the politics and policies surrounding their production of a traditional and minor crop that became a global foodstuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Hiring domestic workers is a routine part of the expat development lifestyle. Whether working for the United Nations, governmental aid agencies, or NGOs such as Oxfam, Save the Children, or World Vision, expatriate aid workers in the developing world employ maids, nannies, security guards, gardeners and chauffeurs. Though nearly every expat aid worker in the developing world has local people working within the intimate sphere of their homes, these relationships are seldom, if ever, discussed in analyses of the development paradigm and its praxis. Aid and the Help: International Development and the Transnational Extraction of Care (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Dinah Hannaford addresses this major lacuna through an ethnographic analysis of the intersection of development work and domestic work. Examining the reproductive labor cheaply purchased by aid workers posted overseas opens the opportunity to assess the multiple ways that the ostensibly "giving" industry of development can be an extractive industry as well. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate the shifting demands of European states. These new kinship relations, however, often prove unreliable, taking on new, unexpected dynamics in the face of codependency; they become more difficult to control than those who enter into such relations can imagine. Through unusually close ethnographic work in West African migrant communities in Amsterdam, Apostolos Andrikopoulos reveals the unseen dynamics of kinship through shared papers, the tensions of race and gender that develop in mutually beneficial marriages, and the vast, informal networks of people, information, and documentation on which migrants rely. Throughout Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe (U Chicago Press, 2023), Andrikopoulos demonstrates how inequality, exclusionary practices, and the changing policies of an often-violent state demand innovative ways of doing kinship to successfully navigate complex migration routes. Apostolos Andrikopoulos is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Harvard University and at the University of Amsterdam. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Who is believed in our mediated world? In Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Kathryn Claire Higgins, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication, examine this question by introducing the conception of an economy of believability governing who is, and who is not, believed or doubted. Written in the wake of #MeToo, the book engages directly with key contexts such as post-truth and the commodification of sexual violence. Thinking through questions of race and class, the analysis ranges widely, covering representations of sexual violence in fiction and non-fiction media, contemporary controversies and court cases, and the backlash from men in positions of power. The book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone seeking to understand ongoing gender inequalities in media and in society. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Fifty Years of Polyamory in America: A Guided Tour of a Growing Movement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) is unique among the many books about polyamory because the scope of this book is the entire history of the polyamory movement. Instead of concentrating on the experiences of a few people exploring alternate lifestyles, it is an exploration of two generations of Americans, the people and the organizations they founded, what they have chosen to do, and how it has changed their lives and affected the culture as a whole. Written in an entertaining and easily accessible style, the authors cover the history of alternative sexual relationship styles starting with a quick peek at colonial times, the Mormon and Oneida movements of the 1840s-70s, and modern day influences starting in the 1950s. Polyamory, literally “many loves,” challenges the relationship norm: monogamy. As its name suggests, polyamory typically refers to emotional/sexual relationships that include multiple partners. Common applications of polyamory include open marriages, triad (three people), two-couple (four people) “marriages,” and larger groups like intimate networks. Swingers are a subset of non-monogamy who often identify as poly. Throughout the course of Fifty Years of Polyamory in America, we explore the history of the polyamory movement: from clinical definitions and attempts at psychiatric treatment, to the advent of advocacy groups in the 1960s and ’70s, to contemporary practitioners and the future of the movement. A wide range of personal stories from advocates and practitioners guides the narrative to the modern day, highlighting the struggles and successes of the movement throughout the years. Glen Olson is an author and historian of the polyamory movement and gives presentations on the history of polyamory and open relationships to interested groups. He is a retired fire captain, paramedic, and technical writer. Terry Lee Brussel-Rogers is a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist and Life/Business Coach, director of Success Center Inc. since 1969. She has done poly relationship coaching and has taught sensitivity training and jealousy workshops since 1975. She lives in Winnetka California. Frances Sacks is a graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society (ILR Press, 2021), Jack Metzgar attempts to determine the differences between working-class and middle-class cultures in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of multidisciplinary sources, Metzgar writes as a now middle-class professional with a working-class upbringing, explaining the various ways the two cultures conflict and complement each other, illustrated by his own lived experiences. Set in a historical framework that reflects on how both class cultures developed, adapted, and survived through decades of historical circumstances, Metzgar challenges professional middle-class views of both the working-class and themselves. In the end, he argues for the creation of a cross-class coalition of what he calls "standard-issue professionals" with both hard-living and settled-living working people and outlines some policies that could help promote such a unification if the two groups had a better understanding of their differences and how to use those differences to their advantage. Bridging the Divide mixes personal stories and theoretical concepts to give us a compelling look inside the current complex position of the working-class in American culture and a view of what it could be in the future. John Lepley is a union activist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and can be reached at jwalterlepley@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In an era of falling births, it’s often said that millennials invented the idea of not having kids. But history is full of women without children: some who chose childless lives, others who wanted children but never had them, and still others—the vast majority, then and now—who fell somewhere in between. Modern women considering how and if children fit into their lives are products of their political, ecological, and cultural moment. But history also tells them that they are not alone. In Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother (Seal Press, 2023), historian Peggy O’Donnell Heffington shows that many of the reasons women are not having children today are ones they share with women in the past: a lack of support, their jobs or finances, environmental concerns, infertility, and the desire to live different kinds of lives. Understanding this history—how normal it has always been to not have children, and how hard society has worked to make it seem abnormal—is key, she writes, to rebuilding kinship between mothers and non-mothers, and to building a better world for us all. Dr Peggy O’Donnell Heffington teaches in History at the University of Chicago, and writes on feminism, women's movements, and motherhood in American and European history. She has been published in numerous outlets including the New York Times, Time Magazine and The Washington Post. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age. Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the preferences and habits of media users, the role of social networks, the resources and strategies of media providers, and the growing impact of media measures—from ratings to user recommendations. He incorporates these factors into one comprehensive framework: the marketplace of attention. In doing so, he shows that the marketplace works in ways that belie our greatest hopes and fears about digital media. Some observers claim that digital media empower a new participatory culture; others fear that digital media encourage users to retreat to isolated enclaves. Webster shows that public attention is at once diverse and concentrated—that users move across a variety of outlets, producing high levels of audience overlap. So although audiences are fragmented in ways that would astonish midcentury broadcasting executives, Webster argues that this doesn't signal polarization. He questions whether our preferences are immune from media influence, and he describes how our encounters with media might change our tastes. In the digital era's marketplace of attention, Webster claims, we typically encounter ideas that cut across our predispositions. In the process, we will remake the marketplace of ideas and reshape the twenty-first century public sphere. James G. Webster is Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In some ways, Hackman’s Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power (Flatiron Books, 2023) serves as a natural update to Arlie Hochschild’s classic, The Managed Heart. After all, in public life it’s most often the women members of the service economy—in retail, in nursing, teaching, and elsewhere—who are asked to exercise emotional skills that often go undervalued and, therefore, also under-compensated. Hackman goes further, however, by also exploring the private realm where men rarely help to fully join in to aid the household, whether in the form of childrearing, aid to ailing parents, and the marriage itself. As Hackman adroitly points out, the situation becomes even worse for black households because 50% of black women have a loved one who is incarcerated. This episode also naturally turns to how men could and should get out of the “man box” of an emotionally destitute existence that is harming themselves and those around them. Rose Hackman is a British journalist who grew up largely in Belgium and now lives in Detroit. For The Guardian, she writes on issues involving gender, race, labor, policing, housing and the environment, with an eye to historically entrenches injustices. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His latest two books are Blah Blah Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo and Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Who are the English upper class? In The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945 (Manchester UP, 2023) Daniel Smith, a lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University, offers an analysis of the role and power of the upper class in English society. Drawing on, and critiquing, sociology, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, the book uses a vast range of methods and examples to tell the story of the continued dominance of English elites. With examples ranging from fashion and bookshops, through fee-paying schools, to memoirs and money, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, and for anyone interested in understanding Britain’s current social, economic, and cultural crisis. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode, we discuss how myths of suburbia, the American West, and the American Dream informed regional planning, suburban design, and ideas about race and belonging in California’s East San Gabriel Valley as found in James Zarsadiaz’s debut monograph Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A. Published by the University of California Press in October 2022, Resisting Change in Suburbia recently won the Organization of American Historians' Lawrence W. Levine Award, which is an honor acknowledging the year’s best book in American cultural history. Throughout the six chapters, Zarsadiaz illustrates the demographic transitions of the suburbs making up the East San Gabriel Valley from the 1960s through the 1990s and how these communities, despite racial and class differences, sought to protect their connections to a perceived ideal of country living away from LA’s ever-expanding metropolitan center. Zarsadiaz constructs the region’s history of settlement, quite literally, from the ground up by taking us through the development of master plans neighborhoods emulating a rural suburban American experience such as Phillips Ranch and Rowland Heights, to the regulations on architectural aesthetics following the arrival of Asian residents found in Chino Hills and Walnut, to the dueling narratives of whether to incorporate or not incorporate found in Hacienda Heights and Diamond Bar. In short, Resisting Change in Suburbia “serves a window into the mindset, perspectives, and lives of typically upwardly mobile suburbanites” (15) of the East San Gabriel Valley and how the suburbs they lived in “grappled with spatial, demographic, and political change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries” (4-5). Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
New Directions in Queer Oral History, edited by Amy Tooth Murphy, Clare Summerskill, and Emma Vickers (Routledge, 2022) is a comprehensive international collection that reflects on the practice, purpose, and functionality of queer oral history, and in doing so demonstrates the vibrancy and innovation of this rapidly evolving field. Drawing on the roots of oral history’s original commitment to "history from below" queer oral history has become an indispensable methodology at the heart of queer studies. Expanding and extending the existing canon, this book offers up key observations about queer oral history as a methodology, and how it might be advanced through cutting-edge approaches. The collection contains a mix of contributions from established scholars, early career researchers, postgraduate students, archivists, and activists, ensuring its accessibility and wide appeal. Dr. Amy Tooth Murphy is Lecturer in Oral History at Royal Holloway, University of London, where her specialisations include queer oral history, post-war lesbian history of Britain, and oral history theory and method. She is a Trustee of the Oral History Society and a Co-Founder and Editor of the peer-reviewed blog, Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in the rural northern part of their state. The crowd eagerly listened to speeches on how the project would bring long-term risks and potentially pollute the drinking water for current and future generations. A year later, another proposed mining project became the subject of a public hearing in a small town near the proposed site. But this time, local politicians and union leaders praised the mine proposal as an asset that would strengthen working-class communities in Minnesota. In many rural American communities, there is profound tension around the preservation and protection of wilderness and the need to promote and profit from natural resources. In Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range (NYU Press, 2023), Erik Kojola looks at both sides of these populist movements and presents a thoughtful account of how such political struggles play out. Drawing on over a hundred ethnographic interviews with people of the region, from members of labor unions to local residents to scientists, Kojola is able to bring this complex struggle over mining to life. Focusing on both pro- and anti-mining groups, he expands upon what this conflict reveals about the way whiteness and masculinity operate among urban and rural residents, and the different ways in which class, race, and gender shape how people relate to the land. Mining the Heartland shows the negotiation and conflict between two central aspects of the state's culture and economy: outdoor recreation in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes and the lucrative mining of the Iron Range. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of place in tourist cities and about the people who reside there. He is currently conducting research for his next project on the social construction of tourist cities. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments are off-topic, or even topic-less. In Reading the Comments, Joseph Reagle urges us to read the comments. Conversations "on the bottom half of the Internet," he argues, can tell us much about human nature and social behavior. Reagle visits communities of Amazon reviewers, fan fiction authors, online learners, scammers, freethinkers, and mean kids. He shows how comment can inform us (through reviews), improve us (through feedback), manipulate us (through fakery), alienate us (through hate), shape us (through social comparison), and perplex us. He finds pre-Internet historical antecedents of online comment in Michelin stars, professional criticism, and the wisdom of crowds. He discusses the techniques of online fakery (distinguishing makers, fakers, and takers), describes the emotional work of receiving and giving feedback, and examines the culture of trolls and haters, bullying, and misogyny. He considers the way comment--a nonstop stream of social quantification and ranking--affects our self-esteem and well-being. And he examines how comment is puzzling--short and asynchronous, these messages can be slap-dash, confusing, amusing, revealing, and weird, shedding context in their passage through the Internet, prompting readers to comment in turn, "WTF?!?" Joseph M. Reagle, Jr. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University and the author of Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (MIT Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Young people in the West are more likely to encounter religion in videogames than in places of worship like churches, mosques or temples. Lars de Wildt interviews developers and players of games such as Assassin’s Creed to find out how and why the Pop Theology of Videogames is so appealing to modern audiences. Based on extensive fieldwork, Lars de Wildt's book The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion (Amsterdam UP, 2023) argues that developers of videogames and their players engage in a ‘Pop Theology’ through which laymen reconsider traditional questions of religion by playing with them. Games allow us to play with religious questions and identities in the same way that children play at being a soldier, or choose to ‘play house.’ This requires a radical rethinking of religious questions as no longer just questions of belief or disbelief; but as truths to be tried on, compared, and discarded at will. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Internet trolls live to upset as many people as possible, using all the technical and psychological tools at their disposal. They gleefully whip the media into a frenzy over a fake teen drug crisis; they post offensive messages on Facebook memorial pages, traumatizing grief-stricken friends and family; they use unabashedly racist language and images. They take pleasure in ruining a complete stranger's day and find amusement in their victim's anguish. In short, trolling is the obstacle to a kinder, gentler Internet. To quote a famous Internet meme, trolling is why we can't have nice things online. Or at least that's what we have been led to believe. In This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Whitney Phillips argues that trolling, widely condemned as obscene and deviant, actually fits comfortably within the contemporary media landscape. Trolling may be obscene, but, Phillips argues, it isn't all that deviant. Trolls' actions are born of and fueled by culturally sanctioned impulses--which are just as damaging as the trolls' most disruptive behaviors. Phillips describes, for example, the relationship between trolling and sensationalist corporate media--pointing out that for trolls, exploitation is a leisure activity; for media, it's a business strategy. She shows how trolls, "the grimacing poster children for a socially networked world," align with social media. And she documents how trolls, in addition to parroting media tropes, also offer a grotesque pantomime of dominant cultural tropes, including gendered notions of dominance and success and an ideology of entitlement. We don't just have a trolling problem, Phillips argues; we have a culture problem. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things isn't only about trolls; it's about a culture in which trolls thrive. Whitney Phillips is a Lecturer in the Department of Communications at Humboldt State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (U California Press, 2023) is the first book to explore how our cities gentrify by becoming social media influencers—and why it works. Cities, like the people that live in them, are subject to the attention economy. In The City Authentic, author David A. Banks shows how cities are transforming themselves to appeal to modern desires for authentic urban living through the attention-grabbing tactics of social media influencers and reality-TV stars. Blending insightful analysis with pop culture, this engaging study of New York State’s Capital Region is an accessible glimpse into the social phenomena that influence contemporary cities. The rising economic fortunes of cities in the Rust Belt, Banks argues, are due in part to the markers of its previous decay—which translate into signs of urban authenticity on the internet. The City Authentic unpacks the odd connection between digital media and derelict buildings, the consequences of how we think about industry and place, and the political processes that have enabled a new paradigm in urban planning. Mixing urban sociology with media and cultural studies, Banks offers a lively account of how urban life and development are changing in the twenty-first century. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place. He is currently conducting research on the branding of cities. I am particularly interested in the similarities and differences in how travel and tourism agencies see a city as compared to how residents and visitors see the same city. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement. Drawing on more than 120 interviews, Orit Avishai illustrates how LGBT Jews accomplished this radical change. She makes the case that it has taken multiple approaches to achieve recognition within the community, ranging from political activism to more personal interactions with religious leaders and community members, to simply creating spaces to go about their everyday lives. Orthodox LGBT Jews have drawn from their lived experiences as well as Jewish traditions, symbols, and mythologies to build this movement, motivated to embrace their sexual identity not in spite of, but rather because of, their commitment to Jewish scripture, tradition, and way of life. Unique and timely, Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel (NYU Press, 2023) challenges popular conceptions of how LGBT people interact and identify with conservative communities of faith. Orit Avishai is an ethnographer at Fordham University, where she teaches in the Sociology Department and in the Program on Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work considers how ideology and culture, broadly defined, shape social institutions, identities, political dialogue, and cultural practices. Her recent public-facing writing has appeared in The Conversation, The Katz Center Blog, and Religion Dispatches. Dr. Avishai has degrees from The University of California at Berkeley, the Yale Law School, and Tel Aviv University Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context (U Michigan Press, 2022), Daniel Agbiboa takes African insurgencies back to their routes by providing a transdisciplinary perspective on the centrality of mobility to the strategies of insurgents, state security forces, and civilian populations caught in conflict. Drawing on one of the world’s deadliest insurgencies, the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, this well-crafted and richly nuanced intervention offers fresh insights into how violent extremist organizations exploit forms of local immobility and border porosity to mobilize new recruits, how the state’s “war on terror” mobilizes against so-called subversive mobilities, and how civilian populations in transit are treated as could-be terrorists and subjected to extortion and state-sanctioned violence en route. The multiple and intersecting flows analyzed here upend Eurocentric representations of movement in Africa as one-sided, anarchic, and dangerous. Instead, this book underscores the contradictions of mobility in conflict zones as simultaneously a resource and a burden. Intellectually rigorous yet clear, engaging, and accessible, Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency is a seminal contribution that lays bare the neglected linkages between conflict and mobility. Daniel E. Agbiboa is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Professor Agbiboa’s research and teaching focus on how state and nonstate forms of order and authority interpenetrate and shape each other, and the spatialization and materialization of mobility, power, and politics in contemporary African cities. Sidney Michelini is a PhD student at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research with the FutureLab - Security, Ethnic Conflicts and Migration. His work focuses on how climate, climate shocks, and climate change impact conflicts of different types. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe (Open Book Publishers, 2023) consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins. The authors use precarity to analyse the state of affairs in the academy, from hiring practices to ‘culturally’ accepted division of labour, systematic forms of discrimination, racialisation, and gendered hierarchies, etc. Building on precarity as a critical concept for challenging social exclusion or forming political collectives, the authors move away from conventional academic styles, instead adopting autobiography and autoethnography as methods of intersectional scholarly analysis. This approach creatively challenges the divisions between the system and the individual, the mind and the soul, the objective and the subjective, as well as science, theory, and art. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars within the field of migration studies, but also to instructors and students of sociology, postcolonial studies, gender and race studies, and critical border studies. The volume’s interdisciplinary approach also seeks to address university diversity officers, managers, key decision-makers, and other readers directly or indirectly involved in contemporary academia. The format and style of its contributions are wide-ranging (including poetry and creative prose), thus making it accessible and readable for a general audience. The volume has been published open access and can be downloaded from here. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and expose the failures of state governance to regulate use. State policies and institutions influenced by global models of reform produce and magnify socio-economic injustice in this "water bureaucracy." Drawing on historical records, an analysis of post-liberalization developments, and fieldwork in the city of Chennai, Leela Fernandes traces the configuration of colonial historical legacies, developmental-state policies, and economic reforms that strain water resources and intensify inequality. While reforms of water governance promote privatization and decentralization, they strengthen the state centralized control over water through city-based development models. Understanding the political economy of water thus illuminates the consequent failures of the state within countries of the Global South. Governing Water in India: Inequality, Reform, and the State (U Washington Press, 2022) is available open access here. Anubha Anushree is a Lecturer at the COLLEGE Program, Stanford University. She could be reached at anubha1@stanford.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Despite initiatives to 'diversify' the publishing sector, there has been almost no transformation to the historic racial inequality that defines the field. White Literary Taste Production in Contemporary Book Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023) argues that contemporary book culture is structured by practice that operates according to a White taste logic. By applying the notion of this logic to an analysis of both traditional and new media tastemaking practices, Alexandra Dane examines the influence of Whiteness on the cultural practice, and how the long-standing racial inequities that characterize Anglophone book publishing are supported by systems, institutions and platforms. These themes are explored through two distinct but interrelated case studies-women's literary prizes and anti-racist reading lists on Instagram-which demonstrate the dominance of Whiteness, and in particular White feminism, in the contemporary literary discourse. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the future for cultural policy? In Cultural Policy Beyond the Economy: Work, Value, and the Social (Edward Elgar, 2023), Deborah Stevenson, Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, analyses key trends on themes in contemporary cultural policy. The book covers the rise of wellbeing, the dominance of economics, sustainable development, cultural work, inequalities in cultural tastes, and cultural value. Introducing the concept of the art world complex as a frame for both understanding and defending cultural policy, the analysis sets a new agenda for the study of cultural policy. Theoretically rich and packed with empirical examples, the book will be essential reading across arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in culture today. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Houseways in Southern Oman (Routledge, 2022) explores how houses are created, maintained and conceptualized in southern Oman. Based on long-term research in the Dhofar region, it draws on anthropology, sociology, urban studies and architectural history. The chapters consider physical and functional aspects, including regulations governing land use, factors in siting houses, architectural styles and norms for interior and exterior decorating. The volume also reflects on cultural expectations regarding how and when rooms are used and issues such as safety, privacy, social connectedness and ease of movement. Houses and residential areas are situated within the fabric of towns, comparison is made with housing in other countries in the Arabian peninsula, and consideration is given to notions of the ‘Islamic city’ and the ‘Islamic house’. The book is valuable reading for scholars interested in the Middle East and the built environment. Marielle Risse Dr. Marielle Risse has lived and taught at the university level in Oman for over sixteen years and in the United Arab Emirates for two years. Her research areas are Dhofari cultures, comparative literature, and intercultural communication. She has published three books: Houseways in Southern Oman (2023, Routledge). Foodways in Southern Oman (Routledge, 2021) and Community and Autonomy in Southern Oman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Ayesha Mu’alla is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, at Shiv Nadar University. Her ethnographic research explores the social life of frankincense, its materiality, and human entanglements in Oman. Ayesha has taught at the College of Applied Sciences in Nizwa and at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Not merely the act of representing events with words or images, a "news event" is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself. In The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization (U Chicago Press, 2023), Francis Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of news, and subjects invested in the idea of democracy are remarkably reflexive about the role of publicly circulating images and texts in the very constitution of their subjectivity. The law comes to stand as both a limit and positive condition in this process of event making, where acts of legal and extralegal repression of publication can also become the stuff of news about news makers. When the subjects of news inhabit multiple participant roles in the unfolding of public events, when the very technologies of recording and circulating events themselves become news, the act of representing a political event becomes difficult to disentangle from that of participating in it. This, Cody argues, is the crisis of contemporary news making: the news can no longer claim exteriority to the world on which it reports. Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist based in Bangalore, India. She tweets at @twitatreyee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The problem of housing insecurity and homelessness consumes the resources of many of the world’s major cities. Homelessness undermines urban cultures, exacerbates social and health problems for those directly affected, and reduces the quality of life of city dwellers generally. Short of homelessness, many people experience the problem of home insecurity, in which they are forced by circumstances to move frequently, or when they cannot maintain or repair their housing. Today’s guest talks with us about a non-governmental approach to housing insecurity. Efrat Altshul Schorr is a member of the board of an Israeli nonprofit organization, Tenufa Bakihila, which provides home repair and personal family advocacy to people who live on the edge. Efrat Altshul Schorr, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist who leads a multidisciplinary team of clinical researchers. She is also a successful entrepreneur. Efrat brings all of her skills and experiences to her leadership of the non-profit effort to relieve housing insecurity in Israel. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with the state. Steeped in an embodied knowledge of Lagos and backed by two years of thorough ethnographic fieldwork, including working as an informal bus conductor, Agbiboa provides an emic perspective on precarious labour, popular agency and the daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the modern world system. Corruption, Agbiboa argues, is not rooted in Nigerian culture but is shaped by the struggle to get by and get ahead on the fast and slow lanes of Lagos. The pursuit of economic survival compels transport operators to participate in the reproduction of the very transgressive system they denounce. They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria is not just a book about corruption but also about transportation, politics, and governance in urban Africa. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers--parents--labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It's almost as if parents are set up to fail--and the result is lost opportunities that limit children's success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis (MIT Press, 2023), Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality. Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today's socioeconomic reality--but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff. We need a program like Medicare--call it Familycare--to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents need to organize to wield their political power on behalf of children--who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country. The Parent Trap exposes the true costs of our society's unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell UP, 2023) illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the corruption plot in all its contradictions. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride-hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the futures of work - what we term “FemWork” - is the need of the day and should manifest in multiple and various forms, placing the worker at the core and drawing on her experiences, aspirations, and realities. Payal Arora, Usha Raman, and René König's book Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy (Amsterdam UP, 2023) offers grounded insights from academic, activist, legal, development and design perspectives that can help us think through these inclusive futures and possibly create digital, social, and governance infrastructures of work that are fairer and more meaningful. The book is published open access and can be downloaded from here. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What are the latest developments in the sociology of the arts? In Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Arturo Rodríguez Morató, a Professor of Sociology and current Director of the CECUPS (Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Society) at the University of Barcelona, and Alvaro Santana-Acuña, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Whitman College, bring together 12 leading researchers to present new empirical and theoretical breakthroughs within the field. The book has a huge range of case studies and approaches, from architectural competitions and graffiti to The Beatles, opera, and football shirts. Drawing on Spanish-speaking scholarship, the book broadens the global basis for the sociology of art, and is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business conducted by large corporations in certain North American, European, and East Asian cities. But most videogames today, in fact, are made by small clusters of people working on shoestring budgets, relying on existing, freely available software platforms, and hoping, often in vain, to rise to stardom—in short, people working like artists. Aiming squarely at this disconnect between perception and reality, Brendan Keogh's book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production (MIT Press, 2023) presents a much more accurate and nuanced picture of how the vast majority of videogame-makers work—a picture that reveals the diverse and precarious communities, identities, and approaches that make videogame production a significant cultural practice. Drawing on insights provided by over 400 game developers across Australia, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Keogh develops a new framework for understanding videogame production as a cultural field in all its complexity. Part-time hobbyists, aspirational students, client-facing contractors, struggling independents, artist collectives, and tightly knit local scenes—all have a place within this model. But proponents of non-commercial game making don't exist in isolation; Keogh shows how they and their commercial counterparts are deeply interconnected and codependent in the field of videogame production. A cultural intervention, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist challenges core assumptions about videogame production—ideas about creativity, professionalism, labor, diversity, education, globalization, and community. Its in-depth, complex portrayal suggests new ways of seeing, and engaging in, the videogame industry that really does exist. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We live in times where theory is often understood as irrelevant in the real world. It appears to have no practical results. This has been further complicated in a post-fact world, where our ‘identities’ and ‘perception’ have become the final judges of truth. Sociology/social anthropology, in contrast, rests on a fundamental distinction between commonsense and theoretically informed knowledge. It teaches us to get rid of ‘perceptions’ and alerts us to go beyond taken-for-granted ideas. The paradox is that although theory is taught as a mandatory paper in sociology, it is either reduced to a topic in the syllabi or used as ceremonial citations. Emphasizing that theories emerge in specific historical contexts and are embedded in economic, political, social, cultural, institutional and intellectual processes, this edited volume Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions (Orient Blackswan, 2018) by Maitrayee Chaudhuri and Manish Thakur takes a new approach by highlighting the sociological paths through which theories travel and are adopted by institutions in different parts of the country. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul—where the author worked as an undertaker—Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge UP, 2023) offers a moving and powerful account of migrants' end-of-life dilemmas, vividly illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe. Osman Balkan is Associate Director of the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on borders and migration, citizenship and identity, race and ethnicity, transnationalism, cultural memory, Islam, and necropolitics. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press, 2022) tells the story of neofanfarrismo, an explosive carnival brass band community turned activist musical movement in Rio de Janeiro, as Brazil shifted from a country on the rise in the 2000s to one beset by various crises in the 2010s. Though predominantly middle-class, neofanfarristas have creatively adapted the critical theories of carnival to militate for a more democratic city. Illuminating the tangible obstacles to musical movement building, Andrew Snyder argues that festive activism with privileged origins can promote real alternatives to the neoliberal city, but meets many limits and contradictions in a society marked by diverse inequalities. Dr. Andrew Snyder is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa [New University] of Lisbon] in Portugal. Building on the recently published book that is the subject of this interview, Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro, he is beginning a new book project focused on the postcolonial relationships enacted in Brazilian carnival practices in Lisbon. He has also increasingly worked as an editor, having co-edited the books, HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism and At the Crossroads: Music and Social Justice, and he will soon be a lead co-editor of the Journal of Festive Studies. He is also a trumpet player, who has played with many of the groups he studies. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Marius Wamsiedel's book The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients: An Ethnography of Triage Work in Romania (Lexington, 2023) is an ethnography of the social process by which healthcare workers ration and rationalize the provision of care. Examining the social categorization of patients, this work documents the interactional production of exclusion at two emergency departments in Romania. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. In Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds (Duke UP, 2023), Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumacı shows how they use improvisation to imagine and bring into being more habitable worlds through the smallest of actions and the most fleeting of movements---what she calls “activist affordances.” Even as an environment shrinks to a set of constraints rather than opportunities, the improvisatory space of performance opens up to allow disabled people to imagine that same environment otherwise. Dokumacı shows how disabled people’s activist affordances present the potential for a more liveable and accessible world for all of us. Dr. Arseli Dokumaci, PhD is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies, and Director of the Access in the Making (AIM) Lab A full transcript of the interview is available for accessibility purposes. Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts (MIT Press, 2023) explores the extent to which disasters facilitate the escalation or abatement of armed conflicts—as well as the ways and contexts in which combatants exploit these catastrophes. Tobias Ide utilizes both qualitative insights and quantitative data to explain the link between disasters and the (de-)escalation of armed conflict and presents over thirty case studies of earthquakes, droughts, floods, and storms in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. He also examines the impact of COVID-19 on armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints is an invaluable addition to current debates on climate change, environmental stress, and security. Professionals and students will greatly appreciate the wealth of timely data it provides for their own investigations. Dr. Tobias Ide is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. His work broadly focuses on the intersections of environmental change and environmental politics with peace, conflict, and security. Sidney Michelini is a PhD student at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research with the FutureLab - Security, Ethnic Conflicts and Migration. His work focuses on how climate, climate shocks, and climate change impact conflicts of different types. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption (Cornell UP, 2023), Michael T. Friedman observes that as cathedrals represented power relations in medieval towns and skyscrapers epitomized those within industrial cities, sports stadiums exemplify urban American consumption at the turn of the twenty-first century. Grounded in Henri Lefebvre and George Ritzer's spatial theories in their analyses of consumption spaces, Mallparks examines how the designers of this generation of baseball stadiums follow the principles of theme park and shopping mall design to create highly effective and efficient consumption sites. In his exploration of these contemporary cathedrals of sport and consumption, Friedman discusses the history of stadium design, the amenities and aesthetics of stadium spaces, and the intentions and conceptions of architects, team officials, and civic leaders. He grounds his analysis in case studies of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore; Fenway Park in Boston; Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles; Nationals Park in Washington, DC; Target Field in Minneapolis; and Truist Park in Atlanta. Emilio J. Weber is a master’s student in the Physical Cultural Studies research group at the University of Maryland at College Park. He can be reached at ejweber@umd.edu or on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country. In Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Oxford UP, 2021), Mark R. Warren documents how Black and Brown parents, students, and low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built an intersectional movement that spread across the country. Examining organizing processes in Mississippi, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other localities, he shows how relatively small groups of community members built the power to win policy changes to reduce suspensions and expulsions by combining deep local organizing with resources from the national movement. As a result, over the course of twenty years, the movement to combat the school-to-prison pipeline resulted in falling suspension rates across the country and began to make gains in reducing police presence in schools, especially in places where there have been sustained organizing and advocacy efforts. In documenting the struggle organizers waged to build national alliances led by community groups and people most impacted by injustice rather than Washington-based professional advocates, Warren offers a new model for movements that operate simultaneously at local, state and national levels, while primarily oriented to support and spread local organizing. In doing so, he argues for the need to rethink national social justice movements as interconnected local struggles whose victories are lifted and spread, In the end, the book highlights lessons from the school-to-prison pipeline movement for organizers, educators, policymakers and a broader public seeking to transform deep-seated and systemic racism in public schools and the broader society. This episode's host, Laura Kelly, is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital (Duke UP, 2022), César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero chronicles the story of El Materno—Colombia’s oldest maternity and neonatal health center and teaching hospital—over several decades as it faced constant threats of government shutdown. Using team-based and collaborative ethnography to analyze the social life of neoliberal health policy, Abadía-Barrero details the everyday dynamics around teaching, learning, and working in health care before, during, and after privatization. He argues that health care privatization is not only about defunding public hospitals; it also ruins rich traditions of medical care by denying or destroying ways of practicing medicine that challenge Western medicine. Despite radical cuts in funding and a corrupt and malfunctioning privatized system, El Materno’s professors, staff, and students continued to find ways to provide innovative, high-quality, and noncommodified health care. By tracking the violences, conflicts, hopes, and uncertainties that characterized the struggles to keep El Materno open, Abadía-Barrero demonstrates that any study of medical care needs to be embedded in larger political histories. If you are interested in a conversation in Spanish about this book listen to this episode of New Books Network en español Host María Camila Núñez Gómez is a professor interested in social studies on health, diseases, and science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Wandering Games (MIT Press, 2022), Melissa Kagen analyzes wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagen’s account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Atheism in Five Minutes, by Professor Teemu Taira, is part of Equinox Publishing’s “Religion in 5 Minutes” series. It offers insights into a number of commonly held questions about the ideas, practices, and attitudes concerning atheism and atheists. The volume highlights approaches based on the study of religion, sociology, history, anthropology, politics, and psychology. It also examines the implications and assumptions in common questions about atheism. Ideal for both classroom use and personal study, some of the questions asked include: Are atheists immoral? Are children born atheist? Do atheists have rituals? How has atheism related to politics? Why do some atheists remain members of religious groups? Is it difficult to be an atheist in Muslim countries? Do atheist parents have atheist children? Why are there so few black atheists? What are the most atheistic societies? And, has the Internet made atheism more popular?Each chapter is based on the latest research written by a leading scholar in the field. They offer concise and thoughtful answers along with suggestions for further reading. Because each chapter can be read in about five minutes, the books of this series offer ideal supplementary resources in classrooms or an engaging read for those curious about the world around them.Teemu Taira is senior lecturer in the study of religion, University of Helsinki, and Docent (Adjunct Professor) at the Department of Study of Religion, University of Turku, Finland. He researches religion in the media; atheism, secularism and nonreligion; and the discursive study of “religion” as a category. This year he has also published Taking ‘Religion’ Seriously: Essays on the Discursive Study of Religion with Brill, which he has also discussed on the New Books Network recently. Find him on Twitter: @TeemuTaira.For more interviews on the New Books Network from this series, check out Hinduism in Five Minutes and Buddhism in Five Minutes.Carrie Lynn Evans is currently a PhD student of English Literature with Université Laval in Quebec.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Chris McMorran about his new book Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2022).Amid the decline of many of Japan’s rural communities, the hot springs village resort of Kurokawa Onsen is a rare, bright spot. Its two dozen traditional inns, or ryokan, draw nearly a million tourists a year eager to admire its landscape, experience its hospitality, and soak in its hot springs. As a result, these ryokan have enticed village youth to return home to take over successful family businesses and revive the community. Chris McMorran spent nearly two decades researching ryokan in Kurokawa, including a full year of welcoming guests, carrying luggage, scrubbing baths, cleaning rooms, washing dishes, and talking with co-workers and owners about their jobs, relationships, concerns, and aspirations. He presents the realities of ryokan work—celebrated, messy, ignored, exploitative, and liberating—and introduces the people who keep the inns running by making guests feel at home. McMorran explores how Kurokawa’s ryokan mobilize hospitality to create a rural escape from the globalized dimensions of everyday life in urban Japan. Ryokan do this by fusing a romanticized notion of the countryside with an enduring notion of the hospitable woman embodied by nakai, the hired female staff who welcome guests, serve meals, and clean rooms. These women are the face of the ryokan. But hospitality often hides a harsh reality. McMorran found numerous nakai in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who escaped violent or unhappy marriages by finding employment in ryokan. Yet, despite years of experience, nakai remain socially and economically vulnerable. Through this intimate and inventive ethnography of a year in a ryokan, McMorran highlights the importance of both the generational work of ryokan owners and the daily work of their employees, while emphasizing the gulf between them. With its focus on small, family-owned businesses and a mobile, vulnerable workforce, Ryokan makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the Japanese workplace. It also will interest students and scholars in geography, mobility studies, and women’s studies and anyone who has ever stayed at a ryokan and is curious about the work that takes place behind the scenes.John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Along with football and religion, housing is a fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian life: it can make or break marriage proposals, invigorate or slow down the economy, and popularize or embarrass a ruler. Housing is political. Almost every Egyptian ruler over the last eighty years has directly associated himself with at least one large-scale housing project. It is also big business, with Egypt currently the world leader in per capita housing production, building at almost double China’s rate, and creating a housing surplus that counts in the millions of units.Despite this, Egypt has been in the grip of a housing crisis for almost eight decades. From the 1940s onward, officials deployed a number of policies to create adequate housing for the country’s growing population. By the 1970s, housing production had outstripped population growth, but today half of Egypt’s one hundred million people cannot afford a decent home.Egypt's Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space (American U in Cairo Press, 2020) takes presidential speeches, parliamentary reports, legislation, and official statistics as the basis with which to investigate the tools that officials have used to ‘solve’ the housing crisis—rent control, social housing, and amnesties for informal self-building—as well as the inescapable reality of these policies’ outcomes. Yahia Shawkat argues that wars, mass displacement, and rural–urban migration played a part in creating the problem early on, but that neoliberal deregulation, crony capitalism and corruption, and neglectful planning have made things steadily worse ever since. In the final analysis he asks, is affordable housing for all really that hard to achieve?Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Vietnam and Russia share a common socialist history dating back to the Cold War. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Vietnam’s đổi mới reforms, Russia has also become a destination for Vietnamese labour migrants who dream of making their fortune. Working in markets, garment factories, and as small traders – both legally and illegally - they live precarious lives, harassed by police, loan sharks, market bosses, and criminals. While huge profits can be made, these migrants are acutely vulnerable to sudden changes in market conditions and government policy, not to mention the bitter Russian cold. In Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty (Amsterdam UP, 2020), Lan Anh Hoang presents an astonishing account of the struggles of Vietnamese migrants in Russia. The book also raises broader issues: about the global phenomenon of labour migration of unskilled Asian workers; and most poignantly, about how conditions of acute uncertainty and dependence on the market in a foreign land, upset migrants’ normal conceptions of social values and morality. Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty won the 2022 Association of Mainland Southeast Asian Scholars (AMSEAS) prize for best first book. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Henni Alava, postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, on her fascinating new book published by Bloomsbury as part of the New Directions in Anthropology of Christianity book series: Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion (Bloomsbury, 2022). Alava's work sheds critical light on the complex and unstable relationship between Christianity and politics, and peace and war. Drawing on long-running ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda's largest religious communities, Henni Alava maps the tensions and ironies found in the Catholic and Anglican Churches in the wake of war between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. The book describes how churches' responses to the war have been enabled by their embeddedness in local communities. Yet it is also in the churches' embeddedness in structures of historical violence that religious faith nurtures peace liable to compound conflict. At the heart of the book is the Acholi concept of anyobanyoba, translate as 'confusion', which depicts an experienced sense of both ambivalence and uncertainty, a state of mixed-up affairs within community and an essential aspect of politics in a country characterized by the threat of state violence. Foregrounding vulnerability, the book advocates 'confusion' as an epistemological and ethical device, and employs it to meditate on how religious believers, as well as researchers, can cultivate hope amid memories of suffering and on-going violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society. With this book, Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression, and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan. Based on twenty-five years of field research, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent (Stanford UP, 2022) examines protests as they are situated in the built environment, bringing together considerations of networks, spatial imaginaries, space and place-making, and political geographies at local, national, regional, and global scales. Schwedler considers the impact of time and temporality in the lifecycles of individual movements. Through a mixed interpretive methodology, this book illuminates the geographies of power and dissent and the spatial practices of protest and repression, highlighting the political stakes of competing narratives about Jordan's past, present, and future. Ronay Bakan is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Contemporary Sweden is a country with a worldwide progressive reputation, despite an undeniable tradition of racism within its borders. In the face of this contradiction of culture and history, Afro-Swedes have emerged as a vibrant demographic presence, from generations of diasporic movement, migration, and homemaking. In Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Ryan Thomas Skinner uses oral histories, archival research, ethnography, and textual analysis to explore the history and culture of this diverse and growing Afro-European community. Skinner employs the conceptual themes of "remembering" and "renaissance" to illuminate the history and culture of the Afro-Swedish community, drawing on the rich theoretical traditions of the African and Black diaspora. Remembering fosters a sustained meditation on Afro-Swedish social history, while Renaissance indexes a thriving Afro-Swedish public culture. Together, these concepts illuminate significant existential modes of Afro-Swedish being and becoming, invested in and contributing to the work of global Black studies. The first scholarly monograph in English to focus specifically on the African and Black diaspora in Sweden, Afro-Sweden emphasizes the voices, experiences, practices, knowledge, and ideas of these communities. Its rigorously interdisciplinary approach to understanding diasporic communities is essential to contemporary conversations around such issues as the status and identity of racialized populations in Europe and the international impact of Black Lives Matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Eugenia Roussou's book Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The 'Evil Eye' in Greece (Bloomsbury, 2021) thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular religiosity. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the ‘evil eye’ produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality in everyday practice. It contributes to current key debates in social sciences concerning globalization and secularization, religious pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement, gender, power and the body, health, illness, and alternative therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of religion in a multicultural world. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the public to answer difficult questions about their identity by looking to the genome. At a time of intensified interest in issues of race and racism, the burgeoning influence of corporations like AncestryDNA and 23andMe has sparked debates about the commodification of identity, the antiracist potential of genetic science, and the promises and pitfalls of using DNA as a source of "objective" knowledge about the past. Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) engages these debates by looking at the ways genomic ancestry testing has been used in Brazil and the United States to address the histories and legacies of slavery, from personal genealogical projects to collective racial politics. Reckoning with the struggles of science versus capitalism, "race-blind" versus "race-positive" public policies, and identity fluidity versus embodied experiences of racism, Permanent Markers seeks to explain why those of us in societies that have broadly embraced the social construction of race continue to search for, and find, evidence that our bodies are marked permanently by the past. Sarah Abel is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Centre of Latin American Studies. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Known as highly mobile cattle nomads, the Wodaabe in Niger are today increasingly engaged in a transformation process towards a more diversified livelihood based primarily on agro-pastoralism and urban work migration. Space, Place and Identity: The Wodaabe of Niger in the 21st Century (Berghahn Books, 2020) by Florian Köhler examines recent transformations in spatial patterns among the Wodaabe, notably in the context of urban migration and in processes of sedentarization in rural proto-villages. “Space, Place and Identity” analyses the consequences that these recent changes entail for social group formation and collective identification, and how these also impact the integration of the Wodaabe into wider society among the structures of the modern nation state. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This innovative study engages critically with existing conceptualisations of diaspora, arguing that if diaspora is to have analytical purchase, it should illuminate a specific angle of migration or migrancy. To reveal the much-needed transformative potential of the concept, the book looks specifically at how diasporas undertake translation and decolonisation. It offers various conceptual tools for investigating diaspora, with a specific focus on diasporas in the Global North and a detailed empirical study of the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. The book also considers the backlash diasporas of colour have faced in the Global North. Prof. Ipek Demir teaches at the University of Leeds in the UK. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022) offers ways to work with the unthinkable and emotionally unendurable current predicament of humanity. The style and writing interweave passion and reflection, animation and containment, radical hope, and tragedy to reflect the dilemmas of our collective crisis. The authors model a relational approach in their styles of writing and in the book's structure. Four chapters, each with a strikingly original voice and insight, form the core of the book, held either end by two jointly written chapters. In contrast to a psychology that focuses on individual behavior change, the authors use a transdisciplinary mix of approaches (depth psychology and psychotherapy, earth systems, deep ecology, cultural sociology, critical history, group and institutional outreach) to bring into focus the predicament of this period. While the last decade required a focus on climate denial in all its manifestations (which continues in new ways), a turning point has now been reached. Increasingly extreme weather across the world is making it impossible for simple avoidance of the climate threat. Wendy Hollway, Paul Hoggett, Chris Robertson, and Sally Weintrobe address how climate psychology illuminates and engages the life and death challenges that face terrestrial life. This book will appeal to three core groups. First, mental health and social care professionals wanting support in containing and potentially transforming the malaise. Second, activists wanting to participate in new stories and practices that nurture their engagement with the present social and cultural crisis. Third, those concerned about the climate emergency, wanting to understand the deeper context for this dangerous blindness. Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It is widely accepted that London is in the midst of a serious housing crisis, manifested most obviously in city's soaring rents. While the causes of this crisis are manifold, many people have come to argue that the diminished role of public housing, which includes council estates, is a major contributing factor. Yet the bitter irony is that, at a time of such massive housing shortages, London's council estates are disappearing from the city's skyline in the name of renewal and regeneration. In Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London (Policy Press, 2021), Watt provides a systematic policy and sociological account of the transformation of council housing in London over the last three decades, drawing on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and statistical and documentary analysis undertaken in several London boroughs. The book explores what this dramatic shift in housing implies for ever-widening inequality in London's distribution of wealth. Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit her website or follow Anna on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. While religious institutions sponsor a number of these initiatives, many are implemented within the secular framework of global health. In Where They Need Me: Local Clinicians and the Workings of Global Health in Haiti (Cornell UP, 2022), Pierre Minn illustrates the divergent criteria that actors involved in global health use to evaluate interventions' efficacy through examining the work of Haitian health professionals in humanitarian aid encounters. Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrative staff are hired to carry out these global health programs, distribute or withhold resources, and produce accounts of interventions' outcomes. In their roles as intermediaries, Haitian clinicians are expected not only to embody the humanitarian projects of foreign funders and care for their impoverished patients but also to act as sources of support for their own kin networks, while negotiating their future prospects in a climate of pronounced scarcity and insecurity. Minn argues that a serious consideration of these local health care providers in the context of global health is essential to counter simplistic depictions of clinicians and patients as heroes, villains, or victims as well as to move beyond the donor-recipient dyad that has dominated theoretical work on humanitarianism and the gift. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the twenty-first century, American culture is experiencing a profound shift toward pluralism and secularization. In Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them (Lexington Books, 2021), Kate Christina Moore Koppy argues that the increasing popularity and presence of fairy tales within American culture is both indicative of and contributing to this shift. By analyzing contemporary fairy tale texts as both new versions in a particular tale type and as wholly new fairy-tale pastiches, Koppy shows that fairy tales have become a key part of American secular scripture, a corpus of shared stories that work to maintain a sense of community among diverse audiences in the United States, as much as biblical scripture and associated texts used to. In this interview with New Books Network, author Kate Koppy and host Carmen Gomez-Galisteo talk about Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them and how they are relevant in today’s society, despite some parents’ and educators’ misgivings that they may instill traditional, outdated values into children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (U Minnesota Press, 2022) insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words. Queer Silence begins by historicizing silence’s negative reputation, beginning with the ways homophile activists rejected medical models pathologizing homosexuality as a disability, resulting in the silencing of disability itself. This silencing was redoubled by HIV/AIDS activism’s demand for “out, loud, and proud” rhetorical activities that saw silence as capitulation. Reading a range of cultural artifacts whose relative silence has failed to attract queer attachment, from anonymous profiles on Grindr to ex-gays to belated gender transitions to disability performance art, Dr. Smilges argues for silence’s critical role in serving the needs of queers who are never named as such. Queer Silence urges queer activists and queer studies scholars to reconcile with their own ableism by acknowledging the liberatory potential of silence, a mode of engagement that disattached queers use every day for resistance, sociality, and survival. J. Logan Smilges is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (Duke UP, 2022), Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a category to hold the myriad ways that people who may or may not have undergone gender-affirmative interventions depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as white: just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus. Marquis Bey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University and author of several books, most recently Black Trans Feminism, also published by Duke University Press. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh (Cornell UP, 2021), Kasia Paprocki challenges two well-worn assumptions about climate change and its relationship with the political economy of development and agriculture, in Bangladesh, which helps shed light on how climate change becomes a politically contested category, in countries across the Global South. The first, is that climate change is simply a contemporary phenomenon without a longer history embedded in the ecology, economics, politics, and social relations in the region. Second, that climate change is the driver of the increased vulnerability of large swaths of the Bangladeshi population, like the community she closely follows in Khulna, in the southwestern part of the country. Through fine-grained ethnographic and archival detail, Paprocki engages with developers, policy makers, scientists, farmers, and rural migrants to show how Bangladeshi and global elites ignore the history of landscape transformation and its attendant conflicts in advancing certain ‘climate adaptation’ agendas, which have dire consequences for the most marginalized. She looks at how groups craft economic narratives and strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities. Although these groups claim that increased production of export commodities will reframe the threat of climate change into an opportunity for economic development and growth, the reality is not so simple. For the country's rural poor, these promises ring hollow. As development dispossesses the poor from agrarian livelihoods, outmigration from peasant communities leads to precarious existences in urban centers. And a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable is not one the land and its people can sustain. Threatening Dystopias shows how a powerful rural movement, although hampered by an all-consuming climate emergency, is seeking climate justice in Bangladesh. Archit Guha is a PhD researcher at the Duke University History Department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us; the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs down our spine at the mere thought of him or her. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is virtually silent on the no less mysterious moments when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, or when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours before. In The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations (Polity Press, 2021), Eva Illouz documents the multifarious ways in which relationships end. She argues that if modern love was once marked by the freedom to enter sexual and emotional bonds according to one's will and choice, contemporary love has now become characterized by practices of non-choice, the freedom to withdraw from relationships. Illouz dubs this process by which relationships fade, evaporate, dissolve, and break down "unloving." While sociology has classically focused on the formation of social bonds, The End of Love makes a powerful case for studying why and how social bonds collapse and dissolve. Particularly striking is the role that capitalism plays in practices of non-choice and "unloving." The unmaking of social bonds, she argues, is connected to contemporary capitalism that is characterised by practices of non-commitment and non-choice, practices that enable the quick withdrawal from a transaction and the quick realignment of prices and the breaking of loyalties. Unloving and non-choice have in turn a profound impact on society and economics as they explain why people may be having fewer children, increasingly living alone, and having less sex. The End of Love presents a profound and original analysis of the effects of capitalism and consumer culture on personal relationships and of what the dissolution of personal relationships means for capitalism. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In When Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City (Routledge, 2019), Rhonda Levine provides a 15-year ethnography that follows the lives of individual, low-income African American youth from the beginning of high school into their early adult years. Levine shows how their interaction and experience with multiple institutions (family, school, community) and individuals (parents, friends, teachers, coaches, strangers) shape their hopes, fears, aspirations, and worldviews. Levine explores the volatility and constraints underlying their decision-making and behaviors. Rhonda Levine is Professor of Sociology, Emerita, at Colgate University, USA. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses have offered us a unique opportunity--a chance to see authors and editors in conversation with each other and themselves about the state and nature of Genocide Studies. Genocide: Key Themes (Oxford University Press, 2022) emerged out of an effort to update and slim down their earlier, larger volume The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. In the just more than a decade between the two, the field has pushed forward in a variety of directions. Moses and Bloxham have used this opportunity to create a volume that interrogates both the field itself and the state of its emergence. Some of the chapters are revisions of essays originally written for the Handbook, allowing the authors to expand, reframe or even withdraw their original ideas. Others are commissioned for this volume and reflect the new directions taken over the past decade. It's a distinctive and compelling contribution to the field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Fandom, the Next Generation (University of Iowa Press, 2022), Bridget Kies and Megan Connor have edited the first collection to offer a close study of fan generations, which are defined not only by fans’ ages, but by their entry point into a canon or via their personal politics. Divided into three parts--Reboots, Revivals, and Nostalgia; Generations of Enduring Fandoms; and Generation Tensions--contributors further the conversation about how generational fandom is influenced by and, in turn, influences technologies, industry practices, and social and political changes. As reboot culture continues, as franchises continue expanding over time, and as new technologies enable easier access to older media, Fandom, the Next Generation offers a necessary investigation into transgenerational fandoms and intergenerational fan relationships. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (UNC Press, 2022), Psyche A. Williams-Forson offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated. What is at stake is nothing less than whether Americans can learn to embrace nonracist understandings and practices in relation to food. Starkly exposing the rampant shaming and policing around how Black people eat, Williams-Forson contemplates food's role in cultural transmission, belonging, homemaking, and survival. Black people's relationships to food have historically been connected to extreme forms of control and scarcity--as well as to stunning creativity and ingenuity. In advancing dialogue about eating and race, this book urges us to think and talk about food in new ways in order to improve American society on both personal and structural levels. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2022), Sarah Dauncey offers the first comprehensive exploration of disability and citizenship in Chinese society and culture from 1949 to the present. Through the analysis of a wide variety of Chinese sources, from film and documentary to literature and life writing, media and state documents, she sheds important new light on the ways in which disability and disabled identities have been represented and negotiated over this time. She exposes the standards against which disabled people have been held as the Chinese state has grappled with expectations of what makes the 'ideal' Chinese citizen. From this, she proposes an exciting new theoretical framework for understanding disabled citizenship in different societies - 'para-citizenship'. A far more dynamic relationship of identity and belonging than previously imagined, her new reading synthesises the often troubling contradictions of citizenship for disabled people - the perils of bodily and mental difference and the potential for personal and group empowerment. Professor Sarah Dauncey is a China specialist with 30 years' experience in visiting and studying China. She joined the School of Sociology and Social Policy in 2016 at the University of Nottingham, having previously served as Deputy Head and Director of Teaching at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford UP, 2020), Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019--the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Her research highlights one of the ways in which modern authoritarians conceal their actions in order to maintain their popularity among ordinary citizens, a theme also explored in my earlier interview with Daniel Treisman about his book Spin Dictators. Author Lynette Ong is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, with a joint appointment at the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy’s Asian Institute. Her other books are The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions Between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in Contentious Politics, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012), She has published research articles in Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Comparative Politics, China Quarterly, China Journal, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and other prominent journals. Here research has also been covered in the Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the South China Morning Post. Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China and he is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR) and USF’s new Center on Business Studies and Innovation in the Asia-Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What if family were not the only place you might hope to feel safe, loved, cared for and accepted? What if we could do better than the family? We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family. Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition. Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022) traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after. Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia, teaching courses for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her first book was Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, Boston Review, n+1, the London Review of Books and Salvage. Sophie studied English, Politics, Environment and Geography at Oxford, the New School, and Manchester University, and is now an unpaid visiting scholar at the Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Oana Uiorean is a Romanian writer and translator. She writes and thinks about communism and feminism while raising children and organising women’s strikes. She curates the book series Bread&Roses on feminist theory and practice for the publisher frACTalia. Her debut novel is Aporia.Dezbărații (frACTalia, 2019). A pamphlet on socialist revolutionary feminism is forthcoming, as well as a book for our comrades the children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the mid-20th century, British anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner studied the Ndembu people of present-day Zambia. They wrote about their findings in their 1967 book The Forest of Symbols. The Turners were interested in rituals and focused their studies on Ndembu rites of passage because they wanted to understand the role of symbols in societies. And through the study of one culture, the Turners helped change the way anthropologists and other scholars understand humans everywhere. Matthew Engelke is a professor of religion at Columbia University. He is the author of A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church, God’s Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England, and Think Like an Anthropologist. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Can we make the finance industry fair? In Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn’t Fair and Diversity Doesn’t Work (Bristol UP, 2022), Louise Ashley, Associate Professor and IHSS Fellow at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Business and Management, explores the history and practice of social mobility into one of Britain’s key professions. The book offers a history of the City and its evolution from a closed world of gentlemen to a seemingly open meritocracy. At the same time, the book destroys the myth of merit, demonstrating how where people went to school, the place they did a degree, who they know, and how they present themselves still determine who is a success. Offering a critique of the City’s superficial attempts to increase its class, race, and gender diversity, the book is essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone wishing to understand how inequalities continue in contemporary society. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
While the world's oceans cover more than seventy percent of its surface, the sea has largely vanished as an object of enquiry in International Relations (IR), being treated either as a corollary of land or as time. Yet, the sea is the quintessential international space, and its importance to global politics has become all the more obvious in recent years. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from IR, Historical Sociology, Blue Humanities and Critical Ocean Studies, The Sea and International Relations (Manchester University Press, 2022), edited by Dr. Benjamin de Carvalho and Dr. Halvard Leira breaks with this trend of oceanic amnesia, and kickstarts a theoretical, conceptual and empirical discussion about the sea and IR, by highlighting theoretical puzzles, analysing broad historical perspectives and addressing contemporary challenges. In bringing the sea back into IR, the book reconceptualises the canvas of international relations to include the oceans as a social, political, economic and military space which affects the workings of world politics. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Alongside rapid socio-economic development, China has achieved remarkable gains in gender equality on metrics like health, education, and labor force participation. Yet, the glass ceiling phenomenon and the underrepresentation of women in management has worsened. Sisi Sung's The Economics of Gender in China (Routledge, 2022) develops a cross-disciplinary paradigm, with economics at its core, to better understand gender in China and women in management in the Chinese business context. In addition to its theoretical advancements, The Economics of Gender in China uses in-depth interviews with managers in China’s largest enterprises to form rich qualitative insights on women’s managerial experiences and career choices. The book also focuses on the enduring power of stereotypes that specify women’s roles in the family, organization, and society. The book's multi-disciplinary approach allows readers across disciplines with an interest in gender studies to find it useful as an introductory reference. Sisi Sung is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany, and a research fellow at Tsinghua University, China. This interview was conducted by Kelsi Caywood, a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Michigan, who researches comparative gender inequality in the United States and East Asia. Kelsi Caywood is a PhD Student in Sociology at the University of Michigan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Mark D. Calder's Bethlehem's Syriac Christians: Self, Nation and Church in Dialogue and Practice (Gorgias Press, 2017) is anthropological study of Syriac Orthodox Christian identity in a time of displacement, upheaval, and conflict. For some Syriac Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem, their self-articulation - the means by which they connect themselves to others, things, places and symbols - is decisively influenced by their eucharistic ritual. This ritual connects being siryāni to a redeemed community or 'body', and derives its identity in large part from the Incarnation of God as an Aramaic-speaking Bethlehemite. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Seattle has a reputation as a city of Progressive values, but as Megan Asaka argues in Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City (U Washington Press, 2022), that image had to be built on bulldozed neighborhoods of migrant workers. Asaka argues it was these individuals, from Japan, Europe, and Indigenous to the Puget Sound, who worked in the extractive industries that built Seattle, and whose presence was threatening to elites who wished for Seattle to reflect their own genteel visions of America's future. In the twenty first century, evidence of these workers lives and neighborhoods is hard to find in the city's urban geography, and Asaka's work excavates what has been a purposefully hidden history of Seattle's complex founding. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India (MIT Press, 2022), written by Janaki Srinivasan and published by MIT Press in October 2022, examines how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender, and the implications of this for development. Information, says Srinivasan, has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice. In this study, she examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation. She presents three cases in India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in information kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—to explore three uses of information to support goals of social change. Countering claims that information is naturally and universally empowering, Srinivasan shows how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender. Srinivasan draws on archival and ethnographic research to challenge the idea of information as objective and factual. Using the concept of an “information order,” she examines how the meaning and value of information reflect the social relations in which it is embedded. She asks why casting information as a tool of development and solution to poverty appeals to actors across the political spectrum. She also shows how the power to label some things information and others not is at least as significant as the capacity to subsequently produce, access, and leverage information. The more faith we place in what information can do, she cautions, the less attention we pay to its political lives and to the role of specific social structures, individual agency, and material form in the defining, production, and use of that information. Janaki Srinivasan is Associate Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, in Bangalore, India. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do transnational Filipino families remain connected through mobile media technologies? In (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media (Oxford UP, 2022), Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto explains the different ways in which smartphones, messaging apps, and social media facilitate transnational connectivity. He explains how relationships of care, intimacy, and connection to the homeland are established through digital routines shaped by power relations and familial expectations. Aside from providing an overview of the book’s key themes, the podcast goes deep into the methodological complexities of documenting intimate lives through mobile phone technologies as well as the ethical challenges of writing intimate portraits of Filipinos’ everyday lives.Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto is a lecturer at Deakin University in Australia. Like this interview? You may also be interested in:
Elizaveta Friesem, Media is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Flame (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)
Zoetanya Sujon, The Social Media Age (SAGE, 2021).
Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do authoritarian political leaders use the built environment to shape understandings of national identity and history? How do major urban development projects affect the political fortunes of authoritarian governments? Why do so many people routinely experience social control and the threat of violence in nominally democratic regimes? These are some of the questions that the contributors to the new edited volume Spatializing Authoritarianism (Syracuse UP, 2022) hope to answer. My guest today, the volume’s editor Natalie Koch, will discuss what geographers can contribute to the study of authoritarianism. Natalie Koch is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. Her previous works include a solo-authored book, The Geopolitics of Spectacle: Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia (Cornell UP, 2018) and articles on a range of topics related to nationalism and nation-building, the politics of natural resources, urban politics, and the geopolitics of Central Asia and the Middle East. She is currently a visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Geoffrey Gordon is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @geofflgordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Is Marx relevant today, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe? Is Marx’s political theory compatible with individual rights? You will be surprised to learn that the answers are yes and yes. Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) offers a theoretical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s new materialist understanding of justice, legality, and rights through the vantage point of his widely invoked but generally misunderstood critique of liberalism. Igor Shoikhedbrod begins his book by reconstructing Marx’s conception of justice and rights through close textual interpretation and extrapolation. The central thesis of the book is, firstly, that Marx regards justice as an essential feature of any society, including the emancipated society of the future; and secondly, that standards of justice and right undergo transformation throughout history. In our discussion, the author tracks the enduring legacy of Marx’s critique of liberal justice by examining how Marx still speaks to our time. The Marx that emerges from this book is therefore a thoroughly modern thinker whose insights shed valuable light on some of the most pressing challenges confronting liberal democracies today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary - is it genocide or not? - a situation often influenced by powerful political pressures.
Genocide addresses these tensions and tests the limits of the concept in cases ranging from the role of sexual violence during the Holocaust to state-induced mass starvation in Kazakh and Ukrainian history, while considering what the Armenian, Rwandan, and Burundi experiences reveal about the uses and pitfalls of reading history and conducting politics through the lens of genocide. Contributors examine the pressures that great powers have exerted in shaping the concept; the reaction Raphaël Lemkin, originator of the word “genocide,” had to the United Nations’ final resolution on the subject; France’s long-held choice not to use the concept of genocide in its courtrooms; the role of transformative social projects and use of genocide memory in politics; and the relation of genocide to mass violence targeting specific groups.
Throughout, Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn edited volume Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) offers innovative solutions to address the limitations of the genocide concept, while preserving its usefulness as an analytical framework. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Adam Crowley's book Representations of Poverty in Videogames (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) argues that digital games address contemporary, middle-class anxieties about poverty in the United States. The early chapters consider gaming as a modern form of slumming and explore the ways in which titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and World of Warcraft thematize poverty. The argument turns to the field of literary studies to identify analytical frameworks for addressing and understanding these themes. Throughout, the book considers how the academic area of inquiry known as game studies has developed over time, and makes use of such scholarship to present, frame, and value its major claims and findings. In its conclusion, the book models how poverty themes might be identified and associated for the purpose of gaining greater insights into how games can shape, and also be shaped by, the player’s economic expectations. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their identities. In Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan (U Chicago Press, 2022), ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig shows how rap music has become a powerful tool in the post-authoritarian period for both exploring and producing new knowledge about the ethnic, cultural, and political history of Taiwan. Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, taking readers to concert venues, music video sets, scenes of protest, and more to show how early MCs from marginalized ethnic groups infused rap with important aspects of their own local languages, music, and narrative traditions. Aiming their critiques at the educational system and a neoliberal economy, new generations of rappers have used the art form to nurture associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship, making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present. Meredith Schweig is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Emory. Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular musics of East Asia, with a particular emphasis on narrative, gender, and cultural politics in post-authoritarian Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Rage and Carnage in the Name of God (Duke University Press, 2022), Dr. Abiodun Alao examines the emergence of a culture of religious violence in postindependence Nigeria, where Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions have all been associated with violence. He investigates the root causes and historical evolution of Nigeria’s religious violence, locating it in the forced coming together of disparate ethnic groups under colonial rule, which planted the seeds of discord that religion, elites, and domestic politics exploit. Dr. Alao discusses the histories of Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions in the territory that became Nigeria, the effects of colonization on the role of religion, the development of Islamic radicalization and its relation to Christian violence, the activities of Boko Haram, and how religious violence intermixes with politics and governance. In so doing, he uses religious violence as a way to more fully understand intergroup relations in contemporary Nigeria. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Lessons in resilience in the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India. Focusing on the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India between April and December 2021, Rustom Bharucha's timely essay reflects on four interconnected realities that haunted this ongoing crisis--death, grief, mourning, and extinction. How do we cope with multiple deaths and the dislocation of rituals when the act of mourning is either postponed or denied? What roles do political surveillance, censorship, the regulation of lockdowns, and the sheer indifference to the lives of people play in the containment of civil liberties? Through vivid examples of photography, theater, dance, visual arts, and the cultures of everyday life, this meditative essay illuminates both the horror of the pandemic as well as its unexpected intimacies and revelations of shared suffering. Against the destruction of nature and the disrespect for the nonhuman, The Second Wave: Reflections on the Pandemic Through Photography, Performance, and Public Culture (Seagull Books, 2022) offers lessons in resilience through its reflections on the ethos of waiting and the need to re-envision breath as a vital resource of self-renewal and resistance. Garima Jaju is a Smuts fellow at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Image by image and hashtag by hashtag, Instagram has redefined the ways we relate to food. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish’s edited book Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (published by the University of Illinois Press in 2022) explore the massively popular social media platform as a space for self-identification, influence, transformation, and resistance. Artists and journalists join a wide range of scholars to look at food’s connection to Instagram from vantage points as diverse as Hong Kong’s camera-centric foodie culture, the platform’s long history with feminist eateries, and the photography of Australia’s livestock producers. What emerges is a portrait of an arena where people do more than build identities and influence. Users negotiate cultural, social, and economic practices in a place that, for all its democratic potential, reinforces entrenched dynamics of power. Interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope, Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation offers general readers and experts alike new perspectives on an important social media space and its impact on a fundamental area of our lives. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans— and more than 300,000 Vietnamese—involved in the conflict are still unaccounted for. In What Remains: Bringing America's Missing Home from the Vietnam War (Harvard UP, 2019), Sarah E. Wagner tells the stories of America’s missing service members and the families and communities that continue to search for them. From the scientists who work to identify the dead using bits of bone unearthed in Vietnamese jungles to the relatives who press government officials to find the remains of their loved ones, Wagner introduces us to the men and women who seek to bring the missing back home. Through their experiences she examines the ongoing toll of America’s most fraught war. Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace—a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones’ sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation. Sarah Wagner is Professor of Anthropology at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University. Professor Wagner is a social anthropologist whose research explores loss through the lens of war, memory, prolonged mourning, and uncertain death. Studying forensic responses to missing persons, she has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Bosnia and Herzegovina and with the US military, including in Vietnam, in its attempts to account for the Missing In Action (MIA) from the past century's conflicts. Since 2020, she has focused on COVID-19 death and remembrance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Richard Petts' Father Involvement and Gender Equality in the United States: Contemporary Norms and Barriers (Routledge, 2022) focuses on issues of family, work, and gender, with a focus on gender inequality. Women are disadvantaged in both paid and domestic work, due in large part to being primarily responsible for duties within the domestic sphere. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these inequalities, making the issue of reducing gender inequality even more pressing. Fathers play an important role in contributing to, and perhaps reducing, gender inequality, but barriers to their involvement in family life have received less attention than detailing challenges that mothers face. If men were equally involved in all aspects of domestic life (i.e., were fully engaged dads), women's burdens would be reduced and perceptions of who is responsible for parenting may change, resulting in greater gender equality. The book focuses on the key issue of father involvement, seeking to understand why fathers are less involved at home than mothers despite an increased desire for fathers to be more engaged parents. This book utilizes recent national survey data, interviews with fathers, and insights from the author's personal experience as a father to identify current norms of fatherhood within the United States, barriers to father involvement, and strategies to overcome these barriers. Overall, this book argues that by establishing the expectation that fathers will be fully engaged dads as a cultural norm, and by providing structural opportunities for fathers to meet this cultural standard, greater gender equality can be achieved within the United States. The arguments presented in this book are valuable for scholars in the areas of family, work, and gender, policymakers and business leaders who seek to promote gender equality and work-family balance, and parents who are interested in achieving a more egalitarian division of labor within their own families. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
America’s Greatest Generation (born before 1945) witnessed incredible changes in technology and social progress. From simple improvements in entertainment to life-changing medical advances, technology changed the way they live, work, and identify. Sadly, with each passing year, fewer members of the Greatest Generation remain alive to share their wisdom as the last Americans to grow up before the digital revolution. In 2015, Millennial author and cultural anthropologist Veronica Kirin drove 12,000 miles across more than 40 states to interview the last living members of the Greatest Generation. Stories of Elders is the result of her years of work to capture and share their perspective for generations to come. Stories of Elders: What the Greatest Generation Knows about Technology that You Don't (2018) preserves the wisdom, thoughts, humor, knowledge, and advice of the people who make up one of America’s finest generations, including the Silent Generation. Their stories include the devastation that came from major events in U.S. history like World War I, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and World War II. The Greatest Generation (many of whom are now centenarians) saw the routine use of airplanes, cars, microwave ovens, telephones, radios, electricity, and the Internet come to fruition in their lifetimes. Their childhoods were simple, relying on outdoor games and imagination for fun. How they went to school, pursued their careers, and raised their kids was radically different than the way we live today. By chronicling more than 8,000 years of life lived during the most transitional time in American history, Stories of Elders offers old-fashioned wisdom and insight for America’s future generations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The census isn't just a data-collection process; it's a ritual, and a tool, of American democracy. Behind every neat grid of numbers is a collage of messy, human stories--you just have to know how to read them. In Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them (MCD, 2022), the data historian Dan Bouk examines the 1940 U.S. census, uncovering what those numbers both condense and cleverly abstract: a universe of meaning and uncertainty, of cultural negotiation and political struggle. He introduces us to the men and women employed as census takers, bringing us with them as they go door to door, recording the lives of their neighbors. He takes us into the makeshift halls of the Census Bureau, where hundreds of civil servants, not to mention machines, labored with pencil and paper to divide and conquer the nation's data. And he uses these little points to paint bigger pictures, such as of the ruling hand of white supremacy, the place of queer people in straight systems, and the struggle of ordinary people to be seen by the state as they see themselves. The 1940 census is a crucial entry in American history, a controversial dataset that enabled the creation of New Deal era social programs, but that also, with the advent of World War Two, would be weaponized against many of the citizens whom it was supposed to serve. In our age of quantification, Democracy's Data not only teaches us how to read between the lines but gives us a new perspective on the relationship between representation, identity, and governance today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Which rules do we obey and which ones can we find a way around? What distinctions can be drawn between rules, models to be emulated and algorithms. Lorraine Daston has published widely on the history of science, probability, scientific objectivity and observation, and many other such matters, and she has now published Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton UP, 2022). Listen to her discussion with Owen Bennett Jones about rules. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do women balance feminist identities whilst being science fiction fans? In Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the “Good” Fan (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Neta Yodovich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa’s department of Sociology, explores the lived experience of feminist women who are sci-fi fans. The book shows their commitments to being both feminists and part of the sci-fi community, even where they face hostility and gatekeeping, personal ambivalences, and the reality of sci-fi as a problematic genre. Adopting an intersectional perspective, the book shows how race, age, and gender all play a role in the way feminist women interpret some of the biggest sci-fi franchises, as well as how they think about iconic characters. Crucially the analysis foregrounds the agency of feminist women sci-fi fans, demonstrating how they are challenging and changing the genre and its fan community for the better. Theoretically and empirically rich and deep, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in fandom! Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Borderline personality disorder is no longer a secret. Many people who are not therapists know what it is and see it as a fitting description for their personal experience. But what does it mean for someone to be “borderline”? Is it something one is or that one has? Perhaps most importantly, where does it come from? The prevailing view in psychological circles has long been that it stems from traumatic experiences and problematic internal psychological patterns. But is it possible that society actually makes certain people “borderline?” These and other questions are taken up in my interview with Željka Matijašević, author of the new book The Borderline Culture: Intensity, Jouissance, and Death (2021, Rowman & Littlefield). She advances a compelling argument that perhaps our fast-paced, capitalist society bears some responsibility for the creation of borderline states, with its proclivity towards intensity and promotion of insatiable consumption, both features with striking resemblance to borderline states. This interview is for anyone wanting to better understand the borderline phenomenon. Željka Matijašević is full professor of comparative literature at the Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She holds and MPhil and Ph.D. in psychoanalytic studies from the University of Cambridge, UK. Her prior books include Lacan: The Persistence of the Dialectics (2005); Structuring the Unconscious: Freud and Lacan (2006); An Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Oedipus, Hamlet, Jekyll/Hyde (2011); The Century of the Fragile Self: Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society (2016); and Drama, Drama (2020). She is a member of La Fondation Européenne pour la Psychoanalyse and the Croatian Writers’ Society. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity (Routledge, 2021), June Carolyn Erlick explores the relationship between natural disasters and civil society, immigration and diaspora communities and the long-term impact on emotional health. Natural disasters shape history and society and, in turn, their long-range impact is determined by history and society. This is especially true in Latin America and the Caribbean, where climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of these extreme events. Ranging from pre-Columbian flooding in the Andes to the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, this book focuses on long-range recovery and recuperation, rather than short-term disaster relief. Written in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, the author shows how lessons learned about civil society, governance, climate change, inequality and trauma from natural disasters have their echoes in the challenges of today’s uncertain world. June Carolyn Erlick is the Editor-in-Chief of ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America and Publications Director at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She is the author of five books, including Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context (Routledge, 2018), Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced, the Irma Flaquer Story (Seal Press, 2004) and A Gringa in Bogotá: Living Colombia's Invisible War (University of Texas Press, 2010). She teaches journalism at Harvard Extension and Summer Schools and coordinates the journalism capstone and internship programs there. Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It’s easy to forget that the cultural archetypes that pass for queerness today have historical roots. Some of these roots are mere years away from today’s reality but they are nonetheless distinct and come with their own artefacts and subcultures. Peter Rehberg’s book Hipster Porn: Queer Masculinities and Affective Sexualities in the Fanzine 'Butt' (Routledge, 2022) looks at one such source artefact and its fandom, using as its matter the pink-papered magazine Butt which gained a cult following among European gay men in the first decade of the 2000s. The book reconstructs an important chapter of recent gay and queer history in order to make sense of the cultural shifts of the last 20 years in the contemporary gay world. Peter Rehberg speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about pornography after porn, Butt‘s outsized influence and the ultimate failures of its politics, as well as queer theory’s urgent need to refocus on the realities of sex and sexuality. Peter Rehberg is a writer, critic, and curator. He holds a PhD in German Literature from New York University and has taught and researched at universities and institutes including Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, University of Bonn, The University of Texas at Austin, and The University of Illinois, Chicago. He has published two novels and a collection of short stories. He also writes regularly for German media. In his academic work, he focusses on queer theory, queer visual culture, and popular culture. He is also the head of collections and archives at Schwules Museum, Berlin. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Focusing on the memory of the German Democratic Republic, Towards a Collaborative Memory: German Memory Work in a Transnational Context (Berghahn Books, 2022) explores the cross-border collaborations of three German institutions. Using an innovative theoretical and methodological framework, drawing on relational sociology, network analysis and narrative, the study breaks out of the epistemic coloniality that has underpinned global partnerships across European actors and institutions. Sara Jones reconceptualizes transnational memory towards an approach that is collaborative not only in its practices, but also in its ethics, and shows how these institutions position themselves within dominant relationship cultures reflected between East and West, and North and South. Nicole Coleman is Associate Professor of German at Wayne State University. She tweets @drnicoleman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma (Duke UP, 2022), Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, and families who experience and care for traumatic injuries due to widespread traffic accidents. He traces trauma’s moves after the accident: from scenes of road and railway injuries to ambulance interiors; through emergency triage, surgery, and intensive care; and from the morgue for patients who do not survive into the homes of those who do. These pathways reveal how trauma shifts inequalities, infrastructures, and institutions through the lives and labors of clinical spaces. Solomon contends that medicine itself must be understood in terms of lifelines: patterns of embodied movement that determine survival. In reflecting on the centrality of traffic to life, Lifelines explores a fundamental question: How does medicine move us? This book is available open access. Please follow this link to access this book free completely of cost. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In urban and peri-urban areas across the Global South, politicians, planners and developers are engaged in a voracious scramble to refashion land for global real estate investment and transfer state power to private sector actors. Much of this development has taken place on the outskirts of the traditional metropoles, in the territorially flexible urban frontier. At the forefront of these processes in India, is Gurgaon, a privately developed metropolis on the south-western hinterlands of New Delhi, that has long been touted as India's flagship neoliberal city. Thomas G. Cowan's book Subaltern Frontiers: Property and Labour in the Neoliberal Indian City (Cambridge UP, 2022) tells a story of India's remarkable urban transformation by examining the politics of land and labour that have shaped the city of Gurgaon. The book examines how the country's flagship post-liberalisation urban project has been shaped and filtered through agrarian and subaltern histories, logics, and subjects. In doing so, the book explores how the production of globalised property and labour in contemporary urban India is filtered through colonial instruments of land governance, living histories of uneven agrarian development, material geographies of labour migration, and the worldly aspirations of peasant-agriculturalists. Garima Jaju is currently a post-doc at Cambridge University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why is our society so unequal? Why, despite their small numbers, do the rich dominate policy and politics even in democratic countries? Why is it so difficult for working people to organize around common interests? How do we begin to build a more equal and democratic society? In Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It (Verso, 2022), Vivek Chibber provides a clear and accessible map of how capitalism works, how it limits the power of working and oppressed people, and how to overcome those limits. The capitalist economy generates incredible wealth but also injustice. Those who own the factories, hotels, and farms always have an advantage over the people who rely on that ownership class for their livelihoods. This inequality in power and income is reflected in the operation of the state, where capitalists are able to exert their will even under relatively democratic conditions. The most important reason is that states depend on the employment and profits from capitalist enterprise for both finances and legitimacy. Every meaningful victory for working people has been won through collective struggle but collective action is very difficult to coordinate. In the final section of the book, Chibber walks the reader through some of the historical attempts to build socialism and presents a vision of how we might, perhaps against the odds, build a socialist future.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Judicial debates on the regulation of religion in post-colonial India have been characterised by the inability of courts to identify religion as a governable phenomenon. Geetanjali Srikantan's book Identifying and Regulating Religion in India: Law, History and the Place of Worship (Cambridge UP, 2020) investigates the identification and regulation of religion through an intellectual history of law's creation of religion from the colonial to the post-colonial. Moving beyond conventional explanations on the failure of secularism and the secular state, it argues that the impasse in the legal regulation of religion lies in the methodologies and frameworks used by British colonial administrators in identifying and governing religion. Drawing on insights from post-colonial theory and religious studies, it demonstrates the role of secular legal reasoning in the background of Western intellectual history and Christian theology through an illustration of the place of worship. It is a contribution to South Asian legal history and sociolegal studies analysing court archives, colonial narratives and legislative documents. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Doomsday prophets of technology predict that robots will take over the world, leaving humans behind in the dust. Tech industry boosters think replacing people with software might make the world a better place--while tech industry critics warn darkly about surveillance capitalism. Despite their differing views of the future, they all agree: machines will soon do everything better than humans. In How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms (MIT Press, 2022), Gerd Gigerenzer shows why that's not true, and tells us how we can stay in charge in a world populated by algorithms. Machines powered by artificial intelligence are good at some things (playing chess), but not others (life-and-death decisions, or anything involving uncertainty). Gigerenzer explains why algorithms often fail at finding us romantic partners (love is not chess), why self-driving cars fall prey to the Russian Tank Fallacy, and how judges and police rely increasingly on nontransparent "black box" algorithms to predict whether a criminal defendant will reoffend or show up in court. He invokes Black Mirror, considers the privacy paradox (people want privacy, but give their data away), and explains that social media get us hooked by programming intermittent reinforcement in the form of the "like" button. We shouldn't trust smart technology unconditionally, Gigerenzer tells us, but we shouldn't fear it unthinkingly, either. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Gurpinder Singh Lalli's book Schools, Space and Culinary Capital (Routledge, 2022) introduces the notion of culinary capital to investigate socialisation and school mealtime experiences in an academy school based in the UK. Drawing on interviews collated from children, teachers and staff within the school, the text sheds light on food insecurity in society and schools as being a major issue in educational policy. The book examines schools as a microcosm for society with school food space being the playground for socialisation. It shows how forms of culinary capital can be extended in the school dining hall where social space is negotiated with notions of inclusion and exclusion during mealtime. The book uses gender, class and race to understand the school dining hall as a space where culinary capital can be exchanged and learnt. Thorough research accompanied by ethnographic visuals, field notes and observations, it also explores the sensory impact of school gardens. As such the book will be of interest to students, teachers, school leaders, educators and policy makers in the fields of Education, Sociology, Social Policy and Food Studies. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Richard Reeves about his important new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings Institution, 2022). The statistics are stunning. Men have a 9% lower graduation rate from college. One in three men without a completed high school education are now out of the workforce. About 40% of births take place outside of marriage (up from 11% in 1970). And men are 50% more likely to die from Covid-19 than women after contracting the virus. The long and short of it, while also advocating for full, real opportunities for women, short shrift is often being given to the problems men face. Neither ignoring the problem (the liberal choice, often) or suggesting we turn-back-the-clock to the 1950s (the conservative choice, often) will suffice. In this episode, Richard Reeves dares to propose some real solutions regarding education reforms, workplace opportunities, and pro-childrearing roles for all dads, married or otherwise. Richard Reeves is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. He’s the author of the 2017 book Dream Hoarders and is also a regular contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what's left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems--the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett--identical twins who write that their book "represents the thought of one mind and two bodies"--harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity--the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone's curiosity. Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (MIT Press, 2022) performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate--to be curious with the book and not simply about it. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Moldova, the number of dual citizens has risen exponentially in the last decades. Before annexation, many saw Russia as granting citizenship to-or passportizing-large numbers in Crimea. Both are regions with kin majorities: local majorities claimed as co-ethnic by external states offering citizenship, among other benefits. As functioning citizens of the states in which they reside, kin majorities do not need to acquire citizenship from an external state. Yet many do so in high numbers. Eleanor Knott's book Kin Majorities: Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) explores why these communities engage with dual citizenship and how this intersects, or not, with identity. Analyzing data collected from ordinary people in Crimea and Moldova in 2012 and 2013, just before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Eleanor Knott provides a crucial window into Russian identification in a time of calm. Perhaps surprisingly, the discourse and practice of Russian citizenship was largely absent in Crimea before annexation. Comparing the situation in Crimea with the strong presence of Romanian citizenship in Moldova, Knott explores two rarely researched cases from the ground up, shedding light on why Romanian citizenship was more prevalent and popular in Moldova than Russian citizenship in Crimea, and to what extent identity helps explain the difference. Kin Majorities offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on how citizenship interacts with cross-border and local identities, with crucial implications for the politics of geography, nation, and kin-states, as well as broader understandings of post-Soviet politics. Joan Francisco Matamoros Sanin is an anthropologist dedicated to Medical Anthropology as well as public education and dissemination of anthropological knowledge. He has a MsC and a PhD in Sociomedical Sciences from Mexico's National Autonomous University. Matamoros has ample ethnographic experience in urban and rural areas in Mexico and Ecuador. You can find him on his Spotify and YouTube Platform (AnthropoMX) and in New Books Network. Currently he is a tutor in the Center for Regional Cooperation for Adult Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as a postdoctoral fellow in CIESAS-Unidad Pacífico Sur (acronym in spanish for the South Pacific Center of Research in Advance Studies in Social Anthropology). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage (Duke UP, 2022), Michael Herzfeld explores how individuals and communities living at the margins of the modern nation-state use nationalist discourses of tradition to challenge state authority under both democratic and authoritarian governments. Through close attention to the claims and experiences of mountain shepherds in Greece and urban slum dwellers in Thailand, Herzfeld shows how these subversive archaists draw on national histories and past polities to claim legitimacy for their defiance of bureaucratic authority. Although vilified by government authorities as remote, primitive, or dangerous—often as preemptive justification for violent repression—these groups are not revolutionaries and do not reject national identity, but they do question the equation of state and nation. Herzfeld explores the political strengths and vulnerabilities of their deployment of heritage and the weaknesses they expose in the bureaucratic and ethnonational state in an era of accelerated globalization. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Follow them on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How ordinary urban objects influence our behavior, exacerbate inequality, and encourage social change Assumptions about human behavior lie hidden in plain sight all around us, programmed into the design and regulation of the material objects we encounter on a daily basis. In the Midst of Things: The Social Lives of Objects in the Public Spaces of New York City (Princeton UP, 2022) takes an in-depth look at the social lives of five objects commonly found in the public spaces of New York City and its suburbs, revealing how our interactions with such material things are our primary point of contact with the social, political, and economic forces that shape city life. Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork and a wealth of original interviews, Mike Owen Benediktsson shows how we are in the midst of things whose profound social role often goes overlooked. A newly built lawn on the Brooklyn waterfront reflects an increasingly common trade-off between the marketplace and the public good. A cement wall on a New Jersey highway speaks to the demise of the postwar American dream. A metal folding chair on a patch of asphalt in Queens exposes the political obstacles to making the city livable. A subway door expresses the simmering conflict between the city and the desires of riders, while a newsstand bears witness to our increasingly impoverished streetscapes. In the Midst of Things demonstrates how the material realm is one of immediacy, control, inequality, and unpredictability, and how these factors frustrate the ability of designers, planners, and regulators to shape human behavior. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Common views of religion typically focus on the beliefs and meanings derived from revealed scriptures, ideas, and doctrines. David Morgan has broadened that framework radically to encompass the understanding that religions are fundamentally embodied, material forms of practice. The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions (UNC Press, 2021) shows readers how to study what has come to be termed material religion—the ways religious meaning is enacted in the material world. Material religion includes the things people wear, eat, sing, touch, look at, create, and avoid. It also encompasses the places where religion and the social realities of everyday life, including gender, class, and race, intersect in physical ways. This interdisciplinary approach brings religious studies into conversation with art history, anthropology, and other fields. In the book, Morgan lays out a range of theories, terms, and concepts and shows how they work together to center materiality in the study of religion. After integrating carefully curated visual evidence, Morgan then applies these ideas and methods to case studies across various religious traditions, modeling step-by-step analysis and emphasizing the importance of historical context. The Thing about Religion will be an essential tool for experts and students alike. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How social networks shaped the imperial Chinese state China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline? The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a strong state while long-lasting emperors governed a weak one, Yuhua Wang shows why lessons from China’s history can help us better understand state building. Wang argues that Chinese rulers faced a fundamental trade-off that he calls the sovereign’s dilemma: a coherent elite that could collectively strengthen the state could also overthrow the ruler. This dilemma emerged because strengthening state capacity and keeping rulers in power for longer required different social networks in which central elites were embedded. Wang examines how these social networks shaped the Chinese state, and vice versa, and he looks at how the ruler’s pursuit of power by fragmenting the elites became the final culprit for China’s fall. Drawing on more than a thousand years of Chinese history, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China highlights the role of elite social relations in influencing the trajectories of state development. Javier Mejia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Political Science Department at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about the many people who supported their unethical or criminal behavior. In each case there was a supporting cast of complicitors: business partners, employees, investors, news organizations, and others. And, whether we're aware of it or not, almost all of us have been complicit in the unethical behavior of others. In Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop (Princeton UP, 2022), Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman confronts our complicity head-on and offers strategies for recognizing and avoiding the psychological and other traps that lead us to ignore, condone, or actively support wrongdoing in our businesses, organizations, communities, politics, and more. Complicit tells compelling stories of those who enabled the Theranos and WeWork scandals, the opioid crisis, the sexual abuse that led to the #MeToo movement, and the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack. The book describes seven different behavioral profiles that can lead to complicity in wrongdoing, ranging from true partners to those who unknowingly benefit from systemic privilege, including white privilege, and it tells the story of Bazerman's own brushes with complicity. Complicit also offers concrete and detailed solutions, describing how individuals, leaders, and organizations can more effectively prevent complicity. By challenging the notion that a few bad apples are responsible for society's ills, Complicit implicates us all--and offers a path to creating a more ethical world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sensing machines are everywhere in our world. As we move through the day, electronic sensors and computers adjust our thermostats, guide our Roombas, count our steps, change the orientation of an image when we rotate our phones. There are more of these electronic devices in the world than there are people--in 2020, thirty to fifty billion of them (versus 7.8 billion people), with more than a trillion expected in the next decade. In Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2022), Chris Salter examines how we are tracked, surveilled, tantalized, and seduced by machines ranging from smart watches and mood trackers to massive immersive art installations. Salter, an artist/scholar who has worked with sensors and computers for more than twenty years, explains that the quantification of bodies, senses, and experience did not begin with the surveillance capitalism practiced by Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google but can be traced back to mathematical and statistical techniques of the nineteenth century. He describes the emergence of the "sensed self," investigating how sensor technology has been deployed in music and gaming, programmable and immersive art environments, driving, and even eating, with e-tongues and e-noses that can taste and smell for us. Sensing technology turns our experience into data; but Salter's story isn't just about what these machines want from us, but what we want from them--new sensations, the thrill of the uncanny, and magic that will transport us from our daily grind. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What are teens actually doing on their smartphones? Contrary to many adults' assumptions, they are not simply "addicted" to their screens, oblivious to the afterlife of what they post, or missing out on personal connection. They are just trying to navigate a networked world. In Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing) (MIT Press, 2022), Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, Harvard researchers who are experts on teens and technology, explore the complexities that teens face in their digital lives, and suggest that many adult efforts to help--"Get off your phone!" "Just don't sext!"--fall short. Weinstein and James warn against a single-minded focus by adults on "screen time." Teens worry about dependence on their devices, but disconnecting means being out of the loop socially, with absence perceived as rudeness or even a failure to be there for a struggling friend. Drawing on a multiyear project that surveyed more than 3,500 teens, the authors explain that young people need empathy, not exasperated eye-rolling. Adults should understand the complicated nature of teens' online life rather than issue commands, and they should normalize--let teens know that their challenges are shared by others--without minimizing or dismissing. Along the way, Weinstein and James describe different kinds of sexting and explain such phenomena as watermarking nudes, comparison quicksand, digital pacifiers, and collecting receipts. Behind Their Screens offers essential reading for any adult who cares about supporting teens in an online world. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Engaging the past, the present, and the future, The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty (Lexington Books, 2021) shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons is linked to the African Diaspora. In so doing, this interdisciplinary undertaking interrogates the definition of Diaspora but mainly emphasizes the term’s use. Mario Nisbett demonstrates that an examination of Jamaican Maroon communities, particularly their socio-political development, can further highlight the significance of the African Diaspora as an analytical tool. He shows how Jamaican Maroons inform resistance to abjection, a denial of full humanity, through claiming their African origin and developing solidarity and consciousness in order to affirm black humanity. This book establishes that present-day Jamaican Maroons remain relevant and engage the African Diaspora to improve black standing and bolster assertions of sovereignty. Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Situated between the 1970s Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and the post-2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. In this thoughtful and extensively researched work, Dr. Sanaa Alimia provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. Refugee Cities reconstructs local micro-histories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. It also increases our understanding of how cities— rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins. At the same time, the book also makes an important intervention through its documentation of the multiple displacements that migrants are subject to, and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management.” In this episode, Tayeba Batool talks to Dr. Sanaa Alimia about her journey in writing this book and how the book makes spaces for voices that are often ignored and de-centered to understand everyday life for Afghan migrants in Pakistan. The conversation also addresses questions of racialization, identity, and place-making for the Afghan refugee population in Karachi and Peshawar. We hear from Dr. Alimia why it is important to locate a "history from below" approach to understand the injustices and limitations faced by multiple generations of Afghan migrants in Pakistan, and how their struggles to remain in the cities they built brings new insights to understand the rights of migrant populations. Dr. Sanaa Alimia is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations, Aga Khan University. Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we understand the processes through which political leaders, god-men, stars of all kinds, and big or small deities mingle together in the public sphere? And what are the consequences of deifying politicians, or opening politics to the gods? In this episode, we discuss South Asian politicians who are treated like gods, and gods who enter politics. We focus, in other words, on political deification, a phenomenon that is in display across South Asia, but also beyond. In India, both national and regional parties work to reclaim the symbols of Hinduism, in order to compete with the discourse and politics of Hindu Nationalism, espoused by the incumbent government. As a result, both Hindu nationalism and its counter-cultures are now squarely placed in the domain of religious symbols, mythological narratives, and deified political figures. Similarly, deified and martyred figures of past conflicts now serve as national icons that cohere the polity in both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Moumita Sen, Michael Stausberg, Praskanva Sinharay and Sharika Thiranagama to discuss the phenomenon of political deification in South-Asia. Their discussion draws on a new thematic issue of the journal Religion, edited by Sen and Nielsen: Religion, volume 52, number 4.
Moumita Sen is an associate professr of Culture Studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society.
Michael Stausberg is editor in chief of the journal Religion and professor of the Study of Religion at the University of Bergen.
Praskanva Sinharay is a PhD scholar at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and also a Research Consultant with the Election Commission of India.
Sharika Thiranagama is an associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University.
The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: http://www.nias.ku.dk/ Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg (Wiley, 2022) provides an insightful institutionalist perspective on the field of gentrification studies. The book explores the relationship between the operation of gentrification and the institutions underpinning - but also influencing and restricting - it in three neighborhoods in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg. Matthias Bernt demonstrates how different institutional arrangements have resulted in the facilitation, deceleration or alteration of gentrification across time and place. The book is based on empirical studies conducted in Great Britain, Germany and Russia and contains one of the first-ever English language discussions of gentrification in Germany and Russia. It begins with an examination of the limits of the widely established “rent-gap” theory and proposes the novel concept of the “commodification gap.” It then moves on to explore how different institutional contexts in the UK, Germany and Russia have framed the conditions for these gaps to enable gentrification. The Commodification Gap is an indispensable resource for researchers and academics studying human geography, housing studies, urban sociology and spatial planning. Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit her website or follow Anna on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As they worked on the second edition of What is Europe? (Routledge, 2022), Anna Triandafyllidou and Ruby Gropas admit that they struggled to keep up. The problem wasn't just the pace of change since 2015 in the EU - the resolution of the Greek and onset of the refugee crisis, Brexit, pandemic and war - but what each of these did to the concept of "Europe" itself. In their history and sociology of an idea, Triandafyllidou and Gropas find that 'Europe' "takes different shapes and meanings depending on the realm of life on which it is applied and the historical period that we are looking at". Anna Triandafyllidou is a sociologist and recently appointed Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University who previously taught at the University of Surrey, the London School of Economics, Rome, Florence and Thrace. Ruby Gropas leads the social market economy team within the European Commission president’s advisory service and, before that, led the social affairs team at the commission’s in-house think-tank. She is a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges and is on leave of absence from the University of Thrace. This Open Access book can be downloaded here. *Triandafyllidou's book recommendations are: My Name Is Europe by Gazmend Kapllani (Ekdotikos Oikos A. A. Livani, 2010) and Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other by Bo Stråth (Presses Interuniversitaires Europeennes, 2010). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors and writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Working on Southeast Asia, one thing we tend to hear a lot of is the notion that civil society is shrinking, and that authoritarianism is on the rise. In fact the rise of anti-democratic and anti-liberal forces and ideas seems to be on the rise around the world, not just in the region. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Professor Garry Rodan argues that contrary to popular claims, civil society is not generally shrinking in Southeast Asia. It is instead transforming, resulting in important shifts in the influences that can be exerted through it. Drawing from his book Civil Society in Southeast Asia: Power Struggles and Political Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2022), he argues that political and ideological differences in Southeast Asia have sharpened as anti-democratic and anti-liberal social forces compete with democratic and liberal elements in civil society. About Garry Rodan: Garry Rodan is an Honorary Professor of Political Science & International Studies at The University of Queensland, Emeritus Professor of Politics & International Studies at Murdoch University, and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. His research thematically analyses dynamic regime struggles between authoritarian, liberal and democratic forces and ideologies in Southeast Asia. He gives special analytical attention to the underlying political economy foundations of these struggles. Garry is the author of Civil Society in Southeast Asia: Power Struggles and Political Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Participation without Democracy: Containing Conflict in Southeast Asia, (Cornell University Press, 2018). For more details on Garry Rodan’s publications, go here. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented amount of protests for far-reaching social change around the world – from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to the protests against police violence following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Yet, for the most part, these uprisings have failed to produce revolutionary social and political changes, achieving at most fig leaf reforms or reconfigurations of political institutions that leave the interests of the powerful untouched. My guest today, Jamie Allinson, argues that understanding this gap between revolutionary demands and the persistence of the social status quo requires an analysis of counter-revolutionary political strategies by incumbent elites and their international patrons. Focusing on the countries of the Arab Spring, The Age of Counter-Revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines how authoritarian elites have used performative violence to smash the optimism and imagination of revolutionary movements, drawn on the legacies of previous revolutions-from-above to reconstruct social bases of support, and gained the support of international allies who stood to lose materially and symbolically by the emergence of new revolutionary states. Jamie Allinson is a senior lecturer of international relations at the University of Edinburgh. Geoffrey Gordon is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @geofflgordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The average person concerned about becoming pregnant spends approximately thirty years trying to prevent conception. People largely do so alone using prescription birth control, a situation often taken for granted in the United States as natural and beneficial. In Just Get On the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics (University of California Press, 2021), a keenly researched and incisive examination, Krystale Littlejohn investigates how birth control becomes a fundamentally unbalanced and gendered responsibility. She uncovers how parents, peers, partners, and providers draw on narratives of male and female birth control methods to socialize cisgender women into sex and ultimately into shouldering the burden for preventing pregnancy. Littlejohn draws on extensive interviews to document this gendered compulsory birth control—a phenomenon in which people who give birth are held accountable for preventing and resolving pregnancies in gender-constrained ways. She shows how this gendered approach encroaches on reproductive autonomy and poses obstacles for preventing disease. While diverse cisgender women are the focus, Littlejohn shows that they are not the only ones harmed by this dynamic. Indeed, gendered approaches to birth control also negatively impact trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people in overlooked ways. In tracing the divisive politics of pregnancy prevention, Littlejohn demonstrates that the gendered division of labor in birth control is not natural. It is unjust. Nicole Bourbonnais is Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational, historical perspective. Profile here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why is religion important in understanding creative industries? In British Muslim Women in the Cultural and Creative Industries (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Saskia Warren, a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester, presents an analysis of the fashion, digital media, and visual arts industries to show, for the first time, the centrality of faith and religion to any intersectional analysis of contemporary cultural production and consumption. The book uses in depth interviews, as well as a rich and detailed understanding of institutions and trends, to map the unique experiences of British Muslim women. Offering insights as to the barriers and exclusions, as well as the successes and forms of resistance, experienced by this community, the book is essential reading across social sciences and the humanities, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how culture is made today. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Lynching is often viewed as a narrow form of violence: either the spontaneous act of an angry mob against accused individuals, or a demonstration of white supremacy against an entire population considered subhuman. However, in this new treatise, historian Guy Lancaster exposes the multiple forms of violence hidden beneath the singular label of lynching. Lancaster, who has written extensively on racial violence, details several lynchings of Blacks by white posses in post-Reconstruction Arkansas. Drawing from the fields of history, philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, and literary theory, and quoting chilling contemporary accounts, he argues that the act of lynching encompasses five distinct but overlapping types of violence. This new framework reveals lynching to be even more of an atrocity than previously understood: that mobs did not disregard the humanity of their victims but rather reveled in it; that they were not simply enacting personal vengeance but manifesting an elite project of subjugation. Lancaster thus clarifies and connects the motives and goals of seemingly isolated lynch mobs, embedding the practice in the ongoing enforcement of white supremacy. By interrogating the substance of lynching, American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching (U Arkansas Press, 2021) shines new light on both past anti-Black violence and the historical underpinnings of our present moment. Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Andrei Nae's book Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games (Routledge, 2021) investigates the narrativity of some of the most popular survival horror video games and the gender politics implicit in their storyworlds. In a thorough analysis of the genre that draws upon detailed comparisons with the mainstream action genre, Andrei Nae places his analysis firmly within a political and social context. In comparing survival horror games to the dominant game design norms of the action genre, the author differentiates between classical and postclassical survival horror games to show how the former reject the norms of the action genre and deliver a critique of the conservative gender politics of action games, while the latter are more heterogeneous in terms of their game design and, implicitly, gender politics. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet. Points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You’ve Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools, and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties. You’ve Been Played is a scathing indictment of a tech-driven world that wants to convince us that misery is fun, and a call to arms for anyone who hopes to preserve their dignity and autonomy. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Atlanta, the capital of the American South, is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance. In recent decades, central Atlanta has experienced heavily racialized gentrification while the suburbs have become more diverse, with many affluent suburbs trying to push back against this diversity. Exploring the city’s past and future, Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta (U California Press, 2022) tracks these racial and economic shifts and the politics and policies that produced them. Dan Immergluck documents the trends that are inverting Atlanta’s late-twentieth-century “poor-in-the-core” urban model. New emphasis on capital-driven growth has excluded low-income people and families of color from the city’s center, pushing them to distant suburbs far from mass transit, large public hospitals, and other essential services. Revealing critical lessons for leaders, activists, and residents in cities around the world, Immergluck considers how planners and policymakers can reverse recent trends to create more socially equitable cities. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode, our host Mariela Morales Suárez discusses the book Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (UNC Press, 2022) by Dr. Larisa Kingston Mann. You’ll hear about:
Dr. Mann’s intellectual trajectory and how she became interested in the topic of copyright in Jamaican popular music;
The concept of “rude citizenship” through the Jamaican music world;
What it means to be “original” from the perspective of copyrights, language, and diverse modes of cultural production in Jamaica;
Dr. Mann’s writing process as a form of translation from fieldwork notes, archival materials, and music contents into ethnography;
How to make the classroom a meaningful pedagogical space by learning from marginal voices and practices;
What constitutes the exilic spaces, namely, the reimagining of marginalized spaces as sites of agency and sovereignty through music and cultural production;
The transnational networks of the local music production in Jamaica and global flows of sonic resistance, especially during COVID-19.
About the book In this deep dive into the Jamaican music world filled with the voices of creators, producers, and consumers, Larisa Kingston Mann—DJ, media law expert, and ethnographer—identifies how a culture of collaboration lies at the heart of Jamaican creative practices and legal personhood. Because many working-class and poor people are cut off from the full benefits of citizenship on the basis of race, class, and geography, Jamaican music spaces are an important site of social commentary and political action in the face of the state’s limited reach and neglect of social services and infrastructure. Music makers organize performance and commerce in ways that defy, though not without danger, state ordinances and intellectual property law and provide poor Jamaicans avenues for self-expression and self-definition that are closed off to them in the wider society. In a world shaped by coloniality, how creators relate to copyright reveals how people will play outside, within, and through the limits of their marginalization. You can find this book on the University of North Carolina Press website. Author: Larisa Kingston Mann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production at Temple University (PA, USA). Host: Mariela Morales Suárez is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania where she specializes in transnational media flows, technological appropriations, diasporic identity formation, and popular culture. Editor & Producer: Jing Wang. She is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What do citizens do in response to threats to democracy? Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the mass politics of civic obligation in the US, UK, and Germany. Exploring threats like foreign interference in elections and polarization, Sara Wallace Goodman shows that citizens respond to threats to democracy as partisans, interpreting civic obligation through a partisan lens that is shaped by their country's political institutions. This divided, partisan citizenship makes democratic problems worse by eroding the national unity required for democratic stability. Employing novel survey experiments in a cross-national research design, this book presents the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of citizenship norms in the face of democratic threat. In showing partisan citizens are not a reliable bulwark against democratic backsliding, Goodman identifies a key vulnerability in the mass politics of democratic order. In times of democratic crisis, defenders of democracy must work to fortify the shared foundations of democratic citizenship. Sara Wallace Goodman is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Her research examines citizenship and the shaping of political identity through immigrant integration. She is the co-author of Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID (Princeton University Press, 2022), and author of Immigration and Membership Politics in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Goodman’s research has been cited in major news outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Vox. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Unequal under Socialism: Race, Women, and Transnationalism in Bulgaria (U Toronto Press, 2021) examines the formation of racial, gender, and national identities and relations in the socialist state. With a specific focus on Bulgaria, a former socialist country in the Balkans, the book traces the intertwined local and global forces driving racialization, socialist state policies, and Eurocentric Marxist and Leninist ideologies, all of which led to valued and devalued categories of women. Roma women, Muslim women, ethnic Bulgarian women, sex workers, and female factory and office workers were among those marked by socialist authorities for prosperity, accommodation, violent reformation, or erasure. Covering the period from the 1930s to the present and drawing upon original archival sources as well as a constellation of critical theories, Unequal under Socialism focuses on the lives of different women to articulate deep doubt about the capacity of socialism to sustain societies where all women prosper. Such doubt, the book suggests, is an under-recognized but important force shaping how women in former socialist countries have related to one another and to other women in the global North and South. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana (University of California Press, 2022) is an ethnographic study of a community of self-identified effeminate men--known in local parlance as sasso--residing in coastal Jamestown, a suburb of Accra, Ghana's capital. Drawing on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye's notion of "amphibious personhood," Kwame Edwin Otu argues that sasso embody and articulate amphibious subjectivity in their self-making, creating an identity that moves beyond the homogenizing impulses of western categories of gender and sexuality. Such subjectivity simultaneously unsettles claims purported by the Christian heteronationalist state and LGBT+ human rights organizations that Ghana is predominantly heterosexual or homophobic. Weaving together personal interactions with sasso, participant observation, autoethnography, archival sources, essays from African and African-diasporic literature, and critical analyses of documentaries such as the BBC's The World's Worst Place to Be Gay, Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic meditation on how Africa is configured as the "heart of homophobic darkness" in transnational LGBT+ human rights imaginaries. Kwame Edwin Otu is a Visiting Associate Professor of African Studies at Georgetown University and an Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, University of Virginia. He wrote and starred in the award-winning short film Reluctantly Queer. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dr Lucy Series Deprivations of Liberty in The Shadows of the Institution (Bristol University Press, 2022) is one that I have long been looking forward to reading, and it did not disappoint. Series provides a rich historical and socio-legal context to bring new understanding of the post-carceral era, and the legacies of the institutions which continue to shape the contemporary era of social care detention. She provides an in-depth analysis of the very odd legal landscape that has been imported into the British care system, to draw out the specific logics, locus and temporality of a complex social problem, for which the legal solution has produced anomalous results. Her key concern goes beyond bringing new understanding of the ways that individuals are regulated and controlled. Crucially, Series delves into what we should be aiming for. Dr Lucy Series is a lecturer in the school for policy studies at the University of Bristol. She also writes a fabulous blog, The Small Places. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Characterized by shared, self-managed access to food, housing, and basic conditions for a creative life, the commons are essential for communities to flourish and protect spaces of collective autonomy from capitalist encroachment. In a narrative spanning more than three centuries, Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) provides a radical counter history of urban planning that explores how capitalism and spatial politics have evolved to address this challenge. Highlighting episodes from preindustrial England, New York City and Chicago between the 1850s and the early 1900s, Weimar-era Berlin, and neoliberal Milan, Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago shows how capitalist urbanization has eroded the egalitarian, convivial life-worlds around the commons. In this episode, channel host Tayeba Batool talks with Dr. Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago on the book's argument about the ways through which urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories. The conversation touches upon the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata, and the various, multiple, and incremental modes of dispossession that are implicated in struggles over land, shared resources, public space, neighborhoods, creativity, and spatial imaginaries. We hear from Dr. Sevilla-Buitrago about the possibilities and alternates to a post-capitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is ultimately defined by the people who inhabit them. Dr. Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the School of Architecture, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Welcome to the New Books in Japanese Studies, a channel of the New Books Network. I am your host: Ran Zwigenberg, a historian of Japan at Penn State. Today I will be talking to Jennifer Prough about her book Kyoto Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Contemporary Japan, which came out with the University of Hawaii Press this year (2022). With me today is Dr. Daniel Milne of Kyoto University, who is co-organizing with me our own project on Kyoto heritage and history. Kyoto Revisited looks at the uses and effects of heritage in tourism in Kyoto today seen through city policy and advertising, hotel infrastructure and tour guiding, season-based events, tourism to sites connected to the Bakumatsu-period hero Sakamoto Ryoma, and the phenomenon of walking in rental kimono. Emphasizing the ways experience-based tourism has been transforming Kyoto’s tourist landscape, Prough examines how heritage has been understood, marketed, and experienced by both the tourist “industry” and domestic and international tourists. Heritage, Prough argues have multiple meanings. These meanings are created as “interested parties—state and local, public, and private—tell different stories about the past,” which are marketed in response to tourists’ desire for face-to-face engagement in an experience economy. Through interviewing long-term tour guides and revealing the traces of past tourism forms in hotels and other tourist infrastructure, among other methodologies, Kyoto Revisited explores the local impact of global and national shifts in tourism on Kyoto’s domestic and international tourism industry from the 1970s to the COVID era. Prough’s period of fieldwork neatly overlapped with a rapid escalation in foreign tourist numbers to the city, with growing calls to address overtourism, and the current crisis in tourism with Japan closed to tourists. The book thus provides important insight into Kyoto during a decade of the biggest transitions in international tourism to the city in the last half century. Kyoto Revisited, thus, demonstrates not only how the past has been used to construct the city’s identity and shape understandings of Japan for travelers, but also how these speak to broader trends in our contemporary moment. Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How is sexuality experienced in contemporary China? What are the connections and tensions between China and the West in producing knowledges of sexuality? Dr Weiyi Hu notes that most of the seminal writings on sexuality are produced in the West, and that the definition of sexuality is largely theorised by Western scholars. In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and an affiliated PhD student at NIAS, Dr. Weiyi Hu sketches an alternative approach that questions the unreflective reliance on Western understanding of sexuality, and to cut through a cluster of dualisms, such as East and West, in theorising Chinese sexuality. She combines Xiaomei Chen’s concept of the Chinese Occidentalism discourse and Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital to elucidate the connections and tensions between China and the West. Drawing on fieldwork, she argues that within contemporary Chinese culture the meaning of sexuality experienced in everyday life is charged with tensions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Weiyi Hu is a sessional facilitator at the University of Sydney, where she recently completed her doctorate in the social sciences. She is interested in the sociology of everyday life, sexuality, feminism, and familial relations in contemporary China. Born in Shanghai, she is fascinated by the complex ways that the Occident (West) is perceived, imagined, narrated, and experienced by Chinese peoples. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: http://www.nias.ku.dk/ Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
While German unification promised a new historical beginning, it also stirred discussions about contemporary Germany's Nazi past and ideas of citizenship and belonging in a changing Europe. Minority Discourses in Germany Since 1990 explores the intersections and divergences between Black German, Turkish German, and German Jewish experiences, with reflections on the evolving academic paradigms with which these are studied. Informed by comparative approaches, the volume investigates social and aesthetic interventions into contemporary German public and political discourse on memory, racism, citizenship, immigration, and history. In this episode, the editors, Ela Gezen, Priscilla Layne, and Jonathan Skolnik, talk about how they came to cross the bridge of often isolated disciplinary fields and in what ways some of the chapters converse with each other. They discuss four chapters in more detail and open up a path to future dialogue between scholars studying minoritized groups in Germany. Nicole Coleman is Associate Professor of German at Wayne State University. She tweets @drnicoleman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness--much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they're whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be. As a media studies professor, she's also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the Deafblind experience, Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism (Simon Element, 2021) explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun sees value in the truth, but worries what data we might be looking at to find it. Chun discusses her new book, Discriminating Data (MIT Press, 2021), and how we might use data, objects, and truth in better ways. She also considers the violence of a drawing of a gorilla and the one thing she knows is true. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at here. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Two neighbors from the same village fall in love and elope to a shelter for couples that break caste norms. A Hindu woman falls in love with a Muslim man, drawing the ire of Hindu nationalists. Two women start a lesbian relationship. These three couples are the protagonists of Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India (Atria Book, 2022). This work charts the lives of Dawinder and Neetu, Monika and Arif, Reshma and Preethi, who all break social norms in their relationships, and are forced to endure the sometimes-violent consequences—not always successfully. In this interview, Mansi and I talk about the three couples in her book—and what their struggles tell us about love, relationships and social pressure in today’s India. Mansi Choksi is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and two-time Livingston Award Finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and more. She lives in Dubai with her husband and son. The Newlyweds is her first book. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Newlyweds. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today we are joined by Ben Chappell, Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas, and author of Mexican American Fastpitch: Identity at Play in Vernacular Sport (Stanford University Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of Mexican American Fastpitch, his interlocutors debate over whether to open Mexican American softball tournaments to Anglo players, and how fastpitch helped Mexican Americans enact a specific and local form of cultural citizenship in the Midwest and Texas. In Mexican American Fastpitch, Chappell uses ethnographic methods to study Mexican American fastpitch in local communities stretching across the Midwest and Texas. His work took place over a decade in small towns, like Newton Kansas, and bigger cities including Austin, Houston and San Antonio. His first two chapters deal with the history of Mexican American softball and set the game alongside the larger history of Mexican habitation in the Midwest and the gender and racial politics of softball. He shows that Mexican Americans played softball from the very beginning of the game, but the oldest specifically Mexican American tournaments in the Midwest started shortly after the Second World War. The oldest – the Newton – will be seventy-five years old in 2023. These tournaments proved opportunities for Mexican American ballplayers to assert their particular citizenship despite barrioization, economic marginalization, racism, and segregation. Through a thick description of several of competitions such as the Newton and the Latin, Chappell shows how these tournaments encompass much more than the batting and fielding on and around the diamond. While softball does possess its own illusio – roughly speaking appeal – to men and women, competitors and fans; the game is only part of the reason for these tournaments’ longevity. Mexican American fastpitch players not only enjoyed a compelling sport, but also a festival that included community engagement, different foodways, and family reunions. The game’s illusio worked differently for Mexican American men and women – the latter have only more recently started to compete in these tournaments. The popularity of these tournament peaked sometime in the late 20th century and now tournament organizers face the difficult question of how to save the game. The most common debate is whether to admit Anglo teams (and thus preserve the tournament) or remain a specific site for Mexican American organization. Tournament organizers also deal with ringers from around the world, double dip scheduling, and rival sporting codes. In a final theoretical chapter, entitled “Between the Lines,” Chappell considers the particular and the universal in the experience of Mexican American fastpitch and compares it to other fastpitch communities including a very close comparison with Native American fastpitch. Chappell’s captivating account of the Mexican American softballers and their tournaments will be of interest to readers interested broadly in local sport and ball games. It should also be required reading for people with interests Mexican American history and ethnography, and sports anthropology and ethnography. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise. However, the state under neoliberalism doesn’t have the technocratic ambition it used to. zIs technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More and more of our lives are governed by unaccountable private tyrannies—tyrannies that employ ruthlessly efficient technocratic systems, with even less democratic input than the technocracies of old. For instance, many modern workplaces function like technocracies. The Amazon warehouse is the most technologically-sophisticated and totalizing manifestation of this. Their algorithmically-managed systems micro-manage workers’ every step, turning their bodies into machines. On part #3 of our technocracy series, we take a look inside the new frontiers of digital Taylorism. Plus, what is the future of technocracy? An emerging slew of Peter Thiel-funded neo-reactionaries want to install a Silicon Valley CEO as our new techno-monarch. We discuss Thiel and Blake Masters, their broader intellectual trajectory from seasteaders to techno-populists, and the technocratic liberal disinformation machine that wants to defeat the neo-reactionaries. SUPPORT THE SHOW You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ABOUT THE SHOW For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What happens to the cultural politics of human rights when atrocities are rendered calculable, abuses are transformed into data, and victims become vectors? As human rights organizations have increasingly embraced information technologies this ‘datafication’ of rights has become both a reality and a pressing concern, one inextricably tangled up with questions regarding the broader political valences of human rights. In The Informational Logic of Human Rights (Edinburgh UP, 2022), Josh Bowsher resituates recent critiques of human rights within ongoing theoretical discussions concerning informational capitalism, digital culture and the politics of data. Critically analysing the contemporary human rights movement as an informational politics, Bowsher provides a new conceptual agenda for both exploring and overcoming the limits of human rights in an era shaped by the data flows, network infrastructures and informational logic of late capitalism. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
With Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories (Amsterdam UP, 2022), Orli Fridman traces the emergence of memory activism in the aftermath of conflict and war, with a focus on Serbia after the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The study offers in-depth accounts of memory activism both on-site and online, analysing the evolution of this practice in the context of generational belonging. In doing so, this work provides a framework for the study of phenomena such as alternative commemorations and commemorative solidarity. Orli Fridman is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, where she heads the Center for Comparative Conflict Studies. She is also the Academic Director of the School for International Training Learning Center in Belgrade, Serbia. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on critical peace and conflict studies, memory politics and digital memory activism. Her recent works include Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories (2022) and chapters in Agency in Transnational Memory Politics (2020) and in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies (2020). Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A decade has passed since the Arab Spring of 2011, during which an uprising in Egypt ended three decades of rule by Hosni Mubarak without realizing a new political order free from the dictates of the country’s military. In a new book, Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation (Stanford University Press, 2021) Mona El Ghobashy treats the uprising as a political and social phenomenon deserving of inquiry regardless of whether it succeeded in achieving its goals or not. She joins this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to discuss why she resurrected the concept of a “revolutionary situation” and how it helped her to explicate what happens when state authority is severely assaulted and damaged, but does not collapse, as in Egypt. Bread and Freedom is with Anastasia Shesterinina’s (Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia, Cornell UP, 2021) joint winner of the 2022 Charles Taylor Book Award, awarded annually by the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association for the best book in political science that employs or develops interpretive methodologies and methods; and, APSA’s Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s Best Book Award for 2022. Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University and in Fall 2022 a fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network at the ANU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A search for new ways to talk about race in Aotearoa New Zealand brought together this powerful group of scholars, writers, and activists. For these authors, attempts to confront racism and racial violence often stall against a failure to see how power works through race, across our modern social worlds. The result is a country where racism is all too often left unnamed and unchecked, voices are erased, the colonial past ignored and silence passes for understanding. By 'bringing what is unspoken into focus', Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2022) seeks to articulate and confront ideas of race in Aotearoa New Zealand – an exploration that includes racial capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. A recurring theme across the book is the inescapable entanglement of local and global manifestations of race. Each of the contributors brings their own experiences and insights to the complexities of life in a racialised society, and together their words make an important contribution to our shared and future lives on these shores. Contributors to this book: Pounamu Jade Aikman, Faisal Al-Asaad, Mahdis Azarmandi, Simon Barber, Garrick Cooper, Morgan Godfery, Kassie Hartendorp, Guled Mire, Tze Ming Mok, Adele Norris, Nathan Rew, Vera Seyra, Beth Teklezgi, Selome Teklezgi and Patrick Thomsen. Arcia Tecun (a.k.a. Daniel Hernandez) is a storyteller (film maker, podcaster) and Pouako (Lecturer) at Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland) in ethnomusicology and social-cultural anthropology. His research and teaching interests include Indigeneity, race, class, gender, religion, food, and popular culture/music in Oceania and the Americas. Lana Lopesi is an author, art critic, editor and multidisciplinary researcher based in Tāmaki Makaurau. In September, she became an Assistant Professor Pacific Islander Studies in the department of Indigenous, Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. Anisha Sankar is a Chennai-born, Te Awakairangi-raised South Indian Tamil living in Pōneke. She is currently working on her PhD, which studies the contradictions of colonial capitalism. Key Point About the Book: • Arrives at a time of burgeoning questions around race, identity, and power • Provides readers with new ways of thinking and talking about race in Aotearoa New Zealand • Addresses New Zealand’s local connections to global and international discussions of race Ed Amon has a Master of Indigenous Studies from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is a columnist at his local paper: Hibiscus Matters, and a Stand-up Comedian. His main interests are indigenous studies, politics, history, and cricket. Follow him on twitter @edamoned or email him at edamonnz@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Barack Obama and his family have been the objects of rumors, legends, and conspiracy theories unprecedented in US politics. Outbreaks of anti-Obama lore have occurred in every national election cycle since 2004 and continue to the present day--two elections after his presidency ended. In Trash Talk: Anti-Obama Lore and Race in the Twenty-First Century (U California Press, 2022), folklorist Patricia A. Turner examines how these thought patterns have grown ever more vitriolic and persistent and what this means for American political culture. Through the lens of attacks on Obama, Trash Talk explores how racist tropes circulate and gain currency. As internet communications expand in reach, rumors and conspiracy theories have become powerful political tools, and new types of lore like the hoax and fake news have taken root. The mainstream press and political establishment dismissed anti-Obama mythology for years, registering concern only when it became difficult to deny how much power those who circulated it could command. Trash Talk demonstrates that the ascendancy of Barack Obama was never a signal of a postracial America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The collapse of neoliberal hegemony in the western world following the financial crash of 2007-8 and subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarian personalities has been described as a crisis of 'the political' in western societies. But the crisis must be seen as global, rather than focusing on the west alone. Pakistan is experiencing rapid financialisation and rapacious capture of natural resources, overseen by the country's military establishment and state bureaucracy. Under their watch, trading and manufacturing interests, property developers and a plethora of mafias have monopolised the provision of basic needs like housing, water and food, whilst also feeding conspicuous consumption by a captive middle-class. In The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons (Pluto Press, 2022), Aasim Sajjad Akhtar explores neoliberal Pakistan, looking at digital technology in enhancing mass surveillance, commodification, and atomisation, as well as resistance to the state and capital. Presenting a new interpretation of our global political-economic moment, he argues for an emancipatory political horizon embodied by the 'classless' subject. Iqra Shagufta Cheema teaches and writes in the areas of postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies. They can be reached via email at IqraSCheema@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Robin McCoy Brooks' book Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe, and Social Action (Routledge, 2021) uses psychoanalytic theory to explore how political subjectivity comes about within the context of global catastrophe, via the emergence of collective individuations through trans-subjectivity. Serving as a jumping-off point to address the structural linkage between collective catastrophe, subject, group, and political transformation, trans-subjectivity is the central tenet of the book, conceptualized as a psyche-social dynamic that initiates social transformation and which may be enhanced in the clinical setting. Each chapter investigates a distinct manifestation of trans-subjectivity in relation to various real-world events as they manifest clinically in the analytic couple and within group processes. The author builds her conceptual arguments through a psyche/social reading of Kristeva's theory of signifiance (sublimation), Lacan's 1945 essay on collective logic, Heidegger's secular reading of the apostle Paul's Christian revolution, and Zizek, Badiou and Jung's conception of the neighbor within a differentiated humanity. The book features clinical illustrations, an auto-ethnographic study of the emergence of an AIDS clinic, an accounting of trans-subjectivity in Black revolutionary events in the U.S., and an examination of some expressions of care that arose in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action is important reading for psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamic based therapists, psychologists, group therapists, philosophers and political activists. Roy Barsness is a Clinical Psychoanalytic Psychologist, Founder and Executive Director of the Post-Graduate Program in Relationally-Focused Psychodynamic Therapy; Professor at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and have been in clinical practice for 30+ years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do digital technologies shape the experiences and meanings of migration? As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states also step up their mechanisms of border control. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories and images of human mobility that circulate among their publics. What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (NYU Press, 2022) is a story of exclusion, marginalization, and violence, but also of care, conviviality, and solidarity. Through it, the border emerges neither as strictly digital nor as totally controlling. Rather, the authors argue, the digital border is both digital and pre-digital; datafied and embodied; automated and self-reflexive; undercut by competing emotions, desires, and judgments; and traversed by fluid and fragile social relationships—relationships that entail both the despair of inhumanity and the promise of a better future. Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as the department’s Doctoral Program Director. She is the author of several books, including The Spectatorship of Suffering and The Ironic Spectator, Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as Research Director. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of five books, including Diaspora, Identity and the Media; Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference; and the Sage Handbook of Media and Migration. Padmapriya Vidhya-Govindarajan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. Her research interests lie at the intersection of environmental justice, digital and film cultures, and community media-use practices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2015, the anonymous leak of the Panama Papers brought to light millions of financial and legal documents exposing how the superrich hide their money using complex webs of offshore vehicles. Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton UP, 2022) takes you inside this shadow economy, uncovering the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders and around the globe. Kimberly Kay Hoang traveled more than 350,000 miles and conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews with private wealth managers, fund managers, entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, bankers, auditors, and other financial professionals. She traces the flow of capital from offshore funds in places like the Cayman Islands, Samoa, and Panama to special-purpose vehicles and holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong, and how it finds its way into risky markets onshore in Vietnam and Myanmar. Hoang reveals the strategies behind spiderweb capitalism and examines the moral dilemmas of making money in legal, financial, and political gray zones. Dazzlingly written, Spiderweb Capitalism sheds critical light on how global elites capitalize on risky frontier markets, and deepens our understanding of the paradoxical ways in which global economic growth is sustained through states where the line separating the legal from the corrupt is not always clear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
There has been no greater surge in global fashion trends and expressions of personal style than in the contemporary era of social media fashion influencers. But what constitutes “being in fashion” amongst this multiplicity of interpretations? In this episode of Humanities Matter, Dr. Laura Petican, Professor of Sociology at the National University, San Diego, and Dr. Jacque Lynn Foltyn, Associate Professor and Director of University Galleries at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, explore various disciplinary, professional, and creative perspectives to expand their proposition that fashion is about self-presentation. In Fashion: Culture, Commerce, Craft, and Identity, published by Brill and edited by Drs. Petican and Foltyn, is a deep exploration of fashion representations; being fashionable, shopping, luxury, and vintage; fashion materials, craft, industry, and innovation; museum-worthy fashion; and fashioning cultural identities. Summary: A conversation on the cultural, commercial, and creative perspectives of what it means to be ‘in fashion’ in the modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; in other words, the United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. When Americans think and talk about our lives, we grapple with this idea, asking how a person got to where he or she is and whether he or she earned it. In What We Mean by the American Dream: Stories We Tell about Meritocracy (Cornell UP, 2021), Taussig tries to find out how we answer those questions. Weaving together interviews with Americans from many walks of life--as well as stories told in the US media about prominent figures from politics, sports, and business--What We Mean by the American Dream investigates how we think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. Taussig looks into the fabric of American life to explore how various people, including dairy farmers, police officers, dancers, teachers, computer technicians, students, store clerks, the unemployed, homemakers, and even drug dealers got to where they are today and whether they earned it or not. Taussig's frank assessment of the state of the US workforce and its dreams allows him to truly and meaningfully ask the question that underpins so many of our political debates and personal frustrations: Did you earn it? By doing so, he sheds new light on what we mean by--and how we can deliver on--the American Dream of today. Doron Taussig is Visiting Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College, and a fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Prior to becoming a Professor he was a journalist for ten years. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi (Stanford UP, 2022) examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Is the Bible the unembellished Word of God or the product of human agency? There are different answers to that question. And they lie at the heart of this book's powerful exploration of the fraught ways in which money, race and power shape the story of Christianity in American public life. The authors' subject is the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC: arguably the latest example of a long line of white evangelical institutions aiming to amplify and promote a religious, political, and moral agenda of their own. In Does Scripture Speak for Itself?: The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation (Cambridge UP, 2022), Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon disclose the ways in which the Museum's exhibits reinforce a particularized and partial interpretation of the Bible's meaning. Bringing to light the Museum's implicit messaging about scriptural provenance and audience, the authors reveal how the MOTB produces a version of the Bible that in essence authorizes a certain sort of white evangelical privilege; promotes a view of history aligned with that same evangelical aspiration; and above all protects a cohort of white evangelicals from critique. They show too how the Museum collapses vital conceptual distinctions between its own conservative vision of the Bible and 'The Bible' as a cultural icon. This revelatory volume above all confirms that scripture – for all the claims made for it that it speaks only divine truth – can in the end never be separated from human politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We’re all trapped. No matter how hard you try to delete apps from your phone, the power of seduction draws you back. Doom scrolling is the new normal of a 24/7 online life. What happens when your home office starts to feel like a call center and you’re too fried to log out of Facebook? We’re addicted to large-scale platforms, unable to return to the frivolous age of decentralized networks. How do we make sense of the rising disaffection with the platform condition? Zoom fatigue, cancel culture, crypto art, NFTs and psychic regression comprise core elements of a general theory of platform culture. Geert Lovink argues that we reclaim the internet on our own terms. Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet (Valiz 2022) is a relapse-resistant story about the rise of platform alternatives, built on a deep understanding of the digital slump. Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organisation after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018) and Sad by Design (2019). In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His center organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the creative sector. In December, 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the Art History Department, Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam for one day a week. Reuben Niewenhuis is interested in philosophy, theory, technology, and interdisciplinary topics. Subscribe to his interviews here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), Deniz Yonucu presents a counterintuitive analysis of contemporary policing practices, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence, perpetual conflict, and ethnosectarian discord by the state security apparatus. Situating Turkish policing within a global context and combining archival work and oral history narratives with ethnographic research, Yonucu demonstrates how counterinsurgency strategies from the Cold War and decolonial eras continue to inform contemporary urban policing in Istanbul. Shedding light on counterinsurgency's affect-and-emotion-generating divisive techniques and urban dimensions, Yonucu shows how counterinsurgent policing strategies work to intervene in the organization of political dissent in a way that both counters existing alignments among dissident populations and prevents emergent ones. Yonucu suggests that in the places where racialized and dissident populations live, provocations of counterviolence and conflict by state security agents as well as their containment of both cannot be considered disruptions of social order. Instead, they can only be conceptualized as forms of governance and policing designed to manage actual or potential rebellious populations. Deniz Yonucu is Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University. She is a cofounder and coconvenor of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR). Follow her on Twitter @denizyonucu. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
‘Nagaland for Christ’ and ‘Jesus Saves’ are familiar slogans prominently displayed on public transport and celebratory banners in Nagaland, north-east India. They express an idealization of Christian homogeneity that belies the underlying tensions and negotiations between Christian and non-Christian Naga. This religious division is intertwined with that of healing beliefs and practices, both animistic and biomedical. Vibha Joshi's book A Matter of Belief: Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India (Berghahn Books, 2012) focuses on the particular experiences of the Angami Naga, one of the many Naga peoples. Like other Naga, they are citizens of the state of India but extend ethnolinguistically into Tibeto-Burman south-east Asia. This ambiguity and how it affects their Christianity, global involvement, indigenous cultural assertiveness, and nationalist struggle is explored. Not simply describing continuity through change, this study reveals the alternating Christian and non-Christian streams of discourse, one masking the other but at different times and in different guises. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dining out used to be considered exceptional. However, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment. The Social Significance of Dining Out: A Study of Continuity and Change (Manchester UP, 2020) draws on a major mixed-methods research project by Dr. Alan Warde, Dr. Jessica Paddock and Dr. Jennifer Whillans about dining out in England. The book offers a unique comparison of the social differences between London, Bristol and Preston from 1995 to 2015, charting the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out. Addressing topics such as the changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, and class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with dining out, the authors explore how the practice has evolved across the three cities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022) is an original study of Black politics and varieties of political mobilization in Italy. Although there is extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is little scholarship about the experiences of Black people who were born and raised in Italy. Camilla Hawthorne focuses on the ways Italians of African descent have become entangled with processes of redefining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy and by extension, of Europe itself. Contesting Race and Citizenship opens discussions of the so-called migrant "crisis" by focusing on a generation of Black people who, although born or raised in Italy, have been thrust into the same racist, xenophobic political climate as the immigrants and refugees who are arriving in Europe from the African continent. Hawthorne traces not only mobilizations for national citizenship but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice—possibilities that are based on shared critiques of the racial state and shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism. Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is coeditor of The Black Mediterranean. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Shinjuku Ni-chome is a nightlife district in central Tokyo filled with bars and clubs targeting the city's gay male community. Typically understood as a "safe space" where same-sex attracted men and women from across Japan's largest city can gather to find support from a relentlessly heteronormative society, Thomas Baudinette's Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo (U Michigan Press, 2021) reveals that the neighborhood may not be as welcoming as previously depicted in prior literature. Through fieldwork observation and interviews with young men who regularly frequent the neighborhood's many bars, the book reveals that the district is instead a space where only certain performances of gay identity are considered desirable. In fact, the district is highly stratified, with Shinjuku Ni-chome's bar culture privileging "hard" masculine identities as the only legitimate expression of gay desire and thus excluding all those men who supposedly "fail" to live up to these hegemonic gendered ideals. Through careful analysis of media such as pornographic videos, manga comics, lifestyle magazines and online dating services, this book argues that the commercial imperatives of the Japanese gay media landscape and the bar culture of Shinjuku Ni-chome act together to limit the agency of young gay men so as to better exploit them economically. Exploring the direct impacts of media consumption on the lives of four key informants who frequent the district's gay bars in search of community, fun and romance, Regimes of Desire reveals the complexity of Tokyo's most popular "gay town" and intervenes in debates over the changing nature of masculinity in contemporary Japan. Alexandra Hambleton is an assistant professor at Tsuda University in Tokyo, Japan. I write on media, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Japan with a particular interest in pornography and sex-positive feminism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Beyond simplistic binaries of the dark continent or Africa Rising, Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra (UNC Press, 2021) examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong's focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, Aubrey Thamann and Kalliopi M. Christodoulaki's edited volume Beyond the Veil: Reflexive Studies of Death and Dying (Berghahn Books, 2021) explores the emotional aspects that death provokes in humans, whether it is disgust, fear, awe, sadness, anger, or even joy. Whereas most studies of death and dying treat the subject from an objective viewpoint, the scholars in this collection recognize their inherent connection with death which allows for a new and more personal form of study. More broadly, this collection suggests a new paradigm in the study of death and dying. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (MIT Press, 2022), Gabriel Levy argues that collective religious narratives and beliefs are part of nature; they are the basis for the formation of the narratives and beliefs of individuals. Religion grows out of the universe, but to make sense of it, we have to recognize the paradox that the universe is both mental and material (or neither). Levy contends that we need both humanities and natural science approaches to study religion and religious meaning, but we must also recognize the limits of these approaches. First, we must make the dominant metaphysics that undergirds the various disciplines of science and humanities more explicit. Second, we must reject those versions of metaphysics that maintain simple monisms and radical dualisms. Bringing Donald Davidson’s philosophy—a form of pragmatism known as anomalous monism—to bear on religion, Levy offers a blueprint for one way that the humanities and natural sciences can have a mutually respectful dialogue. Levy argues that to understand religions, we must take their semantic content seriously. We need to rethink such basic concepts as narrative fiction, information, agency, creativity, technology, and intimacy. In the course of his argument, Levy considers the relation between two closely related semantics, fiction, and religion, and outlines a new approach to information. He then applies his theory to discrete cases: ancient texts, modern media, and intimacy. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, alternative facts: we are awash in a vast sea of epistemically questionable, not to mention false, testimony. How can we discern what is epistemically good to believe from what is not? Why are so many of us vulnerable to believing in ways that are unresponsive to widely available evidence – in other words, to holding bad beliefs? In Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People (Oxford UP, 2021), Neil Levy argues that we are in fact acting rationally, in accordance with how we have evolved to defer to our peers and authorities in our social networks. Levy, who is Professor of philosophy at Macquarie University and research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, argues that bad beliefs are more likely in epistemically polluted environments, and that our current epistemic environments are badly polluted. Overall, the book takes a bold stand against the traditional epistemological emphasis on the individual cognitive agent’s responsibility for justifying belief. This book is available open access here. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious (NYU Press, 2022), Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition. Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today. Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era (Harvard University Press, 2022) tells the story of how a group of intellectuals and policymakers transformed development economics and gave Latin America a new position in the world. Making an innovative and provocative intervention across the fields of global history, Latin American history, and economic thought, Margarita Fajardo reconstructs the origins of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL. Cepalinos challenged the orthodoxies of development theory and policy, outpacing the United States and the International Monetary Fund as the agenda setters for a region traditionally held under the orbit of Washington and its institutions. Their story interlocks with the emergence of dependency theory in Latin America, whose diverse history Fajardo recasts in pioneering fashion. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Tenzan Eaghll and Rebekka King's Representing Religion in Film (Bloomsbury, 2021) is the first full-length exploration of the relationship between religion, film, and ideology. It shows how religion is imagined, constructed, and interpreted in film and film criticism. The films analyzed include The Last Jedi, Terminator, Cloud Atlas, Darjeeling Limited, Hellboy, The Revenant, Religulous, Earth, and The Secret of my Success. Each chapter offers: - an explanation of the particular representation of religion that appears in film - a discussion of how this representation has been interpreted in film criticism and religious studies scholarship - an in-depth study of a Hollywood or popular film to highlight the rhetorical, social, and political functions this representation accomplishes on the silver screen - a discussion about how similar analysis might be pursued for other films of a similar genre, topic, or theme. Written in an accessible style, and focusing on Hollywood and popular cinema, this book will be of interest to both movie lovers and experts alike. Listeners might be interested in Tenzan Eaghll's podcast "Fascism in Cinema." Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dr. Elizabeth Ellcessor presents a much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our lives in In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality (NYU Press, 2022). In an emergency, we often look to media: to contact authorities, to get help, to monitor evolving situations, or to reach out to our loved ones. Sometimes we aren’t even aware of an emergency until we are notified by one of the countless alerts, alarms, notifications, sirens, text messages, or phone calls that permeate everyday life. Yet most people have only a partial understanding of how such systems make sense of and act upon an “emergency.” In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of “emergency” as an opposite of “normal.” Looking broadly across a range of contemporary emergency-related devices, practices, and services, Dr. Ellcessor illuminates the cultural and political underpinnings and socially differential effects of emergency media. By interweaving in-depth interviews with emergency-operation and app-development experts, archival materials, and discursive and technological readings of hardware and infrastructures, Dr. Ellcessor demonstrates that emergency media are powerful components of American life that are rarely, if ever, neutral. The normalization of ideologies produced and reinforced by emergency media result in unequal access to emergency services and discriminatory assumptions about who or what is a threat and who deserves care and protection. As emergency media undergo massive growth and transformation in response to digitization and attendant entrepreneurial cultures, Dr. Ellcessor asks where access, equity, and accountability fit in all of this. The first book to develop a typology of emergency media, In Case of Emergency opens a much-needed conversation around the larger cultural meanings of “emergency,” and what an ethical and care-based approach to emergency could entail. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (Verso, 2021) offers a critical look at policing and the power of the state, examining the relationship between our ideas of order and wider social and political issues. First published in 2000, this new edition of Mark Neocleous' influential book features a new introduction which helpfully situates this ever-relevant text in the context of contemporary struggles over police and policing. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations. Content warning: the last 2 minutes of the interview include a brief discussion of Mark's current work on suicide. Listeners who enjoyed this interview may enjoy my recent interviews with Mark on his most recent book The Politics of Immunity, with undercover police ("Spycop") victims Helen Steel and Alison about Deep Deception, and with counterterrorism scholar Rizwaan Sabir about The Suspect. Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London, and is well-known for his work on police power and security. His recent books include The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind' (2016); War Power, Police Power (2014); and the newly-reissued A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (2021).
Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As police racism unsettles Britain's tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester UP, 2021) details the activism that made movements like Black Lives Matter possible. Adam Elliott-Cooper analyses racism beyond prejudice and the interpersonal - arguing that black resistance confronts a global system of racial classification, exploitation and violence. Imperial cultures and policies, as well as colonial war and policing highlight connections between these histories and contemporary racisms. But this is a book about resistance, considering black liberation movements in the 20th century while utilising a decade of activist research covering spontaneous rebellion, campaigns and protest in the 21st century. Drawing connections between histories of resistance and different kinds of black struggle against policing is vital, it is argued, if we are to challenge the cutting edge of police and prison power which harnesses new and dangerous forms of surveillance, violence and criminalisation. Black Resistance to British Policing is a must read for all those who are interested in the history of the British Empire, its enduring legacies, and anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance. Adam Elliot-Cooper is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Public and Social Policy at Queen Mary University of London. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021). He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence.
Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers sculpt alternate agencies, and game players submerge themselves in those alternate agencies. Thus, the fact that we play games demonstrates the fluidity of our own agency. We can throw ourselves, for a little while, into a different and temporary motivations. This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on their unique value. In Games: Agency as Art (Oxford UP, 2020), C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part our systems of communication and our art. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle. Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.
Games also let us to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, it turns out, are a special technique for communication. They are a technology that lets us record and transmit forms of agency. Our games form a "library of agency" and we can explore that library to develop our autonomy. Games use temporary restrictions to force us into new postures of agency. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Muhtars, the lowest level elected political position in Turkey, hold an ambiguously defined place within the administrative hierarchy. They are public officials, but local citizens do not always associate them with the central government. Elise Massicard's Street-Level Governing: Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2022) is the first book to investigate how muhtars carry out their role—not only what they are supposed to do, but how they actually operate—to provide an ethnographic study of the state as viewed from its margins. It starts from the premise that the seeming "margin" of state administration is not peripheral at all, but instructive as to how it functions. As Massicard shows, muhtars exist at the intersection of everyday life and the exercise of power. Their position offers a personalized point of contact between citizens and state institutions, enabling close oversight of the citizenry, yet simultaneously projecting the sense of an accessible state to individuals. Challenging common theories of the state, Massicard outlines how the position of the muhtar throws into question an assumed dichotomy between domination and social resistance, and suggests that considerations of circumvention and accommodation are normal attributes of state-society functioning. Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Soham Sen talks about standpoint theory, a method of understanding the ways in which individual and collective experience influence public discourses. He begins from its origins in the civil rights movement and in the innovations of feminist thought, and follows it up with a discussion of its efficacy in understanding contemporary media. Soham Sen is pursuing his Masters in the Department of Communication Studies and is the Assistant Course Director of Public Speaking at the College of Media & Communication. His area of research includes border rhetoric and negotiation of immigrant identity , postcolonialism, and performance studies. Image: © 2022 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A standard way of proceeding in political philosophy is to start with some form of conceptual inquiry: we first try to figure out what justice, equality, and freedom are and only then we may eventually begin thinking about how these goods might be pursued and achieved. On this approach, although social activism is perhaps necessary to counteract the worst kinds of social deprivation, it is also premature from the philosophical standpoint: as we still are debating what justice is, present efforts to bring about justice are risky at best. In her new book, Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope (Columbia University Press, 2022), Michele Moody-Adams travels a different path. She begins by looking at social movements and argues that they not only can teach us about what justice is, but that they often play a necessary role in clarifying our normative concepts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sara Brown and Stephen Smith have edited a much needed and fascinating compilation of essays on the intersection of religion and mass atrocity. Their intent is not to theorize the relationship, but rather to explore how religious faith, institutions and leaders have participated in, resisted and remembered genocide and mass violence. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide (Routledge, 2021) is notable for both for its regional and chronological breadth. There are several essays on the Holocaust, as one would expect. But contributions range from mass violence in the Roman world to the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and from the Abrahamic religions to Buddhism, animism and other faith traditions. Most notable are essays that look at how changing understandings of genocide and mass atrocities reshape our understanding of the role of religious beliefs and institutions (see especially the section on colonial violence). But readers can learn much from each section of this fine volume. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today, we speak with Waleed Ziad, about his book Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus, published in 2021 with Harvard University Press. Ziad is an assistant professor of Religion at UNC Chapel Hill and holds a PhD from Yale. In Hidden Caliphate, Ziad offers an incredibly rich, fascinating, and detailed study of Sufi networks. These are expansive networks that span a wide array of geography, from Afghanistan to China to Siberia. Challenging dominant and often simplistic narratives of the region, reduced to the story of the Great Game, the book centers on the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi order, the hidden caliphate in Ziad's title, who play instrumental roles in shaping the religious, social, political, and intellectual landscapes of Central and South Asia. Ziad shows that these networks stay alive well into the 20th century, in a period that other scholars have argued is one of decline, with their legacy and influence still alive today, embedded in everyday life and culture throughout the region. The book is a riveting telling of the mujaddidis’ impact on Muslim reformist movements and their responses to the decline of Muslim political power. In our discussion today, we talk about Ziad’s arguments and contributions. Some of the specific themes we cover in this discussion are Islamic sovereignty and kingship, millenarian eschatology, Sufis as scholars and scholars as Sufis, intellectuals, and teachers, Sufism’s connection with orthodoxy, parallels between Sufi training and Tantric Buddhist esoterism, the woman question in the book, and colonialism and its impact on the Mujaddidis. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan), Merrick D. Pilling urges those invested in social justice for 2SLGBTQ people to interrogate the biomedical model of mental illness beyond the diagnoses that specifically target gender and sexual dissidence. In this first comprehensive application of Mad Studies to queer and trans experiences of mental distress, Pilling advances a broad critique of the biomedical model of mental illness as it pertains to 2SLGBTQ people, arguing that Mad Studies is especially amenable to making sense of queer and trans madness. Based on empirical data from two qualitative research studies, this book includes analyses of inpatient chart documentation from a psychiatric hospital and interviews with those who have experienced distress. Using an intersectional lens, Pilling critically examines what constitutes mental health treatment and the impacts of medical strategies on mad queer and trans people. Ultimately, Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice explores the emancipatory promise of queer and trans madness, advocating for more resources to respond to crisis and distress in ways that are non-coercive, non-carceral, and honour autonomy as well as interdependence within 2SLGBTQ communities. Clayton Jarrard works at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives that bridge research, policy, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of cultural anthropology, queer studies, disability studies, mad studies, and religious studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it? We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony—understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology—Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century. Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert book Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back) (Verso, 2022) explores how these forces came to control our world. The authors show how they have shaped the direction of politics and government as well as the neoliberal economy to benefit their own interests. However, this dominance is under threat. Following the 2008 financial crisis, a new order emerged in which the digital platform is the central new technology of both production and power. This offers new opportunities for counter hegemonic strategies to win back power. Hegemony Now outlines a dynamic socialist strategy for the twenty-first century. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Many Canadians think of their country as a paragon of liberal democratic values at home, and a moderating force on the world stage—not so, argues the compelling new edited collection from Fernwood Publishing, Capitalism and Dispossession: Corporate Canada at Home and Abroad. In this conversation with co-editors, Dr. David P Thomas and Dr. Veldon Coburn, we discuss the book’s numerous case studies of how the Canadian state, and the corporate actors to which it delegates authority, are central actors within a system of global capitalism that is premised on processes of accumulation by dispossession in order to reproduce itself. Phil Henderson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy where his research interests focus on the interrelations between Indigenous land/water defenders and organized labour in what’s presently known as Canada. More information can be found at his personal website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization (Routledge, 2016), Wendy Simonds analyzes the wide-reaching powers of medicalization: the dynamic processes by which medical authorities, institutions, and ideologies impact our everyday experiences, culture, and social life. Simonds documents her own Hospital Land adventures and draws on a wide range of U.S. cultural representations — from memoirs to medical mail, from hospital signs to disaster movies — in order to urge critical thinking about conventional notions of care, health, embodiment, identity, suffering, and mortality. This book is intended for general readers, medical practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students in courses on medical sociology, medicine, medical ethics, nursing, public health, carework, visual culture, cultural studies, and gerontology. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations people and place at festivals and celebrations. His next book project is on research that he conducted about a canoeing and kayaking event that occurs annually on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
After the tumultuous night of October 29, 2012, the residents of Monmouth, Ocean, and Atlantic Counties faced an enormous and pressing question: What to do? The stories captured in this book encompass their answer to that question: the clean-up efforts, the work with governmental and non-governmental aid agencies, and the fraught choices concerning rebuilding. Through a rich and varied set of oral histories that provide perspective on disaster planning, response, and recovery in New Jersey, Abigail Perkiss captures the experience of these individuals caught in between short-term preparedness initiatives that municipal and state governments undertook and the long-term planning decisions that created the conditions for catastrophic property damage. Through these stories, Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten Shore (Cornell UP, 2022) lays bare the ways that climate change and sea level rise are creating critical vulnerabilities in the most densely populated areas in the nation, illuminating the human toll of disaster and the human capacity for resilience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Dispossession as Delivery: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press; 2022), Zachary Levenson explains why post-Apartheid South Africa continues to evict land occupations. Levenson shows that the government does this in the name of preserving the order they imagine is necessary to deliver housing to its citizens. Based upon a decade of participant observation in two land occupations in Cape Town, this book provides a novel, relational understanding about group formation and how collective actions interact with the state. Richard E. Ocejo is professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode of High Theory, Tung-Hui Hu talks with Júlia Irion Martins about Digital Lethargy, as part of our High Theory in STEM series. As a modern ailment, digital lethargy is a societal pathology, like earlier forms of acedia, otium, and neurasthenia, but also a disease of performing selfhood within the disposable identities of contemporary, digital service work. In this episode, Tung-Hui Hu makes the argument that digital lethargy helps us turn away from the demand to constantly “be ourselves” and see the potential of quieter, more ordinary forms of survival in the digital age such as collective inaction. In the episode he discusses Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (Semiotexte/Native Agents, 2018, trans. Katy Derbyshire). He also references the film Sleeping Beauty (dir. Julia Leigh, 2011), Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Anchor, 2008), Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (Semiotexte/Native Agents, 2018, trans. Katy Derbyshire), and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (Penguin Random House, 2020). Other mentions include the artist Aria Dean and scholar Achille Mbembe. Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and scholar. His new website has the best domain ending: tunghui.hu He is a 2022-23 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome and an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan. His book on this topic, Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection (MIT Press, 2022), will be published on October 4 This week’s image was made by Saronik Bosu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Enjoyment appears as purely private matter, but this is by far not the case. Ever since Aristotle the philosophical social critique is tormented by the question, whether the libidinal tendencies of human subjects allow the construction of a just political-economic order. It seemed at first that in modernity this problem had been overcome. Economic liberalism and utilitarianism argued that egoistic private interests and social justice were directly linked and that capitalism united libidinal and political economy in the best possible manner. But the political-economic panorama soon turned out significantly more complex and contradictory. Tomšič’s book The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy (Walther Konig Verlag, 2020) recalls central Marxian and Freudian insights and circumscribes the political stakes of psychoanalysis under the general banner of a Critique of Libidinal Economy. Samo Tomšič is interim professor of philosophy in Hamburg at the University of Fine Arts. Reuben Niewenhuis is interested in philosophy, theory, technology, and interdisciplinary topics. Subscribe to his interviews here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The city of Tel Aviv presents itself as a bastion of liberal values, tolerance, and ultimately of freedom. But like many self-definitions, there is something of a gap between this description and the reality of everyday life. In this gap resides a hidden reality—Palestinians who work, study, and live as an unseen minority, to some degree denied full benefits of equal urban citizenship. Much of the discourse concerning this descriptive gap focuses on attempts to preserve or contextualise the claim to social liberalism from the Israeli Jewish perspective. A new book by the anthropologist Andreas Hackl, takes a different point of view. The Invisible Palestinians: The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv (Indiana UP, 2022) focuses on what he terms the “immersive invisibility” of Israel’s minority Palestinian population: the challenges they face, the strategies they deploy, and ultimately the consequences of acts of personal and collective self-censorship that define and circumscribe their everyday life and presence in Tel Aviv. The Invisible Palestinians documents the experiences of a diverse Palestinian population in the Jewish Israeli city: residents and commuters, professionals and day laborers, activists, artists, students. Differences of education, economic wherewithal, and social class aside, all share one central experience: circumscribed citizenship of the Jewish metropolis. Andreas Hackl is Lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as World Development, American Ethnologist, and Social Anthropology. He has worked as a consultant with the International Labour Organization and as a newspaper correspondent based in Jerusalem. Akin Ajayi (@AkinAjayi) is a writer and editor, based in Tel Aviv. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Latinx Studies has long been overdue for a revamp – a different orientation to the questions with which we concern ourselves. Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader (New York University Press, 2021) is a leap toward this direction by offering the field nine distinct díalogos around which various established and junior scholars from different disciplines present their own writings to these conversations. Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa, the co-editors of the anthology, ground the book in the work of Jesús Colón’s A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. “By opening this anthology with Jesús Colón we aim to highlight the role that history, memoir, and even autobiographical fiction invariably play in most empirically sound and theoretically sophisticated Latinx humanistic social sciences,” Ramos-Zayas and Rúa write (3). From this vantage point, they pry open the field of Latinx Studies and expose its expansiveness and depth by highlighting its methodological innovation, intersectional critique, various geopolitical scales that decenter the U.S. nation-state, and critical takes on seemingly established paradigms. In this New Books Latino Studies interview, we focus on díalogos numbers 1, 2, 8, and 9. These four critical dialogues offer listeners only a glimpse into the 39 articles that make up the anthology. Over 538 pages, 39 articles, and 9 dialogues, Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies provides different ways to access, define, disrupt, and embody Latinidades. Scholars, teachers, and anyone interested in Latino Studies will find something of interest in the anthology. Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative analysis, demonstrating the transformation of working conditions, institutional contexts, and research areas since the introduction of a metrics and quantification regime during the 1980s. Highlighting the complexity and ambivalences of metrics and quantification, as well as the uneven distribution of positive and negative impacts, the book offers essential reading for every academic, irrespective of the nation or institution in which they work. It also will be important for those seeing to better understand the role of metrics and markets in contemporary life. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona. Incarnations and Contestations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Professors Kirsti Niskanen and Michael J. Barany present a rich collection of essays on the historical construction and reinvention of scholarly personae. The book carries this investigation by focusing on three contextual conditions that play a decisive role in the fashioning of such personae: international travels, embodiment, and gender. The book also pays great attention to the role of incomes and funding opportunities in the evolution of scholarly personae in disciplines as varied as mathematics, philosophy, experimental psychology, pedagogy, history, and medicine. Niskanen and Barany “see the history of scholarly personae as occupying a vital space in cultural theories of science and scholarship”. This statement should be understood in at least two ways. Firstly, the study of scholarly personae delves into the dynamic interactions between personalities, institutions, professional ethos, social norms, international exchanges, and explains how these interactions generate ways of conducting and presenting one’s life. Secondly, uncovering such histories of scholarly personae eventually leads to a better understanding of contextual forces that prevent or encourage the emergence of greater diversity and equity within academia today. At the intersection of a wide range of scholarly disciplines and geographical contexts, Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona represent a major contribution to the historical study of scientific personae since Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum’s special issue, “Scientific Personae and Their Histories”, published in 2003. Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is teaching the Humanities and French language to undergraduates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Throughout his career, the internationally renowned Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot unsettled key concepts in anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and beyond. From his early critique of the West to the ongoing challenges he leveled at disciplinary and intellectual boundaries and formations, Trouillot centered the Caribbean as a site both foundational to the development of Western thought and critical to its undoing. Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader (Duke UP, 2021) offers a representative cross section of his work that includes his most famous writings and lesser-known and harder-to-find texts essential to his oeuvre. Encouraging readers to engage with Trouillot's scholarship in new ways, this collection demonstrates the breadth of his writing, his enduring influence on Caribbean studies, and his relevance to politically engaged scholarship more broadly. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation: A Reflexive Ethnography of Christian Experience (Routledge, 2020) offers a uniquely intimate and auto-ethnographic exploration of Christian experience, rendering a deep, phenomenological account of how devotional worlds become real – how they are experienced, shaped, constituted and performed by those who live them. The book starts from a reflexive exploration of the author’s own experiences of the divine, considers the spiritual journeys of family members and the ‘spiritual community’ of which he was a part, and draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the southern Balkans where that community was based. Jamie Barnes considers three main elements: firstly, the role that sensory aspects of experience play in constituting one’s lived world and one’s ideas about the kinds of beings inhabiting it; secondly, how stories and metaphors are tactically employed, not only in the process of expressing aspects of past experience but also in shaping and forming both desired worlds and future pathways; thirdly, how such sensed, narrated and lived worlds are tentatively held together - in hope, trust and love – through charismatic relationships of devotion with a divine Other. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Children and horror are often thought to be an incompatible meeting of audience and genre, beset by concerns that children will be corrupted or harmed through exposure to horror media. Nowhere is this tension more clear than in horror films for adults, where the demonic child villain is one of the genre's most enduring tropes. However, horror for children is a unique category of contemporary Hollywood cinema in which children are addressed as an audience with specific needs, fears and desires, and where child characters are represented as sympathetic protagonists whose encounters with the horrific lead to cathartic, subversive and productive outcomes. Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021) examines the history, aesthetics and generic characteristics of children's horror films, and identifies the 'horrific child' as one of the defining features of the genre, where it is as much a staple as it is in adult horror but with vastly different representational, interpretative and affective possibilities. Through analysis of case studies including blockbuster hits (Gremlins), cult favourites (The Monster Squad) and indie darlings (Coraline), Catherine Lester asks, what happens to the horror genre, and the horrific children it represents, when children are the target audience? Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst, 2022), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the project of ‘decolonisation’ as intellectually unsound and unrealistic. Táíwò rejects decolonisation’s conflation of modernity with coloniality and takes to task the decolonisers’ confused attempts at undoing of global society’s foundations. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University. His writings have been translated into French, Italian, German and Portuguese. His book How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2015. NBN interview with Olúfẹ́mi on Africa Must Be Modern Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water (Duke UP, 2019) traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses. Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Southern California. Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine (Cornell UP, 2022), Grant examines how China’s urban development policies of frontier cities like Xining (Tib. zi ling) accompanied civilizational projects that deployed various discursive and non-discursive practices aimed at creating ideologically homogeneous and modern places. Xining or Ziling is the capital of Qinghai (Tib. mtsho sngon) province and it is the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau and home to over 200, 000 Tibetans. Dr. Grant shows how specific processes complicate the rural/urban divide and allow for the emergence of a “regional modernity” where Tibetan urbanites develop tools for the “remediation of the Chinese Dream,” and subtly challenge and subvert the social and ethnic hierarchies promoted through urban development policies. Despite the idea of the city or Trungcher (grong 'khyer) as a place of moral decay and social disintegration, instead of rejecting and retreating from it, Tibetans view the city as a site of social and political possibility; where they can assert their social existence and cultural identity through creative forms of cultural expression and entrepreneurial endeavor. Palden Gyal is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Tibetan and Late Imperial Chinese history at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Global Agenda for Social Justice 2 (Policy Press, 2022) provides accessible insights into some of the world’s most pressing social problems and proposes practicable international public policy responses to those problems. Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), chapters examine topics such as education, violence, discrimination, substance abuse, public health, and environment. The volume provides recommendations for action by governing officials, policy makers, and the public around key issues of social justice. The book will be of interest to scholars, practitioners, advocates, journalists, and students interested in public sociology, the study of social problems, and the pursuit of social justice. This is a special edition of Global Agenda for Social Justice and will include interviews with all authors who made contributions to this book. Glenn W. Muschert is Professor of Sociology at Khalifa University of Science and Technology Abu Dhabi Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations people and place at festivals and celebrations. His next book project is on research that he conducted about a canoeing and kayaking event that occurs annually on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Amber Sinha works at the intersection law, technology and society, and studies the impact of digital technologies on socio-political processes and structures. His research aims to further the discourse on regulatory practices around internet, technology, and society. He is currently a Senior Fellow-Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation studying models for algorithmic transparency. Networks, whether in the form of Facebook and Twitter or WhatsApp groups, are exerting immense, unchecked power in subverting political discourse and polarizing the public in India. If people’s understandings of their political reality can be so easily manipulated through misinformation, then what role can they play in fostering deliberative democracies? Amber Sinha asks this much ignored and often-misunderstood question in his book The Networked Public: How Social Media is Changing Democracy (Rupa Publications, 2019). In search for an answer, he investigates the history of misinformation and the biases that make the public susceptible to it, how digital platforms and their governance impacts the public’s behaviour on them, as well as the changing face of political targeting in this data-driven world. The book weaves sharp analysis with academic rigour to show that while the public can be irrational and gullible, their actions—be it mob violence or spreading fake news—are symptoms of deeper social malaise and products of their technological contexts.The Networked Public is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how social media and the Internet is transforming democracy not only in India, but across the world. Alok Prasanna Kumar is Co-Founder and Lead, Vidhi Karnataka. Sarayu Natarajan is the Founder of Aapti Institute. In the past, she has worked in management consulting and the venture fund industry before the plunge into researching politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate (U California Press, 2021) examines the failure of recent efforts to improve Americans' diets by increasing access to healthy food. Based on exhaustive research, this book by Kenneth H. Kolb documents the struggles of two Black neighborhoods in Greenville, South Carolina. For decades, outsiders ignored residents' complaints about the unsavory retail options on their side of town—until the well-intentioned but flawed "food desert" concept took hold in popular discourse. Soon after, new allies arrived to help, believing that grocery stores and healthier options were the key to better health. These efforts, however, did not change neighborhood residents' food consumption practices. Retail Inequality explains why and also outlines the history of deindustrialization, urban public policy, and racism that are the cause of unequal access to food today. Kolb identifies retail inequality as the crucial concept to understanding today’s debates over gentrification and community development. As this book makes clear, the battle over food deserts was never about food—it was about equality. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten. Here one of our most insightful writers on American religion trains his focus on that other great passion--team sports--to reveal their surprising connections. In Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America (UNC Press, 2022), Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. Referring to Notre Dame football, The Catholic Sun called its fandom "a kind of sacramental." Legions of sports fans reading Passion Plays will recognize exactly what that means. Randall Balmer holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Having a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended—laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (Stanford UP, 2022), Raúl Pérez argues that we must genuinely confront this unsettling question in order to fully understand the persistence of anti-black racism and white supremacy in American society today. W.E.B. Du Bois's prescient essay "The Souls of White Folk" was one of the first to theorize whiteness as a social and political construct based on a feeling of superiority over racialized others—a kind of racial contempt. Pérez extends this theory to the study of humor, connecting theories of racial formation to parallel ideas about humor stemming from laughter at another's misfortune. Critically synthesizing scholarship on race, humor, and emotions, he uncovers a key function of humor as a tool for producing racial alienation, dehumanization, exclusion, and even violence. Pérez tracks this use of humor from blackface minstrelsy to contemporary contexts, including police culture, politics, and far-right extremists. Rather than being harmless fun, this humor plays a central role in reinforcing and mobilizing racist ideology and power under the guise of amusement. The Souls of White Jokes exposes this malicious side of humor, while also revealing a new facet of racism today. Though it can be comforting to imagine racism as coming from racial hatred and anger, the terrifying reality is that it is tied up in seemingly benign, even joyful, everyday interactions as well— and for racism to be eradicated we must face this truth. Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Desertion: Trust and Mistrust in Civil Wars (Cornell UP, 2020) examines the personal and political factors behind soldiers' choices to stay in their unit or abandon their cause. Theodore McLauchlin's explores what might spur widespread desertion in a given group, how some armed groups manage to keep their soldiers fighting over long periods, and how committed soldiers are to their causes and their comrades. To answer these questions, McLauchlin focuses on combatants in military units during the Spanish Civil War. He pushes against the preconception that individual soldiers' motivations are either personal or political, either selfish or ideological. Instead, he draws together the personal and the political, showing how soldiers come to trust each other—or not. Desertion demonstrates how the armed groups that hold together and survive are those that foster interpersonal connections, allowing soldiers the opportunity to prove their commitment to the fight. McLauchlin argues that trust keeps soldiers in the fray, mistrust pushes them to leave, and political beliefs and military practices shape both. Desertion brings the reader into the world of soldiers and rigorously tests the factors underlying desertion. It asks, honestly and without judgment, what would you do in an army in a civil war? Would you stand and fight? Would you try to run away? And what if you found yourself fighting for a cause you no longer believe in or never did in the first place? Theodore McLauchlin is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Université de Montréal and Director of the Centre d'études sur la paix et la sécurité internationales. His research interests lie in civil wars, international security, military behavior, and civil-military relations. He earned his Ph.D. at McGill University (2013), during which time he was also a visiting scholar at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest (Lexington Books, 2022) explores an annual interstate tug-of-war between two small towns along the Mississippi River. In this book, Johnston examines how media shapes place and identity of people at this festival. In writing this book, he conducted analysis of a ten year period of media coverage, and found that the experience people have while attending Tug Fest is quite different than what is said in classic novels about life on the Mississippi River. Michael O. Johnston is assistant professor of sociology at William Penn University and is a host for New Books in Sociology. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Manuela Ciotti's Retro-modern India: Forging the Low Caste Self (Routledge, 2020) is interesting engagement with Chamar identity and understanding it through the lens of modernity. Through a rich ethnographic engagement the book has looked into what Modernity meant for Chamar community and also the dialectical relationship such identity formation had with the discourse of Modernity. Kalyani Kalyani is a sociologist and currently teaches at School of Arts and Sciences in Azim Premji University at Bengaluru. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke UP, 2022) Eldritch Priest questions the nature of the imagination in contemporary culture through the phenomenon of the earworm: those reveries that hijack our attention, the shivers that run down our spines, and the songs that stick in our heads. Through a series of meditations on music, animal mentality, abstraction, and metaphor, Priest uses the earworm and the states of daydreaming, mind-wandering, and delusion it can produce to outline how music is something that is felt as thought rather than listened to. Priest presents Earworm and Event as a tête-bêche—two books bound together with each end meeting in the middle. Where Earworm theorizes the entanglement of thought and feeling, Event performs it. Throughout, Priest conceptualizes the earworm as an event that offers insight into not only the way human brains process musical experiences, but how abstractions and the imagination play key roles in the composition and expression of our contemporary social environments and more-than-human milieus. Unconventional and ambitious, Earworm and Event offers new ways to interrogate the convergence of thought, sound, and affect. Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theater Labor (University of Michigan Press, 2021) by Dr. Christin Essin illuminates the work of New York City’s theater technicians, shining a light on the essential contributions of unionized stagehands, carpenters, electricians, sound engineers, properties artisans, wardrobe crews, makeup artists, and child guardians. Too-often dismissed or misunderstood as mere functionaries, these technicians are deeply engaged in creative problem-solving and perform collaborative, intricate choreographed work that parallels the performances of actors, singers, and dancers onstage. Although their contributions have fueled the Broadway machine, their contributions have been left out of most theater histories. Theater historian Dr. Essin offers clear and evocative descriptions of this invaluable labor, based on her archival research and interviews with more than 100 backstage technicians, members of the New York locals of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. A former theater technician herself, Dr. Essin provides readers with an insider’s view of the Broadway stage, from the suspended lighting bridge of electricians operating followspots for A Chorus Line; the automation deck where carpenters move the massive scenic towers for Newsies; the makeup process in the dressing room for The Lion King; the offstage wings of Matilda the Musical, where guardians guide child actors to entrances and exits. Working Backstage makes a significant contribution to theater studies and also to labor studies, exploring the politics of the unions that serve backstage professionals, protecting their rights and insuring safe working conditions. Illuminating the history of this typically hidden workforce, the book provides uncommon insights into the business of Broadway and its backstage working relationships among cast and crew members. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Edited by Ellie D. Hernandez, Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., and Magda García, Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Space (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) focuses on queer, trans, and gender nonconforming communities of immigrants and social dissidents who reflect on and write about diaspora and migratory movements while navigating geographical and embodied spaces across gendered and racialized contexts. It forms a nuanced conversation between scholarship and social activism that speaks in concrete ways about diasporic and migratory LGBTQ communities who suffer from immoral immigration policies and political discourses that produce untenable living situations. It received the silver medal in the Best LGBTQ Themed book category at the 2022 International Latino Book Prize. Dr. Ellie D. Hernandez is an Associate Professor in the department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she teaches and writes extensively on Chicanx literature and culture, citizenship, transnational Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural production, and Latinx LGBTQ Studies. She is also the author of Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture and co-editor of The UnMaking of Latina/o Citizenship: Culture, Politics, and Aesthetics. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar’s franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses. But what does Rockstar’s version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar’s games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity (de Gruyter, 2022) offers critical discussion of Rockstar as a company, their video games, and ultimately, their attempts at creating new narratives about U.S. history and culture. It explores the ways in which Rockstar’s brand identity and their titles coalesce to create a new kind of video game history, how promotional materials work to claim the "authenticity" of these products, and assert the authority of game developers to perform the role of historian. By working at the intersection of historical game studies, U.S. history, and film and media studies, this book explores what happens when contemporary demands for historical authenticity are brought to bear on the way we envisage the past – and whose past it is deemed to be. Ultimately, this book implores those who research historical video games to consider the oft-forgotten sources at the margins of these games as importance spaces where historical meaning is made and negotiated. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Science plays a substantial, though under-acknowledged, role in shaping popular understandings of rape. Statistical figures like “1 in 4 women have experienced completed or attempted rape” are central for raising awareness. Yet such scientific facts often become points of controversy, particularly as conservative scholars and public figures attempt to discredit feminist activists. Rape by the Numbers: Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence (Rutgers University Press, 2021) by Dr. Ethan Czuy Levine explores scientists’ approaches to studying rape over more than forty years in the United States and Canada. In addition to investigating how scientists come to know the scope, causes, and consequences of rape, this book delves into the politics of rape research. Scholars who study rape often face a range of social pressures and resource constraints, including some that are unique to feminized and politicized fields of inquiry. Collectively, these matters have far-reaching consequences. Scientific projects may determine who counts as a potential victim/survivor or aggressor in a range of contexts, shaping research agendas as well as state policy, anti-violence programming and services, and public perceptions. Social processes within the study of rape determine which knowledges count as credible science, and thus who may count as an expert in academic and public contexts. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why is reality TV important? In True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us (FSG, 2022), Danielle J. Lindemann, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University, uses a sociological lens to examine the meaning and role of reality TV in contemporary society. In doing so, the analysis demonstrates how reality TV reinforces often narrow and conservative stereotypes about families, gender, class, race, and sexuality. At the same time, the book shows how reality TV can offer representations for excluded communities and is not consumed uncritically by audiences, even as reality TV is reflective of broader social inequalities. Drawing on classical and contemporary sociological theories and frameworks, the book uses a huge range of examples, from some of the early reality TV classics, through the huge hits, to the niche and less well-known shows that both reflect and shape how life is shown on TV. The book is essential reading across the social sciences and arts and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in television! Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The contributors to Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (Duke UP, 2022) assert the importance of queer kinship to queer and trans theory and to kinship theory. In a contemporary moment marked by the rising tides of neoliberalism, fascism, xenophobia, and homo- and cis-nationalism, they approach kinship as both a horizon and a source of violence and possibility. The contributors challenge dominant theories of kinship that ignore the devastating impacts of chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and racialized nationalism on the bonds of Black and Indigenous people and people of color. Among other topics, they examine the “blood tie” as the legal marker of kin relations, the everyday experiences and memories of trans mothers and daughters in Istanbul, the outsourcing of reproductive labor in postcolonial India, kinship as a model of governance beyond the liberal state, and the intergenerational effects of the adoption of Indigenous children as a technology of settler colonialism. Queer Kinship pushes the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of queer theory forward while opening up new paths for studying kinship. Tyler Bradway is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, Cortland, and author of Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading. Elizabeth Freeman is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and author of Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century, and other books also published by Duke University Press. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In recent decades, the North American public has pursued an inspirational vision of successful aging—striving through medical technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines, vulnerabilities, and dependencies previously commonly associated with old age. On the face of it, this bold new vision of successful, healthy, and active aging is highly appealing. But it also rests on a deep cultural discomfort with aging and being old. The contributors to Sarah Lamb's Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession (Rutgers UP, 2017) explore how the successful aging movement is playing out across five continents. Their chapters investigate a variety of people, including Catholic nuns in the United States; Hindu ashram dwellers; older American women seeking plastic surgery; aging African-American lesbians and gay men in the District of Columbia; Chicago home health care workers and their aging clients; Mexican men foregoing Viagra; dementia and Alzheimer sufferers in the United States and Brazil; and aging policies in Denmark, Poland, India, China, Japan, and Uganda. This book offers a fresh look at a major cultural and public health movement of our time, questioning what has become for many a taken-for-granted goal—aging in a way that almost denies aging itself. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
L. L. Wynn and Angel M. Foster,'s edited volume Sex in the Middle East and North Africa (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices. The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies. Mathew Gagné is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women's Mobilization in Violent Contexts (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Dr. Julia Zulver documents the experiences of grassroots women’s organizations that united to demand gender justice during and in the aftermath of Colombia’s armed conflict. In doing so, she illustrates a little-studied phenomenon: women whose experiences with violence catalyze them to mobilize and resist as feminists, even in the face of grave danger. Despite a well-established tradition of studying women in war, we tend to focus on their roles as mothers or carers, as peacemakers, or sometimes as revolutionaries. This book explains the gendered underpinnings of why women engage in feminist mobilization, even when this takes place in a ‘domain of losses’ that exposes them to high levels of risk. It follows four women’s organizations who break with traditional gender norms and defy armed groups’ social and territorial control, exposing them to retributive punishment. Dr. Zulver provides rich evidence to document how women are able to surmount the barriers to mobilization when they frame their actions in terms of resistance, rather than fear. High-Risk Feminism in Colombia has also been translated and released in Spanish! Dr. Zulver discusses the book in Spanish here. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Straight from the beaches of Hawaii comes an exciting new ethnography of a community of big-wave surfers. Oahu’s Waimea Bay attracts the world’s best big wave surfers—men and women who come to test their physical strength, courage, style, knowledge of the water, and love of the ocean. Sociologist Ugo Corte sees their fun as the outcome of social interaction within a community. Both as participant and observer, he examines how mentors, novices, and peers interact to create episodes of collective fun in a dangerous setting; how they push one another’s limits, nourish a lifestyle, advance the sport and, in some cases, make a living based on their passion for the sport. In Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers (U Chicago Press, 2022), Corte traces how surfers earn and maintain a reputation within the field, and how, as innovations are introduced, and as they progress, establish themselves and age, they modify their strategies for maximizing performance and limiting chances of failure. Corte argues that fun is a social phenomenon, a pathway to solidarity rooted in the delight in actualizing the self within a social world. It is a form of group cohesion achieved through shared participation in risky interactions with uncertain outcomes. Ultimately, Corte provides an understanding of collective effervescence, emotional energy, and the interaction rituals leading to fateful moments—moments of decision that, once made, transform one’s self-concept irrevocably. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
From gender expert and professional facilitator Kate Mangino comes Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), an informed guide about how we can all collectively work to undo harmful gender norms and create greater household equity. As American society shut down due to Covid, millions of women had to leave their jobs to take on full-time childcare. As the country opens back up, women continue to struggle to balance the demands of work and home life. Kate Mangino, a professional facilitator for twenty years, has written a comprehensive, practical guide for readers and their partners about gender norms and household balance. Yes, part of our gender problem is structural, and that requires policy change. But much of our gender problem is social, and that requires us to change. Quickly moving from diagnosis to solution, Equal Partners focuses on what we can do, everyday people living busy lives, to rewrite gender norms to support a balanced homelife so both partners have equal time for work, family, and self. Mangino adopts an interactive model, posing questions, and asking readers to assess their situations through guided lists and talking points. Equal Partners is broad in its definition of gender and gender roles. This is a book for all: straight, gay, trans, and non-binary, parents and grandparents, and friends, with the goal to help foster gender equality in readers' homes, with their partners, family and wider community. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 1930, Sigmund Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents and laid out his theory of civilization: civilization’s a problem, and it makes us unhappy. Freud felt humans were aggressive creatures by nature, that we delight in exercising our aggression and hurting one another. He claimed that civilization, with its laws and mores, prevents us from gratifying that aggressiveness. Elizabeth Lunbeck is a professor in the History of Science Department and Director of Graduate Studies at Harvard University, specializing in the history of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology. Her written works include The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America and The Americanization of Narcissism. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Liz Bucar is the Director of Sacred Writes, Professor of Religion, and Dean’s Leadership Fellow at Northeastern University. Bucar is an expert in comparative religious ethics who has published on topics ranging from gender reassignment surgery to the global politics of modest clothing. Bucar’s current book, Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Harvard University Press, 2022), is on the ethics of religious appropriation. She is also the author of award-winning Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Harvard University Press, 2017). Bucar’s public scholarship includes bylines in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, and Zocalo Public Square as well as several podcasts. She has a PhD in religious ethics from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Follow her on Twitter @BucarLiz. You can find an NBN podcast with Bucar talking about Pious Fashion here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Digital discourse has become a widespread way of communicating worldwide, WhatsApp being one of the most popular Instant Messaging tools. A Linguistic Overview of Whatsapp Communication (Brill, 2022) offers a critical state-of-the-art review of WhatsApp linguistic studies. After evaluating a wide range of sources, and seeking to identify relevant works, two major thematic domains were found. On the one hand, references addressing WhatsApp linguistic characteristics: status notifications, multimodal elements such as emojis or memes, and language variation, among others. On the other, the volume offers an overview of references describing the use of WhatsApp to learn English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL). The author provides a broad critical review of previous works to date, which has enabled her to detect areas of research still unexplored. Lucia Fernandez Amaya is Professor in English at the Department of Philology and Translation, Pablo de Olavide University in Seville. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
From social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting the social world. This textual data gives unprecedented insights into fundamental questions in the social sciences, humanities, and industry. Meanwhile new machine learning tools are rapidly transforming the way science and business are conducted. Text as Data shows how to combine new sources of data, machine learning tools, and social science research design to develop and evaluate new insights. Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences (Princeton UP, 2022) is organized around the core tasks in research projects using text--representation, discovery, measurement, prediction, and causal inference. The authors offer a sequential, iterative, and inductive approach to research design. Each research task is presented complete with real-world applications, example methods, and a distinct style of task-focused research. Bridging many divides--computer science and social science, the qualitative and the quantitative, and industry and academia--Text as Data is an ideal resource for anyone wanting to analyze large collections of text in an era when data is abundant and computation is cheap, but the enduring challenges of social science remain.
Overview of how to use text as data
Research design for a world of data deluge
Examples from across the social sciences and industry
Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
An incisive case study of changemaking in action, Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership (Harvard Education Press, 2021) analyzes the complex process of racial equity reform within K-12 schools. Scholar Decoteau J. Irby emphasizes that racial equity is dynamic, shifting as our emerging racial consciousness evolves and as racism asserts itself anew. Those who accept the challenge of reform find themselves "stuck improving," caught in a perpetual dilemma of both making progress and finding ever more progress to be made. Rather than dismissing stuckness as failure, Irby embraces it as an inextricable part of the improvement process. Irby brings readers into a large suburban high school as school leaders strive to redress racial inequities among the school's increasingly diverse student population. Over a five-year period, he witnesses both progress and setbacks in the leaders' attempts to provide an educational environment that is intellectually, socioemotionally, and culturally affirming. Looking beyond this single school, Irby pinpoints the factors that are essential to the work of equity reform in education. He argues that lasting transformation relies most urgently on the cultivation of organizational conditions that render structural racism impossible to preserve. Irby emphasizes how schools must strengthen and leverage personal, relational, and organizational capacities in order to sustain meaningful change. Stuck Improving offers a clear-eyed accounting of school-improvement practices, including data-driven instructional approaches, teacher cultural competency, and inquiry-based leadership strategies. This timely work contributes both to the practical efforts of equity-minded school leaders and to a deeper understanding of what the work of racial equity improvement truly entails. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities (U California Press, 2022) tells the story of how cities across the United States went from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Today, many of these cities have more large and charismatic wild animals living in them than at any time in at least the past 150 years. Why have so many cities—the most artificial and human-dominated of all Earth’s ecosystems—grown rich with wildlife, even as wildlife has declined in most of the rest of the world? And what does this paradox mean for people, wildlife, and nature on our increasingly urban planet? The Accidental Ecosystem is the first book to explain this phenomenon from a deep historical perspective, and its focus includes a broad range of species and cities. Cities covered include New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Austin, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Digging into the natural history of cities and unpacking our conception of what it means to be wild, this book provides fascinating context for why animals are thriving more in cities than outside of them. Author Peter S. Alagona argues that the proliferation of animals in cities is largely the unintended result of human decisions that were made for reasons having little to do with the wild creatures themselves. Considering what it means to live in diverse, multispecies communities and exploring how human and non-human members of communities might thrive together, Alagona goes beyond the tension between those who embrace the surge in urban wildlife and those who think of animals as invasive or as public safety hazards. The Accidental Ecosystem calls on readers to reimagine interspecies coexistence in shared habitats, as well as policies that are based on just, humane, and sustainable approaches. Peter S. Alagona is a Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist at the University of Florida. Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
France is a bellwether for the postcolonial anxieties and populist politics emerging across the world today. Postcolonial France: The Question of Race and the Future of the Republic (Pluto Press, 2018) explores the dynamics and dilemmas of the present moment of crisis and hope in France, through an exploration of recent moral panics. Taking stock of the tensions as they have emerged over the last quarter of a century, Paul Silverstein looks at urban racial violence, female Islamic dress and male public prayer, anti-system gangster rap, and sporting performances in and around which debates over France's multicultural future have arisen. It traces these conflicts to the unresolved tensions of an imperial project, the present-day effects of which are still felt by many. Despite the barriers, which include neo-nationalist racism and Islamophobia, French citizens of various backgrounds have found ways to build flourishing lives. Silverstein shows how they have responded to urban marginalisation, police violence and institutional discrimination in remarkably creative ways. Paul Silverstein is Professor of Anthropology at Reed College, USA. He is author of Postcolonial France (Pluto, 2018) and Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation (Indiana UP, 2004). He writes on identity politics, postcoloniality, and diasporic popular culture in France and North Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Combining archival research with ethnographic fieldwork, Aniket De's book The Boundary of Laughter: Popular Performances Across Borders in South Asia (Oxford UP, 2022) explores how spaces of popular performance have changed with the emergence of national borders in modern South Asia. The author traces the making of the popular theater form called Gambhira by Hindu and Muslim peasants and laborers in colonial Bengal, and explores the fate of the tradition after the Partition of the region in 1947. Drawing on a rich and hitherto unexplored archive of Gambhira songs and plays, this book provides a new approach for studying popular performances as shared spaces-that can accommodate peoples across national and religious boundaries. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
How journalist Lisa Selin Davis became interested in tomboys.
The questions that arise when we say the word “gender.”
The supposed freedoms and limits of being a tomboy.
Why manufacturers insist that clothing and toys and décor are “gendered.”
A discussion of the book Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to be Different.
Today’s book is: Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to be Different, which journalist Lisa Selin Davis was inspired to write when her six-year-old daughter first called herself a "tomboy.” She favored sweatpants and T-shirts over anything pink or princess-themed, just like the sporty and skinned-kneed girls Davis had played with as a kid. But "tomboy" seemed like an outdated word, and why use a word with "boy" in it for girls? Where do tomboys fit into our understandings of gender? In Tomboy, Davis highlights the forces behind what we think of as masculine and feminine, delving into everything from clothing to psychology, history to neuroscience, and the connection between tomboyism, gender identity, and sexuality. Davis's deep-dive appreciates those who defy traditional gender boundaries, and the incredible people they become.
Our guest is: journalist Lisa Selin Davis, who wrote the novels Belly, and Lost Stars, and the non-fiction book Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls* Who Dare to Be Different. She has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time and many others. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in American history. She is the co-producer of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Gender and Our Brains, by Gina Rippon
Raising Them, by Kyl Myers
A Burst of Light, by Audre Lorde
LGBTQ+ Studies channel on NBN
Gender Studies channel on NBN
This conversation about gender bias in science
This discussion of the book Raising Them
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons (NYU Press, 2022) could not have felt further removed from a world where queerness was accepted and celebrated. Instead, the men profiled here maneuver through family and friendship circles where masculinity dominates, gay sexuality is unspoken, and heterosexuality is strictly enforced. For these men, the path to sexual freedom often involves chasing the dreams while resisting the expectations of their immigrant parents—and finding community in each other. Anthony Christian Ocampo also details his own story of reconciling his queer Filipino American identity and those of men like him. He shows what it was like for these young men to grow up gay in an immigrant family, to be the one gay person in their school and ethnic community, and to be a person of color in predominantly White gay spaces. Brown and Gay in LA is an homage to second-generation gay men and their radical redefinition of what it means to be gay, to be a man, to be a person of color, and, ultimately, what it means to be an American. Prof. Anthony Christian Ocampo is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author of The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race (Stanford University Press, 2016). Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Using data from the writers' groundbreaking research on mass shooters, including first-person accounts from the perpetrators themselves, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic (Harry N. Abrams, 2021) charts new pathways to prevention and innovative ways to stop the social contagion of violence. Frustrated by reactionary policy conversations that never seemed to convert into meaningful action, special investigator and psychologist Jill Peterson and sociologist James Densley built The Violence Project, the first comprehensive database of mass shooters. Their goal was to establish the root causes of mass shootings and figure out how to stop them by examining hundreds of data points in the life histories of more than 170 mass shooters--from their childhood and adolescence to their mental health and motives. They've also interviewed the living perpetrators of mass shootings and people who knew them, shooting survivors, victims' families, first responders, and leading experts to gain a comprehensive firsthand understanding of the real stories behind them, rather than the sensationalized media narratives that too often prevail. For the first time, instead of offering thoughts and prayers for the victims of these crimes, Peterson and Densley share their data-driven solutions for exactly what we must do, at the individual level, in our communities, and as a country, to put an end to these tragedies that have defined our modern era. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the most? Is there any way to combat it? In Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies (Verso, 2022), Leslie Kern travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris, and San Francisco and scrutinises the myth and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times. First observed in 1950s London, and theorised by leading thinkers such as Ruth Glass, Jane Jacobs and Sharon Zukin, this devastating process of displacement now can be found in every city and most neighbourhoods. Beyond the Yoga studio, farmer’s market and tattoo parlour, gentrification is more than a metaphor, but impacts the most vulnerable communities. Kern proposes an intersectional way of looking at the crisis that seek to reveal the violence based on class, race, gender, and sexuality. She argues that gentrification is not natural. That it cannot be understood in economic terms, or by class. That it is not a question of taste. That it can only be measured only by the physical displacement of certain people. Rather, she argues, it is a continuation of the settler colonial project that removed natives from their land. And it can be seen today is rising rents and evictions, transformed retail areas, increased policing, and broken communities. But if gentrification is not inevitable, what can we do to stop the tide? In response, Kern proposes a genuinely decolonial, feminist, queer, anti-gentrification. One that demands the right to the city for everyone and the return of land and reparations for those who have been displaced. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
With much existing research on migration focusing on the Global North—like Europe and the US—Pugh’s The Invisibility Bargain: Governance Networks and Migrant Human Security (Oxford UP, 2021) shifts the focus to the Global South, which hosts 86% of refugees. With particular attention to Ecuador and other parts of Latin America, The Invisibility Bargain approaches questions of governance, human security, and international politics with an eye towards how both state and non-state actors enforce an “invisibility bargain,” wherein migrants must stay politically and socially invisible in order to remain welcome. Drawing on over 170 interviews, 15 months of fieldwork, and discourse analysis of over 400 presidential speeches and 800 Ecuadorian news stories, The Invisibility Bargain will be of great interest to those in Latin American Studies, Migration Studies, Sociolegal Studies, and Political Science. Dr. Jeffrey Pugh is Associate Professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, & Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also the executive director of the Center for Mediation, Peace, and Resolution of Conflict (CEMPROC). Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, where they research the how UK asylum tribunals consider claims of belief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Health care is political. It entails fierce battles over the allocation of resources, arguments over the imposition of regulations, and the mediation of dueling public sentiments—all conflicts that are often narrated from a national, top-down view. In All Health Politics Is Local: Community Battles for Medical Care and Environmental Health (UNC Press, 2022), Merlin Chowkwanyun shifts our focus, taking us to four very different places—New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and central Appalachia—to experience a national story through a regional lens. He shows how racial uprisings in the 1960s catalyzed the creation of new medical infrastructure for those long denied it, what local authorities did to curb air pollution so toxic that it made residents choke and cry, how community health activists and bureaucrats fought over who'd control facilities long run by insular elites, and what a national coal boom did to community ecology and health. In a country riven by regional differences, All Health Politics Is Local shatters the notion of a shared national health agenda. It shows that health has always been political and shaped not just by formal policy but also by grassroots community battles. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this timely collection, gender, sex, and technology are explored through an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens. Gender, Sex, and Tech!: An Intersectional Feminist Guide (Canadian Scholars, 2022) provides insight into the ways that technology affects, and is affected by, cultural perceptions of gender and sex. Through an examination of a range of past and present issues, the text highlights our relationships to technology and illustrates how gendered relations are shaped and transformed through social and technological innovations. Contributors bring to the fore feminist, decolonizing, and anti-racist methods to examine our everyday uses of technology, from the mundane to the surreal to the playful to the devastating. Original research and scholarship is skillfully grounded in real-world scenarios like revenge pornography, gender bias in artificial intelligence, menstrual tracking, online dating, and the COVID-19 pandemic, inviting students to take a closer look at technological transformations and their impact on gendered lived experience and to consider how the benefits of technology are inequitably shared within society. Centring Canadian scholars and Canadian perspectives without losing sight of the broader global connection, Gender, Sex, and Tech! is bursting with timely and of-the-moment content, making this collection a must-read for courses focused on gender and technology. Dr. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches about transnational feminisms, Global South #MeToos, postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, and global cinema. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk Performance' in India (Oxford UP, 2019), Brahma Prakash studies bhuiyan puja (landworship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of labor, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On this episode of Darts and Letters, we took a personal journey into virtual sport. Listen in as guest host (and regular lead producer) Jay Cockburn gets ready to enter the world of e-sports, with a lesson in Super Smash Bros from a top player and professional coach. Find out why he won’t make it (spoiler alert: he doesn’t have that reaction time he used to); but also, find out why he might not want to make it. Unfortunately, e-sports have many of the problems that ‘real’ sports do, and some are even worse. E-sports have lower pay, more stringent IP regimes, singular corporate control, and less labour organizing. However, could things be changing? Jay talks to Alexander Lee, esports and games reporter at Digiday. He takes us through the booming world of esports: the good, the bad, the repetitive stress injuries, and what to do about it. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022), edited by James Welker, brings together twenty-one scholars exploring BL media, its fans, and its sociocultural impacts in a dozen countries in East, Southeast, and South Asia—and beyond. Contributors draw on their expertise in an array of disciplines and fields, including anthropology, fan studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, political science, and sociology to shed light on BL media and its fandoms. The boys love (BL) genre was created for girls and women by young female manga (comic) artists in early 1970s Japan to challenge oppressive gender and sexual norms. Over the years, BL has seen almost irrepressible growth in popularity and since the 2000s has become a global media phenomenon, weaving its way into anime, prose fiction, live-action dramas, video games, audio dramas, and fan works. BL’s male–male romantic and sexual relationships have found a particularly receptive home in other parts of Asia, where strong local fan communities and locally produced BL works have garnered a following throughout the region, taking on new meanings and engendering widespread cultural effects. Queer Transfigurations reveals the far-reaching influences of the BL genre, demonstrating that it is truly transnational and transcultural in diverse cultural contexts. It has also helped bring about positive changes in the status of LGBT(Q) people and communities as well as enlighten local understandings of gender and sexuality throughout Asia. Queer Transfigurations shows that, some fifty years after the first BL manga appeared in print, the genre is continuing to reverberate and transform lives. James Welker is a professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies, Kanagawa University, Yokohama, Japan. His research focuses primarily on gender and sexuality in postwar and contemporary Japan, especially fan cultures, feminisms, and the LGBT(Q) community. He is the author of Transfigurations: Redefining Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan (forthcoming). Linshan Jiang is Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also obtained a Ph.D. emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Hinduism in America: An Introduction (Routledge, 2022) is a concise introduction to the long history of religion in the encounter between America and India. It is not a book that will tell you what Hinduism is; rather, it is an introduction to the variety of ways in which Hinduism has been represented, constructed, and practiced in the United States. Americans have been interested in the religions of India since the colonial period, and by the late nineteenth century the first Hindu teachers arrived in the United States. Throughout the twentieth century, interest in Hinduism and yoga grew, even as anti-Asian and anti-immigrant politics and policies in America intensified. When the Cold War led to changes in U.S. immigration policy in 1965, new immigrant communities arrived in the United States and built new Hindu institutions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The 2020 presidential election has cast a long shadow over American politics. Much of the decorum, propriety, and cordiality of the political world was replaced by even more polarization, and violent aggression as demonstrated by the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in support of President Donald Trump. Partisan polarization continues to plague daily life, and unfortunately, as it increases, so does inter-party polarization. The Democratic Party, divided between more establishment candidates and those on the more progressive wing of the party, saw an increasing gap between these ideologies as represented by the 2020 candidates for the presidential nomination. The Republican Party has a somewhat similar dynamic, divided between moderates and conservatives within the party, but also, in 2020, between those willing to criticize President Trump and those who were loyally supporting him. Polarization and Political Party Factions in the 2020 Election (Lexington, 2022) sheds light on the major changes seen during the 2020 campaign and election, while also exploring the longer-term implications of these shifts and changes. This edited volume breaks down key understandings of the American political landscape in order to paint a full picture of the dynamics during the course of the entire 2020 election season. Each chapter examines specific conditions connected to presidential and congressional primaries, polling, activism in online spaces, essential voting rights, ideologies, and more. The focus of the chapters looks at two forms of factionalism: the first and rather obvious form of factionalism is between the Democratic and Republican parties, which leads to our current polarization; the second is the internal and asymmetric dynamic in each party, where tension between different factions push and pull the workings of the parties themselves and the candidates running as members and representatives of these parties. The contributing authors help make sense of a fragile and, at times, frightening era in politics, while also teasing apart the broader implications for national electoral politics. Editors Jennifer C. Lucas, Christopher J. Galdieri, and Tauna S. Sisco (all of whom are members of the faculty at St. Anselm College) have brought together an insightful and illuminating collection of chapters from some of the most respected authors in the field. This is an engaging and accessible book that will appeal to students, scholars, and citizens. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Picture a typical computer geek. Likely white, male, and someone you’d say has a “natural instinct” for technology. Yet, after six years teaching technology classes to first-generation, low-income middle school students in Oakland, California, Cassidy Puckett has seen firsthand that being good with technology is not something people are born with—it’s something they learn. In Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens (U Chicago Press, 2022), she overturns the stereotypes around the digitally savvy and identifies the habits that can help everyone cultivate their inner geek. Drawing on observations and interviews with a diverse group of students around the country, Puckett zeroes in on five technology learning habits that enable tech-savvy teens to learn new technologies: a willingness to try and fail, management of frustration and boredom, use of models, and the abilities to use design logic and identify efficiencies. In Redefining Geek, she shows how to measure and build these habits, and she demonstrates how many teens historically marginalized in STEM are already using these habits and would benefit from recognition for their talent, access to further learning opportunities, and support in career pathways. She argues that if we can develop, recognize, and reward these technological learning habits in all kids—especially girls and historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups—we can address many educational inequities and disparities in STEM. Revealing how being good with technology is not about natural ability but habit and persistence, Redefining Geek speaks to the ongoing conversation on equity in technology education and argues for a more inclusive technology learning experience for all students. Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Candidate in Sociology of Education at the New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We are in the middle of a 'desirevolution' - a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new technologies - with their associated and inherited political biases - are organising and mapping the future. What we don’t seem to notice is that the primary way in which our lives are being transformed is through the manipulation and control of desire itself. Our very impulses, drives and urges are 'gamified' to suit particular economic and political agendas, changing the way we relate to everything from lovers and friends to food and politicians. Digital technologies are transforming the subject at the deepest level of desire – re-mapping its libidinal economy - in ways never before imagined possible. From sexbots to smart condoms, fitbits to VR simulators and AI to dating algorithms, the 'love industries' are at the heart of the future smart city and the social fabric of everyday life. Alfie Bown's Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships (Pluto Press, 2022) considers these emergent technologies and what they mean for the future of love, desire, work and capitalism. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets (Harper Business, 2022), Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash. He explains the technical, political, and cultural differences between our various forms of money and shows how the cash system has been under attack for decades, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress. Cloudmoney takes us to the front lines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom, from marketing strategies against cash to the weaponization of COVID-19 to push fintech platforms, and from there to the rise of the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back. It asks the most pressing questions:
Who benefits from a cashless society and who gets left behind?
Is the end of cash the end of true privacy?
And is our cloudmoney future closer than we think it is?
Brett Scott is an economic anthropologist, financial activist, and former broker. In 2013 he published The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money, and since then has spoken at hundreds of events across the globe and has appeared across international media, including BBC World News and Sky News. He has written extensively on financial reform, digital finance, alternative currency, blockchain technology, and the cashless society for publications like the Guardian, New Scientist, Huffington Post, Wired, and CNN.com, and also publishes the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness newsletter. He has worked on financial reform campaigns and alternative currency systems with a wide range of groups and is a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab (UK). He currently resides in Berlin. Utsav Saksena is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He can be reached at utsavsaksena@protonmail.com. Note: opinions expressed in this podcast are purely personal and do not reflect the official position of NIPFP or the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Beginning in the 1970s Chicana and Chicano organizers turned to community radio broadcasting to educate, entertain, and uplift Mexican American listeners across the United States. In rural areas, radio emerged as the most effective medium for reaching relatively isolated communities such as migrant farmworkers. And in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where the media landscape was dominated by perspectives favorable to agribusiness, community radio for and about farmworkers became a life-sustaining tool. Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley (U Washington Press, 2022) unearths the remarkable history of one of the United States’ first full-time Spanish-language community radio stations, Radio KDNA, which began broadcasting in the Yakima Valley in 1979. Extensive interviews reveal the work of Chicana and Chicano producers, on-air announcers, station managers, technical directors, and listeners who contributed to the station’s success. Monica De La Torre weaves these oral histories together with a range of visual and audio artifacts, including radio programs, program guides, and photographs to situate KDNA within the larger network of Chicano community-based broadcasting and social movement activism. Feminista Frequencies highlights the development of a public broadcasting model that centered Chicana radio producers and documents the central role of women in developing this infrastructure in the Yakima Valley. De La Torre shows how KDNA revolutionized community radio programming, adding new depth to the history of the Chicano movement, women’s activism, and media histories. Brad Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. He teach world history at Kennesaw State University currently. PhD in Public History with specialization in oral history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Setting goals for the new year? Learning a language? Going for a run? Delivering food? Picking packages off a warehouse shelf for delivery? There’s a game for that. Or, at least, a gamified system designed to nudge you in a series of pre-programmed directions in the service of the state, techno-capitalist overlords, or any number of other groups and entities that chart the course of our hyper-connected, cutting-edge, dystopian 21st century lives. On this episode of Darts and Letters, guest host Jay Cockburn and our guests take us through the gamification of…everything. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Adrienne Edgar's Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples—Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2021) is an outstanding study of the evolution of intermarriage practices in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan across the Soviet era and beyond. Based on substantive oral history research work, plus extensive engagement with published and unpublished Soviet sources, the book tells an intriguing story, one that delves into the ever intriguing process of ethnic mixing. As a phenomenon that transcended revolution, war, de-Stalinisation, and independence in a remote part of the Soviet Union, intermarriage becomes a vehicle for a wider argument focusing on the racialization of identities. Edgar’s engaging prose engage with wider process, including the inexorable involution of Soviet internationalism and the rise of primordialism, top describe how mixed couples and families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan were painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Adrienne Edgar is Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she works on the history of the Soviet Union, especially the history of Central Asia in the Soviet period. She is the author of Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton University Press, 2006). Luca Anceschi is Professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is also the editor of Europe-Asia Studies. Follow him on Twitter @anceschistan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Conspiracy theories are not new – but with globalisation and digital media they are perhaps more powerful than ever – and one of the most absurd and yet important is Q Anon – it has so many adherents in the US, including some members of Congress, that it is impossible to ignore. And more than that, to wonder where it might lead. In Pastels and Paedophiles: Inside the Mind of Q Anon (Redwood Press, 2021), Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko address these questions. Today I talked to Moskalenko. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this path breaking work Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh : India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence (Harper Collins, 2021), Shrayana Bhattacharya maps the economic and personal trajectories – the jobs, desires, prayers, love affairs and rivalries – of a diverse group of women. Divided by class but united in fandom, they remain steadfast in their search for intimacy, independence and fun. Embracing Hindi film idol Shah Rukh Khan allows them a small respite from an oppressive culture, a fillip to their fantasies of a friendlier masculinity in Indian men. Most struggle to find the freedom-or income-to follow their favourite actor. Bobbing along in this stream of multiple lives for more than a decade-from Manju’s boredom in ‘rurban’ Rampur and Gold’s anger at having to compete with Western women for male attention in Delhi’s nightclubs, to Zahira’s break from domestic abuse in Ahmedabad-Bhattacharya gleans the details on what Indian women think about men, money, movies, beauty, helplessness, agency and love. A most unusual and compelling book on the female gaze, this is the story of how women have experienced post-liberalization India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
You can learn much about a media and political culture by examining when it panics, and who it panics about. And we’ve always panicked about video games, from the early arcades until this very day. Whether you are a prudish Christian conservative, or a concerned liberal-minded paternalist, demonizing video games has long been good politics. On this episode: guest host and lead producer Jay Cockburn travels back to the 90s, and looks at the story of Mortal Kombat. The game was violent, gory, glorious. It was a youth rebellion in miniature. Parents rebelled against the rebellion, staging their own petulant counter-revolution, and politicians embraced it. It triggered a moral panic and even congressional hearings into violence in games. But why did it happen, who did it serve, and what does it tell us about our own culture? —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Worrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022) looks at the pervasive culture of fear in South Africa. It reveals how narratives of fear manifest in contemporary media forms and the people they serve, and how these are impacted by race, class, gender, space and identity. Through an interdisciplinary body of work, and using a case-based study approach, media analyst Nicky Falkof investigates how risk, anxiety and moral panic show up in media portrayals in modern South Africa. Her main intervention in this approach is through ‘affect’: how do South Africans feel about living under conditions of extreme fear, which is related to gross inequality, and how does the media make us feel? Together, these essays about ‘white genocide’, ‘Satanist’ murders, township urban legends and suburban community groups present an always-partial and necessarily contingent picture of some of the ways in which cultures of fear structure life and meaning for various people in various communities. They show how narratives of fear underpin everyday life, informing both self-making and meaning-making in contemporary South Africa. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today we are joined by Andrew Guest, Professor of Psychology and Sociology at the University of Portland, where he also serves as Director of the Core Curriculum. He is also the author of Soccer in Mind: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to the Global Game (Rutgers University Press, 2022). In our conversation we discussed the possibilities of thinking fandom, soccer as a glocal phenomenon, and whether sport builds character and provides a social good. In Soccer in Mind, Guest uses thematic chapters to address some of the biggest questions in sports studies: why do sports seem so central to many people’s identities, what is the right way to develop player talent, what is the future of sports psychology, and most importantly how can athletes and fans engage in sport in a more critical and socially conscious way? His careful approach to think about and through soccer mixes different analytical lenses including sociology, psychology, and auto-ethnography. He strives to make the familiar things in soccer strange, and the strange things in soccer more familiar. His work moves comfortably between discussions of fan culture in England, women’s football in Portland, and witchcraft in Malawi to identify the ways that aesthetics, emotion and rationality work together to shape popular engagement with the global game. He also considers the sport from the top-down and the bottom-up. His interlocutors and interview subjects range from elite women’s footballers in the US, Zanzibari soccer players called the “Women Fighters,” and disabled children in Angola. Many of his chapters are cross comparative. For example, in his chapter on player development, he looks at the influence of the technocratic Dutch model of top player development, the Ghanaian romantic model of grassroots soccer, and what he calls the Icelandic humanistic model that prioritizes broad human and social development through sport over elite access. Throughout Soccer in Mind, Guest’s work challenges easy assumptions about soccer and sports more generally. While many works challenge the value of mega-events, Guest argues that soccer might only provide a social good when we use the sport to do so attentively and intentionally. His chapter on global development initiatives shows how even well-meaning soccer NGOs can cause negative feedback loops. Participation in sports might not even encourage fair play and sportsmanship unless athletes, coaches, and fans provide a broader social basis for it. Guest’s very readable work – clearly of interest to people involved in sports studies, sports sociology and sports psychology – also has broad appeal and will prove useful in classrooms and boardrooms. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Where are the success stories for people of color in opera? In Access, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Cultural Organizations: Insights from the Careers of Executive Opera Managers of Color in the U.S. (Routledge, 2021), Antonio Cuyler, Director of the MA Program & Associate Professor of Arts Administration at Florida State University (FSU), and Visiting Associate Professor of Theatre & Drama at the University of Michigan, explores the careers of six leading figures in the American opera industry, and in doing so creates important theoretical insights and practical lessons about success and struggle in the arts. The book combines detailed interview data with a deep understanding of arts management and cultural policy as a field, along with a personal commitment to transforming opera to make it both an open and a sustainable genre. The book is essential reading across arts and humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in opera and the arts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) led the Ecuadoran Citizens’ Revolution that claimed to challenge the tenets of neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. The Correa administration promised to advance Indigenous and Afro-descendant rights and redistribute resources to the most vulnerable. In many cases, these promises proved to be hollow. Using two decades of ethnographic research, Undoing Multiculturalism: Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Ecuador (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) by Dr. Carmen Martínez Novo examines why these intentions did not become a reality, and how the Correa administration undermined the progress of Indigenous people. A main complication was pursuing independence from multilateral organizations in the context of skyrocketing commodity prices, which caused a new reliance on natural resource extraction. Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other organized groups resisted the expansion of extractive industries into their territories because they threatened their livelihoods and safety. As the Citizens’ Revolution and other “Pink Tide” governments struggled to finance budgets and maintain power, they watered down subnational forms of self-government, slowed down land redistribution, weakened the politicized cultural identities that gave strength to social movements, and reversed other fundamental gains of the multicultural era. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Linda Connolly is a professor of sociology at Maynooth University, with research focusing on gender, Irish society, family studies, migration, and Irish studies. Dr Tina O'Toole is a literary scholar with research expertise in Irish and diasporic writing, gender studies, and the history of sexualities; she is a senior lecturer at the University of Limerick. In this interview, they discuss their well-known text Documenting Irish Feminisms, first published in 2005 and now re-released. Documenting Irish Feminisms: The Second Wave (Arlen House, 2022) is a wide-ranging volume that traces the development of second-wave feminism in Ireland. The work draws upon a diversity of rare primary sources, including documents, photos, and publications. Connolly and O’Toole explore several themes in Irish feminist politics from the 1970s to the 1990s, including the emergence of pioneering feminist groups and organizations; reproductive rights and activism; the legal system and the state; the development of cultural projects; feminism and Northern Ireland; lesbian activism; and class and education. This book is an invaluable resource in the fields of history, sociology, politics, Irish studies, and women’s studies. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode of High Theory, Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay-Hebert tell us about normalization in international relations. Their research applies Foucault’s social theories of the normal and abnormal to the objects of political science: states, international organizations, and practices of intervention. In the episode (and in their book) Gëzim and Nicolas reference Foucault’s Lectures at the College de France on the Abnormal (printed in English by Verso and Macmillan). They discuss three exemplary figures from Foucault’s work on the abnormal: the monster, the incorrigible, and the onanist. Each one has a corresponding figure in international politics. Their new book Normalization in World Politics is available as an open access text from Michigan University Press. That means you can read it for free! Check it out, and learn all about the ways we produce, impose, and maintain normal and abnormal affairs in the international order. Gëzim Visoka is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Dublin City University, whose research focuses on peacebuilding and statebuilding, transitional justice, global governance, foreign policy, and diplomatic recognition. Nicolas Lemay-Hébert is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Australian National University. He works on interventions: local resistance to political interventions, the political economy of interventions, and mapping political interventions. This week’s image is a 1689 world map, Nova totius terrarum orbis tabula Amstelodami, ex officina G. a Schagen (1682), t'Amsterdam Gedruckt by G. van Schagen, by de Nieuwe Haerlemmer Sluys. It was originally made in using copper engraving, then much later digitized and made available to the public on Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do competing interests shape public policy? Why are the economic interests and priorities of lower-, working-, and middle-class Americans often neglected while the interests and priorities of wealthier Americans are often front and center for the U.S. Congress? Previous work in political science has highlighted income disparity or the importance of agenda setting but Hijacking the Agenda: Economic Power and Political Influence (Russell Sage Foundation, 2021) unpacks HOW business interests and wealthy individuals shape public policy to their benefit by “hijacking the agenda” away from the interests of average Americans. Witko, Morgan, Kelly, and Enns focus on the speech of elected representatives as recorded in the Congressional Record. Their remarkable Congressional Rhetoric Database codes speech from 1995 to 2016. Using an integrated, multi-method research design, they conclude that the interplay between two types of power – structural and kinetic – give wealthy interests considerable influence over the issues that receive congressional attention and explaining these patterns of issue attention over time is crucial for understanding disparate policy outcomes. In addition to a sophisticated quantitative analysis, the book provides three astute case studies (financial deregulation, re-regulation, and the minimum wage) and a general theory of politics and economic power. Hijacking the Agenda details how money – especially in the form of campaign contributions – affects which economic problems Congress believes to be important – and acts upon. Hijacking the Agenda is winner of the 2022 Gladys M. Kammerer Award from the American Political Science Association. Dr. Christopher Witko is professor of public policy and associate director of the School of Public Policy at Penn State, Drs. Jana Morgan and Nathan J. Kelly are professors of political science at the University of Tennessee, and Dr. Peter K. Enns is professor of public policy and political science at Cornell University. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Southeast Asia is a region often associated with authoritarian resilience and democratic decline. In this podcast, Professor Baogang He examines the various ways in which Southeast Asian countries have institutionalised mechanisms for deliberative democracy to address complex governance issues. He is the editor (together with Michael Breen, and James Fishkin) of Deliberative Democracy in Asia (Routledge, 2022). Deliberative democracy – an approach to political decision-making that places emphasis on inclusive, reflective, and other-regarding discussion – is manifest in long-standing practices of consensus-building and communitarian politics in the region. Professor He explains how introducing public deliberation into different political regimes can simultaneously give voice to ordinary citizens while also entrenching elite domination. Professor He draws on a range of case studies in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and reflects on the wider trend of deliberative democratization in Asia and beyond. Baogang He is a Professor of International Relations at Deakin University in Australia. Like this interview? You may also be interested in:
Adele Webb, Chasing Freedom: The Philippines Long Journey to Democratic Ambivalence (Sussex University Press, 2022)
Roman David and Ian Holliday. Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Meredith Weiss, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible. Mirror, Sideshow (Cornell SEAP/NUS Press, 2011)
Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Single Payer Healthcare Reform: Grassroots Mobilization and the Turn Against Establishment Politics in the Medicare for All Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Lindy Hern provides a comprehensive history of the grassroots Movement for Health Care Reform in the United States from within the Single Payer Movement. Hern discusses the role that narrative (constructions of opportunity) plays in grassroots mobilization, which builds on existing social movement theory. She examines the turn against “politics as usual” and establishment politicians that began in progressive social movements long before the election of Donald Trump. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Roselyn Hsueh’s Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism (Cambridge, 2022) presents a new framework for understanding how developing countries integrate into the global economy. Examining the labor-intensive textile sector and the capital-intensive telecommunications sector in China, India, and Russia, Hsueh shows how differences in the way elites perceive the strategic value of a sector can lead to dramatically different patterns of governance. Author Roselyn Hsueh is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, where she co-directs the Certificate in Political Economy. She is also the author of China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization and scholarly articles and book chapters on states and markets, comparative regulation and governance, and development and globalization. She is a frequent commentator on international politics, finance and trade, and comparative economic development. BBC World News, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, and other media outlets have featured her research. She earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco. His own research focus is the political economy of governance in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Adam Jones will be familiar to anyone interested in the field of genocide studies. He's published one of the leading textbooks in the field. He's been influential in drawing attention to the intersection of gender and mass violence. And he's particpated in the emergence of attention to genocides of indigenous peoples over the past decade. Sites of Genocide (Routledge, 2022) is a compilation of Jones' work over the past ten years. The book is comprised of essays, interviews and reflections. Each individual piece stands alone. But together the pieces reflect a decade-long discussion of mass violence. A careful reading of the section on gender reveals, among other things, the gradual emergence of male victims of gender-based violence as an area of interest for Jones. Also prominent is a wrestling with an ever-deeper understanding of mass violence in Central Africa and how to write about this truthfully in a politically fraught environment. These are only two of several throughlines of the essays. The book is valuable for anyone interested in the subject. But graduate students in particular will benefit from witnessing an expert wrestle with ideas over time. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Defying the conventional split between “theory” and “methodology,” Eviatar Zerubavel's Generally Speaking: An Invitation to Concept-Driven Sociology (Oxford UP, 2020) introduces a yet unarticulated and thus far never systematised method of theorising designed to reveal abstract social patterns. Insisting that such methodology can actually be taught, it tries to make the mental processes underlying the practice of a “concept-driven sociology” more explicit. Many sociologists tend to study the specific, often at the expense of also studying the generic. To correct this imbalance, the book examines the theoretico-methodological process by which we can “distil” generic social patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which we encounter them. It thus champions a “generic sociology” that is pronouncedly transcontextual (transcultural, transhistorical, transsituational, and translevel) in its scope. In order to uncover generic, transcontextual social patterns, data need to be collected in a wide range of social contexts. Such contextual diversity is manifested multi-culturally, multi historically, multi situationally, as well as at multiple levels of social aggregation. True to its message, the book illustrates generic social patterns by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and historical periods and a wide range of diverse social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasising cross-contextual commonality, generic sociology tries to reveal formal “parallels” across seemingly disparate contexts. This book features the four main types of cross-contextual analogies generic sociologists tend to use (cross-cultural, cross-historical, cross-domain, and cross-level), disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded formal equivalences. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Millennial Feminism at Work: Bridging Theory and Practice (Cornell UP, 2021), volume editor Jane Juffer brings together recently graduated students from across the US to reflect on the relevance of their feminist studies programs in their chosen career paths. The result is a dynamic collection of voices, shaking up preconceived ideas and showing the positive influence of gender and sexuality studies on individuals at work. Encompassing five areas—corporate, education, nonprofit, medical, and media careers—these engaging essays use personal experiences to analyze the pressure on young adults to define themselves through creative work, even when that job may not sustain them financially. Obstacles to feminist work conditions notwithstanding, they urge readers to never downplay their feminist credentials and prove that gender and sexuality studies degrees can serve graduates well in the current marketplace and prepare them for life outside of their alma mater. Emphasizing the importance of individual stories situated within political and economic structures, Millennial Feminism at Work provides spirited collective advice and a unique window into the lives and careers of young feminists sharing the lessons they have learned. Contributors to this volume include Rose Al Abosy, Rachel Cromidas, Lauren Danzig, Sadaf Ferdowsi, Reina Gattuso, Jael Goldfine, Sassafras Lowrey, Alissa Medina, Samuel Naimi, Stephanie Newman, Justine Parkin, Lily Pierce, Kate Poor, Laura Ramos-Jaimes, Savannah Taylor, Addie Tsai, and Hayley Zablotsky. Rose Al Abosy and Jael Goldfine, along with Dr. Jane Juffer, were able to join us for this conversation. Iqra Shagufta Cheema is a writer, researcher, and chronic procrastinator. When she does write, she writes in the areas of postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies. Check out her latest book chapter Queer Love: He is also Made in Heaven. She can be reached via email at IqraSCheema@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2016, social media users in Thailand called out the Paris-based luxury fashion house Balenciaga for copying the popular Thai “rainbow bag,” using Balenciaga’s hashtags to circulate memes revealing the source of the bags’ design. In Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media's Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property (Duke UP, 2022), Minh-Ha T. Pham examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knockoff fashion, design theft, and plagiarism. Tracing the history of fashion antipiracy efforts back to the 1930s, she foregrounds the work of policing that has been tacitly outsourced to social media. Despite the social media concern for ethical fashion and consumption and the good intentions behind design policing, Pham shows that it has ironically deepened forms of social and market inequality, as it relies on and reinforces racist and colonial norms and ideas about what constitutes copying and what counts as creativity. These struggles over ethical fashion and intellectual property, Pham demonstrates, constitute deeper struggles over the colonial legacies of cultural property in digital and global economies. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Compared to their Uyghur and Kazakh co-religionists in Xinjiang, China’s largest single Muslim group – the Hui – has received less media and scholarly attention lately, perhaps understandably so since the former groups have borne the brunt of the campaigns of ethnic enclosure and erasure launched in recent years by the Chinese Communist Party. But as a near-ubiquitous presence across China and thus a community deeply involved in the waves of migration and urbanisation affecting many PRC citizens in recent decades, the Hui offer a compelling case through which to examine how religious, ethnic, class and other identities intersect with these processes. Focusing on communities in four diverse Chinese cities, David Stroup’s Pure and True: The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China's Hui Muslims (U Washington Press, 2022) provides a careful dissection of the complex negotiations of intersecting identities that face today’s Hui. Based on dozens of interviews and ethnographic observation, this clearly written and persuasive book has much to say about how people’s day-to-day understandings of ‘Huiness’ intersect with the categories put forward by the state, and how local debates unfolding internally within Hui communities may be reframed as they themselves fall under the gaze of the ‘people’s war on terror.’ Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Harvey Graff's pioneering study presents a new and original interpretation of the place of literacy in nineteenth-century society and culture. Based upon an intensive comparative historical analysis, employing both qualitative and quantitative techniques, and on a wide range of sources, The Literacy Myth: Cultural Integration and Social Structure in the Nineteenth Century (Transaction, 1991; new edition Routledge, 2017) reevaluates the role typically assigned to literacy in historical scholarship, cultural understanding, economic development schemes, and social doctrines and ideologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Anastasia Shesterinina begins Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia (Cornell University Press, 2021) with an account of Georgian troops crossing into eastern Abkhazia, in the Southern Caucasus region adjacent Russia, on August 14, 1992. Thus the war that is the book’s subject began. Yet, people didn’t know it at the time. In fact, the question on people’s lips was: is this a war? The answer to the question was: yes. But the uncertainty to which the question gave voice led Shesterinina to the questions motivating this book, namely: how do ordinary people deal with uncertainty in civil war? How do they decide whether and in what way to mobilise, and for whom? On this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science Anastasia Shesterinina discusses her answers to these questions. Along the way, she also reflects on the inadequacies of theories that underestimate or overlook the uncertainty that pervades wartime conditions, particularly in wars’ earliest days; on the conduct and ethics of interview and ethnographic research in post-war settings; and, on the relevance of her research on Abkhazia for our understanding of the war in Ukraine today—and on why comparison of the two is, for her, not just an intellectually or politically interesting exercise. Mobilizing in Uncertainty is (with Mona El-Ghobashy’s Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, Stanford, 2021) joint winner of the 2022 Charles Taylor Book Award, awarded annually by the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association for the best book in political science that employs or develops interpretive methodologies and methods. Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University and in Fall 2022 a fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network at the ANU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In research on 'mass killings' such as genocides and campaigns of state terror, the role of ideology is hotly debated. For some scholars, ideologies are crucial in providing the extremist goals and hatreds that motivate ideologically committed people to kill. But many other scholars are skeptical: contending that perpetrators of mass killing rarely seem ideologically committed, and that rational self-interest or powerful forms of social pressure are more important drivers of violence than ideology. In Ideology and Mass Killing: The Radicalized Security Politics of Genocides and Deadly Atrocities (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Jonathan Leader Maynard challenges both these prevailing views, advancing an alternative 'neo-ideological' perspective which systematically retheorises the key ideological foundations of large-scale violence against civilians. Integrating cutting-edge research from multiple disciplines, including political science, political psychology, history and sociology, Ideology and Mass Killing demonstrates that ideological justifications vitally shape such violence in ways that go beyond deep ideological commitment. Most disturbingly of all, the key ideological foundations of mass killings are found to lie, not in extraordinary political goals or hatreds, but in radicalised versions of those conventional, widely accepted ideas that underpin the politics of security in ordinary societies across the world. This study then substantiates this account by a detailed examination of four contrasting cases of mass killing - Stalinist Repression in the Soviet Union between 1930 and 1938, the Allied Bombing Campaign against Germany and Japan in World War II from 1940 to 1945, mass atrocities in the Guatemalan Civil War between 1978 and 1983, and the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. This represents the first volume to offer a dedicated, comparative theory of ideology's role in mass killing, while also developing a powerful new account of how ideology affects violence and politics more generally. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This week, we’re showcasing some of our favourite past episodes of Darts and Letters themed around “Activism & Academia”. Today’s episode originally aired a little earlier this summer. In the US, the January 6th hearings were continuing - and discourse about the factors that led to the insurrection was rampant. You might notice that when these kinds of events take place, similar descriptors are used: groupthink, mob mentality, deindividuation…and all of these ideas can be traced back to one bigoted, reactionary bigot: 19th-century French physician Gustave Le Bon. Why does academia always fear the masses? Our host Gordon Katic takes us through the story of Le Bon and beyond to analyze the academic stereotype of the public. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dr. Tim Hutchings is a sociologist of digital religion. His Ph.D. (Durham University, 2010) was an ethnographic study of five online Christian churches. Dr. Hutchings is interested in the relationship between religion, media and culture, with particular attention to digital forms of Christianity. His research has included studies of online worship; digital evangelism and formation; online community; digital publishing and e-reading; apps and games; and death and dying. His research led to the publication of his book Creating Church Online: Ritual, Community and New Media (Routledge, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why are societies still not offering racial equality? In The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (Policy Press, 2022), Nasar Meer, a professor of Race, Identity and Citizenship in the School of Social and Political Sciences and director of RACE.ED at the University of Edinburgh, explores the past, present, and future of the struggle for racial justice. In a wide-ranging text, informed by social, cultural, and political theory, the recent history of racial equality policy is juxtaposed with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, to analyse the successes and the failures of struggles to make society racially just. Offering a major theoretical and practical contribution, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for activists and anyone interested in changing society for the better. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality (Routledge, 2021) is about methods for using observational data to make causal inferences. It provides an extensive discussion of causality and the variety of both obvious and subtle challenges to inferring a causal relationship between the variables, using causal diagrams. It then goes through the major techniques that economists use to address these challenges, including regression, matching, simulation, fixed effects, event studies, differences-in-differences, instrumental variables, and regression discontinuity. The book is designed to be accessible to students or practitioners without the extensive math background that is taken for granted in typical econometrics textbooks. Instead, the emphasis is on the intuition behind the techniques and how to implement them with the widely-used programming languages R, Stata, and Python. Nick C. Huntington-Klein is an Assistant Professor at Seattle University. His research focuses on econometrics and higher education. His work has been published in the Economics of Education Review, AEA Papers and Proceedings, Economic Inquiry, Empirical Economics, and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. His book can be read online for free or purchased in print, and is accompanied by a wealth of teaching materials on the same website. Nick can also be found on Youtube and on Twitter. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focus is the political economy of governance in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke UP, 2021), Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the "infrastructures of the sensible." Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Lebanese state is structured through religious freedom and secular power sharing across sectarian groups. Every sect has specific laws that govern kinship matters like marriage or inheritance. Together with criminal and civil laws, these laws regulate and produce political difference. But whether women or men, Muslims or Christians, queer or straight, all people in Lebanon have one thing in common—they are biopolitical subjects forged through bureaucratic, ideological, and legal techniques of the state. With this book, Maya Mikdashi offers a new way to understand state power, theorizing how sex, sexuality, and sect shape and are shaped by law, secularism, and sovereignty. Drawing on court archives, public records, and ethnography of the Court of Cassation, the highest civil court in Lebanon, Mikdashi shows how political difference is entangled with religious, secular, and sexual difference. She presents state power as inevitably contingent, like the practices of everyday life it engenders, focusing on the regulation of religious conversion, the curation of legal archives, state and parastatal violence, and secular activism. Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon (Stanford UP, 2022) locates state power in the experiences, transitions, uprisings, and violence that people in the Middle East continue to live. Maya Mikdashi is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and a Lecturer in the Middle East Studies Program at Rutgers University. Alize Arıcan is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Paul A. Djupe, Anand Edward Sokhey, and Amy Erica Smith, The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences (Oxford UP, 2022) explores a more holistic understanding of knowledge production in the social sciences, moving beyond the publication process often required by those in tenure/tenure-track positions to thinking about the role of community in the construction of knowledge. Political Scientists Paul A. Djupe (Denison University), Anand Edward Sokhey (University of Colorado-Boulder), and Amy Erica Smith (Iowa State University) emphasize the idea of academics as citizens in communities and institutions, endowed with certain rights and responsibilities with regard to knowledge production, exchange, and promotion. These actions go beyond simply research; knowledge production incorporates teaching, reviewing, blogging, podcasting, commenting, mentoring, and other similar actions, all of which inherently depend on collaboration and community. Djupe, Smith, and Sokhey all have first-hand experience in the “publication pipeline” process. They accurately and intricately detail aspects of community that are overlooked within the academia. The collaborative nature of The Knowledge Polity speaks to the power of co-authorship in political science and sociology. The research indicates that building relationships with peers and mentors alike provides scholars with access to people whose advice is trusted, people who they consider friends, and people who know other scholars whose advice can also be trusted and valued. Similar to co-authorship, peer review is another dimension of knowledge exchange, collaboration, and the rights and responsibilities of the knowledge polity. The review process is reciprocal, and there is an innate sense that it is a duty, especially when the authors discuss “reviewer debt” (reviewing fewer papers than one is submitting) and how it is usually “paid off” when scholars reach tenure and have more time and capacity to give back to the community. Most academics would like to do more reviews, proving there is a powerful desire to participate in this important act of knowledge production. The authors use data from an extensive Professional Activity in the Social Sciences (PASS) study, which sampled responses from 1,700 sociology and political science faculty about their publications, and experiences with regard to the process. They integrate different aspects of all of these findings in each chapter, examining for differences across disciplines, methodology, gender, race, and age, among other variables. The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences integrates a diversity of empirical research, qualitative inputs, and sophisticated analysis to better understand knowledge production within the social sciences. It becomes clear that the idea of the solitary scholar, alone in his/her office, creating knowledge is much more of a myth, since the reality is that knowledge production is much more of a collective undertaking and experience. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope (Stanford University Press, 2022), sociologist Victoria Reyes combines her personal experiences with research findings to examine how academia creates conditional citizenship for its marginalized members. Reyes draws from her family background, experiences during routine university life, and academic scholarship to theorize the academic outsiders as those who "are constantly reminded that our presence in the academy is contingent and in constant flux" (10-11). She elaborates on how love and worth are assessed in the university and her experiences as a mother in the academy. The final chapter calls for academic justice and offers practical strategies to combat the academy's exclusionary practices. In this book Reyes contributes to important conversations in the university on the experiences of people of color, women, and those from marginalized backgrounds. This book will be of interest to those who experience the academy's conditional citizenship, those who want to understand how the university perpetuates inequality, and those who want to challenge these conditions. Victoria Reyes is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Global Borderlands (Stanford, 2019). Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (Illinois, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Since the 1970s, there has been a rich, global lineage of broadly guitar-based music scenes which have enacted a political critique of the commercial music industries under the banner of ‘DIY’. DIY music practice has involved taking control of production and distribution processes and lowering barriers to participation and performance, as a form of cultural resistance. In DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2020), Ellis Jones analyses the effects of the internet and social media on the inner lives and the communal music-making of practitioners in contemporary DIY music scenes. Jones provides a nuanced and original reading of the points of convergence and (substantial) divergence between the emancipatory and participatory rhetoric of digital platforms and the ethical imperatives of DIY music, past and present. He argues that the imperatives toward self-branding, commodification and individualization that are baked into the affordances of social media are fundamentally inimical to the convivial, oppositional politics of DIY music. As digital platforms seep into and mediate more and more facets of everyday life, this book underscores the need for a renewed critique of the conditions of cultural production – and offers valuable points of departure for forms of culturally resistant DIY musicking in the 21st Century. Ellis Jones is a Lecturer in Music and Management in the Department of Music at the University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why They Hate Us: How Racist Rhetoric Impacts Education (Teachers College Press, 2021) examines how racist political rhetoric has created damaging and dangerous conditions for Students of Color in schools and higher education institutions throughout the United States. The authors show how the election of the 45th president has resulted in a defining moment in U.S. history where racist discourses, reinforced by ideologies of white supremacy, have affected the educational experiences of our most vulnerable students. This volume situates the rhetoric of the Trump presidency within a broader historical narrative and provides recommendations for those who seek to advocate for anti-racism and social justice. As we enter the uncharted waters of a global pandemic and national racial reckoning, this will be invaluable reading for scholars, educators, and administrators who want to be part of the solution. Dr. Lindsay Pérez Huber is a professor of education at California State University-Long Beach as well as a visiting scholar at the UCLA Center for Critical Race Studies. Her research analyzes racial inequities in education, the impact on marginalized urban students of color, and how students and their communities respond to those inequities through strategies of resistance. Dr. Susana Muñoz is an associate professor of education at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on issues of access, equity, and college persistence for undocumented Latina/o students. Autumn Wilke works in higher education as an ADA coordinator and diversity officer and is also an author and doctoral candidate with research/topics related to disability and higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (Routledge, 2020) brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor introduce a broad, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on the following key interdisciplinary inquiries: Part I illuminates identity as always ecocultural, expanding dominant understandings of who we are and how our ways of identifying engender earthly outcomes. Part II examines ways ecocultural identities are fostered and how difference and spaces of interaction can be sources of environmental conviviality. Part III illustrates consequential ways the media sphere informs, challenges, and amplifies particular ecocultural identities. Part IV delves into the constitutive power of ecocultural identities and illuminates ways ecological forces shape the political sphere. Part V demonstrates multiple and unspooling ways in which ecocultural identities can evolve and transform to recall ways forward to reciprocal surviving and thriving. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity provides an essential resource for scholars, teachers, students, protectors, and practitioners interested in ecological and sociocultural regeneration. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity has been awarded the 2020 Book Award from the National Communication Association's (USA) Environmental Communication Division. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This is part two of a two part interview. Mark Solovey’s ‘Social Science for What?’ is essential reading for anyone in either the history of science policy or the history of the social sciences in the United States. The book is not, as the subtitle might imply, merely an institutional history of the social sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Rather, Solovey’s follow-up to his 2013 book, ‘Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America’, is a commanding explanation of certain characteristics of academic social science as commonly practiced in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. — Audra J. Wolfe, PhD. history and sociology of science, in ISIS Vol. 113, No. 2, June 2022 In our first episode, Professor Solovey shared some of the political and legislative history establishing the National Science Foundation; heated controversy over the social sciences that undermined the effort to include them in the initial legislation for the new science agency; how they nevertheless became included on a small and cautious basis grounded in a scientistic strategy; and some of the landmark developments, controversies, and interesting individuals involved from roughly the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. This included Senator Harris's remarkable legislative proposal in the mid-to-late 1960s to establish a separate national social science foundation. This second part of the interview opens with the late 1960s' controversy over Project Camelot and draws on Mark’s 2001 journal article in the Social Studies of Science, titled ‘Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution: Rethinking the Politics–Patronage–Social Science Nexus’ - which remains the professor’s most often cited scholarly article. We then move up through the dark days of the Reagan years, along the way discussing key figures, from David Stockman to Talcott Parsons, Clifford Geertz, Thomas Kuhn, Milton Friedman, and Richard Atkinson, the emergence and impact of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), alternatives to the scientistic strategy, and persistent challenges faced by the social sciences at the levels of institutional representation, leadership and funding constraints relative to the natural sciences - all of which continue to the present day. We end with Professor Solovey’s call for reviving the idea of a new federal agency for the social sciences, a National Social Science Foundation, as first introduced by Senator Harris of Oklahoma, and finally, with some book recommendations. An open access edition of Social Science for What?: Battles over Public Funding for the "Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation (MIT Press, 2020) was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries. Mark Solovey is professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the development of the social sciences in the United States, and especially the controversies regarding the scientific identity of the social sciences, private and public funding for them, and public policy implications of social science expertise. He has written and co-edited a number of books related to the Cold War and social science history. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Who runs American politics? In Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us (Beacon Press, 2022), Daniel Laurison, an associate professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, explores the hidden world of campaign professionals to offer a new sociological perspective on how contemporary politics works. The book explores how ‘politicos’ get their jobs, how they judge work and worth, and the importance of their actions to political campaigns, showing the inequalities at the heart of the profession. Alongside new theorisations of campaigning and of politics itself, the book offers essential reading across social sciences and arts and humanities, as well as to anyone interested in politics today. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Jin Feng of Grinnell College about her fascinating book Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways (U Washington Press, 2019). Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng's wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta--or Jiangnan, a region known for its paradisiacal beauty and abundant resources--illustrates how people preserve culinary inheritance while also revamping it for the new millennium. Throughout Chinese history, food nostalgia has generated cultural currency for individuals. Feng examines literary treatments of Jiangnan foodways from late imperial and twentieth-century China, highlighting the role played by gender and tracing the contemporary metamorphosis of this cultural landscape, with its new platforms for food culture, such as television and the internet. As communities in Jiangnan refashion their regional heritage, culinary arts shine as markers of ethnic and social distinction. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Bridging the gap between migration studies and the anthropological tradition, Ghassan Hage illustrates that transnationality and its attendant cultural consequences are not necessarily at odds with classic theory. In The Diasporic Condition, Ghassan Hage engages with the diasporic Lebanese community as a shared lifeworld, defining a common cultural milieu that transcends spatial and temporal distance—a collective mode of being here termed the “diasporic condition.” Encompassing a complicated transnational terrain, Hage’s long-term ethnography takes us from Mehj and Jalleh in Lebanon to Europe, Australia, South America, and North America, analyzing how Lebanese migrants and their families have established themselves in their new homes while remaining socially, economically, and politically related to Lebanon and to each other. At the heart of The Diasporic Condition lies a critical anthropological question: How does the study of a particular sociocultural phenomenon expand our knowledge of modes of existing in the world? As Hage establishes what he terms the “lenticular condition,” he breaks down the boundaries between “us” and “them,” “here” and “there,” showing that this convergent mode of existence increasingly defines everyone’s everyday life. Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of several books, including White Nation, Against Paranoid Nationalism, Alter-Politics, and Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Alize Arıcan is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Brazilian Northeast has long been a marginalized region with a complex relationship to national identity. It is often portrayed as impoverished, backward, and rebellious, yet traditional and culturally authentic. Brazil is known for its strong national identity, but national identities do not preclude strong regional identities. In Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 1924-1968 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022), Courtney J. Campbell examines how groups within the region have asserted their identity, relevance, and uniqueness through interactions that transcend national borders. From migration to labor mobilization, from wartime dating to beauty pageants, from literacy movements to representations of banditry in film, Campbell explores how the development of regional cultural identity is a modern, internationally embedded conversation that circulated among Brazilians of every social class. Part of a region-based nationalism that reflects the anxiety that conflicting desires for modernity, progress, and cultural authenticity provoked in the twentieth century, this identity was forged by residents who continually stepped out of their expected roles, taking their region’s concerns to an international stage. Brad Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. He teach world history at Kennesaw State University currently. PhD in Public History with specialization in oral history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In this bracing exposé, Anthony Jack shows that many students’ struggles continue long after they’ve settled in their dorms. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This powerfully argued book documents how university policies and campus culture can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why some students are harder hit than others. Joao Souto-Maior is a PhD Student in Sociology of Education at the New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Melina Palmer about her book What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You: Unlocking Consumer Decisions with the Science of Behavioral Economics (Mango, 2021) Once you realize that the average person makes 35,000 decisions a day, it makes total sense that habits drive 95% of our behavior. Otherwise, we’d become paralyzed with analysis paralysis in trying to choose what to do next. As Melina Palmer fully recognizes, behavioral economic principles help to unlock the mystery of why people do things that seem so confounding. How could it be, for instance, that giving the gift of two mints with your check in the restaurant can lead to a 14% increase in the average tip for the waiter? Well, gratitude—the principle of reciprocity—weighs in. From the difference between satisfaction and delight to what the peak/end rule can make a small business more prosper if used well, this is both a fun and meaningful episode. Melina Palmer is the founder and CEO of the Brainy Business and hosts the podcast by that same name. She received a Masters in behavior economics from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, teaches at the Texas A&M Human Behavior Lab, and writes a column for Inc. magazine. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) argues that Marxist theory is essential for understanding the contemporary industrialization of the form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. It includes a political economic history of AI, tracking how it went from a fringe research interest for a handful of scientists in the 1950s to a centerpiece of cybernetic capital fifty years later. It also includes a political economic study of the scale, scope and dynamics of the contemporary AI industry as well as a labour process analysis of commercial machine learning software production, based on interviews with workers and management in AI companies around the world, ranging from tiny startups to giant technology firms. On the basis of this study, Steinhoff develops a Marxist analysis to argue that the popular theory of immaterial labour, which holds that information technologies increase the autonomy of workers from capital, tending towards a post-capitalist economy, does not adequately describe the situation of high-tech digital labour today. In the AI industry, digital labour remains firmly under the control of capital. Steinhoff argues that theories discerning therein an emergent autonomy of labour are in fact witnessing labour’s increasing automation. James Steinhoff is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada. Reuben Niewenhuis works as a software developer for a warehouse automation company. He double majored in computer science and philosophy at Calvin University. In addition to philosophical theory, he is interested in interdisciplinary topics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Radical Resilience: Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility (Cornell UP, 2022) relates narratives of Athenians struggling to survive the impoverishment of relentless austerity measures, compounding emergencies, and human disasters of successive national crises in Greece since 2010. Drawing on eight years of fieldwork, Othon Alexandrakis examines the effects of injury, erosion, and upheaval on individuals already pushed beyond their limits but holding on against all odds. Through analysis of everyday scenes across different social locations in the city, he documents the often slow, difficult work of picking up the pieces of one's life and moving them around—and the worlds that fade and the ones that become visible in the process. He shares the stories of a disillusioned anarchist organizer, an exhausted nurse helping a father search for his lost daughter, a misunderstood Romani man rejected by his friends and family, and an undocumented migrant who discovers hope in the trash—stories of individuals finding solace and possibility within, with, and against the tragedies of their lives. Alexandrakis shows how these stories lead to a potentially transformative coming to resilience. In Radical Resilience, Alexandrakis traces the bare edges of radical possibility from within the efforts of those continuing on beyond their limits. Othon Alexandrakis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University. He is the editor of Impulse to Act. Alize Arıcan is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why are we working harder? In The Flexibility Paradox: Why Flexible Working Leads To (Self-)Exploitation (Polity Press, 2022), Heejung Chung, a professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Kent, looks a contemporary employment practices to tell the story of the rise of flexible working and its impact on workers, individuals, and families. The book sets out the paradox that even though flexible working seems to offer more control over work, it leads to a worse work/life balance and makes more demands on staff. The paradox is also not evenly distributed, and the book pays close attention to the importance of gender in understanding how flexible work interacts with domestic labour to impact on women’s lives. Packed with rich, cross-national data, along with analysis of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the book is essential across social science disciplines and for anyone interested in contemporary working life! Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Felix Schniz's book Genre and Video Game: Introducing an Impossible Taxonomy (Genre und Videospiel: Einführung in eine unmögliche Taxonomie) explains video game genres as multidimensional and deeply mutable concepts enacted by the interplay of three dimensions: In addition to the hybrid approaches of genre theory, fiction genre and game genre, there are also social components that shape the gaming experience. Working with video games (and working with their genres) turns out to be working with an objet ambigu: an intangible object of art whose potential is revealed and developed, again and again, in the process of interacting with the user. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today, the majority of the world's population lives in a country with falling marriage rates, a phenomenon with profound impacts on women, gender, and sexuality. In Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion, and Possibility (U California Press, 2022), Sarah Lamb probes the gendered trend of single women living in India, examining what makes living outside marriage for women increasingly possible and yet incredibly challenging. Featuring the stories of never-married women as young as 35 and as old as 92, the book offers a remarkable portrait of a way of life experienced by women across class and caste divides, from urban professionals and rural day laborers, to those who identify as heterosexual and lesbian, to others who evaded marriage both by choice and by circumstance. For women in India, complex social-cultural and political-economic contexts are foundational to their lives and decisions, and evading marriage is often an unintended consequence of other pressing life priorities. Arguing that never-married women are able to illuminate their society's broader social-cultural values, Lamb offers a new and startling look at prevailing systems of gender, sexuality, kinship, freedom, and social belonging in India today. Garima Jaju is currently a post-doc at Cambridge University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This is part one of a two part interview. "The social sciences have prospered best in the federal government where they have been included under broad umbrella classifications of the scientific disciplines. … In close company with scientific areas which enjoy the prestige and status of biological or physical sciences, the social sciences have enjoyed a protection and nourishment which they normally do not have when they are identified as such and stand exposed, 'naked and alone.'" — Harry Alpert, sociologist and first social science policy architect, 1960 (Solovey: Ch. 1 lead-in) In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to “other sciences.” Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major—albeit controversial—source of public funding for them. Solovey's analysis underscores the long-term impact of early developments, when the NSF embraced a “scientistic” strategy wherein the natural sciences represented the gold standard, and created a social science program limited to “hard-core” studies. Along the way, Solovey shows how the NSF's efforts to support scholarship, advanced training, and educational programs were shaped by landmark scientific and political developments, including McCarthyism, Sputnik, reform liberalism during the 1960s, and a newly energized conservative movement during the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, he provides a balanced assessment of the NSF's relevance in a “post-truth” era. Solovey's study of the battles over public funding is crucial for understanding the recent history of the social sciences as well as ongoing debates over their scientific status and social value. In this first part of two episodes the professor takes us from the mid-1940s up to the tumultuous 1960s and the (ultimately unsuccessful) legislative proposal for a National Social Science Foundation. Look for the second part which moves from the late 1960s' controversy over Project Camelot up through the dark days of the Reagan years, culminating in a call to revive discussion about the need to create a new federal agency, a National Social Science Foundation. An open access edition of Social Science for What?: Battles over Public Funding for the "Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation (MIT Press, 2020) was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries. Mark Solovey is professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the development of the social sciences in the United States, and especially the controversies regarding the scientific identity of the social sciences, private and public funding for them, and public policy implications of social science expertise. He has written and co-edited a number of books related to the Cold War and social science history. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Gonçalo Santos (University of Coimbra), about his new book, Chinese Village Life Today: Building Families in an Age of Transition, which was published in 2021 by University of Washington Press. Chinese Village Life Today is based on more than twenty years of Gonçalo Santos’s field research. The book paints a richly detailed portrait of a rural township in Guangdong Province, north of the industrialized Pearl River Delta region, to consider the intimate choices that village families make in the face of larger forces of modernization. Filled with vivid anecdotes and keen observations, the book offers a fresh perspective on China’s urban-rural divide and a grounded theoretical approach to understand how China’s rural transformation is changing the ways that local people shape their intimate daily lives - from marriage, childbirth, and childcare to personal hygiene and public sanitation. I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to understand village life in China today, and more broadly for those interested in studies on medical anthropology and the workings of technocratic frameworks of governance. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world High Point, North Carolina, is known as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” Once a manufacturing stronghold, most of its furniture factories have closed over the past forty years, with production shipped off to low-wage countries. Yet as manufacturing left, the city tightened its hold on a biannual global exposition that serves as the world’s furniture fashion runway. At the High Point Market, visitors from more than one hundred nations traverse twelve million square feet of meticulous design. Downtown buildings—once courthouses, movie theaters, post offices, and gas stations—are now chic showroom spaces, even as many sit empty between each exposition. In Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Dr. John Joe Schlichtman applies an ethnographic lens to the global exposition’s relationship with High Point after it defeated rival Chicago in the 1960s and established itself as the world’s dominant furniture center. In recent decades, following trends in global finance, private equity firms were increasingly behind downtown High Point’s real estate transactions, coordinated by buyers far removed from the region. Then, in one massive transaction in 2011, a firm funded by Bain Capital purchased every major showroom building, and the majority of downtown real estate was under one owner. Showroom City is a story of exclusionary growth and unchecked development, of a city flailing to fill the void left by its dwindling factories. But beyond that Schlichtman engages the general lessons behind both High Point’s deindustrialization and its stunning reinvention as a furniture fashion, merchandising, and design node. With great nuance, he delves deeply to reveal how power operates locally and how citizens may affirm, exploit, influence, and resist the takeover of their community. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations people and place at festivals and celebrations. His next book project is on research that he conducted about a canoeing and kayaking event that occurs annually on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be (MIT Press, 2022), Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner analyzed in-depth interviews with more than 2,000 students, alumni, faculty, administrators, parents, trustees, and others, which were conducted at ten institutions ranging from highly selective liberal arts colleges to less-selective state schools. What they found challenged characterizations in the media: students are not preoccupied by political correctness, free speech, or even the cost of college. They are most concerned about their GPA and their resumes; they see jobs and earning potential as more important than learning. Many say they face mental health challenges, fear that they don't belong, and feel a deep sense of alienation. Given this daily reality for students, has higher education lost its way? Fischman and Gardner contend that US universities and colleges must focus sharply on their core educational mission. Fischman and Gardner, both recognized authorities on education and learning, argue that higher education in the United States has lost sight of its principal reason for existing: not vocational training, not the provision of campus amenities, but to increase what Fischman and Gardner call "higher education capital"--to help students think well and broadly, express themselves clearly, explore new areas, and be open to possible transformations. Fischman and Gardner offer cogent recommendations for how every college can become a community of learners who are open to change as thinkers, citizens, and human beings. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Graduate students and newly-minted economists often find that while their time in graduate school taught them a lot about great research of the past and the methods needed to do their own research, they didn't learn that much about the other aspects of the job. How do you submit a paper to a journal? How do you respond to reviewer comments? How do you write referee reports for other people? How do you present you findings in clear and compelling way, whether in a paper or in a talk? Academic advisors and other mentors can help fill the gap, but may not even realize they need to communicate things that they know implicitly. The existence of this hidden curriculum also perpetuates the insider bias and lack of diversity in economics, making it harder for the best ideas to rise to the top. Marc Bellemare's new book Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School--But Didn't (MIT, 2022), helps fill the gap. This book is essential reading for economists and other quantitative social scientists trying to succeed in academia and adjacent fields. Graduate students and junior faculty should read it cover to cover. Senior faculty can also benefit from having a copy around to help make sure their own advice is comprehensive and up-to-date. Author Marc Bellemare is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Distinguished University Teaching Professor, and Northrop Professor in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, where he also directs the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy. He is also currently a co-editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. He also blogs regularly and can be found on Twitter. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focus is the political economy of governance in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work (U Illinois Press, 2021) traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress. A forceful intellectual history, Labor's End challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace. Jason Resnifoff is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Groningen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) in the Netherlands. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Since the founding of the Communist Party in China just over a century ago there is much the country has achieved. But who does the heavy lifting in China? And who walks away with the spoils? Cadre Country: How China Became the Chinese Communist Party (NewSouth Books, 2022) places the spotlight on the nation’s 40 million cadres—the managers and government officials employed by the ruling Communist Party to protect its great enterprise – to show how the Communist Party operates in China and how the stories the party tells about itself are based on thin foundations. The book pays particular attention to the history, language, and culture of the Communist Party but maintains a relentless focus on what has become of China since the Global Financial Crisis and in particular since Xi Jinping came to power. The party is in the act of swallowing a liberalised society, a marketized economy, and a diverse country. This matters for everyone, because the way China’s government behaves at home frames its conduct abroad. John Fitzgerald is an historian of China and the Chinese diaspora. He headed the Asia-Pacific Centre for Social Investment and Philanthropy at Swinburne University after serving five years as China Representative of The Ford Foundation in Beijing (2008-13). From 2015 to 2017 he served as President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His recent books include Cadre Country: How China became the Chinese Communist Party (2022), Taking the Low Road: China’s Influence in Australia’s States and Territories (edited, 2022), and Chinese Diaspora Charity and the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1949 (edited with Hon-ming Yip, 2020). Earlier books include Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (2007), awarded the Ernest Scott Prize of the Australian Historical Association, and Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (1997), awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize of the US Association for Asian Studies. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney (BA 1976), Nanjing University (Language Cert 1977) and ANU (PhD 1983), and studied at UW Madison as a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow (1988). Dong Wang is distinguished professor of history and director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Wars have always been fought in different ways, depending not only on the manpower available – elite professional armies to mass mobilization of whole populations - but also on technological developments, all the way from medieval siege engines to modern fighter jets. Recent developments suggest that there is much more rapid change to come as information campaigns, crime and subversion become weaponised in new ways. Mark Galeotti has been thinking about all these things for a long time. Today I talked to him about his book The Weaponization of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (Yale UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Citizenship is traditionally viewed as a legal status to be possessed. Cultivating Membership in Taiwan and Beyond: Relational Citizenship (Lexington, 2021) proposes the concept of relational citizenship to articulate the value-laden, interactive nature of belongingness. Hsin-I Cheng examines the role of relationality which produces and is a product of localized emotions. Cheng attends to particular histories and global trajectories embedded within uneven power relations. By focusing on Taiwan, a non-Western society with a tradition to adeptly attune to local experiences and those from various global influences, relational citizenship highlights the measures used to define and encourage interactions with newcomers. This book shows the multilayered communicative processes in which relations are gradually created, challenged, merged, disrupted, repaired, and solidified. Cheng further argues that this concept is not bound to nation-state geographic boundaries as relationality bleeds through national borders. Relational citizenship has the potential to move beyond the East vs. West epistemology to examine peoples’ lived realities wherein the sense of belonging is discursively accomplished, viscerally experienced, and publicly performed. Hsin-I Cheng is an associate professor in the Communication department at Santa Clara University. Her research and teaching interests focus on how multiple identities intersect and influence human interaction and relationships. She is the author of Culturing Interface: Identity, Communication, and Chinese Transnationalism (2008), and her work appears in Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Language and Intercultural Communication, and Women & Language. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For decades, immigration has been one of the most divisive, contentious topics in American politics. And for decades, urgent calls for its policy reform have gone mostly unanswered. As the discord surrounding the modern immigration debate has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. Crossing harsher, less porous borders makes unauthorized entry to the United States a permanent, costly undertaking. And the challenges don't end on the other side. At once enlightening and devastating, The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear (U Chicago Press, 2021) examines the costs and ends of America's interior enforcement--the policies and agencies, including ICE, aimed at removing immigrants already living in the country. Economist Tara Watson and journalist Kalee Thompson pair rigorous analysis with deeply personal stories from immigrants and their families to assess immigration's effects on every aspect of American life, from the labor force to social welfare programs to tax revenue. What emerges is a critical, utterly complete examination of what non-native Americans bring to the country, including immigration's tendency to elevate the wages and skills of those who are native-born.d News coverage has prompted many to question the humanity of American immigration policies; The Border Within opens a conversation of whether it is effective. The United States spends billions each year on detention and deportation, all without economic gain and at a great human cost. With depth and discipline, the authors dissect the shock-and-awe policies that make up a broken, often cruel system, while illuminating the lives caught in the chaos. It is an essential work with far-reaching implications for immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In his book Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence (2022, Cambridge University Press), Siniša Malešević emphasises the centrality of the social and historical contexts that make fighting possible. He argues that fighting is not an individual attribute, but a social phenomenon shaped by one's relationships with other people. Drawing on recent scholarship across a variety of academic disciplines as well as his own interviews with the former combatants, Malešević shows that one's willingness to fight is a contextual phenomenon shaped by specific ideological and organisational logic. This book explores the role biology, psychology, economics, ideology, and coercion play in one's experience of fighting, emphasising the cultural and historical variability of combativeness. By drawing from numerous historical and contemporary examples from all over the world, Malešević demonstrates how social pugnacity is a relational and contextual phenomenon that possesses autonomous features. Siniša Malešević is the chair of the sociology department at University College, Dublin. His main research interests include the study of war and violence, ethnicity, nation-states, and nationalism, empires, ideology, sociological theory and comparative historical sociology. Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
At its beginning in 2007, the Southern Movement in South Yemen was a loose merger of different people, most of them former army personnel and state employees of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) who were forced from their jobs after the war in 1994, only four years after the unification between the PDRY and the Yemen Arab Republic. In South Yemen’s Independence Struggle: Generations Of Resistance (American University of Cairo Press, 2021), Dr. Anna-Linda Amira Augustin presents a bold ethnographic account of a persistent Arab uprising, in a rarely studied corner of the Middle East. She explores why the Southern Movement has grown so tremendously during the last decade, and how it developed from a primarily social movement demanding social rights into a mass protest movement claiming independence for a state that had long vanished from the world map. She asks why so many young people born after 1990 joined the movement and demanded the re-establishment of a state that they had never themselves experienced. At the core of South Yemeni resistance lies the transmission from generation to generation of a dominant counternarrative, which may be seen as the continuation and rehabilitation of the PDRY’s national narrative. This narrative, amplified through everyday communication in families and neighborhoods, but also by media-makers, journalists, school and university teachers, civil society actors, and by the movement’s activists, opposes the national-unity narrative of the Republic of Yemen and intensifies the demands for an independent state. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands (U Chicago Press, 2022) begins with the 144 children of Nazi scientists who moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1946 as part of the military program called Operation Paperclip. These German children were bused daily from a military outpost to four El Paso public schools. Though born into a fascist enemy nation, the German children were quickly integrated into the schools and, by proxy, American society. Their rapid assimilation offered evidence that American public schools played a vital role in ensuring the victory of democracy over fascism. Jonna Perrillo not only tells this fascinating story of Cold War educational policy, but she draws an important contrast with another, much more numerous population of children in the El Paso public schools: Mexican Americans. Like everywhere else in the Southwest, Mexican American children in El Paso were segregated into "Mexican" schools, where the children received a vastly different educational experience. Not only were they penalized for speaking Spanish--the only language all but a few spoke due to segregation--they were tracked for low-wage and low-prestige careers, with limited opportunities for economic success. Educating the Enemy charts what two groups of children--one that might have been considered the enemy, the other that was treated as such--reveal about the ways political assimilation has been treated by schools as an easier, more viable project than racial or ethnic assimilation. Listen to an interview with the author here and read an interview in Time and a piece based on the book in the Boston Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2005, Tony Perman attended a ceremony alongside the living and the dead. His visit to a Zimbabwe farm brought him into contact with the madhlozi, outsider spirits that Ndau people rely upon for guidance, protection, and their collective prosperity. Perman's encounters with the spirits, the mediums who bring them back, and the accompanying rituals form the heart of his ethnographic account of how the Ndau experience ceremonial musicking. As Perman witnessed other ceremonies, he discovered that music and dancing shape the emotional lives of Ndau individuals by inviting them to experience life's milestones or cope with its misfortunes as a group. Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life (U Illinois Press, 2020) explores the historical, spiritual, and social roots of ceremonial action and details how that action influences the Ndau's collective approach to their future. The result is a vivid ethnomusicological journey that delves into the immediacy of musical experience and the forces that transform ceremonial performance into emotions and community. Tony Perman is an associate professor music at Grinnell College. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In times of heightened national security, scholars and activists from the communities under suspicion often attempt to alert the public to the more complex stories behind the headlines. But when they raise questions about the government, military and police policy, these individuals are routinely shut down and accused of being terrorist sympathizers or apologists. In such environments, there is immense pressure to condemn what society at large fears. I Refuse to Condemn: Resisting Racism in Times of National Security (Manchester University Press, 2021) explains how the expectation to condemn has emerged, tracking it against the normalization of racism, and explores how writers manage to subvert expectations as part of their commitment to anti-racism. In my conversation with the collection’s editor, Asim Qureshi, Research Director of CAGE, an independent advocacy organization, we discuss the culture of condemnation and the presumption of guilt, its psychological and physiological impacts, issues of trauma, white supremacy and racism as a system of power, structural racism’s relationship to national security, Prevent and countering violent extremism programs, cultural representation, the role of artists and performers, the afterlife of one’s work or art, and advocacy to dismantle anti-Muslim racism. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“Confronting the past” has become a byword for democratization. How societies and governments commemorate their violent pasts is often appraised as a litmus test of their democratization claims. Regardless of how critical such appraisals may be, they tend to share a fundamental assumption: commemoration, as a symbol of democratization, is ontologically distinct from violence. The pitfalls of this assumption have been nowhere more evident than in Turkey whose mainstream image on the world stage has rapidly descended from a regional beacon of democracy to a hotbed of violence within the space of a few recent years. In Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey (Syracuse UP, 2021), Eray Çaylı draws upon extensive fieldwork he conducted in the prelude to the mid-2010s when Turkey’s global image fell from grace. This ethnography—the first of its kind—explores both activist and official commemorations at sites of state-endorsed violence in Turkey that have become the subject of campaigns for memorial museums. Reversing the methodological trajectory of existing accounts, Çaylı works from the politics of urban and architectural space to grasp ethnic, religious, and ideological marginalization. Victims of Commemoration reveals that, whether campaigns for memorial museums bear fruit or not, architecture helps communities concentrate their political work against systemic problems. Sites significant to Kurdish, Alevi, and revolutionary-leftist struggles for memory and justice prompt activists to file petitions and lawsuits, organize protests, and build new political communities. In doing so, activists not only uphold the legacy of victims but also reject the identity of a passive victimhood being imposed on them. They challenge not only the ways specific violent pasts and their victims are represented, but also the structural violence which underpins deep-seated approaches to nationhood, publicness and truth, and which itself is a source of victimhood. Victims of Commemoration complicates our tendency to presume that violence ends where commemoration begins and that architecture’s role in both is reducible to a question of symbolism. Eray Çaylı is the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the European Institute at the London School of Economics. Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“Narcissism” is truly one of the most important words of our time―ceaselessly discussed in the media, the subject of millions of online search queries, and at the center of serious social and political debates. But what does it really mean? In The New Science of Narcissism (Sounds True, 2020), Dr. W. Keith Campbell pulls back the curtain on this frequently misused label, presenting the most recent psychological, personality, and social research into the phenomenon. Rather than pathologizing all behaviors associated with the label, Campbell reveals that not only does narcissism occur on a spectrum, but almost everyone exhibits narcissistic tendencies in their day-to-day behavior. Drawing from real-life incidents and case studies, The New Science of Narcissism offers tools, tips, and suggestions for softening toxically selfish behaviors both in yourself and others. Here you will discover: · An exploration of personality disorders connected with and adjacent to narcissism · Why minor narcissistic tendencies are common in most people · The foundational difference between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism · The “recipe” of mental and emotional traits that combine into narcissism · How to identify when you’re in a relationship with a narcissist and what you can do about it · Why the 21st century has seen the rise of a “Great Fantasy Migration” into evermore insular subcultures · The connection between narcissistic tendencies and leadership · Why “the audience in your pocket” of social media has exacerbated culture-wide narcissistic tendencies Though narcissism looms large in our cultural consciousness, The New Science of Narcissism offers many different options for understanding and treating it. With Campbell’s straightforward and grounded guidance, you’ll not only discover the latest and best information on the condition, but also a hopeful view of its future. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art (Duke University Press, 2022) Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore transition, selfhood, and relationality. Morse contends that rather than being understood as shallow emblems of a narcissistic age, selfies can produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers. Through close readings of selfies and other digital artworks by trans feminist artists, Morse details a set of formal strategies they call selfie aesthetics: doubling, improvisation, seriality, and nonlinear temporality. Morse traces these strategies in the work of Zackary Drucker, Vivek Shraya, Tourmaline, Alok Vaid-Menon, Zinnia Jones, and Natalie Wynn, showing how these artists present improvisational identities and new modes of performative resistance by conveying the materialities of trans life. Morse shows how the interaction between selfie creators and viewers constructs collective modes of being and belonging in ways that envision trans feminist futures. By demonstrating the aesthetic depth and political potential of selfie creation, distribution, and reception, Morse deepens understandings of gender performativity and trans experience. Daniela Meneses Sala is Peruvian Academic and Journalist. She holds an MSc in Gender (Sexuality) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In October, she is starting a PhD in Latin American Studies at Cambridge University, funded by the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Programme. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Brazil is home to the largest number of African descendants outside Africa and the greatest number of domestic workers in the world. Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic research, Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the lives of marginalized informal domestic workers who are called 'adopted daughters' but who live in slave-like conditions in the homes of their adoptive families. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman traces a nuanced and, at times, disturbing account of how adopted daughters, who are trapped in a system of racial, gender, and class oppression, live with the coexistence of extreme forms of exploitation and seemingly loving familial interactions and affective relationships. Highlighting the humanity of her respondents, Hordge-Freeman examines how filhas de criação (raised daughters) navigate the realities of their structural constraints and in the context of pervasive norms of morality, gratitude, and kinship. In all, the author clarifies the link between contemporary and colonial forms of exploitation, while highlighting the resistance and agency of informal domestic workers. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman is an Associate Professor of sociology, interim Vice President for Institutional Equity, and Senior Advisor to the President and Provost for Diversity and Inclusion at The University of South Florida. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why Would I Be Married Here?: Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal India (Cornell UP, 2022) examines marriage migration undertaken by rural bachelors in North India, unable to marry locally, who travel across the breadth of India seeking brides who do not share the same caste, ethnicity, language, or customs as themselves. Combining rich ethnographic evidence with Dalit feminist and political economy frameworks, Reena Kukreja connects the macro-political violent process of neoliberalism to the micro-personal level of marriage and intimate gender relations to analyze the lived reality of this set of migrant brides in cross-region marriages among dominant-peasant caste Hindus and Meo Muslims in rural North India. Why Would I Be Married Here? reveals how predatory capitalism links with patriarchy to dispossess many poor women from India's marginalized Dalit and Muslim communities of marriage choices in their local communities. It reveals how, within the context of the increasing spread of capitalist relations, these women's pragmatic cross-region migration for marriage needs to be reframed as an exercise of their agency that simultaneously exposes them to new forms of gender subordination and internal othering of caste discrimination and ethnocentrism in conjugal communities. Why Would I Be Married Here? offers powerful examples of how contemporary forces of neoliberalism reshape the structural oppressions compelling poor women from marginalized communities worldwide into making compromised choices about their bodies, their labor, and their lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Trevor Boffone's book TikTok Cultures in the United States (Routledge, 2022) examines the role of TikTok in US popular culture, paying close attention to the app’s growing body of subcultures. Featuring an array of scholars from varied disciplines and backgrounds, this book uses TikTok (sub)cultures as a point of departure from which to explore TikTok’s role in US popular culture today. Engaging with the extensive and growing scholarship on TikTok from international scholars, chapters in this book create frameworks and blueprints from which to analyse TikTok within a distinctly US context, examining topics such as gender and sexuality, feminism, race and ethnicity and wellness. Shaping TikTok as an interdisciplinary field in and of itself, this insightful and timely volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of new and digital media, social media, popular culture, communication studies, sociology of media, dance, gender studies, and performance studies. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Marriage's central role in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints distinguishes the faith while simultaneously reflecting widespread American beliefs. But what does Latter-day Saint marriage mean for men? In Revising Eternity: 27 Latter-Day Saint Men Reflect on Modern Relationships (U Illinois Press, 2022), Holly Welker presents a collection of essays exploring this question. The essayists provide insight into challenges involving sexuality, physical and emotional illness, addiction, loss of faith, infidelity, sexual orientation, and other topics. Conversational and heartfelt, the writings reveal the varied experiences of Latter-day Saint marriage against the backdrop of a society transformed by everything from economic issues affecting marriage to evolving ideas about gender. An insightful exploration of the gap between human realities and engrained ideals, Revising Eternity sheds light on how Latter-day Saint men view and experience marriage today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community (U Washington Press, 2022) explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity. With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the evolutionary purpose of religion, and are some individuals more inclined than others to be religious? Our species diverged from the great apes six to eight million years ago. Since then, our propensity toward spiritual thinking and ritual emerged. How, when, and why did this occur, and how did the earliest, informal shamanic practices evolve into the world religions familiar to us today? In How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures (Oxford UP, 2022), Robin Dunbar explores these and other questions, mining the distinctions between religions of experience--as practiced by the earliest hunter-gatherer societies--and doctrinal religions, from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and their many derivatives.
Examining religion's origins, social functions, its effects on the brain and body, and its place in the modern era, Dunbar offers a fascinating and far-reaching analysis of the quintessentially human impulse to reach beyond. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program (NYU Press, 2022) is the first book to look at the impact of the H-4 dependent visa programs on women and men visa holders in Indian families in America. Comparing two distinct groups of Indian immigrant families -families of male high-tech workers and female nurses-Pallavi Banerjee reveals how visa policies that are legally gender and race neutral in fact have gendered and racialized ramifications for visa holders and their spouses. Drawing on interviews with fifty-five Indian couples, Banerjee highlights the experiences of high-skilled immigrants as they struggle to cope with visa laws, which forbid their spouses from working paid jobs. She examines how these unfair restrictions destabilize-if not completely dismantle-families, who often break under this marital, financial, and emotional stress. Banerjee shows us, through the eyes of immigrants themselves, how the visa process strips them of their rights, forcing them to depend on their spouses and the government in fundamentally challenging ways. The Opportunity Trap provides a critical look at our visa system, underscoring how it fails immigrant families. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
'Whiteness' is a politically constructed category which needs to be understood and dismantled because the system of racism so embedded within our society harms us all. It has profound implications for human psychology, an understanding of which is essential for supporting the movement for change. Helen Morgan's The Work of Whiteness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (Routledge, 2021)explores these implications from a psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic perspective. The 'fragility' of whiteness, the colour-blind approach and the silencing process of disavowal as they develop in the childhood of white liberal families are considered as means of maintaining white privilege and racism. A critique of the colonial roots of psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung leads to questioning the de-linking of the individual from society in modern day analytic thinking. The concept of the cultural complex is suggested as a useful means of connecting the individual and the social. Examples from the author's clinical practice as well as from public life are used to illustrate the argument. Relatively few black people join the psychoanalytic profession and those who do describe training and membership as a difficult and painful process. How racism operates in clinical work, supervision and our institutions is explored, and whilst it can seem an intractable problem, proposals are given for ways forward. This book will be of great importance to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, social workers and all those with an interest in the role of white privilege on mental health. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at PhilipJLance@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Black Masculinity and Hip-Hop Music: Black Gay Men Who Rap (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), XinLing Li offers an interdisciplinary study of hip-hop music written and performed by rappers who are black gay men. This study examines the storytelling mechanisms of gay themed lyrics, and how these form protests and become enabling tools for (black) gay men to discuss issues such as living on the down-low and HIV/AIDS. It considers how the biased promotion of feminized gay male artists/characters in the mainstream entertainment industry have rendered masculinity an exclusively male heterosexual property, providing a representational framework for men to identify with a form of “homosexual masculinity” – one that is constructed without having to either victimize anything feminine or necessarily convert to femininity. The book makes a strong case that it is possible for individuals (like gay rappers) to perform masculinity against masculinity, and open up a new way of striving for gender equality. XinLing Li received his PhD in sociology from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Jason Josephson-Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science and Technology Studies at Williams College in Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2006 and has held visiting positions in the US, France, and Germany. He has three primary research foci: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We live in cities whose borders have always been subject to expansion. What does such transformation of rural spaces mean for cities and vice-versa? Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi (Cambridge UP, 2022) looks at the spatial transformation of villages brought into Delhi's urban fray in the 1950s. As these villages transform physically; their residents, an agrarian-pastoralist community - the Jats - also transform into dabblers in real estate. A study of two villages - Munirka and Shahpur Jat - both in the heart of bustling urban economies of Delhi, reveal that it is 'rent' that could define this suburbanisation. 'Bhaichara', once a form of land ownership in colonial times, transforms into an affective claim of belonging, and managing urban property in the face of a steady onslaught from the 'city'. Properties of Rent is a study of how a vernacular form of capitalism and its various affects shape up in opposition to both state, finance capital and the city in contemporary urban Delhi. Sushmita Pati is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. She studied Political Science at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is interested in studying the intersections of Urban Politics and Political Economy. Her recent book, Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi is now out from Cambridge University Press. Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on literary rhetoric and economic thought. He co-hosts the podcast High Theory and is a co-founder of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Commodities of Care: The Business of HIV Testing in China (U Minnesota Press, 2021) examines the unanticipated effects of global health interventions, ideas, and practices as they unfold in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM) in China. Targeted for the scaling-up of HIV testing, Elsa L. Fan examines how the impact of this initiative has transformed these men from subjects of care into commodities of care: through the use of performance-based financing tied to HIV testing, MSM have become a source of economic and political capital. In ethnographic detail, Fan shows how this particular program, ushered in by global health donors, became the prevailing strategy to control the epidemic in China in the late 2000s. Fan examines the implementation of MSM testing and its effects among these men, arguing that the intervention produced new markets of men, driven by the push to meet testing metrics. Fan shows how men who have sex with men in China came to see themselves as part of a global MSM category, adopting new selfhoods and socialities inextricably tied to HIV and to testing. Wider trends in global health programming have shaped national public health responses in China and, this book reveals, have radically altered the ways health, disease, and care are addressed. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Daniel Silva’s Embodying Modernity: Global Fitness Culture and Building the Brazilian Body (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022) examines the current boom of fitness culture in Brazil in the context of the white patriarchal notions of race, gender, and sexuality through which fitness practice, commodities, and cultural products traffic. The book traces the imperial meanings and orders of power conveyed through “fit” bodies and their different configurations of muscularity, beauty, strength, and health within mainstream visual media and national and global public spheres. Drawing from a wide range of Brazilian visual media sources including fitness magazines, television programs, film, and social media, Daniel F. Silva theorizes concepts and renderings of modern corporality, its racialized and gendered underpinnings, and its complex relationship to white patriarchal power and capital. This study works to define the ubiquitous parameters of fitness culture and argues that its growth is part of a longer collective nationalist project of modernity tied to whiteness, capitalist ideals, and historical exceptionalism. Patricio Simonetto a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute of the Americas (University College London). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Labour has taken an about-turn. From Adam Smith’s proposal for specialisation which saw the factory line reorganised so that each worker needed to understand only a small aspect of the production process, many industries now rely on access to specialised skills and resources that are commanded at-hoc in discrete, time- and output-bound chunks. This is the logic of projects. The workforce no longer dedicates itself to the making of a singular commodity, as it was the case with Smith, but bids for discrete pieces of work when those are in demand. In some industries, for example, in the art world, the workforce is also charged with building the demand for their work by initiating the project which would then employ them. The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World (Manchester UP, 2021) by Kuba Szreder contributes new thinking on and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in contemporary art. It is both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speaking to and about the vast cohort of artistic freelancers worldwide. Kuba Szreder speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the artistic project, and the effects of projectarisation on workers’ solidarity, communal governance, and the precarity of artistic activity. Kuba Szreder is a lecturer in the department of art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He combines his research with independent curatorial practice. His previous publications include Joy Forever: Political Economy of Social Creativity (2011) and Art Factory: Division of Labor and Distribution of Resources in the Field of Contemporary Art in Poland (2014). In 2018, together with Kathrin Böhm, he initiated Centre for Plausible Economies, a cluster devoted to reimagining economies of contemporary art and using artistic imagination to redraw the economy at large.
A report on the Free/Slow University of Warsaw
Pierre’s interview with François Matarasso on community art
Pierre’s essay on the social artist’s absorption into the professional-managerial class
Kuba’s work with Kathrin Böhm (Company Drinks/myvillages) on the Centre for Plausible Economies, which contributed to Documenta 15
A New Books Network Interview with Dave O’Brien et al on Culture is Bad for You
Pierre’s review of Sam Friedman’s and Daniel Laurison’s The Class Ceiling
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In Institutional Sexual Abuse in the #metoo Era (Southern Illinois UP, 2021), editors Jason D. Spraitz and Kendra N. Bowen bring together the work of contributors in the fields of criminal justice and criminology, sociology, journalism, and communications. These chapters show #MeToo is not only a support network of victims’ voices and testimonies but also a revolutionary interrogation of policies, power imbalances, and ethical failures that resulted in decades-long cover-ups and institutions structured to ensure continued abuse. This book reveals #MeToo as so much more than a hashtag. Contributors discuss how #MeToo has altered the landscape of higher education; detail a political history of sexual abuse in the United States and the UK; discuss a recent grand jury report about religious institutions; and address the foster care and correctional systems. Hollywood instances are noted for their fear of retaliation among victims and continued accolades for alleged abusers. In sports, contributors examine the Jerry Sandusky scandal and the abuse by Larry Nassar. Advertising and journalism are scrutinized for covering the #MeToo disclosures while dealing with their own scandals. Finally, social media platforms are investigated for harassment and threats of violent victimization. Drawing on the general framework of the #MeToo Movement, contributors look at complex and very different institutions—athletics, academia, religion, politics, justice, childcare, social media, and entertainment. Contributors include revelatory case studies to ensure we hear the victims’ voices; bring to light the complicity and negligence of social institutions; and advocate for systemic solutions to institutional sexual abuse, violence, and harassment. Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television lately. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics, and dystopian world orders fill our screens—typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. In her new book, Apocalypse and Heroism in Popular Culture: Allegories of White Masculinity in Crisis (McFarland Press, 2022), Dr. Katherine E. Sugg asks, why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and major obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future? This book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in films and TV like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer, Mad Max: Fury Road, and more. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions, yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society, and the power of individuals to change the world. Katherine E. Sugg is a professor of English and Latino & Puerto Rican studies at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut. She teaches and writes on world literatures, Latino and comparative American studies, and film and media. She has also written several journal articles and published a book entitled Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Award-winning geographer-designer team James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti transform enormous datasets into rich maps and cutting-edge visualizations. In this triumph of visual storytelling, they uncover truths about our past, reveal who we are today, and highlight what we face in the years ahead. In Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World (W. W. Norton, 2021), Cheshire and Uberti explore happiness levels around the globe, trace the undersea cables and cell towers that connect us, examine hidden scars of geopolitics, and illustrate how a warming planet affects everything from hurricanes to the hajj. Years in the making, Atlas of the Invisible invites readers to marvel at the promise and peril of data, and to revel in the secrets and contours of a newly visible world. Winner of the 2021 British Cartographic Society Awards including the Stanfords Award for Printed Mapping and the John C. Bartholomew Award for Thematic Mapping. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the Pulitzer Prize finalist book Home, Land, Security: Deradicalisation and the Journey Back from Extremism (One World, 2021), Carla Power explores: what are the roots of radicalism? Journalist Carla Power came to this question well before the January 6, 2021, attack in Washington, D.C., that turned the US’ attention to the problem of domestic radicalization. Her entry point was a different wave of radical panic—the way populists and pundits encouraged us to see the young people who joined ISIS or other terrorist organizations as simple monsters. Power wanted to chip away at the stereotypes by focusing not on what these young people had done but why: What drew them into militancy? What visions of the world—of home, of land, of security for themselves and the people they loved—shifted their thinking toward radical beliefs? And what visions of the world might bring them back to society? Power begins her journey by talking to the mothers of young men who’d joined ISIS in the UK and Canada; from there, she travels around the world in search of societies that are finding new and innovative ways to rehabilitate former extremists. We meet an American judge who has staked his career on finding new ways to handle terrorist suspects, a Pakistani woman running a game-changing school for former child soldiers, a radicalized Somali American who learns through literature to see beyond his Manichean beliefs, and a former neo-Nazi who now helps disarm white supremacists. Along the way Power gleans lessons that get her closer to answering the true question at the heart of her pursuit: Can we find a way to live together? An eye-opening, page-turning investigation, Home, Land, Security speaks to the rise of division and radicalization in all forms, both at home and abroad. In this richly reported and deeply human account, Carla Power offers new ways to overcome the rising tides of extremism, one human at a time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Teemu Taira's book Taking ‘Religion’ Seriously: Essays on the Discursive Study of Religion (Brill, 2022) demonstrates through methodological reflections and carefully chosen case studies a new way to conduct the study of religion. It focuses on how social actors negotiate what counts as “religion” and how discourses on religion are part of how contemporary societies organize themselves. It draws on examples from judicial processes, media discourses, and scholarly debates related to Wiccans, Druids, and Jedi knights, among others. By analyzing discourses on religion and building on, rather than rejecting, genealogical critiques of religion, Taira argues that the study of religion can be constructive and socially relevant. Teemu tweets @TeemuTaira. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Philanthropists are praise for their generosity but does their desire to keep control of what happens to their donations mean they exercise power in ways that clash with democratic principles? Approval of philanthropists’ good intentions can mask some important moral considerations about what philanthropy means for the donor and the recipient. Generosity, influence, reputation and paternalism: democracy and philanthropy with Owen Bennett Jones and Emma Saunders Hastings. Hasting is author of Private Virtues, Public Vices: Philanthropy and Democratic Equality (U Chicago Press, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Rachael Hutchinson and Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon's edited volume Japanese Role-Playing Games: Genre, Representation, and Liminality in the JRPG (Lexington Books, 2022) examines the origins, boundaries, and transnational effects of the genre, addressing significant formal elements as well as narrative themes, character construction, and player involvement. Contributors from Japan, Europe, North America, and Australia employ a variety of theoretical approaches to analyze popular game series and individual titles, introducing an English-speaking audience to Japanese video game scholarship while also extending postcolonial and philosophical readings to the Japanese game text. In a three-pronged approach, the collection uses these analyses to look at genre, representation, and liminality, engaging with a multitude of concepts including stereotypes, intersectionality, and the political and social effects of JRPGs on players and industry conventions. Broadly, this collection considers JRPGs as networked systems, including evolved iterations of MMORPGs and card-collecting “social games” for mobile devices. Scholars of media studies, game studies, Asian studies, and Japanese culture will find this book particularly useful. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Inequality is an urgent global concern, with pundits, politicians, academics, and best-selling books all taking up its causes and consequences. In Inequality: A Genetic History (MIT Press, 2022), Carles Lalueza-Fox offers an entirely new perspective on the subject, examining the genetic marks left by inequality on humans throughout history. Lalueza-Fox describes genetic studies, made possible by novel DNA sequencing technologies, that reveal layers of inequality in past societies, manifested in patterns of migration, social structures, and funerary practices. Through their DNA, ancient skeletons have much to tell us, yielding anonymous stories of inequality, bias, and suffering. Lalueza-Fox, a leader in paleogenomics, offers the deep history of inequality. He explores the ancestral shifts associated with migration and describes the gender bias unearthed in these migrations--the brutal sexual asymmetries, for example, between male European explorers and the women of Latin America that are revealed by DNA analysis. He considers social structures, and the evidence that high social standing was inherited--the ancient world was not a meritocracy. He untangles social and genetic factors to consider whether wealth is an advantage in reproduction, showing why we are more likely to be descended from a king than a peasant. And he explores the effects of ancient inequality on the human gene pool. Marshaling a range of evidence, Lalueza-Fox shows that understanding past inequalities is key to understanding present ones. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
While in no way supporting the systemic injustices and disparities of mass incarceration, in Gifts from the Dark: Learning from the Incarceration Experience (Lexington Books, 2021), Joni Schwartz and John Chaney argue that we have much to learn from those who have been and are in prison. Schwartz and Chaney profile the contributions of literary giants, social activists, entrepreneurs, and other talented individuals who, despite the disorienting dilemma of incarceration, are models of adult transformative learning that positively impact the world. In focusing upon how men and women have chosen the worst moments of their lives as a baseline not to define, but to refine themselves, Gifts from the Dark promises to alter the limited mindset of incarceration as a solely one-dimensional, deficit event. Joni Schwartz is professor of humanities at the City University of New York – LaGuardia Community College and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Graduate Studies Program. John Chaney is assistant professor and director of Criminal Justice programs for City University of New York -- LaGuardia Community College. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town (Beacon Press, 2022) paints an intimate portrait of the newcomers revitalizing a fading industrial town – illuminating the larger canvas of refugee life in 21st century America. For many Americans, ‘refugee’ still conjures up the image of a threatening outsider: a stranger who will steal jobs, or a family who will be a drain on the economy. Yet, most people know little about how refugees have actually fared in America: the lives they have built over generations and the cities they have transformed. In New York state, the old manufacturing town of Utica could have disappeared altogether if it wasn’t for the growing population of refugees who revved the economic engine – starting small businesses, renovating houses, and adding a fresh vitality to the community through cultural diversity. For eight years, journalist Susan Hartman followed three newcomers as they put down roots in a new city: Sadia, a bright, rebellious Somali Bantu girl battling her formidable mother; Ali, an Iraqi translator, still suffering trauma from the ongoing war in his homeland; and Mersiha, an ebullient Bosnian, who dreams of opening a café. They’re also the entry point to those leading the city: the mayor, teachers, doctors, and firefighters, who have adapted to the refugees that have made the city their home. Hartman explores the ways these refugees have stitched together their American and traditional identities, the dreams they have for their new lives in Utica, and the pain some still carry from their pasts. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racial, social, and class inequities and the public health crises in the United States are deeply intertwined, their roots and manifestations continually pressuring each other. This has been both illuminated and exacerbated since 2020, with the Movement for Black Lives (BLM) and the disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on historically disadvantaged groups within the U.S. Dr. Dayna Bowen Matthew, Dean of the George Washington University Law School, explores and unpacks the public health crisis that is racism in her new book Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America (NYU Press, 2022). She describes how structural inequality undermines the interests of a thriving nation and the steps we can take to undo the pervasive nature of inequality to create more equitable and just systems. Dr. Bowen Matthew describes her personal relationship with the concepts of structural inequality and racism in the public health system, opening with a heart-wrenching ode to her father’s experience with poverty and prejudice, which ultimately led to his premature death. Through her family’s story, she explains how structural inequality is perpetuated on a large-enough scale and with a powerful-enough scope so as to virtually guarantee social outcomes that reflect predetermined hierarchies based on race and/or class, hierarchies that remain consistent across generations. These disproportionate outcomes are often dismissed as due to comorbidities without the attention paid to social factors are the primary cause of comorbidities, because oppression in its many forms blocks equitable access to the social determinants of health. These social determinants include, but are not limited to, clean and safe housing, adequate education, nutritious food and fresh water, access to recreational spaces, and mental health services. Individuals who lack these, through no fault of their own, are then obligated to accept disproportionate care, illness, and disturbingly shorter life spans then are the norm for many Americans and are much closer to life spans in impoverished countries. Dr. Bowen Matthew presents evidence of discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system, detailing how law has played a central role in erecting disproportionate access to the social determinants of health, and therefore is a requisite tool for dismantling it. She provides a clear path to undoing structural racism and providing an equitable society to all, encouraging health providers, law makers, and citizens all to fight to dismantle the hurdles that many patients face because of the zip code in which they live. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace (Viking, 2022), Chris Blattman explains the five reasons why conflict (rarely) blooms into war, and how to interrupt that deadly process. It's easy to overlook the underlying strategic forces of war, to see it solely as a series of errors, accidents, and emotions gone awry. It's also easy to forget that war shouldn't happen-and most of the time it doesn't. Around the world, there are millions of hostile rivalries, yet only a tiny fraction erupt into violence. Too many accounts of conflict forget this. With a counterintuitive approach, Blattman reminds us that most rivals loathe one another in peace. That's because war is too costly to fight. Enemies almost always find it better to split the pie than spoil it or struggle over thin slices. So, in those rare instances when fighting ensues, we should ask: what kept rivals from compromising? Why We Fight draws on decades of economics, political science, psychology, and real-world interventions to lay out the root causes and remedies for war, showing that violence is not the norm; that there are only five reasons why conflict wins over compromise; and how peacemakers turn the tides through tinkering, not transformation. From warring states to street gangs, ethnic groups and religious sects to political factions, there are common dynamics to heed and lessons to learn. Along the way, we meet vainglorious European monarchs, African dictators, Indian mobs, Nazi pilots, British football hooligans, ancient Greeks, and fanatical Americans. Realistic and optimistic, this is a book that lends new meaning to the old adage, "Give peace a chance." Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The exorbitant costs of urban housing and the widening gap in income inequality are fueling a combative new movement in cities around the world. A growing number of influential activists aren't waiting for new public housing to be built. Instead, they're calling for more construction and denser cities in order to increase affordability. Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing (Princeton UP, 2022) offers an in-depth look at the "Yes in My Backyard" (YIMBY) movement. From its origins in San Francisco to its current cadre of activists pushing for new apartment towers in places like Boulder, Austin, and London, Max Holleran explores how urban density, once maligned for its association with overpopulated slums, has become a rallying cry for millennial activists locked out of housing markets and unable to pay high rents. Holleran provides a detailed account of YIMBY activists campaigning for construction, new zoning rules, better public transit, and even candidates for local and state office. YIMBY groups draw together an unlikely coalition, from developers and real estate agents to environmentalists, and Holleran looks at the increasingly contentious battles between market-driven pragmatists and rent-control idealists. Arguing that advocates for more housing must carefully weigh their demands for supply with the continuing damage of gentrification, he shows that these individuals see high-density urbanism and walkable urban spaces as progressive statements about the kind of society they would like to create. Chronicling a major shift in housing activism during the past twenty years, Yes to the City considers how one movement has reframed conversations about urban growth. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz about his new book Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe (Dey Street Books, 2022) Looking for advice on how to get a date, how to have a successful marriage, or just how to have a happier life? Don’t trust your gut, don’t trust conventional wisdom, and put down that self-help book full of plausible arguments and compelling anecdotes that just happens to contradict the advice you got from the self-help book you. Instead, let Seth Stephens-Davidowitz guide you, using data! Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a data scientist, author, keynote speaker, and recovering economist. His first book Everybody Lies, was a New York Times bestseller that showed how social scientists have used new data about our online behavior to gain new insights about who we really are and what we really think. His latest book, Don’t Trust Your Gut, is about how we can use data not just to understand other people but also how to get what we want in life, whether it’s health, wealth, attractiveness, or inner peace. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
There are three major myths of human nature: humans are divided into biological races; humans are naturally aggressive; and men and women are wholly different in behavior, desires, and wiring. Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature (Second Edition) (U California Press, 2022) counters these pervasive and pernicious myths about human behavior. Agustín Fuentes tackles misconceptions about what race, aggression, and sex really mean for humans, and incorporates an accessible understanding of culture, genetics, and evolution that requires us to dispose of notions of "nature or nurture." Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields, including anthropology, biology, and psychology, Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy, sex, and gender. This revised and expanded edition provides up-to-date references, data, and analyses, and addresses new topics, including the popularity of home DNA testing kits and the lies behind '"incel" culture; the resurgence of racist, nativist thinking and the internet's influence in promoting bad science; and a broader understanding of the diversity of sex and gender. Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dr. Duane Bidwell works to reduce suffering and promote abundant life in all of his teaching, writing, and research. Experiences as chaplain, pastor, spiritual director, pastoral counselor, HIV/AIDS professional, and non-profit director inform his work as teacher-scholar-clinician. CST students have given him teaching and mentoring awards three times since 2014. He is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and practitioner of Vipassana (insight meditation) in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. His most recent book, When One Religion Isn’t Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People (Beacon, 2018), examines complex religious bonds–the experience of being formed by more than one religious tradition at the same time. The book builds on his work in transreligious pastoral theology and in Buddhist-Christian studies. Library Journal named it a Best Book 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Nagas of Northeast India gives great importance to dreams as sources of divine knowledge, especially knowledge about the future. Although British colonialism, Christian missions, and political conflict have resulted in sweeping cultural and political transformations in the Indo-Myanmar Borderlands, dream sharing and interpretation remain important avenues for negotiating everyday uncertainty and unpredictability. Agency and Knowledge in Northeast India: The Life and Landscapes of Dreams (Routledge, 2018) explores the relationship between dreams and agency through ethnographic fieldwork among the Angami Nagas. It tackles questions such as: What is dreaming? What does it mean to say ‘I had a dream’? And how do night-time dreams relate to political and social actions in waking moments? Michael Heneise shows how the Angami glean knowledge from signs, gain insight from ancestors, and potentially obtain divine blessing. Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book advances research on dreams by conceptualizing how the ‘social’ encompasses the broader, co-extensive set of relations and experiences - especially with spirit entities - reflected in the ethnography of dreams. It will be of interest to those studying Northeast India, indigenous religion and culture, indigenous cosmopolitics in tribal India more generally, and the anthropology of dreams and dreaming. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our ‘digital age’ is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (Verso, 2022) surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support. This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life. Dr. Jonathan Crary is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University in the Art history and Archeology Department. He is a prolific art and culture critic and is the co-founder (and co-editor) of Zone Books. Professor Crary has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2005, his teaching and mentoring were recognized with a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. Dr. Crary is also the author of Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (winner of the 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award), and 24/7 (a finalist for the 2016 Terzani International Literary Prize). Cody Skahan (cskahan@ksu.edu) is an anthropologist by training, starting an MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland in August 2022 as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on the intersections of queerness, environmentalisms, and tourism in Iceland. Cody has a blog here where he sometimes writes about Games User Research and will totally, 100% in the future post the podcast and other projects he is working on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Image by image and hashtag by hashtag, Instagram has redefined the ways we relate to food. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish edit contributions that explore the massively popular social media platform as a space for self-identification, influence, transformation, and resistance. Artists and journalists join a wide range of scholars to look at food’s connection to Instagram from vantage points as diverse as Hong Kong’s camera-centric foodie culture, the platform’s long history with feminist eateries, and the photography of Australia’s livestock producers. What emerges is a portrait of an arena where people do more than build identities and influence. Users negotiate cultural, social, and economic practices in a place that, for all its democratic potential, reinforces entrenched dynamics of power. Interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope, Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (U Illinois Press, 2022) offers general readers and experts alike new perspectives on an important social media space and its impact on a fundamental area of our lives. The book has been dubbed by the experts in the field as “a veritable smorgasbord of perspectives on the all-pervasive and all-important nature of food on visual social media” (Tama Leaver, the co-author of Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures) that “shows how the digital app and the kind of food representations it supports contribute to the building identities and negotiating social and economic relationships” (Fabio Parasecoli, author of Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture). It is a path-blazing, inspirational work offering a vast array of theoretical perspectives, methodological tools, and conceptual innovations.
Emily Contois is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa. She holds a PhD in American studies from Brown University along with master's degrees in Gastronomy from Boston University and Public Health Nutrition from University of California, Berkeley. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (2020). She serves on the board of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, H-Nutrition, and Advertising and Society Quarterly. As a public scholar, she has written for NBC News, Jezebel, and Nursing Clio and has appeared on CBS This Morning, BBC Ideas, and Ugly Delicious on Netflix. Learn more about her work at emilycontois.com or connect on social media (@emilycontois). Zenia Kish is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa. She earned her PhD in American studies at New York University and was a post- doctoral fellow at Stanford University. Her work explores global digital media, sociotechnical imaginaries of food and agriculture, and philanthrocapitalism and has been published in journals including American Quarterly, Cultural Studies, Journal of Cultural Economy, and Environment and Planning A. She is a member of the Agri-Food Technology Research (AFTeR) Project and is associate editor for the Journal of Cultural Economy, as well as serving on the boards of the Journal of Environmental Media and Communication and Race. She is writing a book on philanthropic media cultures (@ZeniaKish).
Amir Sayadabdi is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As the world nears 8 billion people, the countries that have led the global order since World War II are becoming the most aged societies in human history. At the same time, the world's poorest and least powerful countries are suffocating under an imbalance of population and resources. In 8 Billion and Counting, political demographer Jennifer D. Sciubba argues that the story of the twenty-first century is less a story about exponential population growth, as the previous century was, than it is a story about differential growth--marked by a stark divide between the world's richest and poorest countries. Drawing from decades of research, policy experience, and teaching, Sciubba employs stories and statistics to explain how demographic trends, like age structure and ethnic composition, are crucial signposts for future violence and peace, repression and democracy, poverty and prosperity. Although we have a diverse global population, demographic trends often follow predictable patterns that can help professionals across the corporate, nonprofit, government, and military sectors understand the global strategic environment. Through the lenses of national security, global health, and economics, Sciubba demonstrates the pitfalls of taking population numbers at face value and extrapolating from there. Instead, she argues, we must look at the forces in a society that amplify demographic trends and the forces that dilute them, particularly political institutions, or the rules of the game. She shows that the most important skills in demographic analysis are naming and being aware of your preferences, rethinking assumptions, and asking the right questions. Provocative and engrossing, 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World (W. W. Norton, 2022) is required reading for business leaders, policy makers, and anyone eager to anticipate political, economic, and social risks and opportunities. A deeper understanding of fertility, mortality, and migration promises to point toward the investments we need to make today to shape the future we want tomorrow. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Rough Draft of History: A Century of US Social Movements in the News (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a new view of U.S. social movement history across the twentieth century by examining how movement organizations were covered in major national newspapers. The book analyzes U.S. social movements--ranging from temperance to women's suffrage to the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street--in a broad comparative fashion. Drawing on the full set of digitized newspapers from the twentieth-century (a task that as little as twenty years ago was considered impossible for researchers), the book offers both an institutional history of news--why the media covered what they covered, and to what effect--and also shows the influence of news coverage on a range of social movements, from the well-known to the obscure. Media coverage is a crucial component of movement visibility; news can draw the general public into battles over new issues but also shapes how movements are perceived. The authors show how a movement's structure--its organization, as well as the protest and non-protests activities it undertakes--influence its coverage, and consider too how macro-political conditions shape movement coverage. They reveal surprising gaps between contemporaneous coverage and current scholarly focus; for instance, the labor movement received the most journalistic attention of any movement of the twentieth century, but it is greatly understudied in comparison to how much it dominated the public sphere. Taking stock of news coverage across a century of movements thus illuminates movements that were influential in public discourse but have been neglected by scholars. Edwin Amenta is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California, Irvine. His books include When Movements Matter and Bold Relief (both Princeton). Twitter @EdwinAmenta Neal Caren is associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Twitter @HaphazardSoc Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Politicians and corporations cannot only measure public opinion but also manipulate and create it. And they have been doing so since the 1930s when serious polling began. And as Professor Susan Herbst, author of Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics, explains early public opinion research raised hopes for better democratic practice but also led to fears for the future. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Unlike many books that examine the how of making theater, Brian Kulick's The Secret Life of Theater: On the Nature and Function of Theatrical Representation (Routledge, 2019) examines the why. Using Jorge Luis Borges' story Averroes's Search as a guide, Kulick defines theatre via its proximity to play, ritual, imitation, and religion, all of which share elements of theatricality. He then takes us on a whirlwind tour of theatrical history by examining key stage moments from some classic works of theater, from Agamemnon to Angels in America. Finally, Kulick looks at theater's changing relationship to fellow-feeling, whether pity, sympathy, or empathy, and articulates how the union of thought and feeling is a key insight of theatrical representation. By rekindling our sense of fellow-feeling and allowing us to see the world anew, Kulick suggests theater may provide valuable emotional and intellectual resources for our troubled times. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States (Ohio State Press, 2022), Sara Austin traces the evolution of monstrosity as it relates to youth culture from the 1950s to the present day to spotlight the symbiotic relationship between monstrosity and the bodies and identities of children and adolescents. Examining comics, films, picture books, novels, television, toys and other material culture—including Monsters, Inc. and works by Mercer Mayer, Maurice Sendak, R. L. Stine, and Stephanie Meyer—Austin tracks how the metaphor of monstrosity excludes, engulfs, and narrates difference within children’s culture. Analyzing how cultural shifts have drastically changed our perceptions of both what it means to be a monster and what it means to be a child, Austin charts how the portrayal and consumption of monsters corresponds to changes in identity categories such as race, sexuality, gender, disability, and class. In demonstrating how monstrosity is leveraged in service of political and cultural movements, such as integration, abstinence-only education, and queer rights, Austin offers insight into how monster texts continue to reflect, interpret, and shape the social discourses of identity within children’s culture. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship. The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia University Press, 2022) by Eli D. Friedman reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. Using the school as a lens on urban life, Eli Friedman investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city. He demonstrates that urban governments are providing quality public education to those who need it least: school admissions for nonlocals heavily favor families with high levels of economic and cultural capital. Those deemed not useful are left to enroll their children in precarious resource-starved private schools that sometimes are subjected to forced demolition. Over time, these populations are shunted away to smaller locales with inferior public services.
Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, this interdisciplinary book details the policy framework that produces unequal outcomes as well as providing a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Mikaela Rabinowitz’s Incarceration without Conviction: Pretrial Detention and the Erosion of Innocence in American Criminal Justice (Routledge, 2021) addresses an understudied fairness flaw in the US criminal justice system: namely, the significant impact of pretrial detention on the millions of Americans held in local jails. On any given day, approximately 500,000 Americans are held in pretrial detention in US jails—not because they are a flight risk, but because they cannot pay for bail or a bail bond. Impacting disproportionally Black and poor individuals, Rabinowitz highlights how pretrial detention is at odds with juridical notions of fairness, effectively punishing Americans before guilt or innocence is ever explored in court. Using a mixed-methods approach, Rabinowitz argues that pretrial detention undermines both the presumption and the meaning of innocence in the American criminal justice system. Incarceration without Conviction is available through Routledge. Mikaela Rabinowitz is Director of Data, Research, and Analytics at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, where they research the how UK asylum tribunals consider claims on the basis of belief. Their public writing focuses on issues of migration governance, as well as how inaccessibility and transphobia can shape the practice of anthropological research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Vulnerable Communities: Research, Policy, and Practice in Small Cities (Cornell UP, 2022) examines the struggles of smaller cities in the United States, those with populations between 20,000 and 200,000. Like many larger metropolitan centers, these places are confronting change within a globalized economic and cultural order. Many of them have lost their identities as industrial or commercial centers and face a complex and distinctive mix of economic, social, and civic challenges. Small cities have not only fewer resources but different strengths and weaknesses, all of which differentiate their experiences from those of larger communities. Vulnerable Communities draws together scholars from a broad range of disciplines to consider the present condition and future prospects of smaller American cities. Contributors offer a mix of ground-level analyses and examinations of broader developments that have impacted economically weakened communities and provide concrete ideas for local leaders engaged in redevelopment work. The essays remind policy makers and academics alike that it is necessary to consider cultural tensions and place-specific conflicts that can derail even the most well-crafted redevelopment strategies prescribed for these communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Women in Lagos, Nigeria, practice a spectacularly feminine form of black beauty. From cascading hair extensions to immaculate makeup to high heels, their style permeates both day-to-day life and media representations of women not only in a swatch of Africa but across an increasingly globalized world. Simidele Dosekun's detailed interviews and critical analysis consider the female subjectivities these elite women are performing and desiring. She finds that the women embody the postfeminist idea that their unapologetically immaculate beauty signals - but also constitutes - feminine power. As wealthy, empowered global consumers and media citizens, the women deny any need to critique their culture or to take part in feminism's collective political struggle. Throughout, Dosekun unearths evocative details around the practical challenges to attaining their style, examines the gap between how others view these women and how they view themselves, and engages with ideas about postfeminist self-fashioning and subjectivity across cultures and class. Intellectually provocative and rich with theory, Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture (U Illinois Press, 2020) reveals why women choose to live, embody, and even suffer for a fascinating performative culture. Dr Simidele Dosekun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia (NYU Press, 2022), Judah Schept takes a closer look at this stunning phenomenon, providing insight into prison growth, jail expansion and rising incarceration rates in America’s hinterlands. Judah Schept is Professor of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 1951, Doña Natalia Barraza opened the Nayarit, a Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, Los Angeles. With A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community (U California Press, 2022), historian Natalia Molina traces the life's work of her grandmother, remembered by all who knew her as Doña Natalia--a generous, reserved, and extraordinarily capable woman. Doña Natalia immigrated alone from Mexico to L.A., adopted two children, and ran a successful business. She also sponsored, housed, and employed dozens of other immigrants, encouraging them to lay claim to a city long characterized by anti-Latinx racism. Together, the employees and customers of the Nayarit maintained ties to their old homes while providing one another safety and support. The Nayarit was much more than a popular eating spot: it was an urban anchor for a robust community, a gathering space where ethnic Mexican workers and customers connected with their patria chica (their "small country"). That meant connecting with distinctive tastes, with one another, and with the city they now called home. Through deep research and vivid storytelling, Molina follows restaurant workers from the kitchen and the front of the house across borders and through the decades. These people's stories illuminate the many facets of the immigrant experience: immigrants' complex networks of family and community and the small but essential pleasures of daily life, as well as cross-currents of gender and sexuality and pressures of racism and segregation. The Nayarit was a local landmark, popular with both Hollywood stars and restaurant workers from across the city and beloved for its fresh, traditionally prepared Mexican food. But as Molina argues, it was also, and most importantly, a place where ethnic Mexicans and other Latinx L.A. residents could step into the fullness of their lives, nourishing themselves and one another. A Place at the Nayarit is a stirring exploration of how racialized minorities create a sense of belonging. It will resonate with anyone who has felt like an outsider and had a special place where they felt like an insider. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022), Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Ximena Vengoechea about Listen Like You Mean It: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection (Portfolio, 2021). What’s your default listening mode? Are you perhaps a pivoter, a distractor, a withdrawer, an explorer or, like today’s guest, an innate problem-solver trying to find a solution to whatever is troubling the person you’re having a conversation with? Three different kinds of difficult conversations get covered here: 1) an imbalance-of-power conversation between a boss and a subordinate; 2) a competitive-conversation between divorced parents navigating childcare; and 3) a regressive-conversation where an elderly parent and child can easily fall into roles they played years ago. In each case, Ximena Vengoechea offers sound, sympathetic advice on how to steer clear of the usual pitfalls. Ximena Vengoechea is a user researcher, writer, and illustrator whose work on personal and professional development has been published in Inc., The Washington Post, Newsweek, Fast Company, and elsewhere. Her career has included positions at Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Disability is often described as a tragedy, a crisis, or an aberration, though 1 in 5 people worldwide have a disability. Why is this common human experience rendered exceptional? In All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship (Beacon Press, 2022), disability studies scholar Jennifer Natalya Fink argues that this originates in our families. When we cut a disabled member out of the family story, disability remains a trauma as opposed to a shared and ordinary experience. This makes disability and its diagnosis traumatic and exceptional. Weaving together stories of members of her own family with sociohistorical research, Fink illustrates how the eradication of disabled people from family narratives is rooted in racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic sorting systems inherited from Nazis. By examining the rhetoric of genetic testing, she shows that a fear of disability begins before a child is even born and that a fear of disability is, fundamentally, a fear of care. Fink analyzes our racist and sexist care systems, exposing their inequities as a source of stigmatizing ableism. Inspired by queer and critical race theory, Fink calls for a lineage of disability a reclamation of disability as a history, a culture, and an identity. Such a lineage offers a means of seeing disability in the context of a collective sense of belonging, as cause for celebration, and is a call for a radical reimagining of carework and kinship. All Our Families challenges us to re-lineate disability within the family as a means of repair toward a more inclusive and flexible structure of care and community. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Offering a fresh perspective, this timely book analyzes the socio-cultural and physical production of planned capital cities through the theoretical lens of feminism. In Trophy Cities: A Feminist Perspective on New Capitals (Edward Elgar, 2021), Dorina Pojani evaluates the historical, spatial and symbolic manifestations of new capital cities, as well as the everyday experiences of those living there, to shed light on planning processes, outcomes and contemporary planning issues. Chapters explore seven geographically, culturally and temporally diverse capital cities across Australia, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Myanmar and South Korea. Pojani argues that new capital cities have embodied patriarchal systems to govern their respective polities which has magnified problems in these cities. The book highlights how in new capitals, notions such as the state, the nation, urbanism, religion, the economy and even nature have been conceived of or treated in patriarchal terms, to the detriment of women and other disadvantaged groups. This book will be an invigorating read for urban studies and planning scholars. The information about the processes of new city formation will also be of great use to urban planner Access more of Dorina's publications via her researcher profile. Ingrid Bailey is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Queensland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Çigdem Çidam, Associate Professor of Political Science at Union College, has a new book titled In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Oxford UP, 2021) that examines political action by citizens, and how we interpret and discuss that action in context of political structures. The title In the Street is a reference to the seminal French poster from May of 1968 that read “beauty is in the street,” and was adapted by the demonstrators in Turkey decades later, providing one of the many examples of street politics that illustrate the discussion of activism throughout the book. Street politics has many forms, such as protests, demonstrations, and acts of civil disobedience. Often such actions are confined to the binary analysis of successes and failures, only examining how likely an action is to bring about change. The origins of this understanding stem from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of popular sovereignty, rejection of theatricality, and the idealization of immediacy. Çidam argues that this Rousseauian framework dilutes the value of these actions, forcing them into a reductive duality and failing to acknowledge that movements can fail simply because of the class positions their members are forced to assume. Regardless of their failures, there is an inherent and aesthetic value to these political actions that can last beyond the actions themselves. Çidam’s alternative framework, developed through dissecting the viewpoints of political theorists Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Antonio Negri, Jurgen Habermas, and Jacques Ranciere, redefines our understanding of the value of political action. In The Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship provides new perspectives and understandings of events like Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi uprising in Turkey, and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Çidam explains that “intermediating practices” are opportunities for encounter and engagement among those who are involved in these street actions. This concept is applied to the ways that individuals might find unity with each other within these political actions. Through intermediating practices, individuals become “political friends,” an Aristotelian concept that builds a relationship of unity and equity between people despite their differences as a result of their shared experiences of political action. These concepts must lead us to the conclusion that the driving forces of political action—anger, rage, joy—cannot be reduced to the binary of either success or failure, as Rousseau would have it. In The Streets re-centers the on-the-ground efforts of individuals, focusing on these communal actions rather than their particular outcomes. Çidam concludes that while these moments of political friendship are fleeting, their transience does not denote failure because the rich and creative practices of political actors are naturally valuable. Tune in to hear about Çigdem Çidam’s interpretations of Negri’s, Habermas’, and Ranciere’s unique political conceptions, how a focus on political friendship in the Gezi protests of 2013 helped to formulate her theoretical lenses for this analysis, and how remembrance of these movements can help us struggle against the powers that be for the next historical moment. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
According to the medical world, hysteria is a thing of the past, an outdated diagnosis that has disappeared for good. Hysteria: Crime, Media, and Politics (Routledge, 2021) argues that hysteria is in fact alive and well. Hyperventilating, we rush from one incident into the next - there is hardly time for a breather. From the worldwide run on toilet paper to cope with coronavirus fears to the overheated discussions about immigration and overwrought reactions to the levels of crime and disorder around us, we live in a culture of hysteria. While hysteria is typically discussed in emotional terms - as an obstacle to be overcome - it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Irritating though this may be, hysteria needs to be taken seriously, for what it tells us about our society and way of life. That is why Marc Schuilenburg examines what hysteria is and why it is fuelled by a culture that not only abuses, but also encourages and rewards it. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, criminology, philosophy and all those interested in hysteria and how it permeates late modern society. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Guns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of public health, as is evident whenever a mass shooting occurs. But guns also play an important role in many Americans’ lives that is not reducible to violence and death—as tools, sporting equipment, and identity markers. They are also central to debates about constitutional rights, as seen in ongoing discussions about the Second Amendment, and they are a continuous source of legislative concern, as apparent in annual ratings of gun-supporting legislators. Even as guns are wrapped up with other crucial areas of concern, they are also fundamentally a rhetorical concern. Guns and gun violence occupy a unique rhetorical space in the United States, one characterized by silent majorities, like most gun owners; vocal minorities, like the firearm industry and gun lobby; and a stalemate that fails to stem the flood of the dead. How Americans talk, deliberate, and fight about guns is vital to how guns are marketed, used, and regulated. A better understanding of the rhetorics of guns and gun violence can help Americans make better arguments about them in the world. However, where guns are concerned, rhetorical studies is not terribly different from American culture more generally. Guns are ever-present and exercise powerful effects, but they are commonly talked about in oblique, unsystematic ways. Rhetoric and Guns (Utah State UP, 2022) advances more direct, systematic engagement in the field and beyond by analyzing rhetoric about guns, guns in rhetoric, and guns as rhetoric, particularly as they relate to specific instances of guns in culture. The authors attempt to understand rhetoric’s relationship to guns by analyzing rhetoric about guns and how they function in and as rhetoric related to specific instances—in media coverage, political speech, marketing, and advertising. Original chapters from scholars in rhetorical studies, communication, education, and related fields elucidate how rhetoric is used to maintain and challenge the deadly status quo of gun violence in the United States and extend rhetoricians’ sustained interest in the fields’ relationships to violence, brutality, and atrocity. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South (NYU Press, 2022) reveals the importance of citywide celebrations like Mardi Gras and Fiesta for LGBTQIA+ communities in the US South. Drawing on five years of research, and over a hundred days at LGBTQ events in cities such as San Antonio, Santa Fe, Baton Rouge, and Mobile, Stone gives readers a front-row seat to festivals, carnivals, and Mardi Gras celebrations, vividly bringing these queer cultural spaces and the people that create and participate in them to life. Stone shows how these events serve a larger fundamental purpose, helping LGBTQ people to cultivate a sense of belonging in cities that may be otherwise hostile Amy L. Stone is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. They are the author of several other books, including Gay Rights at the Ballot Box, Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, and Cornyation: San Antonio’s Outrageous Fiesta Tradition. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Dr. Robert McColl Millar presents the first sociolinguistic history of all languages spoken in Scotland. The book includes analyses from across the country including coverage of Gaelic, Scots, Pictish, British, Norn, Immigrant languages and Scottish Standard English. It also covers four case studies dealing with the birth of a dialect or variety: North East Scots, Scottish Standard English, Shetland Scots and Glasgow Scots. In the book, Dr. Robert McColl Millar examines how language has been used in Scotland since the earliest times. While primarily focusing on the histories of the speakers of Scots and Gaelic, and their competition with the encroaching use of (Scottish) Standard English, he also traces the decline and eventual ‘death’ of Pictish, British and Norn. Four case studies illustrate the historical development of North East Scots, Scottish Standard English, Shetland Scots and Glasgow Scots. Immigrant languages are also discussed throughout the book. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 1975, design engineer Dave Nutting completed work on a new arcade machine. A version of Taito's Western Gun, a recent Japanese arcade machine, Nutting's Gun Fight depicted a classic showdown between gunfighters. Rich in Western folklore, the game seemed perfect for the American market; players easily adapted to the new technology, becoming pistol-wielding pixel cowboys. One of the first successful early arcade titles, Gun Fight helped introduce an entire nation to video-gaming and sold more than 8,000 units. In Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), John Wills examines how video games co-opt national landscapes, livelihoods, and legends. Arguing that video games toy with Americans' mass cultural and historical understanding, Wills show how games reprogram the American experience as a simulated reality. Blockbuster games such as Civilization, Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption repackage the past, refashioning history into novel and immersive digital states of America. Controversial titles such as Custer's Revenge and 08.46 recode past tragedies. Meanwhile, online worlds such as Second Life cater to a desire to inhabit alternate versions of America, while Paperboy and The Sims transform the mundane tasks of everyday suburbia into fun and addictive challenges. Working with a range of popular and influential games, from Pong, Civilization, and The Oregon Trail to Grand Theft Auto, Silent Hill, and Fortnite, Wills critically explores these gamic depictions of America. Touching on organized crime, nuclear fallout, environmental degradation, and the War on Terror, Wills uncovers a world where players casually massacre Native Americans and Cold War soldiers alike, a world where neo-colonialism, naive patriotism, disassociated violence, and racial conflict abound, and a world where the boundaries of fantasy and reality are increasingly blurred. Ultimately, Gamer Nation reveals not only how video games are a key aspect of contemporary American culture, but also how games affect how people relate to America itself. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The durability of strongmen leaders in Southeast Asia has puzzled many scholars and observers of the region. In the book Strategies of Authoritarian Survival and Dissensus in Southeast Asia: Weak Men versus Strongmen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Sokphea Young offers a critical examination of the ways in which the ruling regime in Cambodia maintains political power, and how these strategies of regime maintenance extend to countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. For Young, one way of understanding the longevity of strongman rule is by focusing on the cycle of interaction between government, business, and civil society. He finds that extractive economic institutions in Southeast Asia are essential in maintaining the power of regimes. While grassroots organisations use various tactics of resistance, Young argues that the outcomes of these protests, ultimately, are determined by the strength of neopatrimonial ties between business elites and the regime. In this podcast, Young reflects on the book’s lessons for activist movements and civil society organisations in the region, how his background on international development and finance shaped his thinking on the book, the methodological opportunities available for researchers to conduct rigorous research on sensitive political matters, and the emerging developments in studying strongmen in Southeast Asia that are worth monitoring. Dr Sokphea Young is currently an honorary research fellow at the University College London. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Sebastian Strangio, Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2020) Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was produced in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The air in Los Angeles can be lethal, and nobody knows this better than the city’s Latinx and Asian immigrants, argues Dr. Nadia Kim in Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (Stanford UP, 2021). Kim, a professor of Asian and Asian American Studies and Sociology at Loyola Marymount University, spend years interviewing environmental justice activists and other residents of LA’s most polluted neighborhoods to show the depths of environmental injustice in America’s second largest city, and how people in these places conceive of and engage in political action. Refusing Death provides a depth of insight into how immigrant communities define themselves, protect their families, and organize to create a more just environment for themselves and for their children. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Utah State University Press, 2020) explores notions of Blackness in white institutional—particularly educational—spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against ideas of difference in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Centering Blackness in frameworks for antiracist agency through interdisciplinary Black feminist lenses, Black or Right asks how those racially signifying “diversity” in US higher education (and beyond) make meaning in the everyday. Offering four Black rhetorics as antiracist means for rhetorical reclamation—autoethnography, hashtagging, inter(con)textual reading, and reconceptualized disruption—the book uses Black feminist relationality via an African indigenous approach. Maraj examines fluid, quotidian ways Black folk engage anti/racism at historically white institutions in the United States in response to violent campus spaces, educational structures, protest movements, and policy practice. Black or Right’s experimental, creative style strives to undiscipline knowledge from academic confinement. Exercising different vantage points in each chapter—autoethnographer, digital media scholar/pedagogue, cultural rhetorician, and critical discourse analyst—Maraj challenges readers to ecologically understand shifting, multiple meanings of Blackness in knowledge-making. Black or Right’s expressive form, organization, narratives, and poetics intimately interweave with its argument that Black folk must continuously invent “otherwise” in reiterative escape from oppressive white spaces. In centering Black experiences, Black theory, and diasporic Blackness, Black or Right mobilizes generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts to “fix racism,” which often paradoxically center whiteness. It will be of interest to both academic and general readers and significant for specialists in cultural rhetorics, Black studies, and critical theory. Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads (Routledge, 2022) reviews the roots of the intersection between machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and research on crime; examines the current state of the art in this area of scholarly inquiry; and discusses future perspectives that may emerge from this relationship. As machine learning and AI approaches become increasingly pervasive, it is critical for criminology and crime research to reflect on the ways in which these paradigms could reshape the study of crime. In response, this book seeks to stimulate this discussion. The opening part is framed through a historical lens, with the first chapter dedicated to the origins of the relationship between AI and research on crime, refuting the novelty narrative that often surrounds this debate. The second presents a compact overview of the history of AI, further providing a nontechnical primer on machine learning. The following chapter reviews some of the most important trends in computational criminology and quantitatively characterizing publication patterns at the intersection of AI and criminology, through a network science approach. This book also looks to the future, proposing two goals and four pathways to increase the positive societal impact of algorithmic systems in research on crime. The sixth chapter provides a survey of the methods emerging from the integration of machine learning and causal inference, showcasing their promise for answering a range of critical questions. With its transdisciplinary approach, Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research is important reading for scholars and students in criminology, criminal justice, sociology, and economics, as well as AI, data sciences and statistics, and computer science. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Of the many differences between the West and the rest of the world the issue of religiosity is one of the most striking. In the West ever fewer people belong to a religion – the number for the UK is now around 50% - and in the US around a third of people are religiously unaffiliated. But elsewhere in the world religions are growing – and in the world as a whole nearly 90% of people are religious. Robin Dunbar – Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Oxford University has been thinking about the reason for religion’s appeal for his book How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures (Oxford UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A potential crisis in human fertility is brewing. As societies become more affluent, they experience changes that have a dramatic impact on reproduction. As average family sizes fall, the selection pressure for high-fertility genes decreases; exacerbated by the IVF industry which allows infertility-linked genes to pass into the next generation. Male fertility rates are low, for many reasons including genetics and exposure to environmental toxins. So, a perfect storm of factors is contriving to drive fertility rates down at unprecedented rates. If we do not recognize the reality of our situation and react accordingly, an uncontrollable decline in population numbers is likely, which we'll be unable to reverse. R. John Aitken's book The Infertility Trap: Why Life Choices Impact your Fertility and Why We Must Act Now (Cambridge UP, 2022) addresses, in a unique and multi-faceted way, how the consequences of modern life affects fertility, so that we can consider behavioural, social, medical and environmental changes which could reduce the severity of what is about to come. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Edward Anthony Avery-Natale's book Ethics, Politics, and Anarcho-Punk Identifications: Punk and Anarchy in Philadelphia (Lexington, 2016) explores the ways in which those who identify as punks and anarchists living in the Philadelphia area construct their identifications narratively through the use of ethics. The book shows that contemporary subcultural and political identifications are complicated by the multiplicity of identifications that postmodern subjects must work from. Throughout the book, it is shown that narrators strive to maintain the coherence of their identifications through narrative reconciliations of contradictions and conflicts. The identity label "anarcho-punk" is of particular salience here, as the hyphenation of the two terms, itself a central component of the book's analysis, forefronts the multiple nature of the identification on the whole. This makes anarcho-punk a particularly interesting identity to study because there we can see clearly the complicated nature of identities in the contemporary age most clearly. Ethics, Politics, and Anarcho-Punk Identifications includes chapters focusing on the entry into subculture, fashion, punk, politics, anarchy, race and racism, gender and sexuality, and more coupled with in-depth theoretical analysis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In today’s episode of How To Be Wrong we welcome Dr. Khytie Brown, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Brown’s research examines the intersections of religion, race, gender and sexual alterity, criminality, material culture, sensory epistemologies and social media practices among African diasporic religious practitioners in the Caribbean, Latin America and North America. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard and is a research associate at the Center on Transnational Policing at Princeton. Our conversation explores the humbling power of ethnographic research as well as ways in which race and gender influence perceptions about academic identity and power. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
China has one of the largest queer populations in the world, but what does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of paramount importance? This book analyzes queer cultures in China, offering an alternative to western blueprints of queer individual identity. Using a critical approach—“queering Chinese kinship”—Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, questioning the Eurocentric assumption of the separation of queerness from family ties. Offering five case studies of queer representations, Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China (Hong Kong UP, 2021)also challenges the tendency in current scholarship to understand queer cultures as predominantly marginalized. Shedding light on cultural expressions of queerness and kinship, this book highlights queer politics as an integral part of contemporary Chinese public culture. Dr. Lin Song is a scholar of media and cultural studies, and Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism & Communication at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. He holds a PhD in Gender Studies from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is currently working on projects related to Emotional and algorithmic governance in China during the COVID-19 outbreak, and Erotic self-representation and queer cultural production in Chinese DIY pornography. Cody Skahan (cskahan@ksu.edu) is an anthropologist by training, starting an MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland in August 2022 as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on the intersections of queerness, environmentalisms, and tourism in Iceland. Cody has a blog at where he sometimes writes about Games User Research and will totally, 100% in the future post the podcast and other projects he is working on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Trina Nileena Banerjee's book Performing Silence: Women in the Group Theatre Movement in Bengal (Oxford UP, 2021) addresses the absence of a sustained and critical engagement with the gender politics of the group theatre movement, by looking at the difficult negotiations of a 'movement' that self-consciously fashions itself as a leftist cultural enterprise with questions of gender and sexuality. It endeavours to do so by studying the movement in two different ways, it examines both the aesthetic representations of women on stage and the actual participation of women as cultural activists in the movement. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Ode to Gen X: Institutional Cynicism in "Stranger Things" and 1980s Film (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Melissa Vosen Callens explores the parallels between iconic films featuring children and teenagers and the first three seasons of Stranger Things, a series about a group of young friends set in 1980s Indiana. The text moves beyond the (at times) non-sequitur 1980s Easter eggs to a common underlying narrative: Generation X’s growing distrust in American institutions. Despite Gen X’s cynicism toward both informal and formal institutions, viewers also see a more positive characteristic of Gen X in these films and series: Gen X’s fierce independence and ability to rebuild and redefine the family unit despite continued economic hardships. Vosen Callens demonstrates how Stranger Things draws on popular 1980s popular culture to pay tribute to Gen X’s evolving outlook on three key and interwoven American institutions: family, economy, and government. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Militarized Global Apartheid, Catherine Besteman offers a sweeping theorization of the ways in which countries from the global north are reproducing South Africa's apartheid system on a worldwide scale to control the mobility and labor of people from the global south. Exploring the different manifestations of global apartheid, Besteman traces how militarization and securitization reconfigure older forms of white supremacy and deploy them in new contexts to maintain this racialized global order. Whether using the language of security, military intervention, surveillance technologies, or detention centers and other forms of incarceration, these projects reinforce and consolidate the global north's political and economic interests at the expense of the poor, migrants, refugees, Indigenous populations, and people of color. By drawing out how this new form of apartheid functions and pointing to areas of resistance, Besteman opens up new space to theorize potential sources of liberatory politics. Catherine Besteman is Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and author of Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine, published by Duke University Press. Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Peer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022). Schouten mapped more than 1000 roadblocks in both the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In so doing, he illuminates the relationship between road blocks and what he calls “frictions of terrain” (p 262). These frictions demonstrate how rebels, locals and state security forces interact in the making, or unmaking, of state authority and legitimacy. Looking at roadblocks as a kind of infrastructural empire that existed before the Europeans first arrived in Africa, Schouten develops a new framework to understand the ways in which supply chain capitalism thrives in places of non-conventional logistical capacity, to reframe how state theory fails to capture the nature of statehood and local authority in Central Africa. Schouten calls out governments, the UN and other international actors, to highlight how control of roadblocks translates into control over mineral, territory or people. No analysis of the drivers of conflict anywhere in the world is complete without consideration of Peer Schouten’s groundbreaking book, Roadblock Politics. At the end of the interview, Schouten recommends two books: Mintz’s (1986) Sweetness of Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and Labatut’s (2021) When We Cease to Understand the World. Thomson recommends the CBC podcast Nothing is Foreign. Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Contemporary Housing Struggles: A Structural Field of Contention Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) provides a comparative study of housing contention in Budapest and Bucharest in 2008-2021. The financialization of housing and the resulting inequalities, expulsions and social contention are a central characteristic of today’s capitalist crisis. These two East European cities that fall outside the usual focus of urban movements research provide an illuminating case of similar structural conditions governed by different political constellations at the national and local scales. Instead of searching for unilinear narratives connecting structural tensions to politicized claims, the book offers an in-depth contextual analysis of multiple forms of contention, their (often unintentional) interactions, and their broader political-structural background, including tensions surrounded by political silence. The authors analyze the two cases and their comparative lessons through what they propose as a “structural field of contention” approach to the multiple, interconnected ways in which structural tensions become (or not) politicized in today’s social movements. The book will appeal to everyone interested in today’s urban tensions and social movements. Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit her website or follow Anna on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It’s the age of the strongman. And it’s not just Donald Trump – there is now a long list of leaders who have or want authoritarian powers. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, China’s Xi Jinping, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, India’s Narendra Modi and the and the Philippino Rodrigo Duterte. Financial Times journalist Gideon Rachman has studied these men and some others for his book The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World (Other Press, 2022). And as well as describing the men he has analysed the writers they rely such as the Nazi writer, Carl Schmidt. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers have emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. Reighan Gillam delves into the dynamic alternative media landscape developed by Afro-Brazilians in the twenty-first century. With works that confront racism and focus on Black characters, these artists and the visual media they create identify, challenge, or break with entrenched racist practices, ideologies, and structures. Gillam looks at a cross-section of media to show the ways Afro-Brazilians assert control over various means of representation in order to present a complex Black humanity. These images--so at odds with the mainstream--contribute to an anti-racist visual politics fighting to change how Brazilian media depicts Black people while highlighting the importance of media in the movement for Black inclusion. An eye-opening union of analysis and fieldwork, Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (U Illinois Press, 2022) examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The internet’s potential to perform political miracles has been a source of both hope and disappointment for many grassroots movements. We remember that the Sanders campaign tried to master the meme to mobilise a young, eager audience. Equally, we ascribe Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 to seemingly leaderless internet misinformation.Many of such events have been the subject of academic study - but research is often slow to keep up with the rapidly changing scene. If a researcher tracing the role of the meme to the politicisation and radicalisation of online communities struggles to keep up what hope does an artist have? Joshua Citarella’s practice starts with the understanding that it is impossible to predict what the next generation of meme posters will be interested in and whether their memes will reach beyond their tiny echo chambers. What is clear is that mainstream politics, particularly the politics of the left, remains afraid of these unruly communities that can just as easily turn to the dark corners of the demonised alt-right as they are to carry the flag for Bernie. Joshua Citarella speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about researching internet subcultures, playing politics with the extremely online, the multiple meanings of radicalisation, strategies for subverting right-wing content, and the role of art in internet political aesthetics. Joshua Citarella is an artist, content creator, and researcher. Politigram and the Post-left is one of many projects he has released through self-publishing channels and directly to his supporters.
Joshua on Instagram and Patreon
20 Interviews with meme-posters
Do Not Research, and online internet culture magazine
When Guys Turn 20, Joshua's video series at dis.art
Do Not Research exhibition at Lower Cavity
Interview with Mike Watson on The Memeing of Mark Fisher
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As one of the world's fastest growing industries, heritage tourism is surrounded by political and ethical issues. Yujie Zhu's Heritage Tourism: From Problems to Possibilities (Cambridge UP, 2021) explores the social and political effects and implications of heritage tourism through several pertinent topics. It examines the hegemonic power of heritage tourism and its consequences, the spectre of nationalism and colonialism in heritage-making, particularly for minorities and indigenous peoples, and the paradox of heritage tourism's role in combating these issues. Drawing from global cases, the study addresses a range of approaches and challenges of empowerment within the context of heritage tourism, including cultural landscapes, intangible heritage and eco-museums. The research argues that heritage tourism has the potential to develop as a form of co-production. It can be used to create a mechanism for community-centred governance that integrates recognition and interpretation and promotes dialogue, equity and diversity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
School Farms: Feeding and Educating Children (Routledge, 2021) highlights the potential of school farms to fight hunger and malnutrition by providing access to locally produced, fresh, and healthy food as well as providing young students with educational opportunities to learn, interact with nature, and develop their skills. Hunger is one of the most pressing concerns we face today and there is a clear need to provide alternative sources of food to feed a fast-growing population. School farms offer a sustainable opportunity to produce food locally in order to feed underprivileged students who rely on school meals as an integral part of their daily diet. Approaching the concept of school farms through four themes, Problem, People, Process, and Place, the book shows how they can play an essential role in providing sustainable and healthy food for students, the critical role educational institutions can play in promoting this process, and the positive impact hands-on farming can have on students' mental and physical well-being. Utilising the authors' personal hands-on experiences, and drawing on global case studies, the book provides a theoretical framework and practical guidance to help with the establishment of school farms and community-based gardening projects and an education system which promotes a sustainable and healthy approach to food, agriculture, and the environment. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of food security, agriculture, healthy and sustainable diets, education for sustainable development, and urban studies. It will also be of great interest to practitioners and policymakers involved in food policy, developing school and community projects, global health and international development, as well as education professionals. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Joshua Neves’ Underglobalization: Beijing's Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy (Duke University Press, 2020) examines the interplay of contemporary Chinese media practices with urban space, locating his analysis in political and postcolonial theory. His interdisciplinary approach, as noted in our interview, works to move past the traditional boundaries of Chinese studies and to understand the concatenation of Chinese piratical and official media practices in relation to modes of mediated citizenship as it exists across postcolonial urban spaces. Neves considers urban space in terms of planning and ruin, explores theatrical and televisual screen practices in situ in Chinese cities, and asks us to consider piracy not merely in terms of copied objects like DVDs, but rather in terms of technological intimacies and infrastructures. The book is richly illustrated, complementing Neves analytical argument with evidence of his urban methodology—an ambulatory, photographic mapping of the Beijing which allows us to accompany the scholar through his text. I hope you enjoy our conversation and excuse the faux pas with which I inadvertently opened the podcast! Julia Keblinska is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why does the monarchy matter? In Running the Family Firm: How the Monarchy Manages Its Image and Our Money (Manchester UP, 2021), Laura Clancy, a Lecturer in Media and Lancaster University, considers the British monarchy in the context of contemporary financialised capitalism, exposing the tensions and contradictions between the public face of royalty and the reality of the infrastructures, labour relations, financial arrangements, and political economies of Britain’s ‘family firm’. The book uses a huge range of examples, from the monarchy’s role in politics and public life, through to the personalities that drive much media coverage. Rich with detailed case studies and analysis, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how power and elites function in Britain today. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What happens when the written words of biblical scripture are transformed into experiential, choreographed environments? To answer this question, anthropologist James Bielo explores a diverse range of practices and places that “materialize the Bible,” including gardens, theme parks, shrines, museums, memorials, exhibitions, theatrical productions, and other forms of replication. Integrating ethnographic, archival, and mass media data, case studies focus primarily on U.S. Christianity from the late 19th-century to the present. In Materializing the Bible: Scripture, Sensation, Place (Bloomsbury, 2021), Bielo argues that materializing the Bible works as an authorizing practice to intensify intimacies with scripture and circulate potent ideologies. Performed through the sensory experience of bodies, physical technologies, and infrastructures of place, Bielo illustrates how this phenomenon is always, ultimately, about expressions of power. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The King of France - thinking he was made of glass - was terrified he might shatter...and he wasn't alone. After the Emperor met his end at Waterloo, an epidemic of Napoleons piled into France's asylums. Throughout the nineteenth century, dozens of middle-aged women tried to convince their physicians that they were, in fact, dead. For centuries we've dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks - they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas. In A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse (Oneworld, 2022), Victoria Shepherd uncovers stories of delusions from medieval times to the present day and implores us to identify reason in apparent madness. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success (PublicAffairs, 2022), Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan reveal the true story of immigration and the American economy, debunking myths perpetuated by the media and inflamed by political rhetoric. Through this authoritative account of the historical record and important new findings, Abramitzky and Boustan will help shape our thinking and policies about the fraught topic of immigration with findings such as:
·Where you come from doesn't matter. The children of immigrants from El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala today are as likely to be as successful as the children of immigrants from Great Britain and Norway 150 years ago.
·Children of immigrants do better economically than children of those born in the U.S. – a pattern that has held for more than a century. ·The children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially children of poor immigrants, are more upwardly mobile than the children of US-born residents.
·Immigrants today, especially those from groups accused of lack of assimilation (such as Mexicans and those from Muslim countries) actually assimilate fastest.
·Immigration changes the economy in unexpected positive ways and staves off the economic decline that is the consequence of an aging population.
·Closing the door to immigrants harms the economic prospects of the U.S. born, the people politicians are trying to protect. More, not less, immigration will spur the American economy.
·Severe restrictions on immigration reduce innovation by blocking entry to future scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs.
Using powerful story-telling and unprecedented research employing big data and algorithms, Abramitzky and Boustan are like dedicated family genealogists but millions of times over. They provide a new take on American history with surprising results, especially how comparable the "golden era" of immigration is to today, and why many current policy proposals are so misguided. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Rashna Darius Nicholson’s The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853-1893) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) is the first comprehensive study of the Parsi theatre, colonial South and Southeast Asia’s most influential cultural phenomenon and the precursor of the Indian cinema industry. By providing extensive, unpublished information on its first actors, audiences, production methods, and plays, this book traces how the theatre - which was one of the first in the Indian subcontinent to adopt European stagecraft - transformed into a pan-Asian entertainment industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nicholson sheds light on the motivations that led to the development of the popular, commercial theatre movement in Asia through three areas of investigation: the vernacular public sphere, the emergence of competing visions of nationhood, and the narratological function which women served within a continually shifting socio-political order. The book will be of interest to scholars across several disciplines, including cultural history, gender studies, Victorian studies, the sociology of religion, colonialism, and theatre. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights—usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois—at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children, LGBTQ people, and slum dwellers. In this visceral ethnography of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Moisés Lino e Silva explores what happens when liberalism is challenged by people whose lives are impaired by normative understandings of liberty. He calls such marginalized visions of freedom “minoritarian liberalism,” a concept that stands in for overlapping, alternative modes of freedom—be they queer, favela, or peasant. In Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Lino e Silva introduces readers to a broad collective of favela residents, most intimately accompanying Natasha Kellem, a charismatic self-declared travesti (a term used in Latin America to indicate a specific form of female gender construction opposite to the sex assigned at birth). While many of those the author meets consider themselves “queer,” others are treated as “abnormal” simply because they live in favelas. Through these interconnected experiences, Lino e Silva not only pushes at the boundaries of anthropological inquiry, but also offers ethnographic evidence of non-normative routes to freedom for those seeking liberties against the backdrop of capitalist exploitation, transphobia, racism, and other patterns of domination. Moisés Lino e Silva is tenured faculty in the department of anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in Brazil. Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight (MIT Press, 2022), Alexander Monea argues provocatively that the internet became straight by suppressing everything that is not, forcing LGBTQIA+ content into increasingly narrow channels--rendering it invisible through opaque algorithms, automated and human content moderation, warped keywords, and other strategies of digital overreach. Monea explains how the United States' thirty-year "war on porn" has brought about the over-regulation of sexual content, which, in turn, has resulted in the censorship of much nonpornographic content--including material on sex education and LGBTQIA+ activism. In this wide-ranging, enlightening account, Monea examines the cultural, technological, and political conditions that put LGBTQIA+ content into the closet. Monea looks at the anti-porn activism of the alt-right, Christian conservatives, and anti-porn feminists, who became strange bedfellows in the politics of pornography; investigates the coders, code, and moderators whose work serves to reify heteronormativity; and explores the collateral damage in the ongoing war on porn--the censorship of LGBTQ+ community resources, sex education materials, art, literature, and other content that engages with sexuality but would rarely be categorized as pornography by today's community standards. Finally, he examines the internet architectures responsible for the heteronormalization of porn: Google Safe Search and the data structures of tube sites and other porn platforms. Monea reveals the porn industry's deepest, darkest secret: porn is boring. Mainstream porn is stuck in a heteronormative filter bubble, limited to the same heteronormative tropes, tagged by the same heteronormative keywords. This heteronormativity is mirrored by the algorithms meant to filter pornographic content, increasingly filtering out all LGBTQIA+ content. Everyone suffers from this forced heteronormativity of the internet--suffering, Monea suggests, that could be alleviated by queering straightness and introducing feminism to dissipate the misogyny. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine (Duke UP, 2020), Christopher Harker demonstrates that financial debt is as much a spatial phenomenon as it is a temporal and social one. Harker traces the emergence of debt in Ramallah after 2008 as part of the financialization of the Palestinian economy under Israeli settler colonialism. Debt contributes to processes through which Palestinians are kept economically unstable and subordinate. Harker draws extensively on residents' accounts of living with the explosion of personal debt to highlight the entanglement of consumer credit with other obligatory relations among family, friends, and institutions. He offers a new geographical theorization of debt, showing how debt affects urban space, including the movement of bodies through the city, localized economies, and the political violence associated with occupation. Bringing cultural and urban imaginaries into conversation with monetized debt, Harker shows how debt itself becomes a slow violence embedded into the everyday lives of citizens. However, debt is also a means through which Palestinians practice endurance, creatively adapting to life under occupation. Mehdi Sanglaji is supposed to be writing a PhD thesis on political violence, religion, and all that jazz. Find me @mehdisanglaji on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In conversations about polarised political issues, phrases like ‘it’s not about race, it’s about class’ have become the perfect way to induce a stalemate. It seems as though the traditional, materialist critique of inequality has been supplanted by a fast-evolving set of reflections on group identity. Mainstream politics makes fast and loose assumptions about the relationship between class and identity, and economic conditions and culture. These assumptions are fodder for the culture wars. In The Identity Myth: Why We Need to Embrace Our Differences to Beat Inequality (Constable & Robinson, 2022), David Swift covers the four different kinds of identity most susceptible to rhetorical and cultural manipulation – class, race, sex, and age. He considers how the boundaries of identities are policed and how diverse versions of the same identity can be deployed to different ends. Ultimately, it is not that identities are simply more ‘complex’ than they appear. Rather, there are commonalities more important to the creation of solidarity. David Swift speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the crisis of class and the deceptive allure of identity politics. We talk about the divisive nature of the contested claims of identity and about strategies for regaining control of the narrative. In a powerful call to arms, Swift argues that we must unite against these identity myths and embrace our differences to beat inequality. David Swift is a historian and writer who specialises in the history and contemporary politics of the British Left. He has written on the state of the Left for The Times, Fabian Review, Progress Online, Jewish Chronicle, and The Critic. He is the author of A Left for Itself, 2019.
The Emily Thornberry white van tweet story,
Gordon Brown's 'bigotgate',
Keir Starmer and 'beergate',
Tomiwa Owolade's essay on Anglican social conservatism in London, 'rooted' in David's work,
Rachel Dolezal is now an artist,
San Francisco school board recall,
White narcissism at a BLM protest.
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education (U Chicago Press, 2022), finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large. With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America's unequal system of higher education. Charlie Eaton is an economic sociologist and Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Merced. He studies the role of social ties, organizations, and politics in the interplay between financiers, other elites, and subordinate social groups. His work has been published in Socio-Economic Review, Politics & Society, The Review of Financial Studies, Socius, Sociology Compass, and PS: Political Science and Politics. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems. Rajesh Veeraraghavan's book Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India (Oxford UP, 2021) is an ethnography of one of the largest development programs in the world, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and examines in detail NREGA’s implementation in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It finds that the local system of power is extremely difficult to transform, not because of inertia, but because of coercive counter-strategy from actors at the last mile and their ability to exploit information asymmetries. Upper-level NREGA bureaucrats in Andhra Pradesh do not possess the capacity to change the power axis through direct confrontation with local elites, but instead have relied on a continuous series of responses that react to local implementation and information, a process of patching development. Patching development is a top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical process that makes local information about implementation visible through technology and enlists participation from marginalized citizens through social audits. These processes are neither neat nor orderly and have led to a contentious sphere where the exercise of power over documents, institutions, and technology is intricate, fluid, and highly situated. The book throws new light on the challenges and benefits of using information and technology in novel ways to implement development programs. While focused on one Indian state, the implications for increasing citizen participation and government transparency have global relevance. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What drives and sustains participation in unemployed workers’ movements in Argentina? Today’s guest, Marcos Perez, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Washington and Lee University and author of the new book, Proletarian Lives. Routines, Identity and Culture in Contentious Politics. Marcos talks about how he came to study “piquetero” organizations that emerged in the late 90s and early 2000s, but have retained their influence for decades. He describes his participation in the organizations’ unremarkable daily tasks, and how he came to understand their importance to the lives of working-class participants who felt like economic collapse had robbed them of their blue-collar routines. He discusses the life history interviews through which he came to understand the importance of participation in the context of the rest of their lives, and finally talks about the books that have inspired him. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Randa Khair Abbas and Deborah Court's book The Israeli Druze Community in Transition: Between Tradition and Modernity (Cambridge Scholars, 2021) gives voice to the Israeli Druze through in-depth interviews with 120 people, 60 young adults and 60 of their parents’ generation. How is this traditional group, bound together through the centuries by their secret religion and strong value system, dealing with modernization? Can their religion, and their very identity, survive the meeting with the modern, technological world? What resources do the young and the not-so-young bring to the task of preserving their community and helping it to flourish as the world changes around them? The people in this text answer these questions through the telling of their stories, in which they express their values, opinions, beliefs and aspirations. The book draws out theoretical, practical, religious and sociological implications from this analysis, in order to shed light on the challenges faced by other traditional societies meeting modernity. More about their methodology is available in their brand-new book, Insider-Outsider Research in Qualitative Inquiry: New Perspectives on Method and Meaning. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How the debate over genetically modified crops in India is transforming science and politics Genetically modified or transgenic crops are controversial across the world. Advocates see such crops as crucial to feeding the world's growing population; critics oppose them for pushing farmers deeper into ecological and economic distress, and for shoring up the power of agribusinesses. India leads the world in terms of the intensity of democratic engagement with transgenic crops. In Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India (Yale UP, 2022), anthropologist Aniket Aga excavates the genealogy of conflicts of interest and disputes over truth that animate the ongoing debate in India around the commercial release of transgenic food crops. The debate may well transform agriculture and food irreversibly in a country already witness to widespread agrarian distress, and over 300,000 suicides by farmers in the last two decades. Aga illustrates how state, science, and agrarian capitalism interact in novel ways to transform how democracy is lived and understood, and sheds light on the dynamics of technological change in populous, unequal polities. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success (Oxford University Press, 2022), Ilana M. Horwitz offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers' religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. Religious students orient their life around God so deeply that it alters how they see themselves and how they behave, inside and outside of church. Ilana M. Horwitz is an Assistant Professor and Fields-Rayant Chair of Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Duke UP, 2022), Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced perspective, looking at how race and class intersect to affect modern school segregation. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic observation and dozens of interviews at two distinct high schools in a racially diverse Southern California suburb, Drake unveils hidden institutional mechanisms that lead to the overt segregation and symbolic criminalization of Black, Latinx, and lower-income students who struggle academically. His work illuminates how institutional definitions of success contribute to school segregation, how institutional actors leverage those definitions to justify inequality, and the ways in which local immigrant groups use their ethnic resources to succeed. Academic Apartheid represents a new way forward for scholars whose work sits at the intersection of education, race and ethnicity, class, and immigration. Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans. The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway. Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers (Picador, 2022) ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way – portents for still larger migrations ahead – which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change – remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production – which have made all these epochal developments possible. Tomorrow’s People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Stephen Vider uncovers how LGBTQ people reshaped domestic life in the postwar United States. From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of queer and trans politics have almost exclusively centered on public activism. In The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (U Chicago Press, 2021), Vider turns the focus inward, showing that the intimacy of domestic space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life. Beginning in the 1940s, LGBTQ activists looked increasingly to the home as a site of connection, care, and cultural inclusion. They struggled against the conventions of marriage, challenged the gendered codes of everyday labor, reimagined domestic architecture, and contested the racial and class boundaries of kinship and belonging. Retelling LGBTQ history from the inside out, Vider reveals the surprising ways that the home became, and remains, a charged space in battles for social and economic justice, making it clear that LGBTQ people not only realized new forms of community and culture for themselves—they remade the possibilities of home life for everyone. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Pandemic, climate change, or war: our era is ripe with the odor of doomsday. In movies, books, and more, our imaginations run wild with visions of dreadful, abandoned cities and returning to the land in a desperate attempt at survival. In The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival (Basic Books, 2021), archaeologist Chris Begley argues that we completely misunderstand how disaster works. Examining past collapses of civilizations, such as the Maya and Rome, he argues that these breakdowns are actually less about cataclysmic destruction than they are about long processes of change. In short: it's what happens after the initial uproar that matters. Some people abandon their homes and neighbors; others band together to start anew. As we anticipate our own fate, Begley tells us that it was communities, not lone heroes, who survived past apocalypses--and who will survive the next. Fusing archaeology, survivalism, and social criticism, The Next Apocalypse is an essential read for anxious times. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
An interdisciplinary collection in the new field of environmental humanities, Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) brings together Chinese environmental ethics, religious ontology, and religious practice to explore how traditional Chinese religio-environmental ethics are actually put into social practice both in China’s past and present. It also examines how Chinese religious teachings offer a wealth of resources to the environmental project of forging new ontologies for humans co-existing with other living beings. Different chapters examine how: Buddhist ontology avoids anthropocentrism, fengshui (Chinese geomancy) can help protect the landscape from economic development, popular religion organizes tree-planting, ancient dream interpretation practices avoided constructing the possessive individual subjectivity of modern consumerism, Buddhist rituals and ethics promoted compassion for animals and modern recycling, Confucian ancestor rituals and tombs have deterred industrial expansion, and also how Daoism’s potential role to deter desertification in northern China was stymied by state operations in contemporary China. A significant advance in the field of Chinese environmental anthropology, the outstanding scholars in this volume provide a unique and much needed contribution to the scholarship on China and the environment.
Mayfair Yang is professor of religious and East Asian studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has authored two monographs: Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China (American Ethnological Society Prize) and Re-enchanting Modernity in China: Ritual Economy and Religious Civil Society in Wenzhou) and has edited two books: Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation and Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China.
Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
New York City is a preeminent global city, serving as the headquarters for hundreds of multinational firms and a world-renowned cultural hub for fashion, art, and music. It is among the most multicultural cities in the world and also one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The people that make this global city function—immigrants, people of color, and the working classes—reside largely in the so-called outer boroughs, outside the corporations, neon, and skyscrapers of Manhattan. In A People’s Guide to New York City, published by University of California Press in 2022, Carolina Bank Muñoz, Penny Lewis, and Emily Tumpson Molina expand the scope and scale of traditional guidebooks, providing an equitable exploration of the diverse communities throughout the city. Carolina Bank Muñoz is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Penny Lewis is Professor of Labor Studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) is the story of what happened in Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a collective turn from the coronavirus to the economy occurred in the COVID summer of 2020. State political failures, local negotiations among political and public health leaders, and community (dis)belief about the virus resulted in Okoboji being declared a hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town. The story is both personal and political. Author Emily Mendenhall, an anthropologist at Georgetown University, grew up in Okoboji, and her family still lives there. As the events unfolded, Mendenhall was in Okoboji, where she spoke formally with over 100 people and observed a community that rejected public health guidance, revealing deep-seated mistrust in outsiders and strong commitments to local thinking. Unmasked is a fascinating and heartbreaking account of where people put their trust, and how isolationist popular beliefs can be in America's small communities. Professor Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist and Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2017. She is Editor-in-Chief of Social Science and Medicine-Mental Health and leads the office of Medical Anthropology and Critical Social Science. She has served as Honorary Faculty at the University of the Witwatersrand for the past decade. At Georgetown, she leads the global health concentration in the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program in the School of Foreign Service. Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students. The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened. Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day. Ellen Schrecker is a retired professor of history at Yeshiva University and the author of numerous books, including No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, and The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“Nước Việt Nam: a home, a cradle, a point of departure” (Gandhi, 1). The Vietnamese word nước embraces the duality of land and water with an idea of “home.” Through a nuanced examination of the meaning of homeland and politics of belonging, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi proposes nước to understand complex positionalities of refugee settlers on lands sutured through the traumas of US empire, militarization, and settler colonialism. Division in area studies has foreclosed conversations on how histories of settler colonialism and empire bring to light unexpected connections between Indigenous people and settlers across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. By bringing together Vietnamese refugee settlers in Israel Palestine and Guam, Gandhi asks the difficult question of how we can imagine decolonial futurities when the creation of “home” for refugee settlers was predicated on the settler colonial project of dispossessing Indigenous people. Drawing inspiration from nước that embraces contradictions through relationality, Gandhi charts both the archipelago of US empire and resistance to imagine decolonization based on fraught acknowledgement of histories and relationalities between people, land, and water. Gandhi's new monograph is a vital read for both scholars and public interested in critical refugee studies, Indigenous studies, settler colonialism, US empire, and archipelagic history. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar). Her interdisciplinary research engages critical refugee studies, settler colonial studies, and transpacific studies. She also hosts a podcast, Distorted Footprints, through her Critical Refugee Studies class. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Art historian Catherine McCormack challenges how culture teaches us to see and value women, their bodies, and their lives. Venus, maiden, wife, mother, monster—women have been bound so long by these restrictive roles, codified by patriarchal culture, that we scarcely see them. In Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies (Norton, 2021), Catherine McCormack illuminates the assumptions behind these stereotypes whether writ large or subtly hidden. She ranges through Western art—think Titian, Botticelli, and Millais—and the image-saturated world of fashion photographs, advertisements, and social media, and boldly counters these depictions by turning to the work of women artists like Morisot, Ringgold, Lacy, and Walker, who offer alternative images for exploring women’s identity, sexuality, race, and power in more complex ways. Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Race, Culture and Media (Sage, 2021), Anamik Saha provides an account of the role that media plays in both circulating and shaping ideas about race and racism in the contemporary world. Saha argues that we need to move beyond a focus on representation to engage with how media makes race. As Anamik describes in our interview, alongside providing a much-needed summary of existing work on the media, race and racism, the book also breaks new ground theoretically. By synthesising approaches from postcolonial studies, critical political economy and cultural studies, Saha puts forward an approach he calls ‘postcolonial cultural economy’, one which attends to the specific conjunctural context within which race is made and contested; the intertwined, but separate, forces of capitalism and racism; and which gives equal importance to the role that media production, texts, and consumption as forces which shape race and racisms. With case studies and key themes, ranging from the European migration ‘crisis’ of the mid-2010s to Black Twitter anchoring its analysis, this is an invaluable textbook for students and researchers working in the fields of critical media studies, cultural studies, internet studies and beyond. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As the world confronts the largest refugee crisis since World War II, wealthy countries are being called upon to open their doors to the displaced, with the assumption that this will restore their prospects for a bright future. Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential (Princeton UP, 2022) follows Syrians who fled a brutal war in their homeland as they attempt to rebuild in countries of resettlement and asylum. Their experiences reveal that these destination countries are not saviors; they can deny newcomers’ potential by failing to recognize their abilities and invest in the tools they need to prosper. Heba Gowayed spent three years documenting the strikingly divergent journeys of Syrian families from similar economic and social backgrounds during their crucial first years of resettlement in the United States and Canada and asylum in Germany. All three countries offer a legal solution to displacement, while simultaneously minoritizing newcomers through policies that fail to recognize their histories, aspirations, and personhood. The United States stands out for its emphasis on “self-sufficiency” that integrates refugees into American poverty, which, by design, is populated by people of color and marked by stagnation. Gowayed argues that refugee human capital is less an attribute of newcomers than a product of the same racist welfare systems that have long shaped the contours of national belonging. Centering the human experience of displacement, Refuge shines needed light on how countries structure the potential of people, new arrivals or otherwise, within their borders. Heba Gowayed is the Moorman-Simon Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University. You can find her on Twitter @hebagowayed Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse—yet, in most cases, the things we believe about immigration are based largely on myth, not facts. Using the tools of modern data analysis and ten years of pioneering research, Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success (Public Affairs, 2022) provides new evidence about the past and present of the American Dream, debunking myths fostered by political opportunism and sentimentalized in family histories. They make a powerful case for four key facts:
Children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially those of poor immigrants, do better economically than children of U.S.-born residents.
Immigrants accused of lack of assimilation (such as Mexicans today and the Irish in the past) actually assimilate fastest.
Immigration changes the economy in unexpected positive ways and staves off the economic decline that is the consequence of an aging population.
Closing the door to immigrants harms the economic prospects of the U.S.-born—the people politicians are trying to protect.
Using powerful story-telling and unprecedented research employing big data and algorithms, interviewee Leah Boustan and her co-author Ran Abramitzky are like dedicated family genealogists but millions of times over. They provide a new take on American history with surprising results, especially how comparable the “golden era” of immigration is to today, and why many current policy proposals are so misguided. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Uganda's capital, Kampala, is undergoing dramatic urban transformations as its new technocratic government seeks to clean and green the city. Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability (U California Press, 2021) tracks the dynamics of development and disposability unfolding amid struggles over who and what belong in the new Kampala. Garbage materializes these struggles. In the densely inhabited social infrastructures in and around the city's waste streams, people, places, and things become disposable but conditions of disposability are also challenged and undone. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Jacob Doherty illustrates how waste makes worlds, offering the key intervention that disposability is best understood not existentially, as a condition of social exclusion, but infrastructurally, as a form of injurious social inclusion. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Algorithms that work with deep learning and big data are getting so much better at doing so many things that it makes us uncomfortable. How can a device know what our favorite songs are, or what we should write in an email? Have machines become too smart? In Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence (MIT Press, 2022), Elena Esposito argues that drawing this sort of analogy between algorithms and human intelligence is misleading. If machines contribute to social intelligence, it will not be because they have learned how to think like us but because we have learned how to communicate with them. Esposito proposes that we think of "smart" machines not in terms of artificial intelligence but in terms of artificial communication. To do this, we need a concept of communication that can take into account the possibility that a communication partner may be not a human being but an algorithm--which is not random and is completely controlled, although not by the processes of the human mind. Esposito investigates this by examining the use of algorithms in different areas of social life. She explores the proliferation of lists (and lists of lists) online, explaining that the web works on the basis of lists to produce further lists; the use of visualization; digital profiling and algorithmic individualization, which personalize a mass medium with playlists and recommendations; and the implications of the "right to be forgotten." Finally, she considers how photographs today seem to be used to escape the present rather than to preserve a memory. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Human fertility rates are declining fast and in twenty years or so the global population will go down fast – not just in affluent countries but in the world as a whole. While many may welcome that outcome, Professor John Aitken who has just written The Infertility Trap: Why Life Choices Impact Your Fertility and Why We Must Act Now (Cambridge UP, 2022), argues that a rapid fall in the numbers of people on earth could cause havoc. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Does the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces–historical, psychological, economic, and culture–to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond a culture in which facts are too easily dismissed, and develop a few highly practical skills for separating truth from lies. Disinformation explains:
How human psychology—the very way our brains work—can leave us vulnerable to disinformation.
How the early visions of what a global computer network would and should be unintentionally laid the groundwork for the current post-truth culture.
The ways in which truth is twisted and misrepresented via propaganda and conspiracy theories.
How new technology not only spreads disinformation but may also be changing the way we think.
The ways in which the economics of information and the powerful influence of popular culture have contributed to the creation of the post-truth culture.
Unlike the far-too-numerous one-sided, politically ideological treatments of the post-truth culture, Disinformation does not seek to point the finger of blame at any individuals or groups; instead, its focus is on how a number of disparate forces have influenced human behaviors during a time when all of humanity is struggling to better understand and more effectively control (for better or worse) challenging new technologies that are straining the limits of human intellectual and emotional capacity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ratan Kumar Roy's book Television in Bangladesh: News and Audiences (Routledge, 2020) examines the role of 24/7 television news channels in Bangladesh. By using a multi-sited ethnography of television news media, it showcases the socio-political undercurrents of media practices and the everydayness of TV news in Bangladesh. It discusses a wide gamut of issues such as news making; localised public sphere; audience reaction and viewing culture; impact of rumours and fake news; socio-political conditions; protest mobilization; newsroom politics and perspectives from the ground. An important intervention in the subject, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of media studies, journalism and mass communication, anthropology, cultural studies, political sociology, political science, sociology, South Asian studies, as well as television professionals, journalists, civil society activists, and those interested in the study of Bangladesh. Sharonee Dasgupta is currently a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at UMass Amherst. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Political corruption remains … one of the most intriguing and challenging issues in social science research and public policy, perhaps because although it occurs in virtually all polities, its causes, patterns, and consequences often seem unique to each circumstance. – Cadres and Corruption by Xiaobo Lu (2000) Corruption is rampant in many authoritarian regimes, leading most observers to assume that autocrats have little incentive or ability to curb government wrongdoing. Corruption Control in Authoritarian Regimes – Lessons from East Asia, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022, shows that meaningful anti-corruption efforts by nondemocracies are more common and more often successful than is typically understood. Drawing on wide-ranging analysis of authoritarian anti-corruption efforts globally and in-depth case studies of key countries such as China, South Korea and Taiwan over time, Dr. Carothers constructs an original theory of authoritarian corruption control. He disputes views that hold democratic or quasi-democratic institutions as necessary for political governance successes and argues that corruption control in authoritarian regimes often depends on a powerful autocratic reformer having a free hand to enact and enforce measures curbing government wrongdoing. His book advances our understanding of authoritarian governance and durability while also opening up new avenues of inquiry about the politics of corruption control in East Asia and beyond. Christopher Carothers is a scholar of comparative politics and most recently affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China as a post-doctoral fellow. Professor Carothers research focuses on authoritarianism and corruption control with a regional focus on East Asia, and has written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politics and Society and the Journal of Democracy among others. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP, 2022) begins by calling into question a fundamental principle of orthodox phenomenology (and, for that matter, a great deal of humanities research): that of a fully self-aware unchanging subject who can provide a coherent account of its own experience, one which is commensurable and legible to others. Having foregrounded that instead ‘living means changing’, and that ‘everything in the narration of experience is a distortion’, Sterne suggests that attending to the realities of a world that is full of impairments helps one to more fully understand, and perhaps fight against, the expected norms that structure the social world. After laying out his case for an ‘impairment phenomenology’, Sterne turns to three kinds of impairment: vocal impairment, hearing loss, and fatigue - or as he puts it in our interview, ‘not speaking well, not hearing well, and not feeling well’. Through a careful analysis of the history, treatment, and highly varied sets of cultural attitudes toward these impairments, Sterne makes a compelling case for considering impairment as central to all human experience, raising vital political questions for accommodating bodily variety. Diminished Faculties is written in a range of registers – containing a detailed guide to an imagined exhibition of ‘new vocalities’, a User Guide to impairment theory, and a personal account of vocal paralysis – and synthesises cutting-edge theory from disability studies, sound studies, queer theory and much more. The book is written with generosity and a sense of humour, and will leave any reader thinking differently about how to understand issues of experience, agency and disability. In our interview Jonathan mentions one of his favourite works ‘exhibited’ in the book’s imaginary exhibition, ‘Masque’ by Hodan Youssouf. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality. In A Brief History of Equality (Harvard UP, 2022), Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It's a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people. We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us how. The future is up to us. Javier Mejia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Political Science Department at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village (U Hawaii Press, 2021), anthropologist Holly High combines an engaging first-person narrative of her fieldwork with a political ethnography of Laos, more than forty years after the establishment of the Lao PDR and more than seven decades since socialist ideologues first “liberated” parts of upland country. In a remote village of Kandon, High finds that although socialism has declined significantly as an economic model, it is ascendant and thriving in the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Kandon is remarkable by any account. The villagers are ethnic Kantu (Katu), an ethnicity associated by early ethnographers above all with human sacrifice. They had repelled French control, and as the war went on, the revolutionary forces of Sekong were headquartered in Kandon territories. In 1996, Kandon village moved and resettled in a plateau area. “New Kandon” has become Sekong Province’s first certified “Culture Village,” the nation’s very first “Open Defecation Free and Model Health Village,” and the president of Laos personally granted the village a Labor Flag and Medal. High provides a unique and timely assessment of the Lao Party-state’s resettlement politics, and she recounts with skillful nuance the stories that are often cast into shadows by the usual focus on New Kandon as a success. Her book follows the lives of a small group of villagers who returned to the old village in the mountains, effectively defying policy but, in their words, obeying the presence that animates the land there. Revealing her sensibility with tremendous composure, High tells the experiences of women who, bound by steep bride-prices to often violent marriages, have tasted little of the socialist project of equality, unity, and independence. These women spoke to the author of “necessities” as a limit to their own lives. In a context where the state has defined the legitimate forms of success and agency, “necessity” emerged as a means of framing one’s life as nonconforming but also nonagentive. Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in:
Jane Ferguson, Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred
Nick Enfield, The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia
Tanya Jakimow, Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia
Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance. Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight – Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty – The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies (Verso, 2022) moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder. Wide-ranging and polemical, this book lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined. In this interview, I spoke with Mark Neocleous about his fascinating and wide-ranging book The Politics of Immunity. We also spent time discussing his previous work on security and police power, the personal context informing this work, and connections with the ongoing UK undercover policing controversy (discussed in my previous interview with the authors of Deep Deception). Content warning: between 43-45 minutes into the podcast, there is a brief discussion of suicide in the context of Mark's forthcoming work. Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London, and is well-known for his influential work on police power and security. His recent books include The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind' (2016); War Power, Police Power (2014); and the newly-reissued A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (2021). Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What are the hidden histories of how the modern world functions? In Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In (MIT Press, 2021), Dylan Mulvin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE explores the objects, places, practices, and people that do the work of standing in. Theorising the ‘proxy’, the book uses case studies of the metric system, the Lena Image, and the Standardized Patient Program to uncover and critique the standards underpinning contemporary communications. The book offers critique and resistance, ultimately pointing the reader to the possibilities of a different world. Available open access, the book is essential reading across the arts and humanities and social sciences, as well as for engineering, computer science, and anyone interested in how society operates. You can also learn more about the book from this short film. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison (Columbia UP, 2022) combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral’s field notes, his interviews with fellow inmates, and convict memoirs, this book reveals what time does to prisoners and what prisoners do to time. Carceral and Flaherty consider the connection between the subjective dimensions of time and the existential circumstances of imprisonment. Convicts find that their experience of time has become deeply distorted by the rhythm and routines of prison and by how authorities ensure that an inmate’s time is under their control. They become obsessed with the passage of time and preoccupied with regaining temporal autonomy, creating elaborate strategies for modifying their perception of time. To escape the feeling that their lives lack forward momentum, prisoners devise distinctive ways to mark the passage of time, but these tactics can backfire by intensifying their awareness of temporality. Providing rich and nuanced analysis grounded in the distinctive voices of diverse prisoners, The Cage of Days examines how prisons regulate time and how prisoners resist the temporal regime. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), Banu Subramaniam examines how science and religion have come together to propel a vision of the modern Indian nation, and in particular, a Hindu nationalist vision of India. Subramaniam demonstrates that the politics of gender, race, class, caste, sexuality, and indigeneity are deeply implicated in the projects and narratives of the nation. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Targets of bullying are often the most vulnerable members of the scientific workforce-they may be low-paid graduate students or postdocs, living in a foreign country, navigating a foreign language and culture, and whose immigration status is tied directly to their employment. They may also have young families, be living paycheck-to-paycheck, and have health insurance and other benefits that depend on a contract position that can be revoked with little to no notice or cause. Finally, targets on the low end of a power differential are not likely to be supported by their institutions, particularly institutions that rely on the big grant earnings brought in by senior "bullies." A Brief Guide to Academic Bullying (Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2021) is a brief guide to the causes of academic bullying and to their solutions. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Eve Ng’s new book Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture" from a critical media studies perspective, as both cancel practices (what people and institutional actors do) and cancel discourses (commentary about cancelling). Ng traces multiple lines of origins for cancel practices and discourses, in the domains of Black communicative practices (e.g. cancelling relationship to "dissing"), celebrity and fan cultures, consumer culture (especially around consumer nationalist cancellings), and national politics (U.S. conservative criticisms of cancelling, and nationalist cancelling events in mainland China). Her analysis moves beyond popular press accounts about the latest targets of cancelling or familiar free speech debates, and underscores the different configurations of power associated with “cancel culture” in specific cultural and political contexts. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
School shootings and suicides by young victims of bullying have spurred a proliferation of anti-bullying programs, yet most of the research done on school bullying has been from psychologists. The Sociology of Bullying: Power, Status and Aggression Among Adolescents edited by Christopher Donoghue and published by New York University Press in 2022 will be the first volume to present the leading ideas in sociology about bullying among adolescents that moves beyond an individualistic approach and instead offers ideas about how to address bullying as a by-product of social systems, biases, and status hierarchies. Sociologists investigate the impact of social forces on bullying among adolescents, such as inequality, heteronormativity, militarized capitalism, racism, cancel culture, power, and competition. Contributors explore a wide range of key topics, such as how homophobia and gender normativity encourage bullying; how anti-bullying curricula can ultimately lead to more bullying; and how adolescents use bullying against their friends to improve their own social standing. By advancing sociological perspectives on bullying, this important volume aims to shift the national conversation from one that focuses on villainizing bullies to one that encourages an inward look at the aspects of our culture that foster bullying behaviour among children. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As the culture wars intensify, it seems that all sources of neutral authority get challenged and that includes opinion polls. Accusations about bias and unreliability fly around and yet everyone seriously engaged in the political process studies polls closely because they think they contain important truths. So are polls becoming more reliable because of improved techniques or less so because of the increasingly fractured and perhaps, increasingly difficult to measure nature of western democracies. British polling expert Mark Pak – author of Polls Unpacked - discusses the future of opinion polls. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados (Duke University Press, 2022), Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora. Nicole Charles is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies in Culture and Media, University of Toronto, Mississauga. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web (Indiana University Press, 2021), Sangeet Kumar interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem has spawned to reveal how its conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along with Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation-states. In analysing this new modality of cultural power in the global digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read for scholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and the public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do border policing and violence intersect with gender and sexuality to affect border communities? Today’s guest, Dr. Sahana Ghosh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, tells us about her research on the borderlands of India and Bangladesh. She describes how she transitioned from studying literature to anthropology, and from doing social work with female victims of human trafficking along the border to researching the lives of those who live along the border. She explains how her ethnographic research came to focus on many different social spaces and people—courts, border police, and communities on both sides of the border—describing specifically the ways the border’s militarization affected both her research and the lives of those who experienced it. Finally, she discusses her use of visual anthropological perspectives, and how the camera and its use by her interlocutors became an object of ethnographic analysis. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Millennials in the U.S. have been characterized as uninterested in religion, as defectors from religious institutions, and as agnostic about the role of religious identity in their culture. Amid the rise of so-called "nones," though, there has also been a countervailing trend: an increase in religious piety among some millennial Catholics. The Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS), which began evangelizing college students on American university campuses in 1998, hires recent college graduates to evangelize college students and promote an attractive and culturally savvy Catholicism. These millennial Catholics have personal relationships with Jesus, attend Mass daily, and know and defend papal teachings, while also being immersed in U.S. popular culture. With their skinny jeans, devotional tattoos, and large-framed glasses, FOCUS missionaries embody a hip, attractive style of Catholicism. They promote a faith that interweaves distinctly Catholic identity with outreach methods of twentieth-century evangelical Protestants and the anxieties of middle-class emerging adulthood. Though this new generation of missionaries lives according to strict gender essentialism prescribed by papal teachings-including the notions that men lead while women follow and that biology dictates gender roles-they also support stay-at-home fatherhood and women earning MBAs. Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics Is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool (Oxford UP, 2019) examines how these young people navigate their Catholic and American identities in the twenty-first century. Illuminating the ways missionaries are reshaping American Catholic identity, Katherine Dugan explores the contemporary U.S. religious landscape from the perspective of millennials who proudly proclaim "I am Catholic"-and devote years of their lives to convincing others to do the same. Allison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association and is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order of Naqshbandiyya Sufism in northwestern China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The hallmark of their spiritual practice is the “loud” (jahr) remembrance of God in liturgical rituals featuring distinctive melodic vocal chants. The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China (Columbia UP, 2021) draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation. Guangtian Ha examines how the use of voice in liturgy helps the Jahriyya to sustain their faith and the ways it has enabled them to endure political persecution over the past two and a half centuries. He situates the Jahriyya in a global multilingual network of Sufis and shows how their characteristic soundscapes result from transcultural interactions among Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Chinese Muslim communities. Ha argues that the resilience of Jahriyya Sufism stems from the diversity and multiplicity of liturgical practice, which he shows to be rooted in notions of Sufi sainthood. He considers the movement of Jahriyya vocal recitation to new media forms and foregrounds the gendered opposition of male voices and female silence that structures the group’s rituals. Spanning diverse disciplines—including anthropology, ethnomusicology, Islamic studies, sound studies, and media studies—and using Arabic, Persian, and Chinese sources, The Sound of Salvation offers new perspectives on the importance of sound to religious practice, the role of gender in Chinese Islam, and the links connecting Chinese Muslims to the broader Islamic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly (MIT Press, 2022), Emily West examines Amazon's consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization (Cornell UP, 2022) is an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization that compares data from two frontlines of China's global intervention—sub-Saharan Africa and Inner/Central Asia. Based on their fieldwork on Chinese infrastructure and resource-extraction projects in Mozambique and Mongolia, Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen, and Morten Axel Pedersen provide new empirical insights into neocolonialism and Sinophobia in the Global South. The core argument in Collaborative Damage is that the different participants studied in the globalization processes—local workers and cadres; Chinese managers and entrepreneurs; and the authors themselves, three Danish anthropologists—are intimately linked in paradoxical partnerships of mutual incomprehension. The authors call this "collaborative damage," which crucially refers not only to the misunderstandings and conflicts they observed in the field, but also to their own failure to agree about how to interpret the data. Via in-depth case studies and tragicomical tales of friendship, antagonism, irresolvable differences, and carefully maintained indifferences across disparate Sino-local worlds in Africa and Asia, Collaborative Damage tells a wide-ranging story of Chinese globalization in the twenty-first century. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century (Goldsmiths Press, 2021) uses three Black electronic musics – footwork, grime, and the work of the producer Actress – to provide a theory of how Black musical experimentation has disrupted the circuits of racialized domination and exclusion in the 21st Century city. The book carefully attends to the unique ‘sonic ecologies’ produced by these three musical forms in South/West Chicago; East London and South London respectively, steering a course between uncritical celebration narratives of ‘resistant’ cultural production and dystopian analyses of urban decay. Brar instead theorises these musics as forms of popular experimentalism which are not just inseparable from questions of space, race and class, but are productive of social and spatial relations. The book draws upon, and intervenes in, Black Studies literature to contribute a set of examples, questions and provocations that help readers to think about how the ‘Blackness of Black electronic dance music’ has produced (and continues to produce) a fugitive urban aesthetic sociality that has flourished in spite of the degradations of state and capital. At the end of the interview, Dhanveer recommended some music as good entry points into the three musical worlds that we discuss and that he analyses in the book: Actress – Splazsh (2010) DJ Rashad – Just a Taste Vol. 1 (2011) Slimzee/Wiley/Dizzee Rascal and more – Sidewinder sessions (2002-2004) Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Does protest influence political representation? If so, which groups are most likely to benefit from collective action? The Advantage of Disadvantage: Costly Protest and Political Representation for Marginalized Groups (Cambridge UP, 2022) makes a provocative claim: protests are most effective for disadvantaged groups. According to author LaGina Gause, legislators are more responsive to protesters than non-protesters, and after protesting, racial and ethnic minorities, people with low incomes, and other low-resource groups are more likely than white and affluent protesters to gain representation. Gause also demonstrates that online protests are less effective than in-person protests. Drawing on literature from across the social sciences as well as formal theory, a survey of policymakers, quantitative data, and vivid examples of protests throughout U.S. history, The Advantage of Disadvantage provides invaluable insights for scholars and activists seeking to understand how groups gain representation through protesting. LaGina Gause is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests are at the intersection of U.S. political institutions and political behavior with a focus on racial and ethnic politics, inequality, protest, and representation. Before joining the department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego as an assistant professor, she was a Democracy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. She tweets @LaGina_Gause. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As the turmoil of interlinked crises unfolds across the world—from climate change to growing inequality to the rise of authoritarian governments—social scientists examine what is happening and why. Can communities devise alternatives to the systems that are doing so much harm to the planet and people? Sociologists Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman offer a clear, accessible volume that demonstrates the ways that communities adapt in the face of crises and explains that sociology can help us understand how and why they do this challenging work. Tackling neoliberalism head-on, these communities are making big changes by crafting distributive and regenerative systems that depart from capitalist approaches. The vivid case studies presented range from activist water protectors to hemp farmers to renewable energy cooperatives led by Indigenous peoples and nations. Alongside these studies, Malin and Kallman present incisive critiques of colonialism, extractive capitalism, and neoliberalism, while demonstrating how sociology’s own disciplinary traditions have been complicit with those ideologies—and must expand beyond them. Showing that it is possible to challenge social inequality and environmental degradation by refusing to continue business-as-usual, Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change (Rutgers UP, 2022) offers both a call to action and a dose of hope in a time of crises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The global success of football icons like Samuel Eto'o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fuelled the migratory projects of countless young men across the African continent who dream of following - literally and figuratively - in their footsteps. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, African Football Migration: Aspirations, Experiences and Trajectories (Manchester University Press, 2022) captures and chronicles the aspirations, experiences and trajectories of those pursuing this highly prized form of transnational migration. In doing so, the book’s three authors Dr. Paul Darby, Dr. James Esson, and Dr. Christian Ungruhe uncover and trace the myriad actors, networks and institutions that affect the ability of young people across the continent to realise social mobility through football's global production network. The book sheds critical light on the barriers to social mobility erected by neoliberal capitalism, and how these are negotiated by aspiring African footballers. It also generates original interdisciplinary perspectives on the complex interplay between structural forces and human agency, as young players navigate an industry rife with commercial speculation. While a select few reach the elite levels of the game and build a successful career overseas, the book vividly illustrates how for the vast majority, 'trying their luck' through football results in involuntary immobility in post-colonial Africa. These findings are complemented by rare empirical insights from transnational African migrants at the margins of the global football industry and those navigating precarious retirement from careers as players. African Football Migration offers essential coverage of why and how African youth and young men have become actors in the global football industry, revealing the complex implications of transnational mobility, both imagined and enacted. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Unfortunately, Dr. Christian Ungruhe was unable to join this interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to bestselling author and University of Oxford law professor Charles Foster on how the coronavirus pandemic reveals how so many of us—including so many scientists—have replaced rigorous scientific skepticism with an alarming cult of "scientism." Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Future of the Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy: After Trump (Routledge, 2022), Dr. Robert E. Gutsche Jr. examines the effects of Donald Trump’s presidency on journalistic practices, rhetoric, and discourses. Rooted in critical theory and cultural studies, it asks what life may be like without Trump, not only for journalism but also for American society more broadly. The book places perspectives and tensions around the Trump presidency in one spot, focusing on the underlying ideological forces in tensions around media trust, Trumpism, and the role of journalism in it all. It explores how journalists dealt with racist rhetoric from the White House, relationships between the Office of the President and social media companies, citizens, and journalists themselves, while questioning whether journalism has learned the right lessons for the future. More importantly, chapters on liberal media "bias," the First 100 Days of the Biden Presidency, gender, and race, and how journalists should adopt measures to "reduce harm" hint as to where politics and journalism may go next. Reshaping the scholarly and public discourse about where we are headed in terms of the presidency and publics, social media, and journalism, this book will be an important resource for scholars and graduate students of journalism, media studies, communication studies, political science, race and ethnic studies and sociology. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this timely and insightful new book, Markus Bell presents the case study of Korean-Japanese – “Zainichi” – who have escaped North Korea in the years following the end of the Cold War. Through building alliances and long-distance relationships, Zainichi returnees resist forced integration and push back against life-threatening political purges to forge new ways of belonging and, ultimately, surviving against the odds. Outsiders: Memories of Migration to and From North Korea (Berghahn, 2022) is the story of Korean families who, despite experiencing loss, trauma and dislocation, manage to remake themselves in the process of transplanting their lives. Dr. Markus Bell is an anthropologist specializing in forced migration and labour migration, with over a decade of experience working with displaced people and migrant workers in the Asia Pacific region. He has taught at the Australian National University, University of Sheffield, and Goethe University, Frankfurt. He earned his PhD from the Australian National University in 2016. He works as a long-term consultant for the United Nations International Organisation for Migration, and is also a Research Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Tweets @mpsbell Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dr. Paul Geary’s Experimental Dining: Performance, Experience and Ideology in Contemporary Creative Restaurants (Intellect, 2022) examines the work of four of the world’s leading creative restaurants: Noma, elBulli, The Fat Duck and Alinea. Using ideas from performance studies, cultural studies, philosophy and economics, Dr. Geary explores the creation of the dining experience as a form of multisensory performance. The book examines the construction of the world of the restaurants and their creative methods, the experience of dining and the broader ideological frames within which the work takes place. The book brings together ideas around food, philosophy, performance and cultural politics to offer an interdisciplinary understanding of the practice and experience of creative restaurants. The book interrogates the experience of the performances in and of these restaurants, with a particular focus on the entanglement of sensory, embodied, and reflective experience with the broader cultural and ideological discourses that both frame and produce those seemingly individual, personal and intimate encounters with the work. The author contends that the work of the experimental restaurant, while operating explicitly within an economy of experiences, is not absolutely determined by that political or economic context. Its practice has the potential to appeal to more than idle curiosity for novelty. It can be unsettling and revealing, provocative and evocative, personal and political, experimental and considered, thoughtful and sensual. Or in other words, that the food event can be art. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky exerted a powerful influence on the world, even if his historical and theoretical contributions have often been downplayed, and people who wish to be associated with him are few and far between today. There are a number of factors that have contributed to this marginalization, but correcting it will require revisiting his thought in a careful and contextualized manner in order to better understand his ideas, salvage the underlying core and adapt it for the 21st century. One person attempting to do this is Juan Dal Maso in his new book Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Originally written and published in Spanish before being translated by the author for the series Marx, Engels and Marxism, the text spends the first two chapters revisiting Trotsky’s developing thoughts on hegemony, political leadership, party vanguards and bureaucracies, finding a highly dynamic figure whose thought reflected the changing times he was embedded in. Following this, Dal Maso returns to Gramsci’s notebooks, carefully contextualizing the often-critical remarks on Trotsky, cutting past surface appearances to find some key points of overlap in their thoughts on political revolution. The book ends with a series of reflections on the receptions of Trotsky and Gramsci, with one left on the margins of history and political theory, the other theorized to the point where his political commitments have been made to disappear. In all this, Dal Maso encourages us to see these figures in new light, and in doing so develop a Marxist conception of class struggle that can help bring us into the 21st century. Juan Dal Maso is a freelance researcher and activist in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a frequent contributor to Left Voice. He is also a member of the editorial board of Ideas de Izquierda Semanario (Ideas of the Left Weekly) in Argentina, and the author of the following books; El Marxismo de Gramsci (The Marxism of Gramsci, 2016), translated to Italian and Portuguese, and Althusser y Sacristán (Louis Althusser and Manuel Sacristán, 2020) written with Ariel Petruccelli. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In her new book Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) Jasmin Zine explores the experiences of Canadian Muslim youth as they navigate the landscape of Islamophobia, anti-Muslim racism, global war on terror, and the security industrial complex. By centering the voices of Muslim youth in Canada from the 9/11 generation, the study captures the complex nexus of oppressions experienced by Black and racialized Muslims as they navigate government policies of securitization, university campus culture, news media, and popular culture. Zine also examines how Muslim youth storytellers are creating intentional and resistant counterpublics through artistic and creative productions to disrupt reductive portrayal of Muslims in Canada. The book will be of interest to those who think and write about Islamophobia, Muslim youth, and Islam in Canada, but it will also be of interest to the general reader, particularly those who work in the civic and public sectors, such as educators. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Saronik interviews Kim about intersectionality, a concept developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Kim references two essays by Crenshaw in the episode: one that she read, and one that our previous podcast guest, Chad Hegelmeyer taught. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991) https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039 (Kim read this one) “Demarginalizing the Intersections of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum Iss. 1 (1989) https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/ (Chad taught this one) Kim recommends that you read the latter. This week’s image is a painting by Alma Thomas, titled “Light Blue Nursery” (1968). The image is made available under a Creative Commons license by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ice caps are melting, seas are rising, and densely populated cities worldwide are threatened by floodwaters, especially in Southeast Asia. Building on Borrowed Time is a relevant and powerful ethnography of how people in Semarang, Indonesia, on the north coast of Java, are dealing with this existential challenge driven by global warming. In addition to antiflooding infrastructure breaking down, vast areas of cities like Semarang and Jakarta are rapidly sinking, affecting the very foundations of urban life: toxic water oozes through the floors of houses, bridges are submerged, traffic is interrupted. As Lukas Ley shows, the residents of Semarang are constantly engaged in maintaining their homes and streets, trying to live through a slow-motion disaster shaped by the interacting temporalities of infrastructural failure, ecological deterioration, and urban development. He casts this predicament through the temporal lens of a “meantime,” a managerial response that means a constant enduring of the present rather than progress toward a better future—a “chronic present.” Building on Borrowed Time takes us to a place where a flood crisis has already arrived—where everyday residents are not waiting for the effects of climate change but are in fact already living with it—and shows that life in coastal Southeast Asia is defined not by the temporality of climate science but by the lived experience of tidal flooding. Lukas Ley is head of research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On July 9, 2011, South Sudan celebrated its independence as the world's newest nation, an occasion that the country's Christian leaders claimed had been foretold in the Book of Isaiah. The Bible provided a foundation through which the South Sudanese could distinguish themselves from the Arab and Muslim Sudanese to the north and understand themselves as a spiritual community now freed from their oppressors. Less than three years later, however, new conflicts emerged along ethnic lines within South Sudan, belying the liberation theology that had supposedly reached its climactic conclusion with independence. In Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan (Duke UP, 2021), Christopher Tounsel investigates the centrality of Christian worldviews to the ideological construction of South Sudan and the inability of shared religion to prevent conflict. Exploring the creation of a colonial-era mission school to halt Islam's spread up the Nile, the centrality of biblical language in South Sudanese propaganda during the Second Civil War (1983--2005), and postindependence transformations of religious thought in the face of ethnic warfare, Tounsel highlights the potential and limitations of deploying race and Christian theology to unify South Sudan. Christopher Tounsel is Catherine Shultz Rein Early Career Professor in the College of the Liberal Arts and Assistant Professor of History and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Thomas Zuber is a PhD Candidate in History at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Planetary Longings (Duke UP, 2022), eminent cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of thinking it has catalyzed. She turns to 1990s Latin American vernacular culture, literary fiction, and social movements, which simultaneously registered neoliberalism’s devastating effects and pursued alternate ways of knowing and living. Tracing the workings of colonialism alongside the history of anticolonial struggles and Indigenous mobilizations in the Americas, Pratt analyzes indigeneity both as a key index of coloniality, neoliberal extraction, and ecological destruction, and as a source for alternative modes of thought and being. Ultimately, Pratt demonstrates that the changes on either side of the millennium have catalyzed new forms of world-making and knowledge-making in the face of an unknowable and catastrophic future. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers—parents—labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It’s almost as if parents are set up to fail—and the result is lost opportunities that limit children’s success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis (MIT Press, 2022), Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality. Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today’s socioeconomic reality—but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff. We need programs inspired by Medicare—call them Familycare—to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents need to become an interest group that can wield its political power on behalf of children—who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country. The Parent Trap exposes the true costs of our society’s unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform. Nate Hilger is a Harvard and Stanford-trained economist who has worked as a professor of economics at Brown University and an economist and data scientist in Silicon Valley. While in academia he was a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and continues to hold an affiliation with the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown. In 2020 he served as a lead policy consultant on early childhood and non-K12 child development issues for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. His academic research on child development and inequality has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics and other leading peer-reviewed journals, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major media outlets. He lives with his wife and son in Redwood City, California. Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Race is the subject of passionate and increasingly angry debate. But amidst all the talk of unconscious bias it’s an area into which many fear to tread. In this podcast Professor McWhorter of Colombia University outlines his sometimes controversial views on these issues and explains why he wants to debate them in public. His latest book is Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio, 2021). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Spirit Ambulance: Choreographing the End of Life in Thailand (University of California Press, 2020) is a journey into decision-making at the end of life in Thailand, where families attempt to craft good deaths for their elders in the face of clashing ethical frameworks, from a rapidly developing universal medical system, to national and global human-rights politics, to contemporary movements in Buddhist metaphysics. Scott Stonington’s gripping ethnography documents how Thai families attempt to pay back a “debt of life” to their elders through intensive medical care, followed by a medically assisted rush from the hospital to home to ensure a spiritually advantageous last breath. The result is a powerful exploration of the nature of death and the complexities arising from the globalization of biomedical expertise and ethics around the world. Scott Stonington, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, International Studies, and Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan. Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience representing Black youth in Washington, D.C.'s juvenile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America's irrational, manufactured fears of these young people and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children. Henning explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and she details the long-term consequences of racism that they experience at the hands of the police and their vigilante surrogates. She makes clear that unlike White youth, who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries, experiment with sex and drugs, and figure out who they are and who they want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to White America and are denied healthy adolescent development. She examines the criminalization of Black adolescent play and sexuality, and of Black fashion, hair, and music. She limns the effects of police presence in schools and the depth of police-induced trauma in Black adolescents. Especially in the wake of the recent unprecedented, worldwide outrage at racial injustice and inequality, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth (Pantheon Books, 2021) is an essential book for our moment. Donations to the Georgetown Law Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative can be made here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do social movements intersect with the agendas of mainstream political parties? When they are integrated with parties, are they coopted? Or are they more radically transformative? Examining major episodes of contention in American politics – from the Civil War era to the women's rights and civil rights movements to the Tea Party and Trumpism today – Sidney Tarrow tackles these questions and provides a new account of how the interactions between movements and parties have been transformed over the course of American history. In Movements and Parties: Critical Connections in American Political Development (Cambridge UP, 2021), he shows that the relationships between movements and parties have been central to American democratization – at times expanding it and at times threatening its future. Today, movement politics have become more widespread as the parties have become weaker. The future of American democracy hangs in the balance. Professor Sidney Tarrow is Emeritus Maxwell Upson Professor of Government and Adjunct Professor at Cornell Law School. He is a leading expert on social movements and contentious behaviour. He has published more than sixteen books and numerous articles on the movements' political opportunities, social networks, cultural frames, and forms of collective action. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Jails are the principal people-processing machines of the criminal justice system. Mostly they hold persons awaiting trial who cannot afford or have been denied bail. Although jail sentences max out at a year, some spend years awaiting trial in jail-especially in counties where courts are jammed with cases. City and county jails, detention centers, police lockups, and other temporary holding facilities are regularly overcrowded, poorly funded, and the buildings are often in disrepair. American jails admit over ten million people every year, but very little is known about what happens to them while they're locked away. Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail (Oxford UP, 2022) is an ethnographic study of a California county jail that reflects on what it means to do jail time and what it does to men. Michael L. Walker spent several extended spells in jail, having been arrested while trying to pay parking tickets in graduate school. This book is an intimate account of his experience and in it he shares the routines, rhythms, and subtle meanings that come with being incarcerated. Walker shows how punishment in jail is much more than the deprivation of liberties. It is, he argues, purposefully degrading. Jail creates a racial politics that organizes daily life, moves men from clock time to event time, normalizes trauma, and imbues residents with substantial measures of vulnerability. Deputies used self-centered management styles to address the problems associated with running a jail, some that magnified individual conflicts to potential group conflicts and others that created divisions between residents for the sake of control. And though not every deputy indulged, many gave themselves over to the pleasures of punishment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How the Color Line Bends: The Geography of White Prejudice in Modern America (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the connection between prejudice and place in modern America. Existing scholarship suggests that living near Black Americans presents a "threat" to White Americans, which in turn influences White opinions on policies related to race. This book rejects the tendency to position White people as tacit victims and Black people as threatening, instead recasting White Americans as active viewers of their surroundings. This reframing brings a critical focus on power and positionality to scholarship on racial threat, and challenges the neutrality typically assigned to the White perspective. The book first presents ethnographic analysis of Louisiana residents caught in a racialized debate over incorporating a new city in the Baton Rouge area, using interpretive methods to show how race colors White residents' perspective on local geography and politics. Then, the book applies its conceptualization of a White perspective to the quantitative study of prejudice and place, revisiting the classic racialized policy issues of welfare and affirmative action. These analyses emphasize White Americans' diverse beliefs and surroundings but also their common structural position, and how an interest in defending that position shapes the White perspective. This emphasis supports new empirical insights on the behavior of racially tolerant White people, perceptions of the Black middle class, and the consequences of segregation for racial politics. The book also includes discussion of the author's own positionality as a Black woman researcher in conversation with White interview subjects, and the risks of Whiteness studies that leave Black people invisible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Following the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous peoples' relationship to land, urbanism, and finance is similarly transformed, revealing a legacy of debt and dispossession. Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtness in Mexico (Stanford UP, 2020) examines how Maya families grapple with the ramifications of neoliberal housing policies. M. Bianet Castellanos relates Maya migrants' experiences with housing and mortgage finance in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities. Their struggle to own homes reveals colonial and settler colonial structures that underpin the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. But even as Maya people contend with predatory lending practices and foreclosure, they cultivate strategies of resistance—from "waiting out" the state, to demanding Indigenous rights in urban centers. As Castellanos argues, it is through these maneuvers that Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
With Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021) Erica S. Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith issue a call for qualitative political scientists to go beyond the controlled comparisons so dear to them, and rethink what it is that they compare and why. The call is both earnest and compelling. The book is persuasive not just in its efforts to show that the what and why of comparison ought not be limited to the “Millian paradigm”—even as its editors are at pains to express their appreciation for the paradigm’s logics. Over twelve chapters, an impressive roll-call of contributors together explicate and demonstrate how the practice of comparison can be systematically broadened and creatively adapted to ensure qualitative political science’s enduring relevance, even as its potential objects of inquiry proliferate and diversify. Chapters include one on two ways to compare by Frederic Schaffer, whose Elucidating Social Science Concepts featured on New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science in 2020, and another by series host, Nick Cheesman. Other contributors include Jason Seawright, Joe Soss, and Thea Riofrancos, whose Resource Radicals received the Charles Taylor Book Award in 2021. The book closes via an epilogue with Lisa Wedeen, who spoke about her Authoritarian Apprehensions in an episode that year. Rethinking comparison is not without risk. But a political science without risk-takers would be an inert discipline. Fortunately, with the likes of Simmons and Smith exciting debate about what, why and how we compare, the discipline is sure to remain lively, and relevant. Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network at the ANU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era’s preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor’s A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality’ and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property’ before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism’ and then broaching ‘the question of reparations’. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented’ which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning’. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor’s vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor’s research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in academic research in Marxism and related fields, and many researchers have been stepping up to the plate to offer rigorous analysis and critical reanimations of Marxist theory. One particularly exciting place where this is included is the Palgrave series Marx, Engels and Marxisms, which has been steadily putting new titles out for close to a decade. Including original monographs, edited collections and translated texts, the series covers a wide variety of topics for those interested in rediscovering and developing a Marxism ready to face the 21st century. This conversation with one of the editors is intended to serve as an overview of the series, with more traditional episodes to follow in the near future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
An innovative reassessment of philosopher P. F. Strawson's influential "Freedom and Resentment" P. F. Strawson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 1962 paper "Freedom and Resentment" is one of the most influential in modern moral philosophy, prompting responses across multiple disciplines, from psychology to sociology. In Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals (Princeton UP, 2020), Pamela Hieronymi closely reexamines Strawson's paper and concludes that his argument has been underestimated and misunderstood. Line by line, Hieronymi carefully untangles the complex strands of Strawson's ideas. After elucidating his conception of moral responsibility and his division between "reactive" and "objective" responses to the actions and attitudes of others, Hieronymi turns to his central argument. Strawson argues that, because determinism is an entirely general thesis, true of everyone at all times, its truth does not undermine moral responsibility. Hieronymi finds the two common interpretations of this argument, "the simple Humean interpretation" and "the broadly Wittgensteinian interpretation," both deficient. Drawing on Strawson's wider work in logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, Hieronymi concludes that his argument rests on an implicit, and previously overlooked, metaphysics of morals, one grounded in Strawson's "social naturalism." In the final chapter, she defends this naturalistic picture against objections. Rigorous, concise, and insightful, Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals sheds new light on Strawson's thinking and has profound implications for future work on free will, moral responsibility, and metaethics. The book also features the complete text of Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Zarak Khan and Laurel Newman about their book Building Behavioral Science in an Organization (Action Design Press, 2021). As an academic discipline, behavioral science is as the book’s introduction states, an umbrella term that includes social psychology, behavioral economics, and sociology among other fields. As applied in business and government, for instance, behavioral science is often a matter of creating small “nudges” in designing changes to human behavior in hopes of achieving buy-in rather than resistance from those who are wedded to the status quo. Khan and Newman, who co-edited and contributed to this book, are candid about the challenges involved. They are also faithfully committed as professionals to achieving real innovations and transformational advances whenever feasible. In particular, this episode focuses on a pair of behavioral science applications: in HR and in promoting innovation. Zarak Khan is a Senior Behavioral Researcher at Duke University’s Center for Advanced Hindsight, as well as a Behavioral Science Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a board member of Action Design Network. Lauren Newman is a behavioral scientist at Edward Jones, and a former psychology professor at Fontbonne University. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Political Scientist Stacy Ulbig has a new book that dives into the political attitudes and behaviors of college students to assess how polarization and partisan antipathy in the general public have some genesis on college campuses. Angry Politics: Partisan Hatred and Political Polarization Among College Students (UP of Kansas, 2020) explores affective polarization, and elicited responses from students who have noted that they are experiencing self-censorship, across the political spectrum. The study measured levels of political animosity based on different kinds of news media consumption, with those who consumed social media as the source of their news demonstrating the most animosity towards opposition partisans. Students tend to be nervous when faced with having to deal with conflict, and this inclination also leads them to self-sort and isolate from those who hold different political views. At the same time, the research indicates that students are feeling more vocal in articulating their opinions and beliefs. Part of the experience at college is to learn how to listen to different perspectives and opinions, and to assess diverse input and information. This study is fascinating, examining the layers of student behavior around politics in an atmosphere that is characterized as fraught by a variety of news outlets. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Media Hot and Cold (Duke UP, 2021) attunes the reader to temperature as a crucial but often overlooked terrain of control, communication and contestation. The book skilfully unpacks the complex technical operations of a vast array of heat-based communication technologies in parallel with a close analysis of the cultural and political resonances of these media, taking in early experiments in heat ray technologies, the development of the thermostat, undersea fibre optic cables and torture sweatboxes from the US plantation. Today’s thermal media are framed as politically neutral and scientifically objective technologies of personalised comfort and climate mitigation. However, Starosielski pushes back against this reading, arguing that the manipulation of temperature as a means of coercion and domination has been integral to the construction, normalization and maintenance of unequal relations of power. The book is a timely and significant call for an unflinching analysis of the sociocultural function of temperature in a period of unprecedented thermal volatility. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In today's program, we speak to Nandita Sharma, activist scholar and Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. We talk about Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020). In Home Rule, Sharma brilliantly traces the "historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as 'colonial invaders.'" She theorizes the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states wherein the category of the Native (initially referred to as such to demarcate colonized status) has been revitalized and claims to autochthony have become the basis of "true national belonging." In consequence, migrants have been facing exclusion, expulsion, and even extermination. The hardening of nationalisms in the Postcolonial New World Order has contained demands for decolonization, leaving their potential unfulfilled. Sharma forcefully and convincingly shows that the only way forward is by building a common wherein the ruling categories of Native and Migrant are dissolved. Jochen Schmon is a PhD Student in Politics at the New School for Social Research. You can reach him on Twitter @JohenShmon. Deren Ertas is a PhD Candidate in the joint program in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. You can reach her own Twitter @drnrts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021), Gavin Mueller provides a bracing and wide-ranging study of the fractious relationship between workers and technology under capitalism. Mueller traces the thought and actions of ordinary people past and present – including hackers, dockers, musicians and the titular textile workers - who have recognised that technological ‘progress’ too often comes at the expense of their autonomy and dignity. The book pushes back against visions of machine-driven utopia that have continually re-emerged on both the right and the left, arguing instead that resistance to technology is a key site of struggle throughout modernity, and that a Marxist neo-Luddism is crucial to understanding, and changing, the world today. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
An excerpt from Kim’s conversation with Elaine Freedgood on commodity fetishism that didn’t make it into the original episode. Elaine references Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek on ideology; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP: 1981; and Claude Levi Strauss’s work on Caduveo body painting (which seems to have been published in the surrealist magazine VVV in 1942 and is very hard to find on the internet — see Luciana Martins ‘Resemblances to archaeological finds’: Guido Boggiani, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Caduveo body painting” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2014. DOI:10.1080/13569325.2017.1309317.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why do corporations fund cultural organisations and events? In Black Culture, Inc: How ethnic community support pays for corporate America Patricia Banks, Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College, explores the role of corporate funding in shaping cultural life, from historical examples of tobacco advertising and media, through to contemporary social media businesses’ presence at music festivals. The book draws on a wealth of examples and scholarship on Black culture in America, alongside analysis of diversity policy and practices. Most crucially, the book introduces the idea of ‘diversity capital’, showing the costs of corporate influence on culture, as well as the ambivalence and enthusiasm of cultural producers and audiences. Moving beyond simple explanations and analysis of race, corporate funding, and culture, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the arts today. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Morris Altman about his book Worker Satisfaction and Economic Performance (Routledge, 2021). What sometimes gets overlooked is that Adam Smith not only became the “father of capitalism” by writing The Wealth of Nations; he also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Empathy matters, and this week’s guest Morris Altman argues that sustainable capitalism practices fairness. Too often the basic, economic needs of rank-and-file workers are being overlooked in a global economic where the wealthy are calling the shots. From anti-immigrant rhetoric to events in Ukraine, this is a timely episode that puts the purported move from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism under the lens for skeptical examination. Want more engaged workers? Make them more truly empowered, and the beneficiaries of reciprocity whereby their input is acted on and rewarded alike. Morris Altman is the Dean of the University of Dundee’s School of Business. He’s published over 130 referred papers and 17 books. He’s also held academic posts at the University of Saskatchewan, Victoria University, Newcastle University, and at Hebrew University, Stanford, Cornell and Duke. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Kim talks with Elaine Freedgood about Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. The concept comes from: Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels, 1887, available on marxists.org Other texts mentioned: -Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, edited by Patricia Spyer, Routledge, 1998. -Rosalind Morris and Daniel Leonard, The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea. University of Chicago Press, 2017. In the longer version of our conversation we talked about: -Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. University of Michigan Press, 2011. -Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Translated by ---Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1852. Internet Archive. -And Elaine’s book, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Elaine is super cool. She studies Victorian Literature and teaches in the English Department at NYU. Image borrowed from archive.org. If this image is under copyright, please inform us and we will remove it promptly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and—more recently—Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work. Edited by Jared Champion and Peter Kunze, Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up comedian as public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism. Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli’s use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari’s merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford’s emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, and even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Translation of Contemporary Taiwan Literature in a Cross-Cultural Context (Routledge, 2021) explores the social, cultural, and linguistic implications of translation of Taiwan literature for transnational cultural exchange. It demonstrates principally how asymmetrical cultural relationships, mediation processes, and ideologies of the translation players constitute the culture-specific translation activity as a highly contested site, where translation can reconstruct and rewrite the literature and the culture it represents. Four main theoretical themes are explored in relation to such translation activity: sociological studies, cultural and rewriting studies, English as a lingua franca, and social and performative linguistics. These offer insightful perspectives on the translation as an interpretive encounter between not only two languages, two cultural systems and assumptions taking place, but also among various translation mediators. This book will be useful to scholars and students working on translation and cultural studies, China/Taiwan literature studies, and literature studies in cross-cultural contexts. Szu-Wen Kung (Dr.) is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Program in Translation and Interpretation, National Taiwan University, Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil (MIT Press, 2022), David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom. David Nemer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and in the Latin American Studies program at the University of Virginia. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center and Princeton University's Brazil Lab. His research and teaching interests cover the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology of Technology, ICT for Development (ICT4D), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Nemer is an ethnographer whose fieldworks include the Slums of Vitória, Brazil; Havana, Cuba; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022) and Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013). Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The events of January 6th 2021 are contested in the US. For some supporters of Donald Trump it was, and remains, a case of a legitimate protest against a rigged election. For opponents of Mr. Trump, it was an attempt to bully Congress through physical intimidation into refusing to validate the correct election result. That so many Americans believe the election was rigged raises questions about the nature of right wing politics in the US. This podcast covers these issues with Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Speaking of Race: Language, Identity, and Schooling Among African American Children (Lexington Books, 2020), Jennifer Delfino explores the linguistic practices of African American children in an after school program in Washington, DC. Drawing on ethnographic research, Delfino illustrates how students’ linguistic practices are often perceived as barriers to learning and achievement and provides an in-depth look at how students challenge this perception by using language to transform the meaning of race in relation to ideas about academic success. Jennifer Delfino is assistant professor in the Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Few would disagree that inclusion is both the right thing to do and good for business. Then why are we so terrible at it? If we believe in the morality and the profitability of including people of diverse and underestimated backgrounds in the workplace, why don’t we do it? Because, explains Ruchika Tulshyan in this eye-opening book, we don’t realize that inclusion takes awareness, intention, and regular practice. Inclusion doesn’t just happen; we have to work at it. Tulshyan presents inclusion best practices, showing how leaders and organizations can meaningfully promote inclusion and diversity. Tulshyan centers the workplace experience of women of color, who are subject to both gender and racial bias. It is at the intersection of gender and race, she shows, that we discover the kind of inclusion policies that benefit all. Tulshyan debunks the idea of the “level playing field” and explains how leaders and organizations can use their privilege for good by identifying and exposing bias, knowing that they typically have less to lose in speaking up than a woman of color does. She explains why “leaning in” doesn’t work—and dismantling structural bias does; warns against hiring for “culture fit,” arguing for “culture add” instead; and emphasizes the importance of psychological safety in the workplace—you need to know that your organization has your back. With Inclusion on Purpose: An Intersectional Approach to Creating a Culture of Belonging at Work (MIT Press, 2022), Tulshyan shows us how we can make progress toward inclusion and diversity—and we must start now. Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2021) Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression-language, image, music, communication-into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode of the New Books in Latin America Podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Maria Elena García about her wonderful new book Gastropolitics and the Spectre of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru published in 2021 by the University of California Press. In recent years, Peru has transformed from a war-torn country to a global high-end culinary destination. Connecting chefs, state agencies, global capital, and Indigenous producers, this “gastronomic revolution” makes powerful claims: food unites Peruvians, dissolves racial antagonisms, and fuels development. Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race critically evaluates these claims and tracks the emergence of Peruvian gastropolitics, a biopolitical and aesthetic set of practices that reinscribe dominant racial and gendered orders. Through critical readings of high-end menus and ethnographic analysis of culinary festivals, guinea pig production, and national-branding campaigns, this work explores the intersections of race, species, and capital to reveal links between gastronomy and violence in Peru. María Elena García is an associate professor in the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington in Seattle. García received her PhD in Anthropology at Brown University and has been a Mellon Fellow at Wesleyan University and Tufts University. Her first book, Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Development, and Multicultural Activism in Peru (Stanford, 2005) examined Indigenous and intercultural politics in Peru in the immediate aftermath of the war between Sendero Luminoso and the state. Kenneth Sanchez is a Peruvian journalist that works as a freelance journalist and as a multi-platform content curator for the Peruvian media outlet Comité de Lectura. He is a host of the New Books in Latin American Studies podcast and the movies & entertainment podcast Segundo Plano. He holds a master’s degree in Latin American Politics from University College London (UCL), is a Centre for Investigative Journalism masterclass alumni and is part of the 6th generation of Young Journalists of #LaRedLatam of Distintas Latitudes. He has won several awards including the prestigious Amnesty Media Award given out by Amnesty International UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction (Hachette Go, 2021) tells a long-running, but largely unknown, story of how a few people and groups – propelled at first by the AIDS pandemic -- swam against one of the most powerful policy tides in America – our nation’s 50-year war on drugs. Maia Szalavitz’s book is a personal and political history of the idea of harm reduction, which is a philosophy, a set of health practices, and a call to action. Harm reduction is a powerful alternative to virtually all of the “conventional wisdom” about drugs and drug policy. Harm reduction starts by asserting that the health and safety of drug users, their families, and their communities should be the top priority of drug policy. Undoing Drugs is a global story, with stops in Liverpool, Amsterdam, the San Francisco Bay Area, Vancouver, Glasgow, and New York. By giving life to the saying that “the personal is political,” Szalavitz shows how America might still turn away from the massive failures of the drug war to embrace an approach that seeks to put people first. Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. Recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at noelandsteve@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets (Brazos Press, 2021), written by Lindsey Krinks was published by Baker Publishing Group in 2021. In this personal, and pastoral, account of working alongside Nashville’s homeless population, Lindsey teaches us about God’s heart for the poor and how to work toward collective liberation. At age twenty, Lindsey Krinks thought she had her life figured out. But a devastating injury and an unexpected encounter with a homeless organizing group disrupted her plans and opened her eyes to the immense suffering and injustice around her. Awakened to a fierce pursuit of justice and a faith that called her to "pray with her feet," Krinks plunged into the underside of American society, where she found both staggering loss and astounding love. As a street chaplain, activist, and co-founder of Open Table Nashville, Krinks takes us on an unforgettable spiritual journey to tent cities, alleys, slums, and the front lines of movements for justice. Praying with Our Feet challenges preconceptions about people who live on the streets, calling us to move from charity to justice and to get our hands dirty in the struggle for a better world.
Readers who are dismayed by the world's suffering but don't know where to start will find much inspiration in this intimate and moving book. Includes end-of-book discussion questions for each chapter. Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Director of Outreach for an addiction recovery center. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her work at meggambino.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Internet-enabled mobilization begins long before there is a call for protest. In the book Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and other Authoritarian Regimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Kris Ruijgrok examines the case of Bersih – an anti-corruption movement in Malaysia – to track the sequence of events that lead citizens to take part in protest action. Contrary to the impression that social media platforms like Twitter spontaneously spark protests around the world, the book takes a longer and wider view of how the internet challenges information scarcity in authoritarian regimes, which, consequently, creates conditions for citizens to carefully consider their sympathies for a protest movement and defy their fears about state control. In this podcast, Kris discusses the reasons why the Malaysian government is unable to successfully control the digital public sphere in the same way it controlled the information environment of traditional media. He makes a case for going beyond what he considers to be technologically deterministic debate between cyber-pessimists and cyber-optimists. Instead, Kris foregrounds the importance of context – how different social conditions result to different outcomes. Kris Ruijgrok is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Aim Sinpeng, Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand (U Michigan Press, 2021)
Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was produced in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
El Sistema is Venezuela's large scale classical music education program for poor and working class people on the economic, social, and physical margins. In Sonorous Worlds: Musical Enchantment in Venezuela (University of Michigan, 2021), anthropologist Yana Stainova follows the lives of musicians in examining the effects of the program on individuals and communities. Through conversations and interactions with musicians during music lessons, performances, and during their daily lives, Stainova finds that classical music education opens up a space to dream and makes possible different futures than those generally available to working class youth. Stainova theorizes that musicians engage in enchantment, which arises from, for example, the music itself, the labor of musical practice, and the relations between people and their instruments. Yet, enchantment also exceeds these components and gives way to escape, rupture, and resistance to power structures. Stainova examines these matters as Venezuela falls into violence from economic and governmental crisis. During our discussion we talked about the arguments of the book, the writing and structure of the book, and conducting field research in the circumstances described above. Yana Stainova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned University of Cambridge political theorist John Dunn about what the COVID-19 pandemic reveals about our alarming low levels of collective political judgement. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Listen to this interview of Dashun Wang, Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, and also with Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University. We talk about their new book The Science of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2021) and science, squared. Albert-László Barabási : "There is, of course, the need that you grow professionally. If you're a mathematician, you need to perfect your math. If you're a physicist, you need to do your physics. If you're a biologist, you need to develop your lab techniques. But no matter the magnitude of any discovery you might make, it's not impactful unless you can actually communicate it. And I think that this is where science lacks significantly. I would even go so far as to say, there is a counter-selection: People who are not necessarily the best communicators tend to prefer science because there's the impression that that is not the skill that you need — you just need to be able to solve problems in a meaningful way. But if you're not able to write your ideas down, if you're not able to share your ideas with your community, then it's really as if you didn't have the ideas at all. And you know, I have experienced this in my own career. When I got interested in network science back in 1994/95, for the first few years my papers got rejected one after the other, and not because it wasn't good science (as I would later realize) — no, my papers were getting rejected because I could not communicate to the community at large and to my referees in particular why we should care about networks. And it took me about five years to find the way into people's minds, to learn how they write papers about networks. I needed to learn the hard way about how the community of scientists appreciated and did not appreciate research on networks. And it took me so long because I'd never been offered the opportunity to study the communication of science." Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The continuing crisis in Xinjiang has, thanks to the work of many scholars and reporters, led to greatly increased awareness of the region's history and Uyghur population among publics outside China. But so far less appreciated have been the specific ways in which the targeted regime of Uyghur imprisonment operates, and its creeping emergence over the course of the 2010s. Darren Byler’s Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke UP, 2022) is therefore a vital addition to our understanding of this emergency. Based on long-term fieldwork in Urumqi and elsewhere, this is a chilling and deeply moving portrait of processes of dispossession and ‘reeducation’ whose advance has intensified since the 2014 onset of what the Chinese government calls the ‘People’s War on Terror’. Combining ethnographic nuance with piercing insight into grand colonial processes, Byler both offers an encompassing theory of the technological, economic and political forces which have brought this situation about, and demonstrates its horrifying effects on ordinary people who face an unassailable edifice of state and corporate violence. Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame across Cultures (Princeton UP, 2021) is an expansive look at how culture shapes our emotions—and how we can benefit, as individuals and a society, from less anger and more shame The world today is full of anger. Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel. At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth and the common good. In How to Do Things with Emotions, Owen Flanagan explains that emotions are things we do, and he reminds us that those like anger and shame involve cultural norms and scripts. The ways we do these emotions offer no guarantee of emotionally or ethically balanced lives—but still we can control and change how such emotions are done. Flanagan makes a passionate case for tuning down anger and tuning up shame, and he observes how cultures around the world can show us how to perform these emotions better. Through comparative insights from anthropology, psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy, Flanagan reveals an incredible range in the expression of anger and shame across societies. He establishes that certain types of anger—such as those that lead to revenge or passing hurt on to others—are more destructive than we imagine. Certain forms of shame, on the other hand, can protect positive values, including courage, kindness, and honesty. Flanagan proposes that we should embrace shame as a uniquely socializing emotion, one that can promote moral progress where undisciplined anger cannot. How to Do Things with Emotions celebrates the plasticity of our emotional responses—and our freedom to recalibrate them in the pursuit of more fulfilling lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do societies respond to great demographic change? This question lingers over the contemporary politics of the United States and other countries where persistent immigration has altered populations and may soon produce a majority minority milestone, where the original ethnic or religious majority loses its numerical advantage to one or more foreign-origin minority groups. Until now, most of our knowledge about large-scale responses to demographic change has been based on studies of individual people’s reactions, which tend to be instinctively defensive and intolerant. We know little about why and how these habits are sometimes tempered to promote more successful coexistence. To anticipate and inform future responses to demographic change, Justin Gest's Majority Minority (Oxford UP, 2022) looks to the past. The book entails historical analysis and interview-based fieldwork inside six of the world’s few societies that have already experienced a majority minority transition to understand what factors produce different social outcomes. This research concludes that, rather than yield to people’s prejudices, states hold great power to shape public responses and perceptions of demographic change through political institutions and leaders’ rhetoric. Then, in subsequent survey research, the book identifies novel ways that leaders can leverage nationalist sentiment to reduce the appeal of nativism by framing immigration and demographic change in terms of the national interest. Grounded in rich narratives and novel statistical data, Majority Minority reveals the way this contentious milestone and its accompanying identity politics are ultimately subject to unifying or divisive governance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia (University of Texas Press, 2022), Anadelia Romo argues that visual images were central to the shift from emulating Europe to valuing Brazil’s own local culture, which took place from the late 19th to the early 20th century. The book focuses on Salvador, Bahia, a city in the northeast of Brazil known for its rich Black culture, history of slavery, and tourism industry. Using print culture associated with tourism, Romo shows how representations of Afro-Brazilians engaged ideas of race and nation at the time. The book is filled with photographs and illustrations from Pierre Verger, Carybe, and other visual culture producers, which evidences how the city was rendered. These images featured Afro-Brazilians as central urban figures as well as the festive and religious culture of the city. Yet, in giving less attention to racism, these images masked deeply entrenched racial inequality. Anadelia A. Romo is an Associate Professor of History at Texas State University. She is the author of Brazil’s Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Corruption and ineffectiveness are often expected of public servants in developing countries. However, some groups within these states are distinctly more effective and public oriented than the rest. Why? Patchwork Leviathan (Princeton UP, 2020) explains how a few spectacularly effective state organizations manage to thrive amid general institutional weakness and succeed against impressive odds. Drawing on the Hobbesian image of the state as Leviathan, Erin Metz McDonnell argues that many seemingly weak states actually have a wide range of administrative capacities. Such states are in fact patchworks sewn loosely together from scarce resources into the semblance of unity. McDonnell demonstrates that when the human, cognitive, and material resources of bureaucracy are rare, it is critically important how they are distributed. Too often, scarce bureaucratic resources are scattered throughout the state, yielding little effect. McDonnell reveals how a sufficient concentration of resources clustered within particular pockets of a state can be transformative, enabling distinctively effective organizations to emerge from a sea of ineffectiveness. Patchwork Leviathan offers a comprehensive analysis of successful statecraft in institutionally challenging environments, drawing on cases from contemporary Ghana and Nigeria, mid-twentieth-century Kenya and Brazil, and China in the early twentieth century. Based on nearly two years of pioneering fieldwork in West Africa, this incisive book explains how these highly effective pockets differ from the Western bureaucracies on which so much state and organizational theory is based, providing a fresh answer to why well-funded global capacity-building reforms fail—and how they can do better. Sebastián Rojas Cabal is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at Princeton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2015, Professor Angus Deaton of Princeton University and his wife Professor Anne Case published a paper highlighting the rising mortality rate among middle-aged white non-Hispanic Americans. They described "deaths of despair" which were often related to drug and alcohol poisoning and suicide. They followed up with a widely read book: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton UP, 2020). In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the issue of life expectancy and asks what trends relating to life expectancy are likely to occur in the future. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Housing in the Margins: Negotiating Urban Formalities in Berlin's Allotment Gardens (John Wiley & Sons, 2021) offers a theoretically informed and empirically detailed exploration of unruly housing practices and their governance at the periphery of Berlin. An original empirical contribution to understanding housing precarity in the context of the German housing crisis A novel approach to theorizing the nexus of informality and the state in ways that bridge analytical divides between debates about Northern and Southern states An innovative account of urban development in Berlin that contributes to the limited discussions of urban informality in Euro-American cities A theoretical understanding of the ways in which negotiations and transgressions are embedded in the making of urban order A historically informed narrative of the development of allotment gardens in Berlin with a particular focus on housing practices at these sites. Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit https://annazhelnina.com/ or follow Anna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnnaZhelnina Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Over the last 40 years, the US penal system has grown at an unprecedented rate―five times larger than in the past and grossly out of scale with the rest of the world. In The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America (New York University Press, 2013), criminologists Todd Clear and Natasha Frost argue that America’s move to mass incarceration from the 1960s to the early 2000s was more than just a response to crime or a collection of policies adopted in isolation; it was a grand social experiment. Tracing a wide array of trends related to the criminal justice system, this book charts the rise of penal severity in America and speculates that a variety of force have finally come together to bring this great social experiment to an end. Todd R. Clear is University Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark. He was also the founder of Rutgers University-Newark’s New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) consortium. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Privilege at Play: Class, Race, Gender, and Golf in Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a book about inequalities, social hierarchies, and privilege in contemporary Mexico. Based on ethnographic research conducted in exclusive golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle-class and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, Cerón-Anaya’s book focuses on the class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege. This study makes use of rich qualitative data to demonstrate how social hierarchies are relations reproduced through a multitude of everyday practices. The vast disparities between club members and workers, for example, are built on traditional class indicators, such as wealth, and on more subtle expressions of class, such as notions of fashion, sense of humour, perceptions about competition, and everyday oral interactions. The book incorporates race and gender perspectives into the study of inequalities, illustrating the multilayer condition of privilege. Although Mexicans commonly attributed racial relations a marginal role in the continuation of inequities, the book explains how affluent individuals frequently express racialized ideas to describe and justify the impoverished condition of workers. In doing so, Privilege at Play demonstrates the necessity of considering the role of racialized dynamics when studying social inequalities in Mexico. An analysis of gender relations shows how men maintain a dominant position over their fellow female golfers despite the similar upper-class origins of both male and female golf club members. This book pays particular attention to the spatial dynamics that reinforce social inequalities, arguing that the apparent triviality of space makes it a highly effective way to mark social inequalities and, hence, emphasise privilege. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and the public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In How to Build a Global City: Recognizing the Symbolic Power of a Global Urban Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2022), Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities - Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai - and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyse the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice. The global city is often invoked in theory and practice as an ideal model of development and a logic of internationalization for cities the world over. But the global city also creates deep social polarization and challenges how much local planning can achieve in a world economy. Presenting a unique elite ethnography in Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai, Acuto discusses the global urban discourses, aspirations, and strategies vital to the planning and management of such metropolitan growth. The global city, he shows, is not one single idea, but a complex of ways to imagine a place to be global and aspirations to make it so, often deeply steeped in politics. His resulting book is a call to reconcile proponents and critics of the global city toward a more explicit engagement with the politics of this global urban imagination. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Building effective state institutions before introducing democracy is widely presumed to improve different development outcomes. Conversely, proponents of this "stateness-first" argument anticipate that democratization before state building yields poor development outcomes. In One Road to Riches?: How State Building and Democratization Affect Economic Development (Cambridge UP, 2021), we discuss several strong assumptions that (different versions of) this argument rests upon and critically evaluate the existing evidence base. In extension, we specify various observable implications. We then subject the "stateness-first" argument to multiple tests, focusing on economic growth as an outcome. First, we conduct historical case studies of two countries with different institutional sequencing histories, Denmark and Greece, and assess the "stateness-first" argument (e.g., by using a synthetic control approach). Thereafter, we draw on an extensive global sample of about 180 countries, measured across 1789-2019 and leverage panel regressions, pre-parametric matching, and sequence analysis to test a number of observable implications. Overall, we find little evidence to support the "stateness-first" argument. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton University Press, 2022), Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers tell the story of how a group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews created a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows. Nomi M. Stolzenberg holds the Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. David N. Myers holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pommeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple crises, Afro-Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, ecological ruination, and deepening capitalist extraction. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women create restorative alternatives to dispossession to produce good, meaningful lives for their communities. Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (University of Washington Press, 2021) weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change. In doing so, Lloréns serves as an "ethnographer of home" as she brings to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable. Interviewer Byline: Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Childhood, Religion, and School Injustice (Cork University Press, 2020), Dr. Karl Kitching examines how debates about religion and education internationally often presume the neutrality of secular education governance as an irrefutable public good. However, understandings of secular freedom, rights and neutrality in schooling are continuously contested, and social movements have disrupted the notion that there is a uniform public to be educated. Simultaneously, unjust, neoliberal and majoritarian education policies constantly undermine collective notions of what is good and just. Dr. Kitching presents original empirical research on how religious and secular schools are positioned as competitors for parents’ attention, and shows how inequalities shape parents’ interest in, and access to, both secular and religious schools. Kitching particularly explores how children in urban and rural settings negotiate the joys, pleasures, paradoxes and injustices of schooling and childhood. He outlines ways in which children’s social positions, relationships and encounters with religious and consumer objects inform who they can become, and who and what they value. Drawing on the above research, Childhood, Religion and School Injustice demonstrates the need to engage with each child’s plurality, and to recognise multiple inequalities experienced by families across schools. Given that the mass privatisation and deregulation of schooling favours majority and advantaged social groups, Kitching argues for the becoming public of school systems and localities. In such a process, majoritarian, narrow self-interest is challenged, unchosen obligations to others are recognised, and collective imaginings of what a ‘good’ childhood is, are publicly engaged. Dr. Karl Kitching joined the School of Education, University of Birmingham in June 2020 as a Reader in Education Policy. Previously he was a Senior Lecturer in Education, and Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at University College Cork, Ireland. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Is the finance industry fair? In Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (University of California Press, 2022) Megan Tobias Neely, an assistant professor in the Department of Organisation at Copenhagen Business School, explores this question by asking who is successful, and who is excluded, in hedge funds. Drawing on ethnography and interviews, the book sets out how elite, white, masculinity is the dominant demographic of the industry, along with the importance of patronage relationships in perpetuating inequalities. It also explores the narratives and justifications used to explain the persistence of exclusions, even in the context of an industry that is supposed to reward passion and talent. Closing with a powerful call to transform both the finance industry and the world, the book is essential reading across social science and business, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how inequality persists. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This is an age of crisis. That much we can agree on. But a crisis of what? And how do we get out of it? Many on the right call for tax cuts and deregulation. Others on the left rage against the top 1 percent and demand wholesale economic change. Voices on both sides line up against globalization: restrict trade to protect jobs. In The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It (Harvard UP, 2020), two leading political analysts argue that these views are badly mistaken. Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro focus on what really worries people: not what the rich are making but rather their own insecurity and that of people close to them. Americans are concerned about losing what they have, whether jobs, status, or safe communities. They fear the wolf at the door. The solution is not protectionism or class warfare but a return to the hard work of building coalitions around realistic goals and pursuing them doggedly through the political system. This, Graetz and Shapiro explain, is how earlier reformers achieved meaningful changes, from the abolition of the slave trade to civil rights legislation. The authors make substantial recommendations for increasing jobs, improving wages, protecting families suffering from unemployment, and providing better health insurance and child care, and they guide us through the strategies needed to enact change. These are achievable reforms that would make Americans more secure. The Wolf at the Door is one of those rare books that not only diagnose our problems but also show us how we can address them. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Anita Lama's book Ethnic Inequality in the Northeastern Indian Borderlands (Routledge, 2020) analyses the relationship between symbolic violence, inequality and ethnicity, and addresses the question of unequal integration of small ethnic groups into state structures by using the Limbus of the Northeastern Indian borderlands as a case study. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, the author argues that the ethnicization of the Limbus has been associated with the devaluation of their cultural identity, which was itself first constructed and naturalized by the same process of ethnicization. The book is a pioneering work in terms of the application of Bourdieu's sociology to Northeast India and the theoretical interpretation of ethnic inequality in Northeast India. In addition, the book contributes to the overall understanding of the constant structural identity of symbolic violence and its varying manifestations. Exploring the symbolic dimensions of power relations within state structures, this book will be of interest to a wide readership from various disciplines including area studies, global studies, comparative studies, borderland studies, inequality studies, sociology, anthropology and political science. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For women who have experienced domestic violence, proving that you are a “good victim” is no longer enough. Victims must also show that they are recovering, as if domestic violence were a disease: they must transform from “victims” into “survivors.” Women’s access to life-saving resources may even hinge on “good” performances of survivorhood. Through archival and ethnographic research, Paige L. Sweet reveals how trauma discourses and coerced therapy play central roles in women’s lives as they navigate state programs for assistance. Sweet uses an intersectional lens to uncover how “resilience” and “survivorhood” can become coercive and exclusionary forces in women’s lives. With nuance and compassion, The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath (U California Press, 2021) wrestles with questions about the gendered nature of the welfare state, the unintended consequences of feminist mobilizations for anti-violence programs, and the women who are left behind by the limited forms of citizenship we offer them. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Clint Pulver about his new book I Love It Here: How Great Leaders Create Organizations Their People Never Want to Leave (Page Two, 2021). If you’ve ever completed an annual employee survey by filling-in-the-bubbles, this episode is for you. Clint Pulver’s approach to knowing what employees are thinking (and feeling) has been to pose as if he’s a job seeker at that company or organization so he can catch the “vibe” in an anonymous, candid conversation with his would-be colleagues. Why is the Great Resignation happening? Clint suggests it’s because workers remember how they were treated when Covid-19 first struck (indifferently) and that a Great Rethinking of careers prompted the Great Resignation. Learn as well about Clint’s perspective on managers, and why the ideal type, the mentor manager, is premised on earned trust and being an advocate for those on staff. Clint Pulver is an Emmy award-wining speaker, aka the Undercover Millennial, and also a musician, pilot, and workforce expert whose specialty is employee retention. As a professional drummer, he’s appeared in feature films and on America’s Got Talent. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Inquiries into marital patterns can serve as an effective lens to analyze social structures and material cultures not only on the question of sexuality, but also on the nature of a private citizen’s engagement with state and law. Through ethnographic research in courtrooms, community, and kinship spaces, Rama Srinivasan outlines the transformations in material culture and political economy that have led to renewed negotiations on the institution of marriage in North India, especially in legal spaces. Tracing organically evolving notions of sexual consent and legal subjectivity, Courting Desire: Litigating for Love in North India (Rutgers UP, 2020) underlines how non-normative decisions regarding marriage become possible in a region otherwise known for high instances of honor killings and rigid kinship structures. Aspirations for consensual relationships have led to a tentative attempt to forge relationships that are non-normative but grudgingly approved after state intervention. The book traces this nascent and under-explored trend in the North Indian landscape. Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era (University of California Press, 2022), Natali Valdez examines research trials that enroll pregnant people in the United States and England. These research trials aim to lower the health risks to future generations by intervening in and studying the diet and exercise of pregnant people. As an ethnographer, Valdez enrolled pregnant participants into the studies, met with them to administer the intervention, and observed the processes of the trials. Valdez argues that these studies focus on the pregnant individual without accounting for the social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors that present risk factors to their pregnancies. Structural factors such as racism, pollution, and poverty are not acknowledged, studied, or tracked. And this focus on the individual forecloses addressing issues, such as unstable housing, childcare, immigration, and racism. In the book, Valdez discusses how pregnancy trials have changed very little since the 1950s, the politics of recruiting participants to the trials, and how they handle racial diversity. Valdez asserts that these trials use race as an unstable and inconsistent marker of identifying participants, but they do not address racism, which is an underlying cause of health disparities. In the episode we discuss Valdez’s arguments, ethnographic work, and experience of writing the book. Weighing the Future would be of interest to those in medical anthropology, science and technology studies, as well as women and gender studies. Weighing the Future is the first book of its kind, and it contributes much to our understandings of the increasingly salient issues of maternal health, research, and race. Natali Valdez is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What does it mean to be normal? What even is normal? It’s a strange concept, dependent entirely on context and yet, in spite of this flexibility, it’s an inescapable word. Try as we might, we can’t seem to escape it, even as it seems to collapse under critical scrutiny. So again, what does it mean to be normal? And is normal even something we should try to be? This is an animating question for Phil Christman in his new essay collection How to be Normal: Essays (Belt Publishing, 2022), a collection of previously published writings of the last few years. A sort of companion-piece to his previous book Midwest Futures, these essays are simultaneously fascinated by and skeptical of all the ways normal dominates our public discourse, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic, where a return to normal has loomed over us as the most important achievement we can aim for. Christman tries to get beyond this imperative, and in a series of reflections on masculinity and gender, race and whiteness, religion and faith, culture, irony, love and family he tries get beyond the existential and social imperatives of some presumed normality and think critically about what true flourishing would look like, about the sort of people we’d all actually want to be. Phil Christman teaches writing at the University of Michigan. His first book, Midwest Futures, was a Commonweal Notable Book of 2020, a finalist for a Midwest Independent Book award, and winner of the Independent Publisher Awards' 2020 Bronze Medal for Great Lakes Nonfiction. His writing has appeared in a number of outlets, including The Hedgehog Review, Commonweal, Paste, and Plough Quarterly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke UP, 2021) maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged anti-Black racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, non-White multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to "breathe" that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma's analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in "paradise." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Lorraine Daston, director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin about a number of hugely relevant issues at the intriguing overlap between science and societal values. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“Sketch comedy – more than any other television genre – lays bare the process of identity formation, pokes fun at its contradictions, and invites us to debate its terms.” In Sketch Comedy: Identity, Reflexivity, and American Television (Indiana University Press, 2019), author Nick Marx makes this argument and goes on to systematically prove it through a series of case studies dating from the earliest days of network television through to our post-network era. While sketch is an understudied form of television expression and a genre that rarely garners full-throated network support, it remains one of the most playful, political, and experimental kinds of programming in U.S. television. Close readings of the on-screen representations and off-screen politics of shows including Saturday Night Live, The State, and Key & Peele drive home how vital it is that television scholars and fans recognize the power of sketch in forming what we watch, what we think, and what we believe. In this conversation, Nick Marx discusses this book, his first solo-authored monograph, in conjunction with his prior publications, defines his term “reflexivity flexibility,” gives it up for Mr. Show with Bob and David, and gives it to Pete Davidson. Nick Marx is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. His most recent book (with Matt Sienkiewicz) is That's Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them due out this spring from University of California Press. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Public Books, Literary Hub, The Forward, and Camera Obscura. You can follow her on Twitter @sayanniething. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the future of rational decision making with Professor Olivier Sibony who after 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France, is now at HEC Paris and the Saïd Business School in Oxford University. In 2021 he co-wrote the book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Little, Brown Spark, 2021) with Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman. For those trying to resist the illogicalities of the post truth world, the idea of rational decision-making is perhaps more important than ever. Yet the challenge to rationality comes not only from social media driven myths becoming accepted truths, but also bias and randomness in decision-making. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis (Duke University Press, 2021) collects twenty-one essays that open new paths for doing ethnographic analysis. The contributors —who come from a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions— enliven analysis by refusing to take it as an abstract, disembodied exercise. Rather, they frame it as a concrete mode of action and a creative practice. Encompassing topics ranging from language and the body to technology and modes of collaboration, the essays invite readers to focus on the imaginative work that needs to be performed prior to completing an argument. Whether exchanging objects, showing how to use drawn images as a way to analyze data, or working with smartphones, sound recordings, and social media as analytic devices, the contributors explore the deliberate processes for pursuing experimental thinking through ethnography. Practical and broad in theoretical scope, Experimenting with Ethnography is an indispensable companion for all ethnographers. Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, as well as Film poetics and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This episode we speak with Sophie Chao, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022). Her new book examines the lives of Marind people in West Papua as they are transformed by Indonesian colonialism. These transformations are epitomized in Marind relations to two species of trees: Sago palm, a source of subsistence which is profoundly meaningful to them, and oil palm, an introduced species grown in mono-crop plantations which are destroying Marind lands. While it would be easy to vilify the oil palm as a nefarious symbol of colonialism, Chao chooses the subtler route of describing Marind ambivalence about oil palm, which they see as both the stuff of nightmares and a kidnapped species pressed into use against them by the capitalism and the state. Both pitiful and threatening, oil palm complicate multispecies ethnography, which has not yet fully come to grips with the fact that relationships between species can be violent and exploitative. In this podcast, Sophie talks with Alex Golub about the history of her research, the argument of the book, and changing definitions of 'theory' and 'ethnography' in contemporary anthropology. For more on Sophie and her work, see her website morethanhumanworlds.com Alex Golub is a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implemented, explores business models for broadband providers, surveys the technologies of rural broadband, and offers case studies of broadband use in the rural Midwest. Ali argues that rural broadband policy is both broken and incomplete: broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and incomplete because it fails to recognize the important roles of communities, cooperatives, and local providers in broadband access. For example, existing policies favor large telecommunication companies, crowding out smaller, nimbler providers. Lack of competition drives prices up—rural broadband can cost 37 percent more than urban broadband. The federal government subsidizes rural broadband by approximately $6 billion. Where does the money go? Ali proposes democratizing policy architecture for rural broadband, modeling it after the wiring of rural America for electricity and telephony. Subsidies should be equalized, not just going to big companies. The result would be a multi-stakeholder system, guided by thoughtful public policy and funded by public and private support. Dr. Christopher Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is also the author of Media Localism: The Policies of Place. He is a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and former Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Diversity, Violence, and Recognition: How Recognizing Ethnic Identity Promotes Peace (Oxford UP, 2020), Elisabeth King and Cyrus Samii examine the reasons that governments choose to recognize ethnic identities and the consequences of such choices for peace. The authors introduce a theory on the merits and risks of recognizing ethnic groups in state institutions, pointing to the crucial role of ethnic demographics. Through a global quantitative analysis and in-depth case studies of Burundi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia, they find promise in recognition. Countries that adopt recognition go on to experience less violence, more economic vitality, and more democratic politics, but these effects depend on which ethnic group is in power. King and Samii's findings are important for scholars studying peace, democracy, and development, and practically relevant to policymakers attempting to make these concepts a reality. The authors host continued discussion of the topics raised in the book at their blog https://www.diversity-violence-recognition.com. This interview is with Dr. King, who is Professor of International Education and Politics at New York University. Andrew Miller is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy. Production Note: There may be some issues with the audio on the host side. If it’s not sufficiently high quality let me know and I can propose a re-do with the author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As the US contends with issues of populism and de-democratization, this timely study considers the impacts of digital technologies on the country’s politics and society. In Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life (Bristol University Press, 2021), Dr. Scott Timcke provides a Marxist analysis of the rise of digital media, social networks and technology giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. He looks at the impact of these new platforms and technologies on their users who have made them among the most valuable firms in the world. Offering bold new thinking across data politics and digital and economic sociology, this is a powerful demonstration of how algorithms have come to shape everyday life and political legitimacy in the US and beyond. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In mid-twentieth-century America, women faced a paradox. Thanks to their efforts, World War II production had been robust, and in the peace that followed, more women worked outside the home than ever before, even dominating some professions. Yet the culture, from politicians to corporations to television shows, portrayed the ideal woman as a housewife. Many women happily assumed that role, but a small segment bucked the tide-women who wanted to use their talents differently, in jobs that had always been reserved for men. In They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men (Cynren Press, 2022), author Kathleen Stone meets seven of these unconventional women. In insightful, personalized portraits that span a half-century, Kathleen weaves stories of female ambition, uncovering the families, teachers, mentors, and historical events that led to unexpected paths. What inspired these women, and what can they teach women and girls today? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How should we understand the history of post-war Britain? In The Welfare State Generation Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2022), Eve Worth, a Research Fellow on the Changing Elites project in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford, explores this question by foregrounding the lives of women who grew up, worked, and retired as the first ‘welfare state generation’. The book uses oral history methods to tease out the changing role and changing experiences of the welfare state, along with the role of women in working in and administering that welfare state. It thinks through the sense of autonomy and control, as well as changing perceptions of class identity and feminism, in the lives of women, and thus tells a new story of post-war British history. The book speaks to a huge range of academic audiences and is also essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Britain. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2020), Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas focuses on the parenting practices of Latin American urban elites to analyze how everyday experiences of whiteness, privilege, and inequality reinforce national and hemispheric idioms of anti-corruption and austerity. Ramos-Zayas shows that for upper-class residents in the affluent neighborhoods of Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro) and El Condado (San Juan), parenting is particularly effective in providing moral grounding for neoliberal projects that disadvantage the overwhelmingly poor and racialized people who care for and teach their children. Wealthy parents in Ipanema and El Condado cultivate a liberal cosmopolitanism by living in multicultural city neighborhoods rather than gated suburban communities. Yet as Ramos-Zayas reveals, their parenting strategies, which stress spirituality, empathy, and equality, allow them to preserve and reproduce their white privilege. Defining this moral economy as “parenting empires,” she sheds light on how child-rearing practices permit urban elites in the Global South to sustain and profit from entrenched social and racial hierarchies. Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is Professor of American Studies; Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He can be found on Twitter @arman_c. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), historian Francesca Morgan tracks Americans’ obsession with tracing family ancestry. Morgan sheds light on the evolution of genealogical knowledge from the early republic to the present day. Although our New Books Network conversation concentrates on African Americans, in her text, she looks explicitly at how Anglo-American white, Mormon, Jewish, African American, and Native American people wrestled with locating and documenting their kin and ultimately shaped the practice of genealogy. A Nation of Descendants also explores the transformation of genealogical practices as it becomes commercialized and commodified. N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Gender and sexuality in modern Iran are frequently examined through the prisms of nationalist symbols and religious discourse. In Revolutionary Bodies: Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran (Bloomsbury, 2020), Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi, Associate Professor at the University of Oslo, Norway, takes a different approach, by interrogating how normative ideas of women's bodies in state, religious, and public health discourses have resulted in the female body being deemed as immodest and taboo. Through a diverse blend of sources, including a popular women's journal, a red-light district, cases studies of temporary marriages, iconic public statues, and an HIV-AIDS advocacy organization in Tehran, Batmanghelichi argues that conceptions of gender and sexuality have been mediated in public discourse and experienced and modified by women themselves over the past thirty years of the Islamic Republic. In our conversation we discuss the regulation of gender & sexuality through bodily technologies, tensions between state notions of modernization and Islamization, how Iranian women were visualized in the pages of magazines, a micro-history of the Red-light district in Tehran, organizing sex work within Islamic frameworks through temporary marriages, reinforcing “Islamic” public morality through the regulation of public space, the disfiguring of female mannequins, the challenges of ethnographic research and learning to ask new questions, and notions of gendered work in contemporary Iran. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than “heritage.” In a creative inversion, Elayne Oliphant asks in The Privilege of Being Banal what, exactly, is hiding in plain sight? Could the banality of Catholicism actually be a kind of hidden power? Exploring the violent histories and alternate trajectories effaced through this banal backgrounding of a crucial aspect of French history and culture, this richly textured ethnography lays bare the profound nostalgia that undergirds Catholicism’s circulation in nonreligious sites such as museums, corporate spaces, and political debates. Oliphant’s aim is to unravel the contradictions of religion and secularism and, in the process, show how aesthetics and politics come together in contemporary France to foster the kind of banality that Hannah Arendt warned against: the incapacity to take on another person’s experience of the world. A creative meditation on the power of the taken-for-granted, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a landmark study of religion, aesthetics, and public space. Elayne Oliphant is an assistant professor of anthropology and religious studies at New York University. Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He can be found on Twitter @arman_c. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Scholars Heather Hlavka (Marquette University) and Sameena Mulla (Emory University) have written a new book that examines and interrogates the place and space of the courtroom, the use of expertise, especially scientific expertise, in the adjudicative process, and how this all intersects with race and gender in cases of sexual assault. Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication (NYU Press, 2021) is the result of a long-term ethnographic study of sexual assault cases in the city of Milwaukee, and how those cases, as they come through the legal system, re-animate cultural narratives and re-inscribe the authority associated with law courts and the legal system itself. A key focus of the research was in examining the ways in which medicolegal and forensic evidence was used in the trial process, and how the reliance on these scientific resources and those who narrate and explain these dimensions of evidence and information are often set in contrast with the experiences of the victim-witnesses in sexual assault cases. Hlavka and Mulla, and their team of students and research assistants, spent more than five years in the Milwaukee County Courthouse, sitting in at all aspects of the trial process, from jury selection to the trial itself, and more. During this time, all of the researchers observed the dynamics around how victims and victim-witnesses were assessed based on their class, race, virtue, gender, and how their very bodies were re-visited during the course of the evidence presentment. This analysis was seen in contrast to the approach to “expert” testimony in the form of medical professionals, forensic professionals, police, and legal professionals. Key points that come through the research, and thus through the book, note how the racialize and gendered narratives are clear within the interactions in the courtroom, but these dynamics do not generally come through in trial transcripts, opinions, or the judicial record of a case. Thus, the deeply lopsided racial dynamics of the courtroom are not clear in the written record but are starkly clear within the walls of the courtroom. Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication is a multi-layered, multi-method examination of how the judicial system, in context of sexual assault adjudication, does not, in fact, achieve what might be a just outcome in many situations. The adversarial legal system in the United States does not generally assist the communities that are often broken by this very process. Hlavka and Mulla also suggest that the investment in and use of forensic and scientific evidence has not, in fact, shifted the outcomes in these kinds of cases. Bodies in Evidence will be of interest to a great many readers, from a host of different perspectives and disciplines. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Knowing Women: Same-sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a study of same-sex desire in West Africa, which explores the lives and friendships of working-class women in southern Ghana who are intimately involved with each other. Based on in-depth research of the life histories of women in the region, Serena O. Dankwa highlights the vibrancy of everyday same-sex intimacies that have not been captured in a globally pervasive language of sexual identity. Paying close attention to the women's practices of self-reference, Dankwa refers to them as 'knowing women' in a way that both distinguishes them from, and relates them to categories such as lesbian or supi, a Ghanaian term for female friend. In doing so, this study is not only a significant contribution to the field of global queer studies in which both women and Africa have been underrepresented, but a starting point to further theorize the relation between gender, kinship, and sexuality that is key to queer, feminist, and postcolonial theories. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Serena O. Dankwa is an Associate Researcher in the Institute of Social Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies at the University of Bern and is affiliated with Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. She previously held the Sarah Pettit Fellowship at Yale University and worked as a music journalist with Swiss Radio and Television. Today, she advocates for the rights and dignity of migrant sex workers and women of color in Switzerland. She is a co-founder of the Black women’s network Bla*Sh and a co-editor of the book Racial Profiling: Struktureller Rassismus und antirassistischer Widerstand (2019). Thomas Zuber is a PhD Candidate in History at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Based on longitudinal ethnographic work on migration between the United States and Taiwan, Time and Migration: How Long-Term Taiwanese Migrants Negotiate Later Life (Cornell UP, 2021) interrogates how long-term immigrants negotiate their needs as they grow older and how transnational migration shapes later-life transitions. Ken Chih-Yan Sun develops the concept of a “temporalities of migration” to examine the interaction between space, place, and time. He demonstrates how long-term settlement in the United States, coupled with changing homeland contexts, has inspired aging immigrants and returnees to rethink their sense of social belonging, remake intimate relations, and negotiate opportunities and constraints across borders. The interplay between migration and time shapes the ways aging migrant populations reassess and reconstruct relationships with their children, spouses, grandchildren, community members, and home, as well as host societies. Aging, Sun argues, is a global issue and must be reconsidered in a cross-border environment. Ken Chih-Yan Sun is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova University. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Lindsey Pollak about her book Recalculating: Navigate Your Career Through the Changing World of Work (HarperCollins, 2021). How can envy be a positive catalyst for changing your career? Why is curiosity so vital? (Hint: it’s been said that “Learning is the new pension.”) These are among the topics, and emotions, covered in this episode that runs the gamut from getting hired to managing both your boss and your personal brand. Along the way, this episode delves into what kinds of emotions one might feel at every stage in one’s career. While fear is likely during the job search, and a mixture of happiness, pride and relief on starting the new job, it’s important as well not to let shame keep you from getting the credit you deserve for a job well done. After all, as Pollak notes performance is table stakes, and vital to success. But so is burnishing your image and getting exposure. A job well done that isn’t noticed won’t advance your fortunes. Lindsey Pollak is the New York Times bestselling author of three previous books and was named to the 2020 Thinkers50 Radar List of global management thinkers. Her consulting and keynote speaking clients have included over 250 various corporations, law firms, and universities. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can new faculty find success in academia and what can universities do to support them? In The Empowered Professor: Breaking the Unspoken Codes of Inequity in Academia (Teachers College Press, 2021), the author demonstrates how a coaching-focused stance toward faculty development can improve equitable conditions within the university and contribute to faculty retention and well-being. For faculty and graduate students, this book emphasizes the skills needed to be a successful academic with a focus on lifespan learning. For universities, this book articulates how institutions can implement an equity-driven plan for faculty development. In the first section, Mitra investigates the structures that can contribute to inequities, spotlighting the unspoken assumptions and lack of clarity of institutional processes. In the second section, she interweaves the building blocks needed for faculty success (agency, belonging, and competence) with the traditional academic expectations of research, teaching, and service. With engaging vignettes and extended examples of faculty experiences, The Empowered Professor centers on the space in which individuals can find success within academic settings while maintaining their integrity. Dana Mitra is a professor of education policy studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her books include Civic Education in the Elementary Grades: Promoting Student Engagement in an Era of Accountability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It is slowly becoming clear that we are heading towards a deep ecological catastrophe. Our societies carbon footprint and its impact have been known for some time, and already we are starting to see the effects in terms of melting ice, warming oceans and more frequent extreme weather. This will contribute to food and water shortages, political unrest and migration crises that we are ill-prepared for. In a context such as this, it has become urgent that we rethink the natural world and our relationship to it, but knowing where to start is difficult. Fortunately, John Bellamy Foster has stepped forward with just such a book. Picking up where his book Marx’s Ecology left off 20 years ago, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2021) starts with the funerals of both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, kicking off a story of the many people who worked in their combined shadow. Foster guides us through a century of scientific development in the relatively new field of ecology, showing how many of it’s founders were influenced by the socialist critique of capitalism, and vice-versa. What readers will find are a collection of texts and figures who understood that an economic model that prioritizes profit above all else will eventually have to start asking more of the earth than it can afford to give, incurring long and deep debts that we are now starting to pay. On the one hand, many ecologists have found Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism helpful for thinking dynamically about nature and scientific practice. On the other hand, ecologists have offered socialists a number of theoretical concepts and frameworks for their own thinking. In between are a number of other characters who make their own contributions to discussions on economics and nature, as well as literature, history, epidemiology, race, oppression and emancipation. The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives. It reveals a hidden history of the relationship between science and sociology, between economics and nature and gives us characters who were able to see the seeds we were sowing, but also an unyielding faith that it doesn’t have to be this way, that a more sustainable world is possible. John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of a number of books, including Marx’s Ecology. With The Return of Nature he won the 2020 Isaac Deutscher Memorial prize. He is also the editor and a frequent contributor at the socialist periodical The Monthly Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can you integrate archaeology and photography with ethnographic research to understand the experiences of clandestine migrants? Today we talk with Jason de Leon, professor of Anthropology and Chicano/a Studies at UCLA, Director of the Undocumented Migration Project. Jason talks about how he drew on a mixture of ethnography, interviews, forensics, and archaeology of the objects left behind by migrants to write The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (U California Press, 2015). He then explains how he shifted to studying Honduran human smugglers for Soldiers and Kings, his current project. Finally, he talks about how he integrated photography into this more recent research, reflecting on the potential for integrating still images into ethnographic work. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Nothing has had a more profound impact on the lives of humans than economic growth. Thus, understanding economic growth is, on its own, understanding the essence of humanity. This is the objective of The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality (Dutton, 2022) by Oded Galor. A fascinating book that explores the universal forces behind economic growth and prosperity. With a marvelous exhibition of historical context, empirical evidence, and theoretical insights, Galor provides a comprehensive explanation of how humanity moved from stagnation to growth. In addition, building on his lifetime's investigation, Galor provides in The Journey of Humanity a brilliant and extensive explanation of why some societies have been more successful than others in improving the wellbeing of their populations. This explanation, full of historical and anthropological color, is deeply rooted in a carefully crafted exploration of the institutional, cultural, and environmental context that different societies across the globe have been exposed over the centuries. Overall, Galor’s book is a unique and masterful piece that everyone who is interested in the deep roots of the modern world must read. Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Across the global South, poor women’s lives are embedded in their social relationships and governed not just by formal institutions – rules that exist on paper – but by informal norms and practices. Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh (Rutgers UP, 2021) takes the reader to Bangladesh, a country that has risen from the ashes of war, natural disaster, and decades of resource drain to become a development miracle. The book argues that grassroots women’s mobilization programs can empower women to challenge informal institutions when such programs are anti-oppression, deliberative, and embedded in their communities. Qayum dives into the work of Polli Shomaj (PS), a program of the development organization BRAC to show how the women of PS negotiate with state and society to alter the rules of the game, changing how poor people access resources including safety nets, the law, and governing spaces. These women create a complex and rapidly transforming world where multiple overlapping institutions exist – formal and informal, old and new, desirable and undesirable. In actively challenging power structures around them, these women defy stereotypes of poor Muslim women as backward, subservient, oppressed, and in need of saving. Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Skill—specifically the distinction between the “skilled” and “unskilled”—is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton UP, 2021) shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Natasha Iskander takes readers into Qatar’s booming construction industry in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, and through her unprecedented look at the experiences of migrant workers, she reveals that skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life. Through unique access to construction sites in Doha, in-depth research, and interviews, Iskander explores how migrants are recruited, trained, and used. Despite their acquisition of advanced technical skills, workers are commonly described as unskilled and disparaged as “unproductive,” “poor quality,” or simply “bodies.” She demonstrates that skill categories adjudicate personhood, creating hierarchies that shape working conditions, labor recruitment, migration policy, the design of urban spaces, and the reach of global industries. Iskander also discusses how skill distinctions define industry responses to global warming, with employers recruiting migrants from climate-damaged places at lower wages and exposing these workers to Qatar’s extreme heat. She considers how the dehumanizing politics of skill might be undone through tactical solidarity and creative practices. With implications for immigrant rights and migrant working conditions throughout the world, Does Skill Make Us Human? examines the factors that justify and amplify inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Half of Faith: American Muslim Marriage and Divorce in the Twenty-First Century, readers find a wide range of texts on Muslim Americans’ experiences with questions of marriage and divorce in an effort to do what is deemed Islamically acceptable. This exciting reader, which brings together previously published as well as new content, includes the broad themes of wedding, marriage, and divorce in the Muslim American experience. More specifically, the reader aims to explore the diversity in Islamic legal and theoretical thought, marriage and divorce practices, marriage contracts, wedding customs, and related issues. In today’s very vibrant and engaging conversation, I speak with Kecia Ali, the editor of the reader, in addition to several contributors, who are Zahra Ayubi, Aminah McCloud, and Asifa Quraishi-Landes. Each scholar speaks on her contribution to the volume—Ayubi on divorce, Quraishi-Landes on marriage contracts and Islamic law, and McCloud on African American Muslim women as they transition to Islam, get married, and face issues of male guardianship. Further, we discuss why an Islamic marriage even matters to Muslims, and Kecia and Asifa share their views on fundamental issues with the Islamic marriage contract and whether, as Asifa suggests, it’s possible to re-imagine the Islamic marriage contract as a partnership contract rather than a sales contract. The book, which is available for free, with a searchable PDF, through Boston University’s website, will be of interest to scholars and researchers interested in questions of marriage and divorce generally but more specifically in the context of Islam; individual practicing Muslims who seek resources on nikaah contracts, Islamic law, and divorce; Muslim and other religious leaders who serve Muslim communities; and undergraduate and graduate students in women’s and gender studies as well as religious studies courses. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She is currently working on a book project on Muslim women's marriage to non-Muslims in Islam. Shehnaz runs a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy?! (WTP?!), where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy and uproot it from Islam (ambitious, she knows). She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (Oxford UP, 2022) attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is the relationship between modern states and disasters? Disasters are commonly understood as exceptional occurrences that ruin societies and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific control called 'disaster management.' States and the international institutions perform disaster management to protect society. The book challenges this traditional narrative. It interprets 'disaster management' as a historical struggle to conservate the existence and experience of catastrophes and produce idealized authorities capable of protecting society from uncertainty. It examines the emergence of this struggle in the eighteenth century and reveals how rulers and experts struggling to master God, Nature, and each other, inaugurated modern meanings of risk, normalcy, power, and responsibility. By recovering this history of disaster management, the book reveals underlying legal structures and political-economies that smuggle the unspoken costs of modernity inside the rationalized representation of past catastrophes and future risks. Catastrophes, put bluntly, are not occurrences. They are inventions. Even in their most destructive forms, catastrophes are the stigmata through which the modern state renews itself. The book develops this argument by examining the Marseille plague (1720), the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the Bengal famine (1770), and showing how eighteenth-century beliefs reverberate in structure and policies of 'global' disaster management today. It concludes that Climate Change and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends onreckoning with this past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We speak with Richard Detweiler about his new book The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry and Accomplishment (MIT Press, 2021). This multi-year project, which entailed interviews with a national sample of over 1,000 college graduates aged 25-64, provides convincing evidence of the benefits the liberal arts in enabling individuals to lead more fulfilling lives and successful careers. He uses an innovative definition of the liberal arts which focuses on the distinctive: 1) purpose, 2) context, and 3) content of a liberal arts education, measuring the frequency and intensity of these elements across different higher education institutions. He also shares insights from his tenure as President of Hartwick College and the head of the Great Lakes College Association. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Andrew Rudalevige, the Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government at Bowdoin College, has a new book that examines the processes that transpires in the generation of executive orders—noting that the process itself is not simply done with the stroke of a pen. Rudalevige, an expert on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Executive Branch, started to pursue this particular research project as a result of some archival work he was doing at OMB. Because executive orders go through OMB, Rudalevige came upon decades of files of different proposed executive orders in his work on the Office of Management and Budget; and what seemed like a kind of side project became an extensive, quantitative, and qualitative study of the process that gives birth to an executive order or that may eventually kill an executive order. By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power (Princeton UP, 2021) traces the process that brings together different voices from within the Executive Branch on the substance that becomes the executive order itself. The research is also situated in the context of a more and more gridlocked Congress, with one president after another finding themselves frustrated in their efforts to implement their agendas. One in five executive orders are not issued. Those that are not issued are generally not random. But the process of advocating or pushing back on a potential order is complex and often involves a host of different agencies bargaining with teach other and with OMB and the president. This window into the process gives us significant insight into bureaucratic politics at the national level. This is also a reflection on how the White House and the bureaucracy work—can a president get something done from his perch in the Oval Office, or do particular agencies have jurisdiction and the capacity to move policy and ideas forward within the scope of established law and regulation? This is all explored in By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power, which is a fascinating look behind the scenes at how presidents and the bureaucracy interact. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Speaking Truths: Young Adults, Identity, and Spoken Word Activism (Rutgers UP, 2022), sociologist Valerie Chepp goes behind-the-scenes to uncover how spoken word poetry--and young people's participation in it--contributes to a broader understanding of contemporary social justice activism, including this generation's attention to the political importance of identity, well-being, and love. Drawing upon detailed observations and in-depth interviews, Chepp tells the story of a diverse group of young adults from Washington, D.C. who use spoken word to create a more just and equitable world. Outlining the contours of this approach, she interrogates spoken word activism's emphasis on personal storytelling and "truth," the strategic uses of aesthetics and emotions to politically engage across difference, and the significance of healing in sustainable movements for change. Weaving together their poetry and personally told stories, Chepp shows how poets tap into the beautiful, emotional, personal, and therapeutic features of spoken word to empathically connect with others, advance intersectional and systemic analyses of inequality, and make social justice messages relatable across a diverse public. By creating allies and forging connections based on friendship, professional commitments, lived experiences, emotions, artistic kinship, and political views, this activist approach is highly integrated into the everyday lives of its practitioners, online and face-to-face. Chepp argues that spoken word activism is a product of, and a call to action against, the neoliberal era in which poets have come of age, characterized by widening structural inequalities and increasing economic and social vulnerability. She illustrates how this deeply personal and intimate activist approach borrows from, builds upon, and diverges from previous social movement paradigms. Spotlighting the complexity and mutual influence of modern-day activism and the world in which it unfolds, Speaking Truths contributes to our understanding of contemporary social change-making and how neoliberalism has shaped this political generation's experiences with social injustice. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The digital revolution has not only transformed multiple aspects of social life – it also shakes sociological theory, transforming the most basic assumptions that have underlain it. In this timely book, Ori Schwarz explores the main challenges digitalization poses to different strands of sociological theory and offers paths to adapt them to new social realities in his book Sociological Theory for Digital Society: The Codes that Bind Us Together, published by Polity Press in 2021. What would symbolic interactionism look like in a world where interaction no longer takes place within bounded situations and is constantly documented as durable digital objects? How should we understand new digitally mediated forms of human association that bind our actions and lives together but have little in common with old-time 'collectives'; and why are they not simply ‘social networks’? How does social capital transform when it is materialized in a digital form, and how does it remold power structures? What happens to our conceptualization of power when faced with the emergence of new forms of algorithmic power? And what happens when labor departs from work? By posing and answering such fascinating questions, and offering critical tools for both students and scholars of social theory and digital society to engage with them, this thought-provoking book draws the outline of future sociological theory for our digital society. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern. China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere. In Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise (U Chicago Press, 2020), Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike. Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with agricultural policy, the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition. Rozelle's papers have been published in top academic journals, including Science, Nature, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature. He is fluent in Chinese and has established a research program in which he has close working ties with several Chinese collaborators and policymakers. For the past 20 years, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy; a co-director of the University of California's Agricultural Issues Center; and a member of Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Center on Food Security and the Environment. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focuses on China’s political economy and governance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For this episode, I met historian and writer Dr. Lydia Pyne. She is author of Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network (Reaktion, 2021).. Postcards is a global exploration of postcards as artifacts at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. Postcards are usually associated with banal holiday pleasantries, but they are made possible by sophisticated industries and institutions, from printers to postal services. When they were invented, postcards established what is now taken for granted in modern times: the ability to send and receive messages around the world easily and inexpensively. Fundamentally they are about creating personal connections—links between people, places, and beliefs. Lydia Pyne examines postcards on a global scale, to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. In doing so, she shows how postcards were the first global social network and also, here in the twenty-first century, how postcards are not yet extinct. Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Africa is often portrayed in terms of dictators, starvation, corruption, tribalism, war, disease, poverty and crime. In this podcast Professor James A. Robinson of the University of Chicago who is co-author (with Daron Acemoglu of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Currency, 2013) explains why those stereotypes are often wrong and why he believes Africa has a brighter future than many think. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Seamlessly blending field research, on-the-ground interviews, and social theory, Asef Bayat shows how the practice of everyday life in Egypt and Tunisia was fundamentally altered by revolutionary activity. Women, young adults, the very poor, and members of the underground queer community can credit the Arab Spring with steps toward equality and freedom. In Bayat’s telling in Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Harvard University Press, 2021), the Arab Spring emerges as a paradigmatic case of “refolution”―revolution that engenders reform rather than radical change. Both a detailed study and a moving appeal, Revolutionary Life identifies the social gains that were won through resistance. Mehdi Sanglaji: Political Science; Middle East Studies; working on a PhD thesis, allegedly! Political violence, terrorism, and all in between. Find me at mehdi.haydari@gmail.com or @MehdiSanglaji on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In her new book, Haunted Homes (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Dahlia Sweitzer explores the ways in which the trope of the haunted house in horror signifies the anxieties, traumas, and terrors of suburban American life. Comprehensive and readable, this slim volume establishes beyond a doubt that in movies and television series from The Conjuring to The Haunting of Hill House, "home is where the horror is." Haunted Homes is unique in its focus on what Schweitzer calls the "suburban gothic." Scholarly studies of the supernatural in horror cinema tend to be decidedly ahistorical, suggesting that contemporary films about haunted houses tap into the same fear of the uncanny evoked by eighteenth and nineteenth-century works of European gothic literature. Schweitzer, however, argues that these films are distinctly modern and American, framing them as a dark reflection of suburban life since the 1950s and particularly in the decade following the economic collapse of 2008. Schweitzer undertakes an in-depth examination of the history of suburbia in the United States as well, offering a detailed and informed account of its origins and development. This is a fresh and original approach. It opens up a new way of seeing haunted homes in recent horror cinema and television, setting her book apart from others on the topic. This is consequently a book that will appeal to a wide range of readers, from film scholars and students to fans of the horror genre. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The science on race is clear. Common categories like “Black,” “white,” and “Asian” do not represent genetic differences among groups. But if race is a pernicious fiction according to natural science, it is all too significant in the day-to-day lives of racialized people across the globe. Inequities in health, wealth, and an array of other life outcomes cannot be explained without referring to “race”—but their true source is racism. What do we need to know about the pseudoscience of race in order to fight racism and fulfill human potential? In Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (Columbia UP, 2021), two distinguished scientists tackle common misconceptions about race, human biology, and racism. Using an accessible question-and-answer format, Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Alan H. Goodman explain the differences between social and biological notions of race. Although there are many meaningful human genetic variations, they do not map onto socially constructed racial categories. Drawing on evidence from both natural and social science, Graves and Goodman dismantle the malignant myth of gene-based racial difference. They demonstrate that the ideology of racism created races and show why the inequalities ascribed to race are in fact caused by racism. Graves and Goodman provide persuasive and timely answers to key questions about race and racism for a moment when people of all backgrounds are striving for social justice. Racism, Not Race shows readers why antiracist principles are both just and backed by sound science. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In his book, National Identity in Serbia: Vojvodina and a Multiethnic Society between the Balkans and Central Europe (I.B. Tauris, 2019), Vassilis Petsinis analyses the evolution of Vojvodina's identity over time and the unique pattern of ethnic relations in the province. Although approximately 25 ethnic communities live in Vojvodina, it is by no means a divided society. Intercultural cohabitation has been a living reality in the province for centuries and this largely accounts for the lack of ethnic conflict. Vassilis Petsinis explores Vojvodina's intercultural society and shows how this has facilitated the introduction of flexible and regionalized legal models for the management of ethnic relations in Serbia since the 2000s. He also discusses recent developments in the region, most notably the arrival of refugees from Syria and Iraq, and measures the impact that these changes have had on social stability and inter-group relations in the province. Vassilis Petsinis is a Senior Research Fellow in Comparative Politics at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies (University of Tartu, Estonia) within the frame of the Horizon 2020 POPREBEL international project. He is a political scientist with an expertise in European Politics and Ethnopolitics specializing in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Cartography has a troubled history as a technology of power. The production and distribution of maps, often understood to be ideological representations that support the interests of their developers, have served as tools of colonization, imperialism, and global development, advancing Western notions of space and place at the expense of indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities. But over the past two decades, these marginalized populations have increasingly turned to participatory mapping practices to develop new, innovative maps that reassert local concepts of place and space, thus harnessing the power of cartography in their struggles for justice. In twelve essays written by community leaders, activists, and scholars, Radical Cartographies: Participatory Mapmaking from Latin America (U Texas Press, 2020) critically explores the ways in which participatory mapping is being used by indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other traditional groups in Latin America to preserve their territories and cultural identities. Through this pioneering volume, Bjørn Sletto, Joe Bryan, Alfredo Wagner, and Charles Hale fundamentally rethink the role of maps, with significant lessons for marginalized communities across the globe, and launch a unique dialogue about the radical edge of a new social cartography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
I spoke with Prof Julie Froud and Prof Karel Williams about Foundational Economy: The Infrastructure of Everyday Life (Manchester University Press, 2022). This book originally published in English in 2018 synthesises the collective’s work of the previous five years in developing the foundational approach. It should now be read in conjunction with our The Foundational Approach (2020) guide to current thinking. But the book remains an important source for engaged citizens, active practitioners, and critical academics beyond who want to know more about the foundational economy concept and its relevance to the politics of progressive reform. The book is relevant to all of Europe and beyond and is available as an accessibly priced paperback in four languages. MUP publishes in English with German and Italian editions available from Suhrkamp and Einaudi. The Portuguese edition was published by Actual Editora and Dutch and Turkish translations are pending. Before you buy the book, do read our introductory chapter on this website which explains the argument of the book here. The Foundational Economy book explains how the material utilities and providential services matter economically and politically because they are the collectively consumed infrastructure of everyday life, the basis of well-being, and should be citizens' rights. The arguments about citizenship in chapter four of the book were then an important new development in foundational thinking which leads towards the edited 2020 book on The Foundational Economy and Citizenship. The Foundational Economy book also presents the first history of the foundational economy which began heroically and ends in degradation. In the century after 1880 national and local state action built up the supply of foundational services right across Europe and North America. Since 1980 their systems of provision have been undermined by a malign and neglectful state. Drawing on earlier research by collective members, the book shows how privatisation, outsourcing and market choice import the unsuitable business models of financialized public companies and private equity. Building on this basis, the collective now distinguishes FE1.0 and FE 2.0 in thinking through the Challenge of Foundational Renewal (2020) The final chapter of the book takes up the political challenge of thinking about how we can have a better future. It does not recommend specific policies but proposes broad principles for re-building the foundational which could mobilise old and new social actors in broad political alliances; ask the citizens what they want; reinvent taxation; lean on intermediary institutions; and do not assume the state is benign and competent. This opens the way to the collective’s subsequent arguments in the When Systems Fail (2020) report about the incapacity of the post administrative state and the need for a careful practice of policy to transition towards transformation. A great new book that deserves a wide readership. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Singing the same song is a central part of the worship practice for members for the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Church in Lagos, Nigeria. Vicki L. Brennan reveals that by singing together, church members create one spiritual mind and become unified around a shared set of values. She follows parishioners as they attend choir rehearsals, use musical media—hymn books and cassette tapes—and perform the music and rituals that connect them through religious experience. Brennan asserts that church members believe that singing together makes them part of a larger imagined social collective, one that allows them to achieve health, joy, happiness, wealth, and success in an ethical way. Brennan discovers how this particular Yoruba church articulates and embodies the moral attitudes necessary to be a good Christian in Nigeria today. Singing Yoruba Christianity: Music, Media, and Morality (Indiana UP, 2018) makes an important contribution to understanding the complex religious landscape of Lagos, which includes various Christian demonstrations and Muslim groups. Its firm grounding in ethnomusicology and media theory will be of interest to any who wish to better understand the intersection of music and religious experience. Dr. Vicki Brennan is a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist who is an Associate Professor in the Religion Department and Director of the African Studies Program at the University of Vermont. Sara Katz is a Postdoctoral Associate in the History Department at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Stef Aupers is professor of media culture in the Institute for Media Studies at the University of KU Leuven in the Netherlands. As a cultural sociologist, he studies the role of cultural meaning in the production, textual representation and consumption of media. Stef has published widely in international journals on the topics of religion, modern myth, conspiracy theories and the way these cultures are mediatized. We discuss the fascinating phenomenon of conspirituality, which refers to the overlap between conspiracies and spirituality, something we have seen explode with Covid, and now the attack by Russia on the Ukraine. In this conversation we dive into conspiracies, the spiritual turn, the sacralisation of the self, the New Age, Covid, and more. As always, these conversations bridge the gap between the intelligent practitioner and the academic expert and there is something for everybody in this rich conversation. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Astrology in India: A Sociological Inquiry (Taylor & Francis, 2021) critically examines the larger world of astrology in India, its ubiquity and relationship with religion, caste, gender, class, and aspirations. It looks at astrology through an empirical and phenomenological lens, analyzing different meanings and questions associated with it. How do people see astrology—as magic, science, religion, or a knowledge system? The volume analyses the role of astrology in religious and social ceremonies; the interplay of faith and fear; beliefs, practices, mysticism, and skepticism in middle-class households; and gendered negotiations in everyday life. It also delves into how astrology has emerged as a livelihood and an industry, the continued fascination with it even in an era of technological advancement, and its domination of the vernacular media. Insightful and highly comprehensive, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of sociology, political sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, and urban sociology. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we each do our part to reduce inequality and help the poor, not just in our own communities but around the world? As a devout Christian, Bruce Wydick views helping the poor as an essential requirement of his faith. But is it enough just to give if it may not even be helping? We all have limited time and resources, so where do we allocate them? As an economist, Professor Wydick has the tools to figure out what works, and what works best. As he explains in Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving Our Global Neighbor (Thomas Nelson, 2019), he wants to not just be a Good Samaritan, but a Shrewd Samaritan. Regardless of the foundations of your own ethical system, this book can help you understand not just the latest research findings from development economics, but also all the different ways you can personally contribute to reducing global inequality. Bruce Wydick is a professor at the University of San Francisco who has conducted research on global development for over twenty-five years, publishing widely in top academic journals. In addition to his academic work, he spends his summers in Guatemala working with a non-profit development organization he founded. He also founded the University of San Francisco’s unique Master’s program in International and Development Economics, which for two decades has trained students from all around the world to be shrewd Samaritans. This program provides students with the international field experience to have a practical understanding of the problems faced by the poor, as well as the quantitative econometric tools needed to shrewdly evaluate how best to help them. Links to his research and other writings can be found here and you can follow him on Twitter here. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? In You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences (Princeton University Press, 2020), Daniel Chirot examines a wide range of right- and left-wing revolutions around the world--from the late eighteenth century to today--to provide important new answers to these critical questions. From the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the twentieth, Chirot finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia. From Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Algeria, Angola, Haiti, and Romania, You Say You Want a Revolution? explains why violent radicalism, corruption, and the betrayal of ideals won in so many crucial cases, why it didn't in some others--and what the long-term prospects for major social change are if liberals can't deliver needed reforms. Daniel Chirot is the Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe (Stanford University Press, 2020) offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of financial expansion and its political impacts in Eastern Europe. Following workers, managers, and investors in the Macedonian construction sector, Fabio Mattioli shows how financialization can empower authoritarian regimes—not by making money accessible to everyone, but by allowing a small group of oligarchs to monopolize access to international credit and promote a cascade of exploitative domestic debt relations. The landscape of failed deals and unrealizable dreams that is captured in this book portrays finance not as a singular, technical process. Instead, Matttioli argues that finance is a set of political and economic relations that entangles citizens, Eurocrats, and workers in tense paradoxes. Mattioli traces the origins of illiquidity in the reorganization of the European project and the postsocialist perversion of socialist financial practices—a dangerous mix that hid the Macedonian regime's weakness behind a façade of urban renewal and, for a decade, made it seem omnipresent and invincible. Dark Finance chronicles how, one bad deal at a time, Macedonia's authoritarian regime rode a wave of financial expansion that deepened its reach into Macedonian society, only to discover that its domination, like all speculative bubbles, was teetering on the verge of collapse. Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Producing Islam(s) in Canada: On Knowledge, Positionality and Politics (University of Toronto, 2021), Amélie Barras, Jennifer Selby, and Melanie Adrian bring together twenty-nine interdisciplinary scholars of all levels to engage and reflect on how Islam and Muslims in Canada has been studied from the 1970s to the present moment. Originating from a workshop, the contributors were asked to reflect on diverse approaches to the study of Islam and Muslims in Canada, especially as it centers gender, race, religion, class, and much more. For instance, the chapters include discussions on politics of research funding, hypervisibility of studies of the hijab, surveillance by the state, and issues integration and assimilation in the Muslim diaspora. The collection also includes wonderful interviews with senior scholars in the field, such as with Jasmin Zine, Karim H. Karim and Katherine Bullock. This edited volume is an important contribution to the field of Islam and Muslim studies in Canada, as it provides a necessary introspective survey of the state of the field, while attending to regional diversities of Muslim communities and spotlighting a range of disciplinary approaches to the study. The scholarship here will be of interest to any scholar and student who is thinking of Muslim presence in the global west, while chapters that attend to methodological reflections, such as on positionality, will be particularly insightful for those who reflect on methods and will be great pedagogical tools to utilize in methods courses. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Police use of advanced data collection and analysis technologies—or, "big data policing"—continues to receive both positive and negative attention through media, activism, and politics. While some high-profile cases illustrate its potential to hasten investigations or even solve previously unsolved crimes, and others showcase risks to individual liberties and vulnerable communities, we know surprisingly little about how and why police departments actually adopt and deploy these tools. Sarah Brayne's new book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford UP, 2021) provides the first in-depth study of these questions. Dr. Brayne recorded observations and interviews over a 5-year period of ethnographic fieldwork and follow-up with the LAPD. In the book, she examines the roles of extra- and intra-departmental factors in the uptake of big data tools, their relationship to the practice and culture of policing, and the impacts and reactions they've precipitated among captains, sworn officers, civilian analysts, and policed communities. A major theme of the book is the role of discretion: While data-driven decision-making tools may promise to replace biased human judgment, in practice they can instead displace human judgment—to earlier and less visible steps in the process, exacerbating the problem they are invoked to solve. Conversely, i was also interested in how Dr. Brayne suggests we shift our perspectives on these tools: She proposes to think of a "big data environment" that shapes our social behavior, and she flips the analogy of data as capital to describe a "cumulative disadvantage" that accrues to those with less access to and control over the data collected on them. Dr. Brayne's study has legal and scholarly as well as policy implications, and it will be of interest to anyone interested in the societal role of data or in that of police. I hope that it becomes part of the foundation for urgently needed future work at their intersection. Suggested companion work: Ballad of the Bullet by Forrest Stuart (listen to Stuart's interview with Sarah E. Patterson here) Sarah Brayne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the faculty at UT-Austin, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. Dr. Brayne is the founder and director of the Texas Prison Education Initiative, a group of faculty and students who volunteer to teach college classes in prisons throughout Texas. Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Child Soldiers of Africa's Red Army: The Role of Social Process and Routinised Violence in South Sudan's Military (Routledge, 2022), Dr. Carol Berger examines the role of social process and routinised violence in the use of underaged soldiers in the country now known as South Sudan during the twenty-one-year civil war between Sudan’s northern and southern regions. Drawing on accounts of South Sudanese who as children and teenagers were part of the Red Army—the youth wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)—the book sheds light on the organised nature of the exploitation of children and youth by senior adult figures within the movement. The book also includes interviews with several of the original Red Army commanders, all of whom went on to hold senior positions within the military and government of South Sudan. The author chronicles the cultural transformation experienced by members of the Red Army and considers whether an analysis of the processes involved in what was then Africa’s longest civil war can aid our understanding of South Sudan’s more recent descent into ethnicised conflict. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and political science with interests in ethnography, conflict, and the military exploitation of children. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we understand well-being? In Understanding Well-being Data: Improving Social and Cultural Policy, Practice and Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Susan Oman, a Lecturer in Data, AI and Society at the University of Sheffield, explores the history of well-being, the history of measurement, and cultural policy. The book covers a huge range of subjects but is written in a clear and accessible way, making longstanding debates over research methods, happiness, government decision making, and the meaning of culture (and life!). The book also has numerous practical case studies, and is available as an open access download here. It is essential reading across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the new science of well-being! Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Privacy is gravely endangered in the digital age, and we, the digital citizens, are its principal threat, willingly surrendering it to avail ourselves of new technology, and granting the government and corporations immense power over us. In Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society (Cambridge UP, 2020), Firmin DeBrabander begins with this premise and asks how we can ensure and protect our freedom in the absence of privacy. Can--and should--we rally anew to support this institution? Is privacy so important to political liberty after all? DeBrabander makes the case that privacy is a poor foundation for democracy, that it is a relatively new value that has been rarely enjoyed throughout history--but constantly persecuted--and politically and philosophically suspect. The vitality of the public realm, he argues, is far more significant to the health of our democracy, but is equally endangered--and often overlooked--in the digital age. Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Daniel H. Pink about his new book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward (Riverhead Books, 2022). After the emotion of love, regret is the second most common emotion people report feeling. Regret is therefore our single most common negative emotion, and yet an emotion that we can benefit from. In this episode, the celebrated author Daniel H. Pink explains that what we regret also serves as a compass pointing us toward what we value most and want to get right in our lives. What did Pink learn from his global survey that catalogued over 16,000 regrets? That they fit into four categories: connection regrets, boldness regrets, foundation regrets, and moral regrets. From the goals of love, learning, stability, to being lovable, these regrets compel us to be better by ideally reflecting, rather than brooding, over what might have been better. One fun or at least intriguing take-away from this episode: you can hear about Pink’s own Regret Resume, i.e., the two take-away lessons that reflecting on his regrets taught him first and foremost. Daniel H. Pink is the author of the New York Times bestsellers A Whole New Mind, Drive, To Sell Is Human, and When. His books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into 42 languages. His TED talk has been viewed over 38 million times. Daniel hosted the TV series Crowd Control on the National Geographic Channel. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.Today I talked to Daniel H. Pink about his new book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward (Riverhead Books, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented experiment that reshaped white-collar work and turned remote work into a kind of new normal. Now comes the hard part. Many employees want to continue that normal and keep working remotely, and most at least want the ability to work occasionally from home. But for employers, the benefits of employees working from home or hybrid approaches are not so obvious. What should both groups do? In a prescient new book, The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face (Wharton School Press, 2021), Wharton professor Peter Cappelli lays out the facts in an effort to provide both employees and employers with a vision of their futures. Cappelli unveils the surprising tradeoffs both may have to accept to get what they want. Cappelli illustrates the challenges we face in drawing lessons from the pandemic and deciding what to do moving forward. Do we allow some workers to be permanently remote? Do we let others choose when to work from home? Do we get rid of their offices? What else has to change, depending on the approach we choose? Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other mussings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Whether you like it or not, the pandemic has pushed us to make many changes in our life, from working from home to following all the mitigation measures. In the previous episodes in New Books in Education, we talked with book authors about how the pandemic has impacted their field, or the particular groups of students and families with whom they work. We look at the new expansion of the use of educational technology, the challenges that students who are learning English as their second language have encountered, and experiences of undocumented immigrant families. In today’s episode, we shift our focus to doing educational research using digital tools. This topic is not new, but during the pandemic, a lot of educational researchers have found a new sense of urgency and relevance to look into it. Our guests for today’s episode are Trena Paulus, Professor in the Research Division of Family Medicine at East Tennessee State University, and Jessica Lester, Professor of Inquiry Methodology at Indiana University. They recently published a book, Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World, to systematically investigate this topic. Published by Sage Press in 2021, Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World is a timely contribution to the field of social research methodology in a period when almost all the social research activities were moved to online. Even though we have gradually resumed our in-person activities, some researchers predict that many of the qualitative research activities will remain in the digital space. What does this mean to research communities and to the wider public? How are researchers going to do research differently? What has the new advancement of technology afforded to the current research practice? Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World takes a deep dive into these questions. Both novice and seasoned researchers will benefit from the book’s comprehensive and in-depth discussion on digital tools and research methodology, which blends in together theories of technology, methodological theories, practical advice, and empirical cases. Trena M. Paulus, Ph.D. is a professor in the Research Division of Family Medicine, Quillen College of Medicine, East Tennessee State University. Jessica Nina Lester, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Inquiry Methodology (Qualitative Research) in the School of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
If you're like most people, you probably believe that your identity is stable. But in fact, your identity is constantly changing—often outside your conscious awareness and sometimes even against your wishes—to reflect the interests of the groups you belong to. In The Power of Us (Little Brown, Spark, 2021), psychologists Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel integrate their own cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to explain how identity really works and how to harness its dynamic nature to:
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Boost cooperation and productivity
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Overcome bias
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Escape from echo chambers
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Break political gridlock
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Foster dissent and mobilize for change
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Lead effectively
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Galvanize action to address persistent global problems
Along the way, they explore such seemingly unrelated phenomena as why a small town in Germany spent decades divided by shoes, why beliefs persist after they are disproven, how working together synchronizes our brains, what makes selfish people generous, why effective leaders say “we” a lot, and how playing soccer can reduce age-old conflicts. Understanding how identity works allows people to take control, moving beyond wondering, “Who am I?” to answer instead, “Who do I want to be?” Packed with fascinating insights, vivid case studies, and a wealth of pioneering research, The Power of Us will change the way you understand yourself—and the people around you—forever. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Silicon Valley is known for its lavish perks, intense work culture, and spiritual gurus. Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley (Princeton UP, 2022) explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and transforming the very nature of spiritual experience in modern life. Over the past forty years, highly skilled workers have been devoting more time and energy to their jobs than ever before. They are also leaving churches, synagogues, and temples in droves—but they have not abandoned religion. Carolyn Chen spent more than five years in Silicon Valley, conducting a wealth of in-depth interviews and gaining unprecedented access to the best and brightest of the tech world. The result is a penetrating account of how work now satisfies workers’ needs for belonging, identity, purpose, and transcendence that religion once met. Chen argues that tech firms are offering spiritual care such as Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practices to make their employees more productive, but that our religious traditions, communities, and public sphere are paying the price. We all want our jobs to be meaningful and fulfilling. Work Pray Code reveals what can happen when work becomes religion, and when the workplace becomes the institution that shapes our souls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But, as Jessie Singer argues convincingly in There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price (Simon and Schuster, 2022), there are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers how the term “accident” protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators. As the rate of accidental death skyrockets in America, the poor and people of color end up bearing the brunt of the violence and blame, while the powerful use the excuse of the “accident” to avoid consequences for their actions. Born of the death of her best friend, and those who insisted it was an accident, this book is a moving investigation of the sort of tragedies that are all too common, and all too commonly ignored. In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn-of-the-century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer illustrates how what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. Before moving to the UK in 2021 she was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India (University of Washington Press, 2022), the first book-length study of Mumbai's taxi industry and of the livelihoods that surround it, Tarini Bedi draws from the lives and voices of chillia taxi drivers who have sustained a hereditary trade for more than a century. Bedi considers the Bombay taxi in all its forms: a material object that is driven, an economic and political connection, an expression of kinship, an embodiment of urban time and technology, and more. She illustrates how the accumulation of capital in this masculinized and mobile trade depends on forms of fixed domestic labor and an ethics of care, and how connections among these factors impact the production and reshaping of working-class personhood and laboring subjects. From beginning to end, the world of Mumbai automobility unfolds through depictions of the sensory, embodied, and political domains of taxi drivers' work. While most understandings of automobility remain tied to Western assumptions, patterns of driving, (sub)urbanization, and engagements with the road, realities in the Global South differ. Mumbai Taximen provides a correction to this imbalance from Mumbai through an timely exploration of South Asian social, material, political, labor, and technological histories and practices of motoring and automobility. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Nicole Rafter (Routledge, 2021) is a critical summary and exegesis of the work of Nicole Rafter, who was a leading scholar of the history of biological theories of crime causation as well as a profound theorist of the role of history within criminology. It introduces Rafter’s key works and assesses her contributions to the fields of feminist criminology, cultural criminology, visual criminology and historical criminology. It also explores her theorization of criminology’s identity, scientific status, and possible futures. While many books on criminological theory explain and historically contextualize theory, they do not interrogate the production of theory or the epistemological assumptions behind it. Drawing on the world of Nicole Rafter, this book offers an accessible handbook to her extensive historical studies and to how her work demonstrated the importance of historical theory to criminological knowledge. Furthermore, the author brings Rafter’s historical research to life and shows how it speaks to contemporary issues in criminology and punishment. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminological theory, intellectual history, sociology, comparative criminology, and feminist criminology. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Michael Méndez: Climate Change from the Streets: How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement (Yale University Press, 2020) An urgent and timely story of the contentious politics of incorporating environmental justice into global climate change policy. Although the science of climate change is clear, policy decisions about how to respond to its effects remain contentious. Even when such decisions claim to be guided by objective knowledge, they are made and implemented through political institutions and relationships—and all the competing interests and power struggles that this implies. Michael Méndez tells a timely story of people, place, and power in the context of climate change and inequality. He explores the perspectives and influence low‑income people of color bring to their advocacy work on climate change. In California, activist groups have galvanized behind issues such as air pollution, poverty alleviation, and green jobs to advance equitable climate solutions at the local, state, and global levels. Arguing that environmental protection and improving public health are inextricably linked, Mendez contends that we must incorporate local knowledge, culture, and history into policymaking to fully address the global complexities of climate change and the real threats facing our local communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Bypass the faulty processes and communication styles that make change impossible in so many other organizations; access these practical tools and ideas for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in your company. Filled with actionable advice Alida Miranda-Wolff learned through her own struggles being an outsider in a work culture that did not value inclusion, and having since worked with over 60 organizations to prioritize DEI initiatives and all the value and richness it adds to the workplace, Cultures of Belonging: Building Inclusive Organizations That Last (HarperCollins, 2022) helps leaders:
Learn why creating an environment where everyone feels belonging is the new barometer for employee engagement.
Develop an understanding of the key terms around DEI and why they matter.
Assess where your organization is today.
Define and take the small steps that build new muscle memory into an organizational culture.
Increase employee engagement, collaboration, innovation, communication, and sense of belonging.
Build confidence in how to solve future DEI-related challenges.
Get buy-in from colleagues (and even resisters) who can clearly see how to move forward and why.
Overcome any limiting work environment and build all new processes and communication priorities that allow your employees to be a part of something greater than themselves while your organization learns to value and embrace the unique experiences and perspective that each employee brings to the company. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge UP, 2021), Julia Dehm provides a critical analysis of how the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) scheme operates to reorganise social relations and to establish new forms of global authority over forests in the Global South, in ways that benefit the interests of some actors while further marginalising others. In accessible prose that draws on interdisciplinary insights, Dehm demonstrates how, through the creation of new legal relations, including property rights and contractual obligations, new forms of transnational authority over forested areas in the Global South are being constituted. This important work should be read by anyone interested in a critical analysis of international climate law and policy that offers insights into questions of political economy, power, and unequal authority. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dr. Andrea Flores’ most recent book, The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America (University of California Press, 2021), is a detailed account of how immigrant youth in Nashville, Tennessee negotiated the stakes of academic achievement by reproducing terms of belonging while at the same time recasting what it means to belong in the United States. By focusing on a nonprofit college access program for Latino youth from which the title of the book is derived, Flores argues that Succeeders’ educational achievements were viewed “as positive moral proof against deficit constructions of Latinos while also maintaining a link to educación’s [emphasis in original] personal, cultural, and familial value” (16). The hybridity of assigning moral value to book learning while also hinging their striving to familial networks is what Flores believes to be critical to the Succeeders’ perception of self. By offering a radically different route to belonging through the vehicle of family and care, the Succeeders hoped to earn not just their own national membership, but also the membership of those near and dear. Flores conducted ethnographic research for twelve months while also serving as a volunteer for the Succeeders program of southern Nashville across four campuses for the academic year 2012 - 2013. She observed effective communication skits, field trips, organizational meetings, community service activities, musical performances, athletic games, scholarship selection committees, and graduation ceremonies to best understand the lived experiences of Succeeders within and outside of their educational institutions. Flores also conducted thirty-one semistructured interviews with Succeeders whose families were primarily from Mexican and Central America. Further, half of the interviews included undocumented youth, and students from all levels of academic achievement were selected. Strategic selecting of Succeeders allowed Flores to examine how students across a variety of academic preparations and immigrant backgrounds perceived themselves within larger conceptions of Latindidad and educational achievement. Interviews with the program’s leaders, teachers, and admissions officers revealed the internal dialogues of those most tasked with the Succeeders’ success. A robust textual archive in the form of college admissions handouts, college entrance essays, and Succeeders curricular materials were collected by the author. These mixed methods allowed Flores to provide detailed and rich accounts of how Latino youth navigated the college application process, the end of high school, and their personal lives. Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The story of how the Lisu of southwest China were evangelized one hundred years ago by the China Inland Mission is a familiar one in mission circles. The subsequent history of the Lisu church, however, is much less well known. Songs of the Lisu Hills: Practicing Christianity in Southwest China (Penn State University Press, 2020) brings this history up to date, recounting the unlikely story of how the Lisu maintained their faith through twenty-two years of government persecution and illuminating how Lisu Christians transformed the text-based religion brought by the missionaries into a faith centered around an embodied set of Christian practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork as well as archival research, this volume documents the development of Lisu Christianity, both through larger social forces and through the stories of individual believers. It explores how the Lisu, most of whom remain subsistence farmers, have oriented their faith less around cognitive notions of belief and more around participation in a rhythm of shared Christian practices, such as line dancing, attending church and festivals, evangelizing, working in one another’s fields, and singing translated Western hymns. These embodied practices demonstrate how Christianity developed in the mountainous margins of the world’s largest atheist state. A much-needed expansion of the Lisu story into a complex study of the evolution of a world Christian community, this book will appeal to scholars working at the intersections of World Christianity, anthropology of religion, ethnography, Chinese Christianity, and mission studies. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History & Ecumenics, focusing on World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research interest lies in Indonesia and the Muslim dominant regions of Southeast Asia, from the postcolonial approach to Christianity and the coexistence of various religions, including the study of Christianity and the Islamic faith in a Muslim dominant society that includes challenges of ethnic diversity. Briana Wong is Visiting Assistant Professor of World Christianity and Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Her interests include Christianity in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
More than one million Indians travel annually to work in oil projects in the Gulf, one of the few international destinations where men without formal education can find lucrative employment. Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Stanford University Press, 2021) follows their migration, taking readers to sites in India, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, from villages to oilfields and back again. Engaging all parties involved—the migrants themselves, the recruiting agencies that place them, the government bureaucrats that regulate their emigration, and the corporations that hire them—Andrea Wright examines labor migration as a social process as it reshapes global capitalism. With this book, Wright demonstrates how migration is deeply informed both by workers' dreams for the future and the ghosts of history, including the enduring legacies of colonial capitalism. As workers navigate bureaucratic hurdles to migration and working conditions in the Gulf, they in turn influence and inform state policies and corporate practices. Placing migrants at the center of global capital rather than its periphery, Wright shows how migrants are not passive bodies at the mercy of abstract forces—and reveals through their experiences a new understanding of contemporary resource extraction, governance, and global labor. Irene Promodh is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Quotas for women in government have swept the globe. Yet we know little about their capacity to upend entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. Property and Power seeks to explore this issue within the context of India, the world's largest democracy. Brulé uses cutting-edge research design and extensive field research to make connections among political representation, backlash, and economic empowerment. Her findings show that women in government catalyze access to fundamental economic rights: property rights. Women in politics also have the power to support constituent rights at critical junctures, such as marriage negotiations, sparking integrative solutions to intra-household bargaining. Although they can lead to backlash, quotas are essential for enforcement of rights. In this groundbreaking study, Brulé shows how quotas can operate as a crucial tool to foster equality and benefit the women they are meant to empower. Women, Power, and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India has been awarded the APSA’s 2021 Luebbert Prize for the Best Book in Comparative Politics. Dr. Rachel Brule is Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and Graduate Faculty with BU’s Department of Political Science, a Core Faculty at the Global Development Policy Center, and affiliated faculty with the Institute for Economic Development. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: Food Not Bombs and the World-Class Waste of Global Cities (Duke UP, 2021), David Boarder Giles explores the ways in which capitalism simultaneously manufactures waste and scarcity. Illustrating how communities of marginalized people and discarded things gather and cultivate political possibilities, Giles documents the work of Food Not Bombs (FNB), a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need. He explores FNB's urban contexts: the global cities in which late-capitalist economies and unsustainable consumption precipitate excess, inequality, food waste, and hunger. Beginning in urban dumpsters, Giles traces the logic by which perfectly edible commodities are nonetheless thrown out—an act that manufactures food scarcity—to the social order of “world-class” cities, the pathways of discarded food as it circulates through the FNB kitchen, and the anticapitalist political movements the kitchen represents. Describing the mutual entanglement of global capitalism and anticapitalist transgression, Giles captures those emergent forms of generosity, solidarity, and resistance that spring from the global city's marginalized residents. David Boarder Giles is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin university, Australia. His writes about waste, cities, and social movements. He is also one of the producers of Conversations in Anthropology. Blog: https://dhboardergiles.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @DHBoarderGiles
Amir Sayadabdi is Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do we engage with food through memory and imagination? Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place and, Taste (Bloomsbury, 2022) spans time and space to illustrate how, through food, people have engaged with the past, the future, and their alternative presents. Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice have brought together first-class contributions, from both established and up-and-coming scholars, to consider how imagination and memory intertwine and sometimes diverge. Chapters draw on cases around the world-including Iran, Italy, Japan, Kenya, and the US-and include topics such as national identity, food insecurity, and the phenomenon of knowledge. Contributions represent a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. This volume is a veritable feast for the contemporary food studies scholar. Beth Forrest is Professor of Liberal Arts and Applied Food Studies at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY with a PhD in History from Boston University. She is also the president of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS). She is currently working on an edited volume that considers the role of sauces and condiments in the west (Oxford UP). Twitter: @BettafrmdaVille Greg de St. Maurice is Tenured Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Business and Commerce at Keio University. He earned his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. His key research interests include place and place brands, globalization, taste, craft, chefs and cuisine. Greg serves as Vice President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS). Twitter: @burgersandsushi Amir Sayadabdi is Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
With The Handbook for Folklore and Ethnomusicology Fieldwork (Indiana University Press, 2019), Lisa Gilman and John Fenn offer a comprehensive review of the ethnographic process for developing a project, implementing the plan, and completing and preserving the data collected. Throughout, readers will find a detailed methodology for conducting different types of fieldwork such as digital ethnography or episodic research, tips and tricks for key elements like budgeting and funding, and practical advice and examples gleaned from the authors' own fieldwork experiences. This handbook also helps fieldworkers fully grasp and understand the ways in which power, gender, ethnicity, and other identity categories are ever-present in fieldwork and guides students to think through these dynamics at each stage of research. Written accessibly for lay researchers working in different mediums and on projects of varying sizes, this step-by-step manual will prepare the reader for the excitement, challenges, and rewards of ethnographic research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Coming of Age in Iran: Poverty and the Struggle for Dignity (NYU Press, 2020), Manata Hashemi takes readers inside the lives of Iranian youth. Drawing on first-hand accounts, Hashemi shows how the young Iranian men and women known as the “burnt generation”—those between the ages of 15 and 29, who came of age after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution—face their future prospects. With a compassionate eye, Hashemi paints a nuanced portrait of their day-to-day struggles in Iran. Hashemi spent months with these youth, observing them at bazaars, hair salons, parks, and mosques, tutoring them in English and sharing meals in their family homes. Many young Iranian men and women are jobless, living with their parents, and delaying marriage, ultimately failing to meet what they consider the traditional benchmarks of adulthood. Hashemi follows their stories, one by one, as they try to climb up the proverbial ladder of success. Coming of Age in Iran sheds light on the inner lives of a new generation of Iranian youth as they struggle in the face of ongoing economic crisis. Manata Hashemi is a sociologist, ethnographer, and the Farzaneh Family Associate Professor of Iranian Studies in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is also the co-editor of Children in Crisis: Ethnographic Studies in International Contexts (2013, Routledge). Website: www.manatahashemi.com.Twitter: @ManataHashemi. Amir Sayadabdi is Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Historically, discourses of racial, civilizational, and sexual difference have inevitably been entangled with, shaped by, and constitutive of institutions that divide up the land and allocate rights of access and use. Yet, traditionally, political theorists and social scientists have thought of property as an exclusively economic category, and of property rights as institutions that reflect a deeper ‘objective’ balance of power between class forces. This economistic understanding of property has not only served to erase the racialized, colonial, and gendered foundations of capitalism, but it has also led contemporary political and social theorists interested in identity and new social movements to abandon the critique of property. In his recent book Towards an Improper Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), my guest Mark Devenney argues that “property belies any crude distinction between the economic and the political.” Instead, he emphasizes that political orders always link the ability to appropriate land, labor, and commodities with discourses that delimit proper modes of being. He argues for an ‘improper’ politics that challenges both the distribution of property and the norms of propriety that serve to justify inequality. Mark Devenney is a professor at the University of Brighton. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age (Southern Illinois UP, 2021) focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members. This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community’s material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women’s lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor. An impressive and diverse array of archival and material research grounds each chapter’s examination of women’s professional, domestic, or reproductive labor in a particular community. Fleeting though they may seem, the practices and lives of those intentional women, Smith argues, pattern contemporary divisions of work along the vibrant and contentious lines of gender, race, and class and stage the continued search for what is possible. Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Double Exposure: How Social Psychology Fell in Love with the Movies (Rutgers University Press, 2022) examines the role of film in shaping social psychology’s landmark postwar experiments. Dr. Kathryn Millard shares that we are told that most of us will inflict electric shocks on a fellow citizen when ordered to do so. Act as a brutal prison guard when we put on a uniform. Walk on by when we see a stranger in need. But there is more to the story. Documentaries that investigators claimed as evidence were central to capturing the public imagination. Did they provide an alibi for twentieth century humanity? Millard examines dramaturgy, staging and filming of these experiments, including Milgram's Obedience Experiments, the Stanford Prison Experiment and many more to recover a new set of narratives. Kathryn Millard is a writer, independent filmmaker and an honorary professor of screen and creative arts at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Screenwriting in a Digital Era. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Tug Villages: Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at a Tug of War Festival. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Cities around the world are formulating plans to respond to climate change and adapt to its impact. Often, marginalized urban residents resist these plans, offering “counterplans” to protest unjust and exclusionary actions. In Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (MIT Press, 2021), Kian Goh examines climate change response strategies in three cities—New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam—and the mobilization of community groups to fight the perceived injustices and oversights of these plans. Looking through the lenses of urban design and socioecological spatial politics, Goh reveals how contested visions of the future city are produced and gain power. Goh describes, on the one hand, a growing global network of urban environmental planning organizations intertwined with capitalist urban development, and, on the other, social movements that themselves often harness the power of networks. She explores such initiatives as Rebuild By Design in New York, the Giant Sea Wall plan in Jakarta, and Rotterdam Climate Proof, and discovers competing narratives, including community resiliency in Brooklyn and grassroots activism in the informal “kampungs” of Jakarta. Drawing on participatory fieldwork and her own background in architecture and urban design, Goh offers both theoretical explanations and practical planning and design strategies. She reframes the critical concerns of urban climate change responses, presenting a sociospatial typology of urban adaptation and considering the notion of a “just” resilience. Finally, she proposes a theoretical framework for designing equitable and just urban climate futures. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Presidential Elections of Trump and Bolsonaro, Whiteness, and the Nation (Lexington Books, 2021) is a sociological analysis of the similarities between the elections of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, based on biographies, academic sources, newspaper, television, and internet reports published in the United States and Brazil between 2014 and 2021. The author argues that the success of each candidate reflects the racially hierarchical structure of their societies and the strength of the ideology of White supremacy to maintain that structure despite efforts to dismantle it. Regardless of class and gender, Whites responded to Trump's nativist call to exclude undesirable immigrants, especially Mexicans and Muslims, both of whom are racialized as non-White.In Brazil, the country with the largest population of African descent outside of Africa and the largest miscegenation rates in the world, the votes for Bolsonaro pointed to the social wish to achieve Whiteness and thus eliminate (or at least abate) the insecurity that comes from a belief in the racial inferiority of non-Whites. The author suggests that the results of the presidential elections reflect Whites' fear of losing ground after decades of gains by minorities, women, and the poor in both countries. Dr. Penha-Lopes will have a book launch with the Columbia Global Center in Rio de Janeiro on Feb.11, 2022. Check the Center's Youtube page to view the event. Vânia Penha-Lopes is a Professor of Sociology at Bloomfield College, co-chair of the Brazil Seminar at Columbia University (2008-present), and was a member of the executive committee of the Brazilian Studies Association-BRASA (2010-14). Reighan Gillam is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Homeschooling has skyrocketed in popularity in the United States: in 2019, a record-breaking 2.5 million children were being homeschooled, within an increasingly diverse subset of American families. In The Homeschool Choice: Parents and the Privatization of Education (NYU Press, 2021), sociologist Kate Henley Averett examines the reasons why parents homeschool and how homeschooling, as a growing practice, has changed the roles that families, schools, and the state play in children’s lives. Drawing on in-depth interviews, surveys and close ethnographic observation of homeschooling conferences, Averett paints a rich picture of parental decision-making in a period dominated by a neoliberal discourse of school ‘choice’. This book is essential reading not only for those interested in homeschooling, but for anyone concerned about the current state and the future of public education. Kate Henley Averett is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, and an affiliate of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at the University at Albany, SUNY. -- Dr Alice Garner, educator and historian, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How is power enacted in everyday broadcast practices? National Public Radio has a “rhetoric of impartiality” but this obscures the ideological work done by the network.” In The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public (U Arizona Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Chávez interrogates how NPR determines what it means to be American and what is deemed American news. NPR’s original mandate included engaging listeners in civic discourses and representing the diversity of the nation. Yet Chavez argues that NPR has created a "white public space" that pushes Latinx listeners to the periphery. As a result, NPR promotes the cultural logic that Latinx identity is separate from national identity – hindering Latinx participation in civic discourses. But Chavez maintains that the shared act of listening might facilitate the ways in which Latinx listeners negotiate and resist norms of what it means to belong, also known as sonic citizenship. He writes that through the act of listening, "... those without sustained access to political power might imagine alternative political possibilities in which they are included." Dr. Christopher Chávez is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon where he also directs the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies. His publications include a previous book Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language, Ideology, and Practice (Lexington Books, 2015). Daniella Campos served as editorial assistant for this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
An unexpected fusion of two major western religious traditions, Judaism and Christianity, has been developing in many parts of the world. Contemporary Christian movements are not only adopting Jewish symbols and aesthetics but also promoting Jewish practices, rituals, and lifestyles. Becoming Jewish, Believing in Jesus: Judaizing Evangelicals in Brazil (Oxford University Press, 2021), is the first in-depth ethnography to investigate this growing worldwide religious tendency in the global South. Focusing on an austere "Judaizing Evangelical" variant in Brazil, Manoela Carpenedo explores the surprising identification with Jews and Judaism by people with exclusively Charismatic Evangelical backgrounds. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and socio-cultural analysis, the book analyses the historical, religious, and subjective reasons behind this growing trend in Charismatic Evangelicalism. Interviewee: Manoela Carpenedo is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Something is definitely up with men. From millions online who engage with the manosphere to the #metoo backlash, from Men's Rights activists and incels to spiralling suicide rates, it's easy to see that, while men still rule the world, masculinity is in crisis. Feminism has gone some way towards dismantling the patriarchy, but how can we hold on to the best aspects of our metaphorical Father? Nina Power, author of What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents (Penguin, 2022), speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the challenge of accepting biological differences and the potential for men and women living well in a world where capitalism has replaced the values - family, religion, service, and honour - that used to give our lives meaning. Nina Power is a philosopher, critic, and cultural theorist. She is the author of One Dimensional Woman, a co-host of The Lack, and she publishes a newsletter on Substack. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
I spoke with Eric Protzer (Harvard University) and Paul Summerville (University of Victoria) about their great new book: Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters, published by Polity in 2022. The book provides an original and counterintuitive analysis of what triggered populism around the world. It has received excellent reviews by journalists, policy makers, economists, and academic colleagues. Those who read with interest 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' and those who disagreed with Thomas Piketty shall read this book. Eric Protzer and Paul Summerville argue that populism is a response to a profound sense that many of the world’s leading economies are unfair. The countries that have been hit by the worst populist upheavals - like the US, UK, France, and Italy – have low social mobility. Unequal economic outcomes would be better tolerated in a society where individual efforts in education and work were fully recognised. The book, based on solid empirical data, demonstrate that illiberal populism strikes hardest when success is influenced by family origins rather than talent and effort. ‘Reclaiming Populism is about 230 pages long and is organised in five chapters: 1 – The Inequality Delusion and Other Scapegoats for Populism; 2 – The Fairness Instinct; 3 – Economic Unfairness and the Rise of Populism; 4 – The Twin Virtues of Equal Opportunity and Fair Unequal Outcomes; 5 – Constraints and Solutions to Economic Fairness. What explains contemporary developed-world populism? A largely-overlooked hypothesis, advanced herein, is economic unfairness. This idea holds that humans do not simply care about the magnitudes of final outcomes such as losses or inequalities. They care deeply about whether each individual’s economic outcomes occur for fair reasons. Thus citizens turn to populism when they do not get the economic opportunities and outcomes they think they fairly deserve. A series of cross-sectional regressions show that low social mobility – an important type of economic unfairness – consistently correlates with the geography of populism, both within and across developed countries. Conversely, income and wealth inequality do not; and neither do the prominent cultural hypotheses of immigrant stocks, social media use, nor the share of seniors in the population. Collectively, this evidence underlines the importance of economic fairness, and suggests that academics and policymakers should pay greater attention to normative, moral questions about the economy. The book is very interesting and accessible to a wide public. For policymakers and scholars in economics, politics and sociology it is a must-read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How should we understand identity? What sort of politics are needed to address various forms of oppression and marginalization? Are knowledge and practice untainted by ideological obfuscation possible? These questions and many more are what animate my guest today, Himani Bannerji, here to discuss her book The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender (Brill, 2020). Clocking in at close to 800 pages and spanning several decades of research and writing, this volume brings a number of themes together. Following Marx, Bannerji argues that social inquiry and critique must start with everyday life as it is lived, with the various social formations and relations generating various forms of consciousness. From this rather humble starting point, Bannerji is poised to enter into a productive dialogue with various other thinkers, particularly Lukacs, Gramsci and Dorothy Smith. She is also able to tackle questions of education, economics, race, gender, narrative, history, colonialism and emancipation. Tying these threads together is no easy task, but in working her way through an assortment of different themes and thinkers, Bannerji helps clarify the ways in which disparate elements of reality are tied to one another and cannot be understood in isolation. Readers will find this book to be overflowing with insights, and endlessly clarifying in the struggle to understand who we are, what we know, and what we can do. Shortlisted for the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, the book was published as part of the Historical Materialism book series, and was published first by Brill and then by Haymarket. Himani Bannerji is professor emeritus of sociology at York University. Her publications include Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology, Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Racism and Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Rockies (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Molly P. Rozum explores the two related concepts of regional identity and sense of place by examining a single North American ecological region: the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie Provinces. All or parts of modern-day Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba form the center of this transnational region. As children, the first postconquest generation of northern grasslands residents worked, played, and traveled with domestic and wild animals, which introduced them to ecology and shaped sense-of-place rhythms. As adults, members of this generation of settler society worked to adapt to the northern grasslands by practicing both agricultural diversification and environmental conservation. Rozum argues that environmental awareness, including its ecological and cultural aspects, is key to forming a sense of place and a regional identity. The two concepts overlap and reinforce each other: place is more local, ecological, and emotional-sensual, and region is more ideational, national, and geographic in tone. This captivating study examines the growth of place and regional identities as they took shape within generations and over the life cycle. Molly P. Rozum is the Ronald R. Nelson Chair of Great Plains and South Dakota History and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of South Dakota. Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The opinions expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, and Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Based on religious ethnography, in-depth interviews and archival data, Afe Adogame, Indigeneity in African Religions: Oza Worldviews, Cosmologies and Religious Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the historical origins, worldviews, cosmologies, ritual symbolism and praxis of the indigenous Oza people in South West Nigeria. The author's locationality and positionality plugs the book within decolonizing knowledges and indigeneity discourses, thus unpacking the complexity of “indigeneity” and contributing to its conceptual understanding within socioreligious change in contemporary Africa. The future of Oza indigeneity in the face of modernity is illuminated against the backlash of encounters, contestations with multiple hegemonies, transmissions of Christianity and Islam and indigenous (re)appropriations. Thus, any theorizations of such encounters must be cognizant of instantiations of indigeneity politics and identity, culture, tradition and power dynamics. Through decolonizing burdens of history, memory and method, Afe Adogame demonstrates a framework of understanding Oza indigenous religious,sociocultural and political imaginaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In her new book, Fan Sites: Film Tourism and Contemporary Fandom (U Iowa Press, 2021)(University of Iowa Press, 2021), Abby Waysdorf explores why and how we experience film and television-related places, and what the growth of this practice means for contemporary fandom. Through four case studies—Game of Thrones tourism in Dubrovnik, Croatia and Northern Ireland, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme parks in Orlando, Florida, fandom of The Prisoner in Portmeirion, Wales, and Friends events in the United Kingdom and United States—this book presents a multifaceted look at the ways place and fandom interact today. Fan Sites explores the different relationships that fans build with these places of fandom, from the exploratory knowledge-building of Game of Thrones fans on vacation, the appreciative evaluations of Harry Potter fans at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, to the frequent “homecoming” visits of Prisoner fans, who see Portmeirion as a “safe vault” and the home of their fandom. Including engaging accounts of real fans at each location, Fan Sites addresses what the rise of fan tourism and places of fandom might mean for the future of fandom and its relationship with the media industry. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Despite the virtually unanimous agreement about his importance, describing Hirschman’s legacy and influence on others is not an easy task— arguably because he was indeed in a league of his own. His search for fresh perspectives was so eclectic that, as many have noted, no recognizable school has ever developed in his footsteps … – Michele Alacevich, Albert O. Hirschman – An Intellectual Biography (2021) These thoughts from the concluding chapter of Michele Alacevich’s latest book Albert O. Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography (Columbia University Press, 2021), speaks to the remarkable life and scholarship as analyzed and described in the professor’s concise and stimulating book of 330 pages including notes and index. In this episode Professor Alacevich explains the significance and ongoing relevance of the interesting work of the political economist and social scientist Hirschman who was a product of the Weimar Republic, and who later became a founding member of The Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. As many listeners know, Hirschman authored books such as Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, The Passions and The Interests, and The Rhetoric of Reaction – just a few of his more recognizable titles as Michele discusses many others in this interview. For instance, Professor Alacevich describes the 1977, The Passions and The Interests, as a history of ideas wherein Hirschman tried to make sense of political developments of the time in Latin America by examining the link between economic growth and dictatorship. He also talks about the 1967, Development Projects Observed, as insightful analysis that the original publisher reissued in 2015 with a Foreword by Cass Sunstein and an Afterword written by Michele even though he modestly does not mention his own contribution in this conversation. This new book examines the ideas and scholarly debate surrounding Hirschman’s scholarly work and is a nice complement to the 2013, The Worldly Philosopher, a Hirschman biography by Jeremy Adelman. Professor Alacevich shares many interesting insights about the relevance of Hirschman’s approach today – from how the problem of democracy was a unifying theme in his scholarship including the more formal economic analysis, as well as his emphasis on how ‘doubt’ must be at the heart of a working democracy. Michele’s thoughtful analysis of Hirschman’s important ideas and works is well-worth a listen as is a reading of his engaging intellectual biography. Michele Alacevich is a professor of Economic History and Thought at the University of Bologna, and is currently working on a history of development economics in relation to the three questions of economic growth, democracy, and environmental sustainability. Keith Krueger lectures at the SILC Business School in Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Culture, Context and Ageing of Older Indians: Narratives from India and Beyond (Springer 2021) discusses the intersections between culture, context, and ageing. It adopts a socio-cultural lens and highlights emotional, social, and psychological issues of the older adults in urban India. It is set in multiple sites such as Ahmedabad, Delhi, Kolkata, and Saskatoon to indicate how different cultural practises and contextual factors play an integral role in determining the course of ageing. It also focuses on different narratives such as older adults living with adult children, older adults living with spouses, and older adults living alone to demonstrate the intricate process of growing old. Drawing from various sites and living arrangements of older adults, it sheds light on cultural constructions of growing old, ideas of belonging, the inevitability of death, everyday processes of ageing, perceptions associated with growing old in India, acceptance of the ageing body, and intergenerational ties in later lives. Given its scope, the book is essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of sociology, demography, and social scientists studying ageing. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“This is America”: Race Gender and Politics in America’s Musical Landscape by Katie Rios (Lexington Books, 2021) examines an eclectic mix of different artists and cultural products, from Laurie Anderson and Childish Gambino to Hamilton. The artists Rios studies confront problems of race and gender that have deep roots in American history, often by championing social movements that have recently swept the nation such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. While a musicologist by training, Rios is concerned with more than the sonic signifiers of political dissent and resistance. She finds a shared language of cultural and political critique in a wide array of music, videos, dance, visual arts, and theater. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure (U California Press, 2021) is a rich and intimate account of urban transformation told through the story of Delhi's Metro, a massive infrastructure project that is reshaping the city's social and urban landscapes. Ethnographic vignettes introduce the feel and form of the Metro and let readers experience the city, scene by scene, stop by stop, as if they, too, have come along for the ride. Laying bare the radical possibilities and concretized inequalities of the Metro, and how people live with and through its built environment, this is a story of women and men on the move, the nature of Indian aspiration, and what it takes morally and materially to sustain urban life. Through exquisite prose, Rashmi Sadana transports the reader to a city shaped by both its Metro and those who depend on it, revealing a perspective on Delhi unlike any other. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The labels of victim and perpetrator in the aftermath of genocide have shaped the stories of pain and reconstructions for many of the Bosnian and Rwandan Americans. The trauma created by the labels has not only affected the first generations but has had profound impacts on future generations. The younger generations in Diaspora have learned about their country and history through their communities' stories and had to deal with their communities' labeling of victims or perpetrators created by the accident of their ethnicity. Claudine Kuradusenge-McLeod's book Narratives of Victimhood and Perpetration: The Struggle of Bosnian and Rwandan Diaspora Communities in the United States (Peter Lang, 2021) explores how these labels and their complicated national histories shape the newer generations sense of homeland and identity as well as their involvement in their homeland or host-country politics. The narratives presented in this book helps us understand how young people understand their identities, their communities' narratives, and their reflections on post-atrocity reconciliation as well as how they engage with the Diaspora communities' politics in their homeland and in America. This book brings to light the individual stories of all ethnic groups and explores the impacts of the labels of victimhood and perpetrator on the second generations. By creating a space for the stories of all individuals who have experienced mass atrocities, this book hopes to start the healing process of these transgenerational traumas and works to reduce the interethnic resentments that result from them. Allowing the stories of all groups to be heard will provide an important outlet and, we may hope, help prevent future recurrences of the violence. Christopher P. Davey is Visiting Assistant Professor at Clark University's Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns (U California Press, 2022), Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city-including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility-and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, Homelessness is a Housing Problem explores U.S. cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (Princeton UP, 2019), Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of The Imperative of Integration, and Value in Ethics and Economics. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2021) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists’ religious life and practices and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of ‘conflict’ and ‘complementarity.’ By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Vincent Joos' book Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships: Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti (Rutgers UP, 2021) explores the failed international reconstruction of Port-au-Prince after the devastating 2010 earthquake. It describes how, in the meantime, people from various backgrounds use, transform, and create vibrant urban spaces and economies that enable them to rebuild their lives. By exploring how the state, international organizations, and everyday people transform the environment, the book reflects on the possibilities of dwelling in post-disaster landscapes. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The common-sense way of thinking about what representatives should do in democracies tends to revolve around the concept of responsiveness: representatives should respond to the interests and demands of their constituents. However, this account of representation does not tell us much about how citizens form preferences. If political representatives and other actors have the ability to shape the interests and preferences of actors, this raises the specters of manipulation, voter incompetence, and false consciousness. All of these concepts question whether citizens have the capacity to form accurate beliefs about their own interests and to judge whether or not politicians are serving them. In her new book Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2021), my guest Lisa Disch argues that concerns about manipulation and voter competence are overwrought because they are grounded in a mistaken understanding of how representation works in democracies. Building on the “constructivist turn” in representation, Disch argues that the starting point of theorizing about how representation should work in democracies should be on the processes through which representatives of all kinds – from elected politicians to media outlets and social movements – constitute the very groups that they claim to speak for. Rather than asking how we can make politicians respond to the interests of voters, Disch argues that we should be asking how political actors, parties, and movements can mobilize constituencies for projects of social change. Lisa Disch is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Geoffrey Gordon is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @geofflgordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (U of Minnesota Press, 2021), co-editors Karen Redrobe and Jeff Schieble argue that the notion of “depth” is a multivalent one in the field of the humanities. In literary criticism, “depth” is a term that can qualify the profoundness of a given text and the ways that we analyze it, while for film theorists “depth” typically refers to the volume and spatial coordinates of the moving image. In the geohumanities, “deep time” names broad stretches of geological time, while in recent political discourse, the “deep state” suggestively evokes ideas about covert networks of political control. Across a range of essays on topics ranging from cinematic depth of field to deep-fake pornography, Deep Mediations brings together the work of leading scholars who collectively navigate the legacies of depth models of thought and vision, particularly in light of the “surface turn” and as these models impinge on the realms of cinema and media studies. Jules O’Dwyer is Research Fellow in Film Studies and French at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Amidst accelerating environmental change and intense urbanisation, there is growing enthusiasm for building sustainable and ‘natural’ cities. Yet, when a flourishing eco-futuristic urban imaginary is enacted, it is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. In a Southeast Asian context, no city or country better encapsulates this than Singapore. But the pursuit of a singular narrative of progress has very specific consequences, particularly when that progress benefits some but not all beings. In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Jamie Wang to shed more light on the implications of Singapore’s growth fetish, and its implications for humans and non-humans. About Jamie Wang: Dr Jamie Wang is a Sydney Southeast Asia Centre Writing Fellow, a research affiliate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, and an editor of the journal Feminist Review. She has a PhD in Environmental Humanities and Cultural Studies from the University of Sydney. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections of environmental humanities, urban geography, more-than-human studies and sustainable development in the context of planetary urbanism, climate change and environmental injustice. Jamie’s recent project ‘Reimagining the More-than-Human cities, stories of Singapore’ has explored the multifaceted pressing urban environmental issues, from urban greenery to housing development projects, transportation, water infrastructure, and urban agriculture, with a geographic focus in Singapore. It asks how we might develop ways of re-thinking, re-seeing and re-storying cities through foregrounding their more-than-human worlds. Jamie is also a writer and poet. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode I spoke to Professor Peter Cappelli about his new book The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented experiment that reshaped white-collar work and turned remote work into a kind of "new normal." Now comes the hard part. Many employees want to continue that normal and keep working remotely, and most at least want the ability to work occasionally from home. But for employers, the benefits of employees working from home or hybrid approaches are not so obvious. What should both groups do? In a prescient new book, Cappelli lays out the facts in an effort to provide both employees and employers with a vision of their futures. Cappelli unveils the surprising tradeoffs both may have to accept to get what they want. Cappelli illustrates the challenges we face in drawing lessons from the pandemic and deciding what to do moving forward. Do we allow some workers to be permanently remote? Do we let others choose when to work from home? Do we get rid of their offices? What else has to change, depending on the approach we choose? His research reveals there is no consensus among business leaders. Even the most high-profile and forward-thinking companies are taking divergent approaches: Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies say many employees can work remotely on a permanent basis. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and others say it is important for everyone to come back to the office. Ford is redoing its office space so that most employees can work from home at least part of the time, and GM is planning to let local managers work out arrangements on an ad-hoc basis. As Cappelli examines, earlier research on other types of remote work, including telecommuting offers some guidance as to what to expect when some people will be in the office and others work at home, and also what happened when employers tried to take back offices. Neither worked as expected. In a call to action for both employers and employees, Cappelli explores how we should think about the choices going forward as well as who wins and who loses. As he implores, we have to choose soon. Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School of Business and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He teaches awesome sounding courses like How to be the boss and Managing and motivating. Some of his areas of research are human resource practices, public policy related to employment, talent, and performance management. He publishes in journals like theAcademy of Management Journal and Harvard Business Review and op-eds in many magazines like The New Yorker or the Atlantic magazine. Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
When I was a teenager, I spent entirely too much time at the Pontiac Silverdome watching the Detroit Pistons play basketball. In all the games I watched, it never occurred to me to wonder why a professional basketball team was playing in a cavernous, multi-purpose stadium entirely unsuited to basketball. Frank Andre Guridy begins his wonderful book The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (U Texas Press, 2021) by examining the Houston Astrodome as both a result of and a contributor to dramatic changes in sports and society in the United States. Guridy is recognizes that the games we watch and the athletes who play them are valuable in and of themselves and the book is full of lyrical descriptions of games and athletes. But he is mostly interested in the ways sports reflected and formed American society. He argues that the economic and social forces reshaping America in the 1960s and 70s provided the context for a change in the ways sports were played, produced and consumed and that Texas served as an incubator for these changes. His book is always insightful and interesting. But his examination of the intersection of race and economics in the emergence of the NBA's San Antonio Spurs is particularly strong, as is a chapter examining the emergence of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders as a national phenomenon. In a world where sports is again undergoing a transformation, The Sports Revolution offers a valuable lens through which to view both the dramatic changes of the 1970s and those so prominent in today's society. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change. In Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds (U California Press, 2021), Colin McFarlane examines such fragments, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? For those living on the economic margins, the city is often experienced as a set of fragments. Much of what low-income residents deal with on a daily basis is fragments of stuff, made and remade with and through urban density, social infrastructure, and political practice. In this book, McFarlane explores infrastructure in Mumbai, Kampala, and Cape Town; artistic montages in Los Angeles and Dakar; refugee struggles in Berlin; and the repurposing of fragments in Hong Kong and New York. Fragments surface as material things, as forms of knowledge, as writing strategies. They are used in efforts to politicize the city and in urban writing to capture life and change in the world's major cities. Fragments of the City surveys the role of fragments in how urban worlds are understood, revealed, written, and changed. Colin McFarlane is Professor of Urban Geography at Durham University, UK. His work focuses on the experience and politics of urban life. He is author of Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
America’s community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree―or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), Robin Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them and help them flourish. Robin Isserles is a professor of sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. This book tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows. Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers paint a richly textured portrait of daily life in Kiryas Joel, exploring the community’s guiding religious, social, and economic norms. They delve into the roots of Satmar Hasidism and its charismatic founder, Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, following his journey from nineteenth-century Hungary to post–World War II Brooklyn, where he dreamed of founding an ideal Jewish town modeled on the shtetls of eastern Europe. Stolzenberg and Myers chart the rise of Kiryas Joel as an official municipality with its own elected local government. They show how constant legal and political battles defined and even bolstered the community, whose very success has coincided with the rise of political conservatism and multiculturalism in American society over the past forty years. Timely and accessible, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton UP, 2022) unravels the strands of cultural and legal conflict that gave rise to one of the most vibrant religious communities in America, and reveals a way of life shaped by both self-segregation and unwitting assimilation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What does it take to become a digitally agile scholar? This manual explains how academics can comfortably navigate the digital world of today and tomorrow. It foregrounds three key domains of digital agility: getting involved in research, education and (community) service, mobilising (digital) skills on various levels, and acting in multiple roles, both individually and interlinked with others. After an introduction that outlines the foundations of the three-dimensional framework, the chapters focus on different roles and skills associated with evolving as a digital scholar. There is the author, who writes highly specialised texts for expert peers; the storyteller, who crafts accessible narratives to a broader audience in the form of blogs or podcasts; the creator, who uses graphics, audio, and video to motivate audiences to delve deeper into the material; the integrator, who develops and curates multimedia artefacts, disseminating them through channels such as websites, webinars, and open source repositories; and finally the networker, who actively triggers interaction via social media applications and online learning communities. Additionally, the final chapters offer a blueprint for the future digital scholar as a professional learner and as a change agent who is open to and actively pursues innovation. Informed by the authors' broad and diverse personal experience, Evolving as a Digital Scholar: Teaching and Researching in a Digital World (Leuven UP, 2021) offers insight, inspiration, and practical advice. It equips a broad readership with the skills and the mindset to harness new digital developments and navigate the ever-evolving digital age. It will inspire academic teachers and researchers with different backgrounds and levels of knowledge that wish to enhance their digital academic profile. Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and Project Muse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For mixed-citizenship couples, getting married is the easy part. The US Supreme Court has confirmed the universal civil right to marry, guaranteeing every couple's ability to wed. But the Supreme Court has denied that this right to marriage includes married couples' right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on US soil, creating a challenge for mixed-citizenship couples whose individual-level rights do not translate to family-level protections. While US citizens can extend legal inclusion to their spouses through family reunification, they must prove their worthiness and the worthiness of their love before their relationship will be officially recognized by the state. In Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State (Stanford UP, 2021), Jane López offers a comprehensive, critical look at US family reunification law and its consequences as experienced by 56 mixed-citizenship American couples. These couples' stories––of integration and alienation, of opportunity and inequality, of hope and despair––make tangible the consequences of current US immigration laws that tend to favor Whiteness, wealth, and heteronormativity, as well as the individual rather than the family unit, in awarding membership and official belonging. In examining the experiences of couples struggling to negotiate intimacy under the constraints of immigration policy, López argues for a rethinking of citizenship as a family affair. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Can libraries be radical positive change agents in their communities? R. David Lenkes offers a guide for librarians who see their profession as a chance to make a positive difference in their communities —librarians who recognize that it is no longer enough to stand behind a desk waiting to serve. Lankes reminds libraries and librarians of their mission: to improve society by facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. In this book, he provides tools, arguments, resources, and ideas for fulfilling this mission. Librarians will be prepared to become radical positive change agents in their communities, and other readers will learn to understand libraries in a new way. The libraries of Ferguson, Missouri, famously became positive change agents in August 2014 when they opened their doors when schools were closed because of civil unrest after the shooting of an unarmed teen by police. Working with other local organizations, they provided children and their parents a space for learning, lunch, and peace. But other libraries serve other communities—students, faculty, scholars, law firms—in other ways. All libraries are about community. In The New Librarianship Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016), Lankes addresses the mission of libraries and explains what constitutes a library. He offers practical advice for librarian training; provides teaching notes for each chapter; and answers “Frequently Argued Questions” about the new librarianship. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Useful Bullshit: Consitutions in Chinese Politics and Society (Cornell University Press, 2022) Dr. Neil Diamant pulls back the curtain on early constitutional conversations between citizens and officials in the PRC primarily around the first draft constitution in 1954. Scholars have argued that China, like the former USSR, promulgated constitutions to enhance its domestic and international legitimacy by opening up the constitution-making process to ordinary people, and by granting its citizens political and socioeconomic rights. Despite many considering the document "bullshit," successive PRC governments have promulgated it, amending the constitution, debating it at length, and even inaugurating a "Constitution Day." But what did ordinary officials and people say about their constitutions and rights? Did constitutions contribute to state legitimacy? Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources from the Maoist and reform eras, Diamant explores all facets of this constitutional discussion, as well as its afterlives in the late '50s, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era. Useful Bullshit illuminates how the Chinese government understands and makes use of the constitution as a political document, and how a vast array of citizens—police, workers, university students, women, and members of different ethnic and religious groups—have responded. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Dr. Melcher also lived in Beijing, China for nearly 10 years, and keeps an eye on China-Africa security issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we rethink anthropology beyond itself? In this book, twenty-one artists, anthropologists, and curators grapple with how anthropology has been formulated, thought, and practised 'elsewhere' and 'otherwise'. They do so by unfolding ethnographic case studies from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland - and through conversations that expand these geographies and genealogies of contemporary exhibition making. This collection considers where and how anthropology is troubled, mobilised, and rendered meaningful. Across Anthropology: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (Leuven UP, 2020) charts new ground by analysing the convergences of museums, curatorial practice, and Europe's reckoning with its colonial legacies. Situated amid resurgent debates on nationalism and identity politics, this book addresses scholars and practitioners in fields spanning the arts, social sciences, humanities, and curatorial studies. Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and ProjectMuse. Margareta von Oswald is a research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (also known as CARMAH), at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Jonas Tinius is also an associated research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do gender and race interact to affect the election, behavior, and impact of all individuals – raced women and gendered minorities alike? According to our authors, “what we know depends mightily on how we go about obtaining that knowledge.” Political scientists have often assumed that there are no gender differences among minority representatives, and no racial differences among female representatives. Race, Gender, and Political Representation: Toward a More Intersectional Approach (Oxford UP, 2020)examines HOW and to what extent political representation is simultaneously gendered and raced in the context of late 20th and early 21st century US state legislatures. Haynie, Reingold, and Widner examine how gender and race interact to affect the election, behavior, and impact of individual state legislators. The analysis – and their substantive findings – demonstrate how intersectionality, as a critical epistemology, compels us to re-evaluate the study of gender, race, and representation. Without critically evaluating single-axis women-and-politics and race-and-ethnic-politics theories about descriptive representation, we miss the differences in obstacles to election, substantive policy contributions, or policy leadership styles among White women, men of color, and women of color. The book aims to both give us a more nuanced understanding of representation and an intersectional “tool kit” that others can use to answer critical political questions. Winner of the 2021 Richard Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book in Legislative Studies. Dr. Kerry L. Haynie is Professor and Chair of Political Science and Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. His many books and articles interrogate how the underlying theory, structures, and practices of American political institutions affect African Americans’ and women’s efforts to organize and exert influence on the political system. Dr. Beth Reingold is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her previous books and articles engage questions about the complex relationships between gender, race, ethnicity, and political representation, primarily in and around legislative institutions in U.S. states. Dr. Kirsten Widner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. As a lawyer, she represented children in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and taught in the public policy and legislative advocacy clinics at Emory Law School. She helped advocate for laws in Georgia to address child abuse, human trafficking, and adoption. As a political scientist she focuses on how laws and policies that affect marginalized groups are made with a particular interest in the political representation of people without the right to vote – children, noncitizens, and people disenfranchised due to criminal convictions or mental incapacity. Her work has been published in both political science journals and law reviews. Thank you to Nadia E. Brown for suggesting the book and Daniella Campos, the senior editorial assistant for New Books in Political Science. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Law and violence are thought to share an antithetical relationship in postcolonial modernity. Violence is considered the other of law, lawlessness is understood to produce violence, and law is invoked and deployed to undo the violence of lawlessness. Oishik Sircar's book Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (Oxford UP, 2021) uses a critical legal perspective to show that law and violence in the New India share a deep intimacy, where one symbiotically feeds the other. Researched and written between 2008 and 2018, the chapters study the cultural sites of literature, cinema, people's movements, popular media and the university to illustrate how law's promises of emancipation and performances of violence live a life of entangled contradictions. The book foregrounds reparative and ethical accounts where law does not only inhabit courtrooms, legislations and judgments, but also lives in the quotidian and minor practices of disobediences, uncertainties, vulnerabilities, double binds and failures. When the cultural lives of law are reimagined as such, the book argues, the violence at the foundations of modern law in the postcolony begins to unravel. Sebastián Rojas Cabal is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at Princeton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ever tried to cross the road in Hanoi? There’s no point in waiting for a gap. Close your eyes and start walking: the traffic will magically weave around you. While Vietnamese cities were once dominated by bicycles and pedestrians, the growth in motorized mobility over the past decades have been astounding. The speed with which Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have changed into hostile environments for pedestrians and cyclist is quite remarkable. Yet in mobility terms Vietnamese urban transport somehow works, largely thanks to the continuing dominance of motorbikes. In this episode, Hue-Tam Jamme and Arve Hansen discuss motorbike madness in Vietnam, and what we can learn from the combination of vibrant street life and relatively efficient transport of millions of people on two wheels. Hue-Tam Jamme is an assistant professor at Arizona Sate University. She studies urbanisms in transition from a comparative perspective, using a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, focusing on the lived experience of societal transformations Arve Hansen is a researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Hear Dr. Rosina Lippi-Green talk about some of her shocking findings on language discrimination and bias on campus. Lippi-Green and Avi discuss her book English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the US (Routledge, 2011) and what the academic community can do to be more inclusive of scholars with different levels of English. We also discuss Rosina's transition from researcher to popular novelist. Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dr. Stephanie (Sam) A. Martin’s new book, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump (U Alabama Press, 2021), is a fascinating exploration of the way that sermons, particularly those delivered by white evangelical pastors with sizeable congregations, link together storytelling, patriotism, conservative and Republican politics, and American exceptionalism. Martin’s work is a rich and deep textual and rhetorical analysis of sermons that are delivered both in person and online. These sermons—delivered over the course of more than a decade—reach many listeners and believers since they are given by pastors who preside over churches with congregations of at least 2000 members. And Martin teases out the focus of so many of these sermons, which are not always directly discussing or addressing politics, but have and continue to create an understanding of the white evangelical individual within American society. Decoding the Digital Church explains that part of the thrust of this understanding is to position white Evangelicals as both insiders and outsiders simultaneously. Part of this context, as explained via these sermons, is that the American Founders were the original evangelicals, thus contemporary evangelicals have an original claim to the benefits of being the first true Americans. This is also combined with the nostalgic rendering of America’s past—building on the concept of American exceptionalism as well. At the same time, the content of these sermons opens the pathway for Evangelicals to disavow the ill-effects of their political choices, absolving them of the responsibility for their votes or those they support for elected office. Martin provides a “digital rhetorical ethnography” to understand the narratives that are coming through the white evangelical megachurches. To unpack the threads of these narratives, Martin uses a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives for her research, including approaches from political science, rhetoric and communication, sociology and ethnography, and religious studies. This is an accessible and important study of the connection between evangelical storytelling and the evangelical community’s understanding of its place and role in American society. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A political party worker who produces crowds for electoral rallies. A “prison specialist” who serves other people’s prison sentences in exchange for a large fee. An engineer who is able to secure otherwise impossible building permits. These and other dealmakers—whose behind-the-scenes expertise and labor are often invisible—have an intrinsic role in the city's functioning and can be indispensable for navigating everyday life in Bombay, one of the world’s most complex, dynamic, and populous cities. Bombay Brokers collects profiles of thirty-six such “brokers.” Written by anthropologists, artists, city planners, and activists, these character sketches bring into relief the paradox that these brokers’ knowledge and labor are simultaneously invisible yet essential for Bombay’s functioning. Their centrality reveals the global-scale paradoxes and gaps that these brokers mediate and bridge. In this way, Bombay Brokers (Duke UP, 2021) prompts a reconsideration of what counts as legitimate and valuable knowledge and labor while offering insight into changing structures of power in Bombay and around the globe. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness (MIT Press, 2021), social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good. Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including the futilitarian condition, homo futilitus, and semio-futility--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness. This urgent and provocative book chimes with the mood of the time by at once mapping the historical relationship between utilitarianism and capitalism, developing an original framework for understanding neoliberalism, and recounting the lived experience of uselessness in the early twenty-first century. At a time of epoch-defining disasters, from climate emergencies to deadly pandemics, countering the futility of neoliberal existence is essential to building an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future. Neil Vallelly is a political and social theorist based at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research has appeared in journals such as Rethinking Marxism, Angelaki, and Poetics Today, and magazines, including New Internationalist and ROAR. In 2022, he will take up a two-year Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Otago, working on a history of capitalism and migrant detention. An Italian translation of Futilitarianism will be published in March 2022. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Uber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, the press, the general public, and Argentina's president himself. Economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido, who had arrived in the city six months earlier to research the taxi industry, suddenly found himself documenting the unprecedented upheaval in real time. Taxis Vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires (Stanford UP, 2021) examines the ensuing conflict from the perspective of the city's globalist, culturally liberal middle class, showing how notions like monopoly, efficiency, innovation, competition, and freedom fueled claims that were often exaggerated, inconsistent, unverifiable, or plainly false, but that shaped the experience of the conflict such that taxi drivers' stakes in it were no longer merely disputed but progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away. This first book-length study of the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the arrival of a major platform economy to a metropolitan capital considers how the clash between Uber and the traditional taxi industry played out in courtrooms, in the press, and on the street. Looking to court cases, the politics of taxi licenses, social media campaigns, telecommunications infrastructure, public protests, and Uber's own promotional materials, del Nido examines the emergence of "post-political reasoning": an increasingly common way in which societies neutralize disagreement, shaping how we understand what we can even legitimately argue about and how. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do researchers navigate the complexities of the field? In Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Columbia UP, 2020), political scientists from a diverse range of biographical and academic backgrounds describe their research experiences in North and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, ranging from archival work to interviews with combatants. In sharing their stories, the book's forty-four contributors provide accessible illustrations of methods like conducting surveys and interviews, practical questions of health and safety, and general principles such as the importance of flexibility, creativity, and interpersonal connections. Peter Krause is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston College and Research Affiliate with the MIT Security Studies Program. He is the author of Rebel Power: Why National Movements Compete, Fight, and Win (Cornell University Press, 2017), co-editor with Kelly Greenhill of Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), and co-editor with Ora Szekely of Stories from the Field: An Unorthodox Guide to Fieldwork (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). His research focuses on Middle East politics, terrorism and political violence, and nationalism and revolution. His current book project analyzes which rebel groups take power 'the day after' regime change. Ora Szekely is Associate Professor of Political Science at Clark University. Her research focuses on the politics, behavior, and ideologies of armed groups in the Middle East, including ideologies of gender and the relationship between propaganda and violence against civilians. In addition to co-editing Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (2020), she is the co-author of Insurgent Women (2019), and the author of The Politics of Militant Group Survival in the Middle East (2016) and a forthcoming book about the civil war in Syria. Her research is based on fieldwork across the Middle East. Aditya Srinivasan assisted with this episode. Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Confidence Culture (Duke UP, 2022), Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucault’s notion of technologies of self to demonstrate how “confidence culture” demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that women—along with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Minal Bopaiah about her new book Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives (Berrett-Koehler, 2021). Remember the Marlboro Man? Of course you do, as he symbolizes the myth of rugged individualism. Minal Bopaiah is here to suggest that the idea of the “making it on your own” is and has always been a myth. There’s always a social context, which favors one group more than another. It’s not that individual efforts aren’t valid; it’s just that the story is always more complicated, and there are those in positions of power eager to camouflage the degree to which the “game” is tilted by factors involving gender, race, and other factors. Many aspects of this book and discussion are unique when it comes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). This episode explores the world of non-profits, where “doing good” has aspects to it that should welcome reform. At the same time, how about the 19% of the population that have a disability? Rarely do they get addressed as part of what DEI initiatives should entail. Minal Bopaiah is among the most impassioned, incisive guests the show has had on. Give her a listen! Minal Bopaiah is the founder of Brevity & Wit, a strategy and design firm focused on DEI initiatives. She’s written for the Stanford Social Innovation Review and TheHill.com an author, among other activities and career accomplishments. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Scholars Esther De Dauw and Daniel J. Connell have assembled an array of chapters that explore the idea of masculinity in the realm of contemporary heroes and superheroes. Toxic Masculinity: Mapping the Monstrous in Our Heroes (UP of Mississippi, 2020) examines not only the presentation of masculinity in which we are constantly immersed in the superhero narrative in films, television, and comics, but also how this translates into our expectations as to what is the model for heroism. The editors and authors unpack this concept of hegemonic masculinity, and how it generally incorporates hypermasculinity and toxic masculinity, and how it also, by definition, tends to reject femininity, thus bifurcating gender and gender performances and images into two distinct silos. This reification is communicated in so many of these superheroic narratives and is re-absorbed by the audience. The contributing authors to Toxic Masculinity interrogate these presentations and continue the conversation that is active in the academe. This conversation, according to the research, is also quite active within superhero fandom. The first section of the book specifically examines masculinity and the pop culture superhero artifacts. The second section of the book examines the contrast to masculinity—namely those who embody a different gender or sexuality but are still superheroes. If masculinity itself is a kind of fan service in this superhero genre, the question arises as to what it is that non-male characters must do for fan service. How are consumers of superheroes satisfied if the superhero isn’t hard bodied in the same way? The final section of the book focuses on unexpected heroes, who play with gender a bit more than the hypermasculine heroes who dominate so many of the contemporary superhero films and television shows. Toxic Masculinity examines both the male and the female gaze in the way that we see and interpret these superheroic narratives. This is a fascinating book, for scholars, for fans, for anyone interested in our current popular culture environment and questions of gender. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Helga Nowotny about her new book In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (Polity, 2021). One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us. At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care. As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Up to Heaven and Down to Hell (Princeton UP, 2021) is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet--whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet--is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent. The United States is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend up to heaven and down to hell, which means that landowners have the exclusive right to lease their subsurface mineral estates to petroleum companies. Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living with rural communities outside of Williamsport as they confronted the tension between property rights and the commonwealth. In this deeply intimate book, he reveals how the decision to lease brings financial rewards but can also cause irreparable harm to neighbors, to communal resources like air and water, and even to oneself. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell casts America's ideas about freedom and property rights in a troubling new light, revealing how your personal choices can undermine your neighbors' liberty, and how the exercise of individual rights can bring unintended environmental consequences for us all. Sebastián Rojas Cabal is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at Princeton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Structural racism has impacted the lives of African Americans in the United States since before the country’s founding. Although the country has made some progress towards a more equal society, political developments in the 21st century have shown that deep divides remain. The persistence of inequality is an indicator of the stubborn resilience of the institutions that maintain white supremacy. To bridge our divides, renowned political scientist Terri Givens calls for ‘radical empathy’ - moving beyond an understanding of others’ lives and pain to understand the origins of our biases, including internalized oppression. In Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides (Policy Press, 2021), she offers practical steps to call out racism and bring about radical social change. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Stepping Up: COVID-19 Checkpoints and Rangatiratanga (Huia Publishers, 2021) discusses the roadside checkpoints that were set up by Māori to protect communities during the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Case studies of four different checkpoints are examined, each of which looked slightly different, but all of which were underpinned by tikanga Māori. The checkpoints are discussed as practical expressions of whanau, hapū, iwi and Māori rangatiratanga and indicate the ongoing existence and flourishing of rangatiratanga. In this podcast episode we delve deep into the concept of Rangatiratanga as expressed through the checkpoints and its wider societal implications. Dr Maria Bargh (Te Arawa, Ngāti Awa) is Tumuaki/Head of School, Te Kawa a Māui/School of Māori Studies and is a Senior Lecturer in the School. Maria studied at Victoria University of Wellington before completing her PhD in Political Science and International Relations at the Australian National University in 2002. She has worked for iwi organisations such as Ngāti Awa Research and Archives Trust and Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi in Whakatāne before beginning work at Victoria in 2005. Luke Fitzmaurice (Te Aupōuri) is a teaching fellow at Te Kawa a Māui, Māori Studies, Te Herenga Waka: Victoria University of Wellington and a PhD candidate in law at the University of Otago. His interests include kaupapa Māori approaches to law and policy, particularly family law and children’s rights. Luke has a BA in politics and international relations, an LLB, and a Postgraduate Certificate in indigenous studies from Victoria University of Wellington. He also holds a Postgraduate Diploma in child-centred practice from the University of Otago. Ed Amon is a Master of Indigenous Studies Candidate at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, a columnist at his local paper: Hibiscus Matters, and a Stand-up Comedian. His main interests are indigenous studies, politics, history, and cricket. Follow him on twitter @edamoned or email him at edamonnz@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Societies all over the world are getting older, the result of the fact that we are living longer and having fewer children. At some point in the near future, much of the developed world will have at least twenty percent of their national populations over the age of sixty-five. Bradley Schurman calls this the Super Age. Today, Italy, Japan, and Germany have already reached the Super Age, and another ten countries will have gone over the tipping point in 2021. Thirty-five countries will be part of this club by the end of the decade. This seismic shift in the world population can portend a period of tremendous growth--or leave swaths of us behind. In The Super Age: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny (Harper Business, 2022), Schurman explains how changing demographics will affect government and business and touch all of our lives. Fewer people working and paying income taxes, due to outdated employment and retirement practices, could mean less money feeding popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare--with greater numbers relying on them. The forced retirement or redundancy of older workers could impact business by creating a shortage of workers, which would likely drive wages up and result in inflation. Corporations, too, must rethink marketing strategies--older consumers are already purchasing the majority of new cars, and they are a growing and vitally important market for health technologies and housing. Architects and designers must re-create homes and communities that are more inclusive of people of all ages and abilities. If we aren't prepared for the changes to come, Schurman warns, we face economic stagnation, increased isolation of at-risk populations, and accelerated decline of rural communities. Instead, we can plan now to harness the benefits of the Super Age: extended and healthier lives, more generational cooperation at work and home, and new markets and products to explore. The choice is ours to make. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory (Routledge, 2020) explores the complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, Western Armenia or Northern Kurdistan. Spatially rooted in the shatter zone of the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space, it sheds light on the multi-layered memory landscape of the Lake Van region in Southeastern Turkey, where collective violence stretches back from the Armenian Genocide to the Kurdish conflict of today. Based on his fieldwork in Turkey and Armenia, the author examines how states work to construct and monopolize collective memory by narrating, silencing, mapping and performing the past, and how these narratives might help to contribute and resolve present-day conflicts. By looking at how national discourses are constructed and asking hard questions about why nations are imagined as exclusive and hostile to others, Embattled Dreamlands provides a unique insight into the development of national identity which will provide a great resource to students and researchers in sociology and history alike. Ronay Bakan is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How should we understand the role of television in everyday life? In On Living with Television (Duke UP, 2021), Amy Holdsworth, a Senior Lecturer in Theatre, Film & Television Studies at the University of Glasgow uses an autobiographical and autoethnographic approach to understand an object that has ‘always been there’ in many people’s lives. The book combines analysis of programmes, including In the night garden, Man vs food and Last Tango in Halifax, with rich theoretical reflections from television studies, cultural studies, and beyond. Exploring ideas of time, home, and care, the book will be essential reading across the humanities, as well as for anyone watching television! Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Toward Camden (Duke UP, 2021), Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Every day, hundreds of thousands of people move through the Gare du Nord train station in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, the largest train station in Europe. Julie Kleinman's Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris (University of California Press, 2019) delves into the contemporary life of the station, and especially the lives and social world of the West African migrants who congregate there daily. The project makes connections between twentieth and twenty-first-century stories and politics and the longer-term of the Gare du Nord as a transportation hub and a crossroads for French histories of urban infrastructure, labour and class, mobility, racial inequality, and identity (African and French primarily in this case). Drawing on a decade of archival and fieldwork that included the investigation of state and police archives, an internship at the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF-the French national railway company), as well as in-depth interviews and interactions with a group of (mostly male) West African migrants who spend time regularly at the station, the book is a fascinating exploration of the community and life strategies of migrants in and around this practical and social hub where issues of labour, employment, surveillance, violence, resistance, family, and friendship meet. Informed by a deep knowledge of the broader historical and contemporary culture and politics of France and empire, the book stays close to the perspectives, stories, and analyses of the West African "adventurers" at the heart of the project. In doing so, it also offers a compelling and illuminating view of the Gare du Nord and all that its busy spaces lead to and from within and beyond the borders of France. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What can years of ethnographic engagement with rural Indonesia teach us about capitalism, development, and resistance? On this episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, our guest is Dr. Tania Li, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Tania tells us about three decades of research on development programs, local activism, and class formation in rural Indonesia. She talks about her own frustrations as a development practitioner led her to study development programs for the book The Will to Improve. She then describes how research over 20 years on how families’ lives changed with the introduction of capitalist relations in rural Indonesian highlands led to her next book, Land’s End. Finally, she explains the collaborative methodology behind her new book Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone (Duke UP, 2021), co-authored with Pujo Semedi. She talks about the insights that emerged from their different perspectives and positionality, how they used the project to inspire a whole generation of Indonesian anthropologists, and their joint efforts to avoid a colonial dynamic in their writing process. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Logic of Professionalism: Work and Management in Professional Service Organizations (Bristol UP, 2022) discusses common management and work practices in professional service organizations. Johan Alvehus opens important discussions on what it means to work, manage, and be managed in such professional organizations, casting light on classic conflicts. He takes everyday work as a starting point and adopts a critical view that focuses on challenges and struggles in both public and private settings. He offers new perspectives and key insights for the future of professionalism. Providing a comprehensive overview of the field, this book is an important guide for understanding how professionalism is maintained in today's organizations. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of management and leadership. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Based on comparative ethnographic research in four countries and three continents, Butinage: The Art of Religious Mobility (U Toronto Press, 2021) explores the notion of "religious butinage" as a conceptual framework intended to shed light on the dynamics of everyday religious practice. Derived from the French word butiner, which refers to the foraging activity of bees and other pollinating insects, this term is employed by the authors metaphorically to refer to the "to-ing and fro-ing" of believers between religious institutions. Focused on urban, predominantly Christian settings in Brazil, Kenya, Ghana, and Switzerland, Butinage examines commonalities and differences across the four case studies and identifies religious mobility as existing at the meeting points of religious-institutional rules and narratives, social norms, and individual agency and practice. Drawing on anglophone, francophone, and lusophone academic traditions, Butinage is dedicated to a dialogue between ethnographic findings and theoretical ideas, and explores how we may rethink common conceptions of religious normativity. Irene Promodh is a Ph.D. student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on mobile forms of Christianity across the Indian Ocean, particularly among migrant communities circulating between their places of work in the Arabian/Persian Gulf and their home societies in South India. She is especially interested in questions of caste, denominational difference, and religious conversion among Christian diasporas in the Indian Ocean world. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History & Ecumenics, focusing on World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research interest lies in Indonesia and the Muslim dominant regions of Southeast Asia, from the postcolonial approach to Christianity and the coexistence of various religions, including the study of Christianity and the Islamic faith in a Muslim dominant society that includes challenges of ethnic diversity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we make creative industries fair and inclusive? In Reimagining the Creative Industries: Youth Creative Work, Communities of Care (Routledge, 2021), Miranda Campbell, an associate professor in the School of Creative Industries at Ryerson University, explores this question theoretically and empirically to present a new vision for both young creative workers and creative production itself. Drawing on ideas of ordinariness and the everyday, along with the need for care and inclusivity, the book is critical of current creative industry practice at corporate level, whilst offering new models and new methods for making culture. With examples from a range of art and cultural forms, the book is essential reading for creative industries, arts and humanities, and social science scholars, as well as for creative practitioners everywhere. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (Duke UP, 2021), Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now threaten the West itself. Engaging with the work of Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari, Césaire, and Arendt, Povinelli highlights four axioms of existence-the entanglement of existence, the unequal distribution of power, the collapse of the event as essential to political thought, and the legacies of racial and colonial histories. She traces these axioms' inspiration in anticolonial struggles against the dispossession and extraction that have ruined the lived conditions for many on the planet. By examining the dynamic and unfolding forms of late liberal violence, Povinelli attends to a vital set of questions about changing environmental conditions, the legacies of violence, and the limits of inherited Western social theory. Between Gaia and Ground also includes a glossary of the keywords and concepts that Povinelli has developed throughout her work. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Amy C. Sullivan explores the complexity of America’s opioid epidemic through firsthand accounts of people grappling with the reverberating effects of stigma, treatment, and recovery. Taking a clear-eyed, nonjudgmental perspective of every aspect of these issues—drug use, parenting, harm reduction, medication, abstinence, and stigma—Opioid Reckoning: Love, Loss, and Redemption in the Rehab State (U Minnesota Press, 2021) questions current treatment models, healthcare inequities, and the criminal justice system. The oral histories associated with Opioid Reckoning will be archived with the University of Minnesota's Social Welfare History Archives. Learn more at the Minnesota Opioid Project. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Hate in the Homeland shows how tomorrow’s far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from college campuses and mixed martial arts gyms to clothing stores, online gaming chat rooms, and YouTube cooking channels. Instead of focusing on the how and why of far-right radicalization, Cynthia Miller-Idriss seeks answers in the physical and virtual spaces where hate is cultivated. Where does the far right do its recruiting? When do young people encounter extremist messaging in their everyday lives? Miller-Idriss shows how far-right groups are swelling their ranks and developing their cultural, intellectual, and financial capacities in a variety of mainstream settings. She demonstrates how young people on the margins of our communities are targeted in these settings, and how the path to radicalization is a nuanced process of moving in and out of far-right scenes throughout adolescence and adulthood. Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton UP, 2020) is essential for understanding the tactics and underlying ideas of modern far-right extremism. This eye-opening book takes readers into the mainstream places and spaces where today’s far right is engaging and ensnaring young people, and reveals innovative strategies we can use to combat extremist radicalization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Neha Sahgal, Associate Director, Research, at the Pew Research Center speaks of Pew’s ground-breaking research on Indian public opinion on religion. The data shows that Indians maintain a commitment to religious tolerance while also living highly religiously segregated lives. The survey report explores these themes in greater detail along with Indians’ attitudes about caste, religious observance, and a variety of other social and political issues. Find out more about the report here and here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Ansaru Allah Community, also known as the Nubian Islamic Hebrews (AAC/NIH) and later the Nuwaubians, is a deeply significant and controversial African American Muslim movement. Founded in Brooklyn in the 1960s, it spread through the prolific production and dissemination of literature and lecture tapes and became famous for continuously reinventing its belief system. In this book, Michael Muhammad Knight studies the development of AAC/NIH discourse over a period of thirty years, tracing a surprising consistency behind a facade of serial reinvention. It is popularly believed that the AAC/NIH community abandoned Islam for Black Israelite religion, UFO religion, and Egyptosophy. However, Knight sees coherence in AAC/NIH media, explaining how, in reality, the community taught that the Prophet Muhammad was a Hebrew who adhered to Israelite law; Muhammad’s heavenly ascension took place on a spaceship; and Abraham enlisted the help of a pharaonic regime to genetically engineer pigs as food for white people. Against narratives that treat the AAC/NIH community as a postmodernist deconstruction of religious categories, Knight demonstrates that AAC/NIH discourse is most productively framed within a broader African American metaphysical history in which boundaries between traditions remain quite permeable. Unexpected and engrossing, Metaphysical Africa: Truth and Blackness in the Ansaru Allah Community (Pennsylvania State UP, 2020) brings to light points of intersection between communities and traditions often regarded as separate and distinct. In doing so, it helps move the field of religious studies beyond conventional categories of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ challenging assumptions that inform not only the study of this particular religious community but also the field at large. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Viktoriya Kim, Nelia Balgoa, and Beverley Anne Yamamoto's book The Politics of International Marriage in Japan (Rutgers UP, 2021) provides an in-depth exploration and analysis of marriages between Japanese nationals and migrants from three broad ethnic/cultural groups - spouses from the former Soviet Union countries, the Philippines, and Western countries. It reveals how the marriage migrants navigate the intricacies and trajectories of their marriages with Japanese people while living in Japan. Seen from the lens of ‘gendered geographies of power’, the book explores how state-level politics and policies towards marriage, migration, and gender affect the personal power politics in operation within the relationships of these international couples. Overall, the book discusses how ethnic identity intersects with gender in the negotiation of spaces and power relations between and amongst couples; and the role states and structural inequalities play in these processes, resulting in a reconfiguration of our notions of what international marriages are and how powerful gender and the state are in understanding the power relations in these unions. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City (NYU Press, 2020), edited by Alison Hope Alkon, Yuki Kato, and Joshua Sbicca, is a collection of essays examining how gentrification uproots the urban food landscape, and what activists are doing to resist it. From hipster coffee shops to upscale restaurants, a bustling local food scene is perhaps the most commonly recognized harbinger of gentrification. A Recipe for Gentrification explores this widespread phenomenon, showing the ways in which food and gentrification are deeply―and, at times, controversially―intertwined. Contributors provide an inside look at gentrification in different cities, from major hubs like New York and Los Angeles to smaller cities like Cleveland and Durham. They examine a wide range of food enterprises―including grocery stores, restaurants, community gardens, and farmers' markets―to provide up-to-date perspectives on why gentrification takes place, and how communities use food to push back against displacement. Ultimately, they unpack the consequences for vulnerable people and neighborhoods. A Recipe for Gentrification highlights how the everyday practices of growing, purchasing and eating food reflect the rapid―and contentious―changes taking place in American cities in the twenty-first century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why are Americans so angry? American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation (Greenleaf, 2021) explores history to find the answer to a divided America Two disparate Americas have always coexisted. In this thoroughly researched, engaging and story of our nation’s divergent roots, Seth David Radwell clearly links the fascinating history of the two American Enlightenments to our raging political division. He also demonstrates that reasoned analysis and historical perspective are the only antidote to irrational political discourse. “Did my vision of America ever exist at all, or was it but a myth?” Searching for a fresh and distinctive perspective on the recent corrosion of our civic life, Radwell’s very personal and yet broadly shared question propelled his search back to the nation’s founding for a fresh and distinctive perspective on the recent corrosion of its civic life - and led to a surprising discovery. Today’s battles reflect the fundamentally divergent visions of our country that emerged at the nation’s founding and have been vying for prominence ever since. The founding principles that shaped the United States may be rooted in the Enlightenment era. But the origin of our dual Americas is a product of two distinct Enlightenments - Radical and Moderate. Radwell shows the impact of this schism on American history from the early expansion of the U.S. through Jim Crow and The Age of Trumpism. In an optimistic final section, Radwell lays out an analysis of our current governmental structure and a plan to move forward, arguing that it is only by embracing Enlightenment principles that we can build a civilized, progressive, and tolerant society - where Americans can firmly ground their different views in rationality. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. We invite your comments and suggestions: reneeg@vanleer.org.il. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Have you ever stopped to think about your local grocery cooperative and what makes it different than, say Safeway or Giant or Whole Foods? That is, if you have a grocery cooperative in your neighborhood – they are neither ubiquitous nor evenly distributed. They do, however, offer perhaps the most visible model of how economic practices can exist outside the central dogma of capitalism. In Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Andrew Zitcer uses the travails and triumphs of four non-traditional organizations to create a compelling argument for a better, more equitable way to organize social and economic practices. His portraits of two grocery co-ops and a dance collective in Philadelphia, as well as a national acupuncture multistakeholder cooperative, ground his theory in the real world where ordinary people sweat, argue, stock shelves, heal each other, and make art. But his interlocutors have an underlying passion – to create a place where cooperation, rather than competition, is the guiding principle. This approach to social practice has deep implications for the creation of a more equitable and just society. Zitcer’s personal immersion in his research yields a “loving critique” of his four case studies and offers a realistic optimism for our post-pandemic world. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the wake of unthinkable atrocities, it is reasonable to ask how any population can move on from the experience of genocide. Simply remembering the past can, in the shadow of mass death, be retraumatizing. So how can such momentous events be memorialized in a way that is productive and even healing for survivors? Genocide memorials tell a story about the past, preserve evidence of the violence that occurred, and provide emotional support to survivors. But the goal of amplifying survivors' voices can fade amid larger narratives entrenched in political motivations. In After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda (U Wisconsin Press, 2021), Nicole Fox investigates the ways memorials can shape the experiences of survivors decades after mass violence has ended. She examines how memorializations can both heal and hurt, especially when they fail to represent all genders, ethnicities, and classes of those afflicted. Drawing on extensive interviews with Rwandans, Fox reveals their relationships to these spaces and uncovers those voices silenced by the dominant narrative--arguing that the erasure of such stories is an act of violence itself. The book probes the ongoing question of how to fit survivors in to the dominant narrative of healing and importantly demonstrates how memorials can shape possibilities for growth, national cohesion, reconciliation, and hope for the future. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke UP, 2022), Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this commercial industry seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance programs target women, and explores the exploitative implications of this targeting. Smitha Radhakrishnan is Professor of Sociology and Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s Studies at Wellesley College. Her research examines the cultural, financial, and political dimensions of gender and globalization, with particular focus on India, the United States, and South Africa. Her most recent book, Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India, examines exploitative anti-poverty practices that target women. Radhakrishnan’s previous book, Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a Transnational Class (Duke University Press 2011) is a transnational ethnography of Indian IT professionals. She has previously researched the cultural politics of post-apartheid South Africa. Her articles have appeared in World Development, Gender and Society, Theory and Society, and Signs, among other prominent journals. She received her PhD in Sociology from University of California, Berkeley. Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on South Asian economic writing. He co-hosts the podcast High Theory and is a co-founder of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Much has been reported and discussed about the hotly debated issue of immigration enforcement, yet a question is still to be explored: What is the impact of the immigration enforcement on schools and our educational system? In Schools Under Siege: The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on Educational Equity (Harvard Education Press, 2021), Patricia Gándara and Jongyeon Ee addressed this question using rich and comprehensive data from their survey and interview studies. More than 6 million school aged children and youths live in a household in which at least one of their close family members is undocumented. Schools Under Siege sheds light on what the immigration enforcement by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) means to these children. The book also explores the multi-faceted consequences, both direct and indirect, for their classmates, educators, schools, and communities. Schools Under Siege found that fear, stress, and trauma invoked by the threat of ICE detention and deportation contribute to increased absenteeism, decreased student achievement, and parent disengagement. Bullying becomes more widespread, and a multitude of other effects impact school climate and student health and well-being. Amplifying the burden, these effects are experienced disproportionately in poorly funded districts and Title I schools and are felt more acutely among vulnerable populations such as immigrant students, English language learners, and Latinx students. In this episode, you will hear their findings, with vivid examples, about the challenges that these children encountered living under the fear of being separated from their family members. Many children are American citizens and they faced the challenges of absenteeism, trauma, bully, among other things. Patricia and Jongyeon also discussed various innovative ways that educators come up with to support these students, including the idea of sanctuary schooling. They offer informative suggestions to educators and policy makers and engage the public in understanding the profound challenges schools and educators are facing today in supporting disadvanted and minoritized studenets. Patricia Gándara is research professor and codirector of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. She is also director of education for the University of California–Mexico Initiative. Jongyeon Ee is an assistant professor at the School of Education, Loyola Marymount University (LMU). Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Lucie Fremlova's book Queer Roma (Routledge, 2021) offers in-depth insight into the lives of queer Roma, thus providing rich evidence of the heterogeneity of Roma. The lived experiences of queer Roma, which are very diverse regionally and otherwise, pose a fundamental challenge to one-dimensional, negative misrepresentations of Roma as homophobic and antithetical to European and Western modernity. The book platforms Romani agency and voices in an original and novel way. This enables the reader to feel the individuals behind the data, which detail stories of rejection by Romani families and communities, and non-Romani communities; and unfamiliar, ground-breaking stories of acceptance by Romani families and communities. Combining intersectionality with queer theory innovatively and applying it to Romani Studies, the author supports her arguments with data illustrating how the identities of queer Roma are shaped by antigypsyism and its intersections with homophobia and transphobia. Thanks to its theoretical and empirical content, and its location within a book series on LGBTIQ lives that appeals to an international audience, this authoritative book will appeal to a wide range of readers. It will a be useful resource for libraries, community and social service workers, third-sector Romani and LGBTIQ organisations, activists and policymakers. Dr. Lucie Fremlova is an independent researcher who works at the interface between academia, social movements and policy. Her close-up, transdisciplinary research focuses on ethnic, ‘racial’, sexual and gender identities, particularly in relation to queer Roma. Her article ‘LGBTIQ Roma and queer intersectionalities: the lived experiences of LGBTIQ Roma’, published by the European Journal of Politics and Gender in 2019, won the EJPG 2021 Best Article and the Council for European Studies Gender and Sexuality Research Network 2019 Best Article Award. Her article ‘Non-Romani researcher positionality and reflexivity: queer(y)ing one’s privilege’ was the most-read article published in 2019 in volume 1, number 2 of the Critical Romani Studies Journal. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure (Duke UP, 2021), Hatim El-Hibri explores how the creation and circulation of images has shaped the urban spaces and cultural imaginaries of Beirut. Drawing on fieldwork and texts ranging from maps, urban plans, and aerial photographs to live television and drone-camera footage, El-Hibri traces the histories of how the technologies and media infrastructure that visualize the city are used to consolidate or destabilize regimes of power. Throughout the twentieth century, colonial, economic, and military mapping projects helped produce and govern its spaces. In the 1990s, the imagery of its post-civil war downtown reconstruction cast Beirut as a site of financial investment in ways that obscured its ongoing crises. During and following the 2006 Israel/Hizbullah war, Hizbullah's use of live television broadcasts of fighting and protests along with its construction of a war memorial museum at a former secret military bunker demonstrate the tension between visualizing space and the practices of concealment. Outlining how Beirut's urban space and public life intertwine with images and infrastructure, El-Hibri interrogates how media embody and exacerbate the region's political fault lines. Mathew Gagné in an independent writer, scholar, and educator, currently teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the second edition of her book, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America (Berrett-Koehler, 2021), Tamara Winfrey Harris interviews over 100 diverse Black women about marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more. Winfrey Harris examines the Mammy, Sapphire, and Jezebel stereotypes that persist in American popular media and culture. Winfrey Harris explores the evolution of stereotypes of Black women, with new real-life examples, such as the rise of blackfishing and digital blackface (which help white women rise to fame) and the media’s continued fascination with Black women’s sexuality (as with Cardi B or Megan Thee Stallion). The second edition includes a new chapter on Black women and power that explores how persistent stereotypes challenge Black women’s recent leadership and achievements in activism, community organizing, and politics. The chapter includes interviews with activists and civic leaders and interrogates media coverage and perceptions of Stacey Abrams, Vice President Kamala Harris, and others. Winfrey Harris exposes anti–Black woman propaganda and shows how real Black women are pushing back against racist, distorted cartoon versions of themselves. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a Black woman in America. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Intersectionality in the Muslim South Asian-American Middle Class: Lifestyle Consumption beyond Halal and Hijab (Lexington Books, 2021), wherein Ternikar theorizes the everyday consumption of South Asian Muslim American women through case studies of their food, clothing, and social media presence. Through feminist, intersectional, and sociology of consumption theories, she provides excellent insights into the nuanced ways that these women negotiate their gendered, classed, racial, and religious identities. Far from being simply a book about the clothing styles, dietary habits and preferences, and social media presence of Muslim American women of South Asian backgrounds, it is an excellent exploration of the ways that this group of American women maintain, form, and re-invent new identities through consumption while maintaining and re-negotiating inherited ethno-religious traditions. Farha Bano Ternikar is an associate professor of Sociology and director of Gender and Women’s Studies at Le Moyne College. She has an MA in Religious Studies and a PhD in Sociology. Her publications include “Feeding the Muslim South Asian Immigrant Family" in Feminist Food Studies (2019), “Constructing the Halal Kitchen in the American Diaspora” (2020), and “Hijab and the Abrahamic Traditions” in Sociology Compass (2010). Her publications “Ethical consumption and Modest fashion” is forthcoming in Fashion Studies Journal (Spring 2022), and “The Changing Face of Arranged Marriage irl and online in the Muslim Diaspora” in the Politics of Tradition, Resistance and Change (summer 2022). In our interview today, we discuss the main contributions and findings of her book Intersectionality in the Muslim South Asian-American Middle Class: Lifestyle Consumption beyond Halal and Hijab, her choice to focus on upper-middle class South Asian American women, her respondents’ complex ideas of hijab, modesty, and halal consumption of food, and their presence on and consumption of social media. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (Berghahn Books, 2021) provides a theory of the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool of unforeseen social change, people experience confusion as to where and when they belong on timelines of previously unquestioned pasts and futures. Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book explores the everyday affects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal promises of accumulation, defeated futures, and the existential dilemmas of life held captive in the uncanny elsewhen. Daniel M. Knight is Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is author of History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece (Palgrave, 2015) and co-author of The Anthropology of the Future (Cambridge, 2019, with Rebecca Bryant). Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Governing for Revolution: Social Transformation in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2021) Dr. Megan Stewart argues that despite significant risks, some rebels undertake costly governance projects during wartime, to achieve transformational goals. Dr. Stewart explores the development of this model by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and how its become a prototype ever since. Dr. Stewart uses different kinds of qualitative case studies as well as quantitative analysis to prove her theory, using archival data from six countries, primary rebel sources, and fieldwork. Miranda Melcher (Ph.D., Defense Studies, Kings College, London) studies post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with deep analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old--and again when she was eighteen--she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating disorders--their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination. Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America (U California Press, 2019), the culmination of over two decades of anthropological and clinical work, as well as a lifetime of lived experience, presents a profound rethinking of eating disorders and how to treat them. Through a mix of rich cultural analysis, detailed therapeutic accounts, and raw autobiographical reflections, Famished helps make sense of why people develop eating disorders, what the process of recovery is like, and why treatments so often fail. It's also an unsparing condemnation of the tension between profit and care in American healthcare, demonstrating how a system set up to treat a disease may, in fact, perpetuate it. Fierce and vulnerable, critical and hopeful, Famished will forever change the way you understand eating disorders and the people who suffer with them. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980) (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, is a groundbreaking collection of writings by Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group documenting their efforts to expose France's inhumane treatment of prisoners Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970-71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet. These archival documents--public announcements, manifestos, reports, pamphlets, interventions, press conference statements, interviews, and round table discussions--trace the GIP's establishment in post-1968 political turmoil, the new models of social activism it pioneered, the prison revolts it supported across France, and the retrospective assessments that followed its denouement. At the same time, Intolerable offers a rich, concrete exploration of Foucault's concept of resistance, providing a new understanding of the arc of his intellectual development and the genesis of his most influential book, Discipline and Punish. Presenting the account of France's most vibrant prison resistance movement in its own words and on its own terms, this significant and relevant collection also connects the approach and activities of the GIP to radical prison resistance movements today. Kevin Thompson is professor of philosophy at DePaul University. He is author of Hegel’s Theory of Normativity. Perry Zurn is assistant professor of philosophy at American University. He is coeditor of Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (Minnesota, 2020) and Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition. Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In a nation deeply divided by race, the "Karens" of the world are easy to villainize. But in Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It (Seal Press, 2021), Jessie Daniels addresses the unintended complicity of even well-meaning white women. She reveals how their everyday choices harm communities of color. White mothers, still expected to be the primary parents, too often uncritically choose to send their kids to the "best" schools, collectively leading to a return to segregation. She addresses a feminism that pushes women of color aside, and a wellness industry that insulates white women in a bubble of their own privilege. Daniels then charts a better path forward. She looks to the white women who fight neo-Nazis online and in the streets, and who challenge all-white spaces from workplaces to schools to neighborhoods. In the end, she shows how her fellow white women can work toward true equality for all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Gender and Food: A Critical Look at the Food System (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) synthesizes existing theoretical and empirical research on food, gender, and intersectionality to offer students and scholars a framework from which to understand how gender is central to the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Shelley L. Koch is professor of sociology at Emory & Henry College. She is the author of A Theory of Grocery Shopping: Food, Choice, and Conflict and co-editor of Food, Masculinities and Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Her areas of specialization include gender, food studies, the environment, and consumer society. She also teaches in courses in the Women and Gender Studies and Food Studies programs. She received the HOPE Award in 2018 for her work on sustainable local food systems, and tends a garden and raises chickens in Washington County. Amir Sayadabdi is a lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Global thinker, public intellectual, and world-famous theorist of ‘liquid modernity’, Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a scholar who, despite forced migration, built a very successful academic career and, after retirement, became a prolific and popular writer and an intellectual talisman for young people everywhere. Izabela Wagner's Bauman: A Biography (Polity Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive biography of his life and work. Dr. Wagner, Professor of Sociology at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, returns to Bauman’s native Poland and recounts his childhood in an assimilated Polish-Jewish family and the school experiences shaped by anti-Semitism. Bauman’s life trajectory is typical of his generation and social group: the escape from Nazi occupation and Soviet secondary education, communist engagement, enrolment in the Polish Army as a political officer, participation in WWII, and the support for the new political regime in the post-war Poland. Dr. Wagner sheds new light on Bauman’s activity as a KBW political officer. His eviction in 1953 from the military ranks and his academic career reflect the dynamic context of Poland in 1950s and 1960s. His professional career in Poland was abruptly halted in 1968 by the anti-Semitic purges. Bauman became a refugee again - leaving Poland for Israel, and then settling down in Leeds in the UK in 1971. His work would flourish in Leeds, and after his retirement in 1991 he entered a period of enormous productivity which propelled him onto the international stage as one of the most widely read and influential social thinkers of our time. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora (Ohio State UP, 2016), Vivian Nun Halloran examines food memoirs by immigrants and their descendants and reveals how their treatment of food deeply embeds concerns about immigrant identity in the United States. Halloran argues that by offering a glimpse into the authors' domestic lives through discussions of homemade food, these memoirs demystify the processes of immigration, assimilation, acculturation, and expatriation--ultimately examining what it means to live as naturalized citizens of the United States. Having grown up hearing about their parents' often fraught experiences of immigration, these authors examine the emotional toll these stories took and how such stories continue to affect their view of themselves as Americans. Halloran covers a wide swathe of immigrant food memoirs, moving seamlessly between works by authors such as Austin Clarke, Madhur Jaffrey, Kim Sun e, Diana Abu-Jaber, Eduardo Machado, Colette Rossant, Maya Angelou, and Jonathan Safran Foer. The Immigrant Kitchen describes how these memoirs function as a complex and engaging mass media genre that caters to multiple reading constituencies. Specifically, they entertain readers with personal anecdotes and recollections, teach new culinary skills through recipes, share insight into different cultural mores through ethnographic and reportorial discussions of life in other countries, and attest to the impact that an individual's legal immigration into the United States continues to have down through the generations of his or her American-born families.
Vivian Nun Halloran is professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a Caribbeanist by training, and a literary food studies scholar by vocation. She is the author of Exhibiting Slavery and is currently working on her next book that examines those moments when Americans of Caribbean descent address themselves to the American people to share the lessons of their immigrant upbringing. She is also working on two digital humanities projects. Twitter: @HalloranVivian
Amir Sayadabdi is a lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Bogdan Popa’s De-Centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War (Manchester University Press, 2021) seeks to reorient queer theory to a different conception of bodies and sexuality derived from Eastern European Marxism. The book articulates a contrast between the concept of the productive body, which draws its epistemology from Soviet and avant-garde theorists, and Cold War gender, which is defined as the social construction of the body. The first part of the book concentrates on the theoretical and visual production of Eastern European Marxism, which proposed an alternative version of sexuality to that of western liberalism. In doing so it offers a historical angle to understand the emergence not only of an alternative epistemology, but also of queer theory's vocabulary. The second part of the book provides a Marxist, anti-capitalist archive for queer studies, which often neglects to engage critically with its liberal and Cold War underpinnings. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ethnographer and sociologist Joanne Golann spent 18 months observing the day-to-day life of students and teachers in a “no-excuses” charter school. In her book Scripting the Moves, she explores the school’s use of behavioural scripts, including SLANT. Golann investigates the reasoning behind the use of these scripts, their implementation and their impacts on the school community, and questions whether the micro-management shaping every school day serves its stated purpose, namely, to prepare students for college in the future. Exploring ideas about cultural capital, authority, socialisation, leadership and autonomy in the charter school setting, Golann’s study provides a rare glimpse into the internal workings of an educational institution that should be required reading for anyone interested in school reform. Joanne Golann is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Education and an Assistant Professor of Sociology (secondary) at Vanderbilt University. Twitter: @jwgolann, Alice Garner is historian, teacher and performer with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
John and Elizabeth continue their conversation with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan’s work fits into a newish approach in anthropology of researching people with greater power and influence than the researchers themselves. That's sometimes called "studying up" and Dan and Elizabeth (who's writing a book about gold, after all!) have both thought a lot about it. Read the transcript here. Read Aneil Tripathy's RTB piece about actuarial time scales and how they shape the sort of anthropology that both he and Souleles practice. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin: Popular Culture, Masculinity, and Social Perceptions (Springer, 2021) explores how language ideologies have emerged for gangtaiqiang through a combination of indexical and ideological processes in televised media. Gangtaiqiang (Hong Kong-Taiwan accent), a socially recognizable form of mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin, has become a stereotype for many Chinese mainlanders who have little real-life interaction with Taiwanese people. Using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the author examines how Chinese millennials perceive gangtaiqiang by focusing on the following questions: 1) the role of televised media in the formation of language attitudes, and 2) how shifting gender ideologies are performed and embodied such attitudes. This book presents empirical evidence to argue that gangtaiqiang should, in fact, be conceptualized as a mediatized variety of Mandarin, rather than the actual speech of people in Hong Kong or Taiwan. The analyses in this book point to an emerging realignment among the Chinese towards gangtaiqiang, a variety traditionally associated with chic, urban television celebrities and young cosmopolitan types. In contrast to Beijing Mandarin, Taiwanese Mandarin is now perceived to be pretentious, babyish, and emasculated, mirroring the power dynamics between Taiwan and China. Chun-Yi Peng is an Associate Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. His primary research interests are in the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Mindy Thompson Fullilove traverses the central thoroughfares of our cities to uncover the ways they bring together our communities After an 11-year study of Main Streets in 178 cities and 14 countries, Fullilove discovered the power of city centers to “help us name and solve our problems.” In an era of compounding crises including racial injustice, climate change, and COVID-19, the ability to rely on the power of community is more important than ever. However, Fullilove describes how a pattern of disinvestment in inner-city neighborhoods has left Main Streets across the U.S. in disrepair, weakening our cities and leaving us vulnerable to catastrophe. In the face of urban renewal programs built in response to a supposed lack of “personal responsibility,” Fullilove offers “a different story, that of a series of forced displacements that had devastating effects on inner-city communities. Through that lens, we can appreciate the strength of segregated communities that managed to temper the ravages of racism through the Jim Crow era, and build political power and many kinds of wealth. . . . Only a very well-integrated, powerful community—one with deep spiritual principles—could have accomplished such a feat.” This is the power she hopes we will find again. Throughout Main Street: How a City's Heart Connects Us All (New Village Press, 2020), readers glimpse strong, vibrant communities who have conquered a variety of disasters, from the near loss of a beloved local business to the devastation of a hurricane. Using case studies to illustrate her findings, Fullilove turns our eyes to the cracks in city centers, the parts of the city that tend to be avoided or ignored. Providing a framework for those who wish to see their communities revitalized, Fullilove’s Main Street encourages us all to look both inward and outward to find the assets that already exist to create meaningful change. See below for references mentioned in this episode:"A Score for Main Street" published by the University of Orange (twitter: @UofO_07050); A profile of photographer Wing Young Huie; The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Elizabeth Korver-Glenn's book Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America (Oxford UP, 2021) examines how housing market professionals-including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and appraisers-construct 21st century urban housing markets in ways that contribute to or undermine racial segregation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data collected in Houston, Texas, Race Brokers shows that housing market professionals play a key role in connecting people-or refusing to connect people-to housing resources and opportunities. They make these brokering decisions through reference to racist or anti-racist ideas. Typically, housing market professionals draw from racist ideas that rank-order people and neighborhoods according to their perceived economic and cultural housing market value, entwining racism with their housing market activities and interactions. Racialized housing market routines encourage this entwinement by naturalizing racism as a professional tool. Race Brokers tracks how professionals broker racism across the housing exchange process-from the home's construction, to real estate brokerage, mortgage lending, home appraisals, and the home sale closing. In doing so, it shows that professionals make housing exchange a racialized process that contributes to neighborhood inequality and racial segregation. However, in contrast to the racialized status-quo, a small number of housing market professionals draw on anti-racist ideas and strategies to extend equal opportunities to individuals and neighborhoods, de-naturalizing housing market racism. Race Brokers highlights the imperative to interrupt the racism that pervades housing market professionals' work, dismantle the racialized routines that underwrite such racism, and cultivate a truly fair housing market. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Should we love work? In The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality (U California Press, 2021), Erin Cech, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, demonstrates how having passion for work fosters and reinforces a wide range of social inequalities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and data analysis, the book combines qualitative and quantitative data to elaborate and theorise ‘the passion principle’ that underpins how the more advantaged justify the inequalities associated with education and the labour market. Alongside revealing who benefits, and who suffers, from the ideology that people must be passionate about work, the book gives strategies and ideas on how to challenge and change the passion principle. The book will be essential reading across academia and for anyone interested in contemporary working life. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Japan is often imagined as a homogeneous society with few immigrant communities, but it is increasingly home to migrants from across the world. How does an extended stay in Japan influence Indian migrants’ sense of their identity as they adapt to a country very different from their own? Indian Migrants in Tokyo: A Study of Socio-Cultural, Religious, and Working Worlds (Routledge, 2020) by Megha Wadhwa explores the small but growing community of Indian migrants living in Japan. Japan has very distinctive customs and a complex culture, to which foreigners often struggle to adapt. Links between India and Japan go back a long way in history, and the connections and relations between the two countries have evolved and transformed over the years. The emerging Indian diaspora in Japan is one contemporary and important facet of this relationship between the two countries. Focusing on Indian migrants settled in Tokyo, this book analyzes their lives through interviews with approximately one hundred respondents among them, as well as extensive participant observation. Wadhwa examines the lifestyles, fears, problems, relations, and expectations of Indians who attempt to create “a home away from home” in Japan. This book will be of great interest to anthropologists and sociologists concerned with diaspora communities and the impact of migration, as well as scholars who research Japan, India, or both countries and regions. Megha Wadhwa is a Research Associate at the Institute of Japanese Studies at the Free University of Berlin and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University in Tokyo. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why do some armies fare better than others on the battlefield? In Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton UP, 2020), Jason Lyall argues that a state's prewar treatment of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, either by subjecting them to state-sanctioned discrimination or, worse, violence, undermines interethnic trust, fuels grievances, and leads victimized soldiers to subvert military authorities once war begins. The author tests this argument using Project Mars, a new dataset on conventional wars fought since 1800. Combining historical comparisons and statistical analysis, he also marshals evidence from nine wars, ranging from the Eastern Fronts of World Wars I and II to less familiar wars in Africa and Central Asia, to illustrate inequality's effects. Divided Armies was awarded the 2021 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, the 2020 Joseph Lepgold Prize, and was named a "Best of 2020" book by Foreign Affairs. Jason Lyall is the inaugural James Wright Chair of Transnational Studies and Associate Professor in the Government department. He also directs the Political Violence FieldLab at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. His research examines the effects and effectiveness of political violence in civil and conventional wars. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Politics, and World Politics, among others. He has received funding from AidData/USAID, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the MacArthur Foundation, the Folke Bernadotte Academy, and the United States Institute of Peace. He has conducted fieldwork in Russia and Afghanistan, where he served as the Technical Adviser for USAID's Measuring the Impact of Stabilization Initiatives (MISTI) project during 2012-15. He was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2020. Aditya Srinivasan assisted with this episode. Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In his new book Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/Inhibition (Routledge, 2021), Jacob Johanssen takes us on a journey into the dark masculinist recesses of the internet. He analyses original data from online communities of Involuntary Celibate (Incel) men, women-denigrating “Men Going Their Own Way”, anti-porn crusading NoFap users and the manifestos of mass shooters. By making use of the work of Willhelm Reich, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Klaus Theweleit, he is able to construct a convincing and sinister portrait of this dis/inhibited online culture, in which intermingling fantasies of victimhood and destructive annihilation of the feminine Other create a seething mélange of hatred and misogyny. It is testament to the power of the psychoanalytically informed approach of gathering “identificatory knowledge” that Johanssen does not stop at painting a damning picture of these men, but tries to grasp the psychodynamics at play in their polarized and fragmented world views and identities. As unlikely as it seems, there is even a glimmer of hope at the end of the book. Johanssen applies Jessica Benjamin’s concept of recognition to the men discussed - a possible way out of the dead end of the obsessively intensified hate of the manosphere? We discuss this question and many more in the interview. Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Taking a multidisciplinary perspective (including public health, sociology, criminology, and political science amongst others), and using examples from across the globe, Alison Ritter's Drug Policy (Routledge, 2021) provides a detailed understanding of the complex and highly contested nature of drug policy, drug policy making and the theoretical perspectives that inform the study of drug policy. It draws on four different theoretical perspectives: evidence-informed policy, policy process theories, democratic theory, and post-structural policy analysis. The use and trade in illegal drugs is a global phenomenon. It is viewed by governments as a significant social, legal, and health problem that shows no signs of abating. The key questions explored throughout this book are what governments and other bodies of social regulation should do about illicit drugs, including drug policies aimed at improving health and reducing harm, drug laws and regulation, and the role of research and values in policy development. Seeing policy formation as dynamic iterative interactions between actors, ideas, institutions, and networks of policy advocates, the book explores how policy problems are constructed and policy solutions selected, and how these processes intersect with research evidence and values. This then animates the call to democratise drug policy and bring about inclusive meaningful participation in policy development in order to provide the opportunity for better, more effective, and value-aligned drug policies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of drug policy from a number of disciplines, including public health, sociology, criminology, and political science. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among workers in meatpacking plants—and Americans feared for their meat supply. But the Midwest is not simply the place where animals are fed corn and then butchered. Native midwesterner Kristy Nabhan-Warren (Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa) spent years interviewing Iowans who work in the meatpacking industry, both native-born residents and recent migrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), she digs deep below the stereotype and reveals the grit and grace of a heartland that is a major global hub of migration and food production—and also, it turns out, of religion. Across the flatlands, Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims share space every day as worshippers, employees, and employers. On the bloody floors of meatpacking plants, in bustling places of worship, and in modest family homes, longtime and newly arrived Iowans spoke to Nabhan-Warren about their passion for religious faith and desire to work hard for their families. Their stories expose how faith-based aspirations for mutual understanding blend uneasily with rampant economic exploitation and racial biases. Still, these new and old midwesterners say that a mutual language of faith and morals brings them together more than any of them would have ever expected. This podcast will highlight the human right dimensions of the book and features a conversation between Nabhan-Warren and John McKerley, Curator of the Iowa Labor History Oral Project at the University of Iowa. This podcast was produced by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Personal reinvention is a core part of the human condition. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, certain private religious choices became lightning rods for public outrage and debate. Rebecca L. Davis's book Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics (UNC Press, 2021) reveals the controversial religious conversions that shaped modern America. Rebecca L. Davis explains why the new faiths of notable figures including Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Chuck Colson, and others riveted the American public. Unconventional religious choices charted new ways of declaring an authentic identity amid escalating Cold War fears of brainwashing and coercion. Facing pressure to celebrate a specific vision of Americanism, these converts variously attracted and repelled members of the American public. Whether the act of changing religions was viewed as selfish, reckless, or even unpatriotic, it provoked controversies that ultimately transformed American politics. Public Confessions takes intimate history to its widest relevance, and in so doing, makes you see yourself in both the private and public stories it tells. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how—and why—we eat the way we do. In How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America (Little Brown Spark, 2021), we get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family. Whether it's worrying about how far pantry provisions can stretch or whether there's enough time to get dinner on the table before soccer practice, all families have unique experiences that reveal their particular dietary constraints and challenges. By diving into the nuances of these families’ lives, Fielding-Singh lays bare the limits of efforts narrowly focused on improving families’ food access. Instead, she reveals how being rich or poor in America impacts something even more fundamental than the food families can afford: these experiences impact the very meaning of food itself. Packed with lyrical storytelling and groundbreaking research, as well as Fielding-Singh’s personal experiences with food as a biracial, South Asian American woman, How the Other Half Eats illuminates exactly how inequality starts on the dinner plate. Once you’ve taken a seat at tables across America, you’ll never think about class, food, and public health the same way again. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Robert Talisse’s new book, Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side (Oxford UP, 2021) is, in a certain sense, a continuation of his work from his previous book, Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place (Oxford University Press, 2019). As we discuss during the podcast conversation, Sustaining Democracy explores the conundrum or tension that may well be inherent in democracy, the conflict between holding fast to our beliefs about what we think is just and appropriate for society, and giving our political opponents the respect they deserve even if we disagree with their beliefs about justice. This is tricky, especially in our polarized political world, but Talisse argues that it is the very polarization that we need to pay attention to, since there are two kinds of polarization, external and internal. We have become used to the external polarization within democracy, which does not solve the problem, but it has become regularized to cast our political opponents as an “enemy” who does not, in fact, support justice and equality—on whichever side of the aisle one sits. This is the warped perspective that is applied by many to those with whom they politically disagree. Sustaining Democracy also exposes the growing anti-democratic, hierarchical shifts that have transpired within political groups. As noted throughout the book, Talisse highlights the need for internal reflection, especially among those who are on the “same side,” so that the political dynamics among like-minded citizens don’t devolve into opinion policing and echo chambers. Part of the concern here is the inclination within these political groupings towards homogeneity and conformity. This is belief polarization—and it pushes in undemocratic directions. Talisse, in a somewhat contrarian approach, wants to determine if the solution to democracy’s problems is not, in fact, more democracy, as has often been suggested. The solution may be to move away from the political fray for a time, to reflect on ideas and issues on one’s own, and to then re-enter the political community. This is a lively and frustrating thesis, and the conversation and the book reflect these overlapping tensions and considerations about democracy, deliberation, and political engagement. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today we are joined by William J. Morgan, Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California, and the author of Sport and Moral Conflict: A Conventionalist Theory (Temple University Press, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed three theories of sports ethics (formalism, internalism/interpretivism, and conventionalism.) We looked at how sports philosophers use historical controversies as test cases for their philosophical theories, but also applied those philosophical approaches to contemporary sports issues including the use of performance enhancing drugs and the payment of college athletes. Sport and Moral Conflict takes sport as a moral laboratory and Morgan wrote it as an extended conversation between theories of sports ethics. Each chapter addresses a different sports philosophical theory: formalism, a broad internalism that centres metaphysical methods, a broad internalism that uses a discourse method, and finally a conventionalist ethical theory of sport. He also outlines what he calls the two duelling conceptions of sport in the early 20th century, an amateur world guided by British public school athletes and a professional world of American scientific sportsmen. These two different sporting conceptions, according to Morgan, shape much of the athletic debate the age. Understanding the different world views of these two schools provides for conventionalists a way of comprehending contemporary moral controversy in sport. The bulk of Morgan’s book is an extensive and fairhanded analysis of alternative theories of sports ethics; the depth of his investigation defies easy summary. He looks closely at formalism and internalism, offering appraisals of these theories that highlight both their successes and their failures. For example, formalists like Bernard Suits not only succeeded in developing very plausible definitions of sports, but in their emphasis on the written rules of sport, also failed to appropriately consider the rules beyond the written rules that guide competitive performances. A close look at a range of test cases allow Morgan to interrogate the different sports philosophy approaches. In 1887, a baserunner that crossed home plate, tackled and held down the catcher which allowed two other runners to score. Was this behaviour permissible, even if it was technically not a rule violation? A formalist approach would have difficulty in dealing with these kinds of rules violation; by contrast, internalists and conventionalists stress the subtextual rules that shape athletes’ behaviours. The baserunners in 1887 were called out. Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The autumnal Navarātri festival—also called Durgā Pūjā, Dassehra, or Dasain—is the most important Hindu festival in South Asia and wherever Hindus settle. A nine-night-long celebration in honor of the goddess Durgā, it ends on the tenth day with a celebration called “the victorious tenth” (vijayadaśamī). The rituals that take place in domestic, royal, and public spaces are closely connected with one’s station in life and dependent on social status, economic class, caste, and gender issues. Exploring different aspects of the festival as celebrated in diverse regions of South Asia and in the South Asian diaspora, Ute Hüsken, Vasudha Narayanan and Astrid Zotter's Nine Nights of Power: Durgā, Dolls, and Darbārs (SUNY Press, 2021) addresses the following common questions: What does this festival do? What does it achieve, and how? Why and in what way does it sometimes fail? How do mass communication and social media increase participation in and contribute to the changing nature of the festival? The contributors address these questions from multiple perspectives and discuss issues of agency, authority, ritual efficacy, change, appropriation, and adaptation. Because of the festival’s reach beyond its diverse celebrations in South Asia, its influence can be seen in the rituals and dances in many parts of Western Europe and North America. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is “capacity”? In science research and health interventions, it typically refers to the relative availability of equipment, infrastructure, personnel, and skills needed to get a job done. Noémi Tousignant’s book, Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal (Duke UP, 2018), feels its way into the experience of capacity to observe a crucial characteristic. Capacity has “temporal qualities.” Waiting, interrupting, prolonging, repairing: these processes show that the elements of lab science and public health called “capacity” operate with different rhythms that often fail to synchronize or to be formally acknowledged. Yet the material world of capacity also implies a direction, which orients scientists to (im)possibilities for better futures, “to moral imaginations of responsibility and commitment.” The book won the 2020 Ludwik Fleck prize for outstanding book from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. The award signals the book’s broad relevance for anyone interested in critical studies of science, technology, and health; intrigued by the phenomenology of time; keen to combine training in history with ethnographic methods; or interested in postcolonial studies, especially Africa. The book is based on Tousignant’s field work in Senegal from in 2010 and 2011 studying professional toxicologists across three institutions as they “improvised and imagined a more capacious and protective toxicology.” In terms of empirical content, this work is important for anyone interested in environmental contamination and the politics of poisoning lands, waters, and bodies. The interview also refers to the work of Gabrielle Hecht on exposure and imaginaries of Africa, Julie Livingstone on improvisation and slow risks, Joanna Crane on commodification of global health, and Monika Krause on how NGOs perform worthy projects. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process. Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2016, amid an epidemic of police shootings of African Americans, the celebrated NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a series of quiet protests on the field, refusing to stand during the U.S. national anthem. By “taking a knee,” Kaepernick bravely joined a long tradition of American athletes making powerful political statements. This time, however, Kaepernick’s simple act spread like wildfire throughout American society, becoming the preeminent symbol of resistance to America’s persistent racial inequality. Critically acclaimed sports journalist and author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States, Dave Zirin chronicles “the Kaepernick effect” for the first time, through interviews with a broad cross-section of professional athletes across many different sports, college stars and high-powered athletic directors, and high school athletes and coaches. In each case, he uncovers the fascinating explanations and motivations behind a mass political movement in sports, through deeply personal and inspiring accounts of risk-taking, activism, and courage both on and off the field. A book about the politics of sport, and the impact of sports on politics, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World (New Press, 2021) is for anyone seeking to understand an essential dimension of the new movement for racial justice in America. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Investigating the communicative practices of indigenous Santali speakers in eastern India, this book examines the overlooked role of script in regional movements for autonomy to provide one of the first comprehensive theoretical and ethnographical accounts of 'graphic politics'. Based on extensive fieldwork in the villages of southwestern West Bengal, Nishaant Choksi explores the deployment of Santali scripts, including a newly created script called Ol Chiki, in Bengali-dominated local markets, the education system and in the circulation of print media. He shows how manipulating the linguistic landscape and challenging the idea of a vernacular enables Santali speakers to delineate their own political domains and scale their language on local, regional and national levels. In doing so, they contest Bengali-speaking upper castes' hegemony over public spaces and institutions, as well as the administrative demarcations of the contemporary Indian nation-state. Combining semiotic theory with ethnographically grounded investigation, Graphic Politics in Eastern India: Script and the Quest for Autonomy (Bloomsbury, 2021) offers a new framework for understanding writing and literacy practices among ethnic minorities and points to future directions for interdisciplinary research on indigenous autonomy in South Asia. Amir Lehman is an MA student in linguistics at UCL. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in the Indian City (Northwestern UP, 2021) follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life. Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that express a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‑class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton UP, 2021) examines the “contemporary population politics of national Latino civil rights advocacy.” The book challenges readers to generally understand democratic projections as problematic, political, and manufactured -- and specifically consider the case of how prominent Latino civil rights groups used such projections during the Obama and Trump administrations to “accelerate the when of Latino political power.” Groups like UnidosUS, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Voto Latino believed that they could mobilize demographic data about the growing Latino population to increase political recognition and respect -- hoping to unify and inspire. But Figures of the Future urges us to be attentive to the manner in which projected demographics can be “objects of aspiration” but also weaponized and sources of frustration. Deploying three main sources of data (participation observation, interviewing, and the collection of primary material) Dr. Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz asks us to see that “it is politics -- not demography -- that governs what we think and feel about ethnoracial demographic change.” We don’t need better data -- we need a more critical and vigilant eye to the political phenomenon. Dr. Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is an assistant professor of sociology and Latina/Latino studies at Northwestern University. Daniella Campos assisted with and helped inspire this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Social World, Reexamined is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Brian Epstein, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Brian Epstein’s career as a management consultant piqued his interest and his later research into the reasons why our current models of economics, politics and other areas of social science so often go terribly wrong. The conversation explores how we can dramatically improve our current economic and political models by reexamining our assumptions about the nature of the social world. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“Made of light and later sound, the film experience cannot be touched, but that does not mean it is immaterial.” So writes Dr. Caetlin Benson-Allott in her third academic monograph, The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television (University of California Press, April 2021). In The Stuff of Spectatorship, Dr. Benson-Allott turns away from that canonical concept of medium specificity to explore the nature of material specificity. How might the cinematic and televisual apparatus be expanded to incorporate the lost off-the-air recording, the decaying VHS tape, the mediocre branded Cabernet, and the eruption of violence at your local multiplex? It is not just what you watch, but how you watch, that makes meaning. This reframing not only has profound implications for how critics and fans enjoy their preferred media, while laying bare the racist and classist commitments at the heart of our shared material media cultures. In this discussion, Dr. Benson-Allott describes the origin of her latest project, details her decision to include herself as a character in the proceedings, and talks about her work as the editor at the disciplinary flagship, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Caetlin Benson-Allott is Professor of English and Film & Media Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television (University of California Press, 2021), Remote Control (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (University of California Press, 2013). She is also Editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), the scholarly publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and writes a regular column on politics, platforms, and contemporary media for Film Quarterly. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in Public Books, Literary Hub, Feminist Media Histories, Ms., and Camera Obscura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a revered classic today fifty five years after it was first published in 1967. Today I talked to Alvaro Santana Acuña a sociologist and historian who describes the ingredients that went into manufacturing the success of this book. In Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (Columbia UP, 2020), Alvaro Santana-Acuña first deconstructs the “fake news” surrounding García Márquez and then describes the cultural brokers, the literary cognoscenti of the Boom, the gatekeepers, the Spanish publishing industry and the Casa de las Americas who made the One Hundred Years of Solitude a bestseller across generations. The multitudinous references in this book are part of the archives that Alvaro Santana-Acuña has curated for an exhibition “Gabriel Garcia Márquez – The Making of a Global Writer” by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin which will run till January 2022. Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Critical Situations is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. During this extensive conversation Philip Zimbardo relates his intriguing life history and the survival techniques that he developed from the particular dynamics of his upbringing in the Bronx to his quarantine experiences, his experiences with South Bronx gangs, and more. Further topics include his relationship with his former classmate Stanley Ingram and the impact the different experiences in his youth had on the development of his personal situational awareness and how that influenced his psychological research. After a detailed description of the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, Philip discusses what we have—and haven’t—learned since then, the Abu Ghraib trial, his Heroic Imagination Project, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this installment of our Recall this Buck series (check out our earlier conversations with Thomas Piketty, Peter Brown and Christine Desan), John and Elizabeth talk with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan's work explores the world of private equity "guys" (who are indeed mostly guys) and the ways they are "suspended in webs of significance [they themselves have] spun" as Clifford Geertz puts it. Further, he explores the ways we are all suspended in these webs through the immense buying and managing power of private equity firms. Private equity investors buy out publicly traded companies, often through enormous debt (which is why these deals used to be called "leveraged buyouts" or LBOs), manage the companies and then sell them. They argue they are creating value by cutting fat in management; typically workers bear the brunt of the debt while executives--and the private equity firm and lawyers and others servicing the deal--receive hefty payments. Dan pulls off a tough feat in his book, helping us see the concerns and motivations of people he's working with as understandable and the people themselves as reasonable and even likeable, while also maintaining his own view of private equity as, generally speaking, a noxious force in society. We end with a discussion of the Occupy movement and how it helped to change public conversations about inequality and the power of finance (another angle on the themes we tackled in our earlier "Brahmin Left" conversations). Mentioned in this episode:
Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gates: The Fall of NJR Nabisco
Karen Ho Liquidated; ethnography of Wall Street, and of "smartness"
Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, (John misremembered the title as Confessions of a Stockjobber)
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991)
The transcript for this episode is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Research Methods in Digital Food Studies (Routledge, 2021) offers the first methodological synthesis of digital food studies. It brings together contributions from leading scholars in food and media studies and explores research methods from textual analysis to digital ethnography and action research. In recent times, digital media has transformed our relationship with food which has become one of the central topics in digital and social media. This spatiotemporal shift in food cultures has led us to reimagine how we engage in different practices related to food as consumers. The book examines the opportunities and challenges that the new digital era of food studies presents and what methodologies are employed to study the changed dynamics in this field. These methodologies provide insights into how restaurant reviews, celebrity webpages, the blogosphere and YouTube are explored, as well as how to analyse digital archives, digital soundscapes and digital food activism and a series of approaches to digital ethnography in food studies. The book presents straightforward ideas and suggestions for how to get started on one's own research in the field through well-structured chapters that include several pedagogical features. Written in an accessible style, the book will serve as a vital point of reference for both experienced researchers and beginners in the digital food studies field, health studies, leisure studies, anthropology, sociology, food sciences, and media and communication studies. Jonatan Leer is head of food and tourism research at the University College Absalon and has published widely on food culture including Food and Age and Alternative Food Politics, and previously edited the anthology Food and Media. He is visiting lecturer at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, Italy. Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark. She has published on food, gender and methodologies in multiple venues including Routledge’s Critical Food Studies, and she is also Editor-in-Chief at the Nordic Journal, MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research. Twitter: @stinnegunder Amir Sayadabdi is a lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this interview, I speak with Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway about their new book, Transecting Securityscapes: Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique (University of Georgia Press, 2021). In addition to the book's methodological and theoretical contributions, we also discussed the extensive field research and important personal experiences informing this project. This is an innovative book on the everyday life of security, told via an examination of three sites: Cambodia, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and Mozambique. The authors' study of how security is enacted differently in these three sites, taking account of the rich layers of context and culture, enables comparative reflections on diversity and commonality in "securityscapes." The book puts into practice a diverse and contextual approach to security that contrasts with the aerial, big-picture view taken by many geopolitics scholars. In applying this grounded approach, Paasche and Sidaway develop a method of urban and territorial transects, combined with other methods and modes of encounter. The book draws on a broad range of traditions, but it speaks mostly to political geography, urban studies, and international relations research on geopolitics, stressing the need for ethnographic, embodied, affective, and place-based approaches to conflict. The result is a sustained theoretical critique of abstract research on geopolitical conflict and security-mainstream as well as academic-that pretends to be able to know and analyze conflict "from above." Please note: the second half of this podcast includes discussion of combat, death and loss. Till F. Paasche is Associate Professor of political geography at Soran University. James D. Sidaway is Professor of political geography at the National University of Singapore. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office; she has previously published on US Africa Command and the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Getting Something to Eat in Jackson (Princeton Press, 2021) uses food—what people eat and how—to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary urban South. Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. examines how “foodways”—food availability, choice, and consumption—vary greatly between classes of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, and how this reflects and shapes their very different experiences of a shared racial identity. Ewoodzie spent more than a year following a group of socioeconomically diverse African Americans—from upper-middle-class patrons of the city’s fine-dining restaurants to men experiencing homelessness who must organize their days around the schedules of soup kitchens. Ewoodzie goes food shopping, cooks, and eats with a young mother living in poverty and a grandmother working two jobs. He works in a Black-owned BBQ restaurant, and he meets a man who decides to become a vegan for health reasons but who must drive across town to get tofu and quinoa. Ewoodzie also learns about how soul food is changing and why it is no longer a staple survival food. Throughout, he shows how food choices influence, and are influenced by, the racial and class identities of Black Jacksonians. By tracing these contemporary African American foodways, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson offers new insights into the lives of Black Southerners and helps challenge the persistent homogenization of blackness in American life. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of Britain and other Western societies: thriving cities versus the provinces; the high-skilled elite versus the less educated. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical, reciprocal obligations to others that were crucial to the rise of post-war prosperity — and are inherently aligned with how humans are meant to live: in a friendly, collaborative community. So far these rifts have been answered only by ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right across much of Europe. Sir Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties (Harper, 2019), winner of the 2019 Handelsblatt Prize, provides a diagnosis for how these anxieties have arrived, alongside a pragmatic and ambitious prescription for how we can address them. In our conversation, we trace these anxieties of 21st century capitalism back to their ethical, economic, and social roots and discuss ideas to rebuild reciprocal obligations in our society, paving the way to more sustainable, more kind, and more successful future of capitalism. Paul is currently Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and a Director of the International Growth Centre in London. He is a world-renowned development economist, working with governments around the world; an award-winning author, notably writing The Bottom Billion, on how the world’s poorest countries can achieve prosperity, and most recently Greed is Dead, with Sir John Kay; and frequently writes for magazines such as Prospect and the New Statesman. Host, Leo Nasskau, is an expert on the future of work and interviews authors writing about public policy and political economy — particularly how capitalism can be reformed to deliver sustainable prosperity for all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
White middle-class eaters are increasingly venturing into historically segregated urban neighborhoods in search of "authentic" eating in restaurants run by-and originally catering to-immigrants and people of color. What does a growing white interest in these foods mean for historically immigrant neighborhoods and communities of color? What role does foodie culture play in gentrification? In The Sixteen-Dollar Taco: Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification (U Washington Press, 2021), Pascale Joassart-Marcelli sheds light on food gentrification and the emotional, cultural, economic, and physical displacement it produces. She explores three neighborhoods of San Diego, California where "authentic" ethnic food attracts growing numbers of affluent white consumers, while the black and brown people who make this food continue to struggle with economic insecurity and food apartheid. Drawing on rich interviews with the locals who work, live, cook, and eat in these contested landscapes, Joassart-Marcelli maps the shift of foodscapes from serving the needs of long-time minoritized residents to pleasing the tastes of younger, wealthier, and whiter newcomers. She also shows how food becomes a powerful force behind gastrodevelopment, an urban development strategy built around food gentrification. Joassart-Marcelli highlights the ways in which immigrants and people of color are resisting gentrification and simultaneously fighting for food sovereignty. Ultimately, the work offers valuable lessons for cities all over the country where food projects are transforming neighborhoods at the expense of the communities they claim to uplift and celebrate. The book reveals the negative consequences of foodies' contemporary love affair with ethnic and presumably authentic food on the urban neighborhoods where such food has long been a source of livelihood, sustenance, resistance, and belonging. Doing so, it engages critically with the concept of cosmopolitanism and points out the limitations of consumer-centered food-based cross-cultural encounters that celebrate racial and ethnic difference without acknowledging the material consequences of historical and ongoing exclusion, dispossession, and displacement Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do Black women entrepreneurs in South Africa play off westerners’ fear and desire for impoverished townships through home-based tourist accommodations? This episode’s guest is Dr. Annie Hikido, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colby College. She tells us how her racialized experiences growing up as a Japanese-American woman in California pushed her to become an ethnographer and race scholar. She then describes the ethnographic experiences behind her wonderful new article in Qualitative Sociology, “Making South Africa Safe: The Gendered Production of Black Place on the Global Stage,” in which she stayed with Black women in marginalized South African townships who open their homes to mostly-white tourists. She explains both these women’s public-facing performances of themselves to their visitors, as well as the behind-the-scenes and community efforts that went into presenting the townships as a safe space. She then reflects on how the women and community members understood her as an Asian-American woman and researcher, before describing her ongoing relationships with the women and the current state of her research given the pandemic. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The concept of revolution marks the ultimate horizon of modern politics. It is instantiated by sites of both hope and horror. Within progressive thought, “revolution” often perpetuates entrenched philosophical problems: a teleological philosophy of history, economic reductionism, and normative paternalism. At a time of resurgent uprisings, how can revolution be re-conceptualized to grasp the dynamics of social transformation and disentangle revolutionary practice from authoritarian usurpation? Eva von Redecker reconsiders critical theory’s understanding of radical change in order to offer a bold new account of how revolution occurs. She argues that revolutions are not singular events but extended processes: beginning from the interstices of society, they succeed by gradually re-articulating social structures toward a new paradigm. Developing a theoretical account of social transformation, Praxis and Revolution incorporates a wide range of insights, from the Frankfurt School to queer theory and intersectionality. Its revised materialism furnishes prefigurative politics with their social conditions and performative critique with its collective force. Von Redecker revisits the French Revolution to show how change arises from struggle in everyday social practice. She illustrates the argument through rich literary examples—a ménage à trois inside a prison, a radical knitting circle, a queer affinity group, and petitioners pleading with the executioner—that forge a feminist, open-ended model of revolution. Praxis and Revolution: A Theory of Social Transformation (Columbia UP, 2021) urges readers not only to understand revolutions differently but also to situate them elsewhere: in collective contexts that aim to storm manifold Bastilles—but from within. Eva von Redecker is a German critical theorist and public philosopher, currently based at the University of Verona as the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. She was previously a research associate at Humboldt University of Berlin and she has also taught at Goethe University Frankfurt and the New School. Lucy Duggan is a writer and translator. She is the author of the novel Tendrils (2014). Fulya Pinar is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on alternative economies, refugee care, and migration in Turkey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Yael Levy examines the underexplored antiheroine of early twenty-first century television in Chick-TV: Antiheroines and Time Unbound (Syracuse UP, 2022). Levy advances antiheroines to the forefront of television criticism, revealing the varied and subtle ways in which they perform feminist resistance. Offering a retooling of gendered media analyses, Levy finds antiheroism not only in the morally questionable cop and tormented lawyer, but also in the housewife and nurse who inhabit more stereotypical feminine roles. By analyzing Girls, Desperate Housewives, Nurse Jackie, Being Mary Jane, Grey’s Anatomy, Six Feet Under, Sister Wives, and the Real Housewives franchise, Levy explores the narrative complexities of “chick TV” and the radical feminist potential of these shows. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today, someone in the wealthiest 1 per cent of adults – a club of some 40,000 people – has a net worth 68 times that of the average New Zealander. Too Much Money: How Wealth Disparities are Unbalancing Aotearoa New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2021) is the story of how wealth inequality is changing Aotearoa New Zealand. Possessing wealth opens up opportunities to live in certain areas, get certain kinds of education, make certain kinds of social connections, exert certain kinds of power. And when access to these opportunities becomes alarmingly uneven, the implications are profound. This ground-breaking book provides a far-reaching and compelling account of the way that wealth – and its absence – is transforming our lives. Drawing on the latest research, personal interviews and previously unexplored data, Too Much Money reveals the way wealth is distributed across the peoples of Aotearoa. Max Rashbrooke's analysis arrives at a time of heightened concern for the division of wealth and what this means for our country's future. Max Rashbrooke is a journalist, author and academic based in Wellington. His books, led by the best-selling Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis (new edition 2018), have helped transform national understanding of income and wealth inequality. Max’s journalism has appeared in publications worldwide, including The Guardian, The Economist Group and the New Zealand Herald, and he has twice received the Bruce Jesson Senior Journalism Award. He is also a research associate of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and was a 2015 Winston Churchill Fellow and the 2020 J.D. Stout Fellow. His TED.com talk on renewing democracy has had over 1 million views. To explore Max’s other work please visit: https://www.maxrashbrooke.net/ Ed Amon is a Master of Indigenous Studies Candidate at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, a columnist at his local paper: Hibiscus Matters, and a Stand-up Comedian. His main interests are indigenous studies, politics, history, and cricket. Follow him on twitter @edamoned or email him at edamonnz@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Jeff Guhin joins us today to talk about his book Agents of God: Boundaries and Authority in Muslim and Christian Schools (Oxford University Press, 2020). Jeff, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA, shares with us how his experiences with religious schooling shaped his interests in education, culture and religion. Agents of God is the culmination of Jeff’s dissertation work while he was a doctoral student in Sociology at Yale University, a thoughtful comparative ethnography of Muslim and Conservative Protestant high schools. In today’s conversation we explore the nuances of religious education, how people negotiate boundaries and the agentification of institutions. We also discuss the politics of national identity and the role of schools in this nationalization. Jeff also touches on his experiences with mental health and how he works to navigate those within academia and in the process of writing this book. This book provides a compelling lens for how to understand the forces of Science, Scripture and Prayer as “external authorities” that shape individual and national behavior. Nafeesa Andrabi is a 4th year Sociology PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, a Biosocial Fellow at Carolina Population Center and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
When faced with some of the complex identity questions which often arise in borderlands, Koreans in China – known as Chosonjok in Korean, Chaoxianzu in Chinese – have long seemed adept at navigating the shifting demands of being both Chinese and Korean. Sunhee Koo’s new book, Sound of the Border: Music and Identity of Korean Minority Nationality in China (U Hawaii Press, 2021), makes a strong case for Chaoxianzu music being a clear index of this, reflecting as it does the layered cultural worlds of this community living in Yanbian prefecture where China, North and South Korea, and the wider world collide. Offering an in-depth account of the shifting styles, genres and themes present in Chaoxianzu musical output across the decades, Koo examines the form and content of Korean folksongs and traditional instrumentation, Chinese- and North Korean-inflected socialist propaganda tunes, and more recent commercialised blends of essentialised ‘ethnic’ music and South Korean pop. Woven into the book’s close musical analysis are rich reflections on the often-tumultuous social and political contexts navigated by Chaoxianzu musicians and their publics over time, all of which reveals that from these intersecting cultural worlds has emerged not so much a musical chimera as a varied and distinctive musical tradition in its own right. Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why do we love the music we love? In Why You Like IT: The Science & Culture of Musical Taste (Flatiron Books, 2019) musicologist Nolan Gasser, architect of Pandora Radio’s Music Genome Project, discusses how psychology, anthropology, history, sociology, and culture combine to define our musical tastes—what he calls “inculturing.” From the Northern California Redwoods to Paris to Africa, from Nashville to New York City, and from medieval music to Phillip Glass to Led Zeppelin to Taylor Swift, Dr. Gasser takes us on a ride through our minds and how they process, understand and, yes, like music. David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CEST/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit this website. Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLab The first conversation is between Dr. Roy Richard Grinker and Dr. Hilal Lashuel, with support from Galina Limorenko. Mental health experts and advocates tell us that "stigma" is the major barrier to mental health care throughout the world. But where did stigma come from? And how can we begin to eradicate it? Dr. Grinker, a cultural anthropologist, specializing in psychological anthropology will discuss his new book, Nobody's Normal. Drawing on research in sub-Saharan Africa, the U.S., and South Korea, as well as his own history as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of psychiatrists, Dr. Grinker writes that we are on the cusp of ending the marginalization of people with mental illnesses and developmental disorders. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Brazil markets itself as a racially mixed utopia. The United States prefers the term melting pot. Both nations have long used the image of the mulatta to push skewed cultural narratives. Highlighting the prevalence of mixed race women of African and European descent, the two countries claim to have perfected racial representation-all the while ignoring the racialization, hypersexualization, and white supremacy that the mulatta narrative creates. In Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U. S. and Brazilian Media (U Illinois Press, 2020), Jasmine Mitchell investigates the development and exploitation of the mulatta figure in Brazilian and U.S. popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, she analyzes policy debates and reveals the use of mixed-Black female celebrities as subjects of racial and gendered discussions. Mitchell also unveils the ways the media moralizes about the mulatta figure and uses her as an example of an "acceptable" version of blackness that at once dreams of erasing undesirable blackness while maintaining the qualities that serve as outlets for interracial desire. Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Of the dozens of juicy questions for future inquiry that Dr. Michelle Nario-Redmond provides at the end of Ableism: The Causes and Consequences of Disability Prejudice (Published by Wiley in 2021), the following stands out the most to me, in my various group-membership roles: How do we build common ground between disadvantaged groups for effective cross-impairment coalitions? Though it seemed impossible for this question to feel any more urgent after over a year and a half of COVID-19 and the parallel prominence of social movements to make Black Lives Matter, a recent article by my latest author crush unpacking a profoundly intersectional moment in the meme culture of what we should be calling (thanks to Neal Stephenson’s 30-year old book) Metaverse 1.0 – AKA social media, especially those platforms now owned by the maybe-monopoly formerly known as Facebook – reminded me again of the immense possibilities of disability as a political identity (see Annamma & Morrison, 2018, particularly the footnotes for more background on this). Nicole Froio’s article-that-should-become-a-book extrapolates from a celebrity’s (whack!) Instagram post as an exemplification of what the writer dubs the masculine “performativity of doing the least,” in which the “‘model’ heterosexual family consists of an all-sacrificing mother, a paternalistic father, and children free from disability.” The timing of Froio’s deft analysis and the 34,000 likes it has garnered–compared to the upwards of 2 million bestowed upon the post in question—remind me of beloved if nuclear boomer Bill Maher’s synchronous editorial segment comparing “model citizen” Greta Thunburg (who is autistic), with 13 million followers, to the “model” (capitalist straight femme normate) Kylie Jenner, with 279 million. Christina Anderson Bosch is an assistant professor of special education at the California State University, Fresno, also on Twitter @DocCABosch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On Atheists and Bonobos is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and primatologist Frans de Waal, Emory University, who is renowned for his work on the behaviour and social intelligence of primates. This thought-provoking conversation examines fascinating questions such as: Are we born with an innate sense of “the good”? Do we learn from others what is “wrong”? Does religion determine, or is it a result of, morality? Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Just about everyone knows correlation does not equal causation, and probably that a randomized controlled experiment is the best way to solve that problem, if you can do one. If you’ve been following the economics discipline you will have heard about the Nobel Prize given to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for their work applying the experimental method to test real-world policy interventions out in the field. But what if you can’t do this? Are you just stuck with untestable claims? This year’s Nobel Prize to Josh Angrist, David Card, and Guido Imbens for methods of causal inference with observational data confirms that you don't have to give up. Scott Cunningham’s Causal Inference: The Mixtape (Yale UP, 2021) provides an accessible practical introduction to techniques developed by these luminaries and others. Along with the statistical theory, it provides intuitive explanations of these techniques, and examples of the computer code needed to run them. In our conversation we discuss why economists needed these techniques and how they work. Scott Cunningham is a professor of economics at Baylor University. He researches topics including mental healthcare, sex work, abortion and drug policy. He is active on Twitter, has a blog on Substack, and frequently conducts workshops on causal inference methods. A complete web version of his book is available here. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Despite their considerable presence in Hollywood, extras and working actors have received scant attention within film and media studies as significant contributors to the history of the industry. Looking not to the stars but to these supporting players in film, television, and, recently, streaming programming, Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production (University of Texas Press, 2021), highlights such actors as precarious laborers whose work as freelancers has critically shaped the entertainment industry throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the books, Kate Fortmueller, Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia, proposes a media industry history that positions underrepresented and quotidian experiences as the structural elements of the culture and business of Hollywood. Resisting a top-down assessment, Fortmueller explores the wrangling of labor unions and guilds that advocated for collective action for everyday actors and helped shape professional norms. She pulls from archival research, in-person interviews, and firsthand observation to examine a history that cuts across industry boundaries and situates actors as a labor group at the center of industrial and technological upheavals, with lasting implications for race, gender, and labor relations in Hollywood. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Vulnerable narratives of fatherhood are few and far between; rarer still is an ethnography that delves into the practical and emotional realities of intensive caregiving. Grounded in the intimate everyday lives of men caring for children with major physical and intellectual disabilities, Worlds of Care: The Emotional Lives of Fathers Caring for Children with Disabilities (U California Press, 2021) undertakes an exploration of how men shape their identities in the context of caregiving. Anthropologist Aaron J. Jackson fuses ethnographic research and creative nonfiction to offer an evocative account of what is required for men to create habitable worlds and find some kind of “normal” when their circumstances are anything but. Combining stories from his fieldwork in North America with reflections on his own experience caring for his severely disabled son, Jackson argues that care has the potential to transform our understanding of who we are and how we relate to others. Aaron J. Jackson is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University. His research focuses on fatherhood, care, and disability. Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the wake of labor market deregulation during the 2000s, online content sharing and social networking platforms were promoted in Japan as new sites of work that were accessible to anyone. Enticed by the chance to build personally fulfilling careers, many young women entered Japan's digital economy by performing unpaid labor as photographers, net idols, bloggers, online traders, and cell phone novelists. While some women leveraged digital technology to create successful careers, most did not. In Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy (Duke UP, 2020), Gabriella Lukács traces how these women's unpaid labor became the engine of Japan's digital economy. Drawing on interviews with young women who strove to sculpt careers in the digital economy, Lukács shows how platform owners tapped unpaid labor to create innovative profit-generating practices without employing workers, thereby rendering women's labor invisible. By drawing out the ways in which labor precarity generates a demand for feminized affective labor, Lukács underscores the fallacy of the digital economy as a more democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive mode of production. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do you do archaeological research on a place that exists for only one week per year, in the middle of the Nevada desert, and is based on the ethos of "leave no trace?" In The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City (U New Mexico Press, 2020), Dr. Carolyn White, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, sets out to tackle just this question. Using the methods of contemporary archaeology, White spent a decade attending the annual Burning Man event in the desert of northwestern Nevada, chronicling the construction, the day to day life, and the dismantling of Black Rock City, which is among the largest cities in the state for the short time exists every August and September. White examines the various ways that people live in Black Rock, the semi-invisible infrastructure and bureaucracy which keep it running and keep its 75,000 residents safe, and the day to day life in the city itself. White shows a side of Burning Man not often seen by outsiders, and one that runs counter to the chaotic, Instagram-ified, narrative often presented in mainstream media. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
At his 1994 inauguration, South African president Nelson Mandela announced the "Rainbow Nation, at peace with itself and the world." This national rainbow notably extended beyond the bounds of racial coexistence and reconciliation to include "sexual orientation" as a protected category in the Bill of Rights. Yet despite the promise of equality and dignity, the new government's alliance with neoliberal interests and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic left South Africa an increasingly unequal society. Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation (U Michigan Press, 2020) on the queer embodiments that both reveal and animate the gaps between South Africa's self-image and its lived realities. It argues that performance has become a key location where contradictions inherent to South Africa's post-apartheid identity are negotiated. The book spans 30 years of cultural production and numerous social locations and includes: a team of black lesbian soccer players who reveal and redefine the gendered and sexed limitations of racialized "Africanness;" white gay performers who use drag and gender subversion to work through questions of racial and societal transformation; black artists across the arts who have developed aesthetics that place on display their audiences' complicity in the problem of sexual violence; and a primarily heterosexual panAfrican online soap opera fandom community who, by combining new virtual spaces with old melodramatic tropes allow for extended deliberation and new paradigms through which African same-sex relationships are acceptable. Prismatic Performances contends that when explicitly queer bodies emerge onto public stages, audiences are made intimately aware of their own bodies' identifications and desires. As the sheen of the New South Africa began to fade, these performances revealed the inadequacy and, indeed, the violence, of the Rainbow Nation as an aspirational metaphor. Simultaneously they created space for imagining new radical configurations of belonging. Dr. April Sizemore-Barber is Associate Professor of the Practice in Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University. Isabel Machado is Research Associate with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture hosted by the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What happens when the human brain, which evolved over eons, collides with twenty-first-century technology? Machines can now push psychological buttons, stimulating and sometimes exploiting the ways people make friends, gossip with neighbors, and grow intimate with lovers. Sex robots present the humanoid face of this technological revolution―yet although it is easy to gawk at their uncanniness, more familiar technologies based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality are insinuating themselves into human interactions. Digital lovers, virtual friends, and algorithmic matchmakers help us manage our feelings in a world of cognitive overload. Will these machines, fueled by masses of user data and powered by algorithms that learn all the time, transform the quality of human life? Robert Brooks, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers (Columbia UP, 2021) offers an innovative perspective on the possibilities of the present and near future. The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider the interaction of new technologies and fundamental human behaviors. He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs―and are getting better at what they do. Brooks combines an understanding of core human traits from evolutionary biology with analysis of how cultural, economic, and technological contexts shape the ways people express them. Beyond the technology, he asks what the implications of artificial intimacy will be for how we understand ourselves. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
"Algeria is different." Africa's largest country is a place that few western academics have studied or been able to travel to. The modern nation, forged in the anticolonial struggle against French colonialism between 1957 and 1963, has been bolstered by the discovery of oil shortly thereafter. Nearly two-thirds of Algeria's population is under the age of 35. Growing up during or soon after the violent conflict that wracked Algeria during the 1990's, and amid the powerful influences of global online culture, this generation views the world much differently than their parents or grandparents do. The Algerian Dream: Youth and the Quest for Dignity (New Degree Press, 2021) invites readers to discover this generation, their hopes for the future and, most significantly, the frustrations that have brought them into the streets en masse since 2019, peacefully challenging a long-established order. After seven years living and working alongside these young people across Algeria, Andrew G. Farrand shares his insights on what makes the next generation tick in North Africa's sleeping giant. Few outsiders have had the privilege to get to know Algeria and its youth so intimately-or to observe firsthand this pivotal chapter in the nation's history. It's a story that reveals much about the relationship between citizens and leaders, about the sanctity of human dignity, and about the power of dreams and the courage to pursue them. Clearly written and easily accessibly to undergraduates as well as the general public, The Algerian Dream should be considered by anyone interested in contemporary North Africa or looking for new texts for courses on the modern Middle East and contemporary Arab culture. Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why do weak autocrats create strong autocracies? Using game-theoretic logic and an analysis of the post-colonial experience of sub-Saharan Africa, Anne Meng shows that by creating institutions that incorporate other elites into the inner circles of power, dictators create regimes that can outlast their founders. By creating clear lines of succession, they avoid disruptive power struggles that could bring down the regime. Anne Meng is a professor of political science at the University of Virginia who studies authoritarian institutions. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Host Peter Lorentzen is a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese's Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work (Routledge, 2020) explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on three years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as part of their everyday work practices. The authors argue that predictive policing must not be analyzed as an isolated technological artifact, but as part of a larger sociotechnical system that is embedded in organizational structures and occupational cultures. The book highlights how, for crime prediction software to come to matter and play a role in more efficient and targeted police work, several translation processes are needed to align human and nonhuman actors across different divisions of police work. Police work is a key function for the production and maintenance of public order, but it can also discriminate, exclude, and violate civil liberties and human rights. When criminal futures come into being in the form of algorithmically produced risk estimates, this can have wide-ranging consequences. Building on empirical findings, the book presents a number of practical recommendations for the prudent use of algorithmic analysis tools in police work that will speak to the protection of civil liberties and human rights as much as they will speak to the professional needs of police organizations. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, and cultural studies as well as to police practitioners and civil liberties advocates, in addition to all those who are interested in how to implement reasonable forms of data-driven policing. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For the majority of Americans, hard times have long been a way of life. Some work multiple low-wage jobs, others face the squeeze of stagnant wages and rising costs of living. Sociologist Celine-Marie Pascale talked with people across Appalachia, at the Standing Rock and Wind River reservations, and in the bustling city of Oakland, California. Their voices offer a wide range of experiences that complicate dominant national narratives about economic struggles. Yet Living on the Edge: When Hard Times Become a Way of Life (Polity Press, 2021) is about more than individual experiences. It's about a nation in a deep economic and moral crisis. It's about the long-standing collusion between government and corporations that prioritizes profits over people, over the environment, and over the nation's well-being. It's about how racism, sexism, violence, and the pandemic shape daily experience in struggling communities. And, ultimately, it's a book about hope that lays out a vision for the future as honest as it is ambitious. Most people in the book are not progressives; none are radicals. They're hard-working people who know from experience that the current system is unsustainable. Across the country people described the need for a living wage, accessible health care, immigration reform, and free education. Their voices are worth listening to. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What does ‘sexual citizenship’ mean in practice for people with mobility impairments who may need professional support to engage in sexual activity? Sexual Citizenship and Disability: Understanding Sexual Support in Policy, Practice and Theory (Routledge, 2021) explores this subject through empirical investigation based on case studies conducted in four countries – Sweden, England, Australia and the Netherlands – and develops the abstract notion of ‘sexual citizenship’ to make it practically relevant to disabled people, professionals in disability services and policy-makers. Through a cross-national approach, it demonstrates the variability of how sexual rights are understood and their culturally specific nature. It also shows how the personal is indeed political: states’ different policy approaches change the outcomes for disabled people in terms of support to explore and express their sexualities. By proposing a model of sexual facilitation that can be used in policy development, to better cater to disabled service users’ needs as well as furthering the theoretical understanding of sexual rights and sexual citizenship, this book will be of interest to professionals in disability services and policy-makers as well as academics and students working in the following subject areas: Disability Studies, Sociology, Social Policy, Sexuality Studies/Sexology, Social Work, Nursing, Occupational Therapy and Public Health. Julia Bahner is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Social Work, Lund University, Sweden, and was formerly Marie Curie Individual Fellow at the Centre for Disability Studies, School of Sociology, University of Leeds, UK. She holds a PhD in social work and has worked extensively with disabled people’s organisations, sexual rights organisations and disability service organisations to develop better policies and practices around sexuality, disability and support. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism (U Toronto Press, 2021), Katja Praznik counters the Western understanding of art – as a passion for self-expression and an activity done out of love – and instead builds a case for understanding art as a form of invisible labour. Focusing on the experiences of art workers and the history of labour regulation in the arts in socialist Yugoslavia, Praznik unpacks the contradiction at the heart of artistic production, and shines a light on how the economic reality of creative work has often been obscured by the mystification of artistic endeavour. Drawing on Marxist-feminist analysis, the book demonstrates the value of recognising that artistic labour is ultimately a category of work. In this way, Praznik offers a strategic framework for enhancing our understanding of the struggle for equity in the world of institutionalised art production. Katja Praznik is Associate Professor within the Arts Management Program at the University at Buffalo. Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. Dana Malone’s inspiration for researching in her own backyard, why she chose to do qualitative research for her dissertation and her first book, how she managed her insider/outside status, what bracketing is, using feminist research ethics, and how she dealt with gatekeepers. Our guest is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, a dynamic scholar-practitioner with a diverse portfolio of experiences in higher education. She specializes in the intersection of gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as student success, assessment planning and program evaluation. Currently, Dr. Malone is an Independent Scholar, based in the Philadelphia area, writing, teaching, speaking, and working with institutions on a contract basis. She provides invited talks on her book, From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses (Rutgers University Press), and she teaches in the M.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership and Social Justice Program at Bellarmine University. She is also the co-producer and co-host of The Academic Life channel. When she’s not engaging in the academic life, Dana can be found enjoying a good latte with family and friends, wandering the Jersey shore, and spending time on her yoga mat. Connect at danammalone.com. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: --From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses by Dana M. Malone, published by Rutgers University Press --Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approach (5th ed) by John W. Creswell and J. David Creswell, published by SAGE --Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods: Integrating Theory and Practice (4th ed) by Michael Quinn Patton, published by SAGE --Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science (2nd ed) by Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True --Tufford, L. & Newman, P. (2010). Bracketing in Qualitative Research. Qualitative Social Work, 11(1), 80-96. DOI: 10.1177/1473325010368316 --Dr. Gessler and Dr. Malone’s conversation about sexuality on evangelical campuses: You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Political Scientist Efrén Pérez’s new book, Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity (U Chicago Press, 2021), explores the term and category “people of color” and how this grouping has been used within politics, but also how it is has been used by those who are classified as people of color. Pérez examines group identity, language and public opinion, and implicit cognition to explain how marginalization of non-white groups can form a collective group identity that is interchangeable for the individual. Diversity’s Child fills in a rather substantial gap in research about racial and ethnic identity in the United States by surveying people of color about how they think and feel about racial disparities that impact them as well as other groups that are often categorized as people of color. Part of what Pérez finds in the multi-method approach is that politics can be seen as a solution to the inequality that many of those within this broad umbrella category experience and understand. Pérez’s training and research in both political science and political psychology allows him to bring together these connected social science threads and frameworks in exploring the understanding of broad group identity as well as intergroup identity. Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of identity both conceptualizes and analyzes the identity of people of color by developing meaningful measurements and using Social Identity Theory to examine connections to differing identities. Pérez’s work also thinks through the evolving demographic shifts in the United States, exploring the projection that white Americans will become the minority population by 2050, and what the political ramifications are for the new majority minority. Although the term “people of color” has been used to identify Black, Latino, and other races for some time, Pérez research examines how these groups that are often pulled together under this common identity actually share in this broader category, and whether there are commonalities and concerns across ethnic, racial, and national identities. He does this by gathering data through opinion surveys, experiments, content analysis of newspapers and congressional archives, and in-depth interviews. Pérez’s research indicates that a person’s “color” identity exists and can be measured, and that identifying as a person of color shapes how minorities view themselves and their position within the political system. Diversity’s Child introduces a new perspective into the ongoing conversation about shifting political demographics, and elaborates on how the people of color identity has the capacity to mobilize groups and shape American politics. Pérez’s research also indicates how and where this umbrella category can essentially come undone—how the unifying qualities can be undermined by intergroup antagonisms. As he notes in our discussion, the research that highlights the capacity to bring together African Americans, LatinX Americans, and Asian Americans under the title of “people of color” also has within it the fissures and factions that can disconnect these groups from each other and from shared political pursuits. Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dominican women being seen--and seeing themselves--in the media Rachel Afi Quinn investigates how visual media portray Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative endeavors in response to existing stereotypes. Delving into the dynamic realities and uniquely racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals the way racial ambiguity and color hierarchy work to shape experiences of identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic. She merges analyses of context and interviews with young Dominican women to offer rare insights into a Caribbean society in which the tourist industry and popular media rewards, and rely upon, the ability of Dominican women to transform themselves to perform gender, race, and class. Engaging and astute, Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo (University of Illinois Press, 2021) reveals the little-studied world of today's young Dominican women and what their personal stories and transnational experiences can tell us about the larger neoliberal world. Rachel Afi Quinn is an associate professor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Culture Studies at the University of Houston. Reighan Gillam is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect (U Arizona Press, 2021) tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility. This book highlights the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a space of resistance, conviviality, agency, and creative community building where transformative politics can take place. It shows hope, struggle, and possibility in the context of gendered violences of racial capitalism on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I spoke to Professor Andrew Kipnis about his book on social change in urban China from the perspective of funerals. In rural China funerals are conducted locally, on village land by village elders. But in urban areas, people have neither land for burials nor elder relatives to conduct funerals. Chinese urbanization, which has increased drastically in recent decades, involves the creation of cemeteries, state-run funeral homes, and small private funerary businesses. The Funeral of Mr. Wang: Life, Death, and Ghosts in Urbanizing China (U California Press, 2021) examines social change in urbanizing China through the lens of funerals, the funerary industry, and practices of memorialization. It analyzes changes in family life, patterns of urban sociality, transformations in economic relations, the politics of memorialization, and the echoes of these changes in beliefs about the dead and ghosts. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
When Americans talk about guns, they often use terms like “gun rights” or “gun control.” They also tend to separate gun politics and the politics of the police. In Policing and the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race (Princeton University Press, 2021), Jennifer Carlson identifies the inaccuracies of both. She provides two alternative narratives of American “gun talk” -- gun militarism and gun populism -- that clarify the stakes in today’s gun debates.. Based on her extensive research – using local and national newspapers, interviews with police chiefs, and observations made at gun licensing boards – she insists these two discourses reveal how race shapes both how gun politics unfold and how gun policies are created to differentiate between legitimate violence and criminal violence. Coercive social control is organized by racialized understandings of gun violence. Carlson demonstrates the roles that the NRA, police chiefs, and gun administrators play in distinguishing the boundaries of legitimate violence for both private and public gun owners. For her, linking the politics of guns with the politics of the police clarifies our political and policy debates -- as well as the complex terrain negotiated each day between police and private civilians in our social lives. Dr. Jennifer Carlson is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Government, & Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Her remarkable earlier book, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (Oxford, 2015), has shaped the study of how guns impact American society in multiple fields. Her public facing scholarship includes commentary in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Clustered Injustice and The Level Green (Legal Action Group, 2020), Professor Luke Clements tackles the problem of the way in which "our legal system generates and exacerbates disadvantage." Examining the interconnectedness of disadvantage faced by many minorities - such as people who are homeless, Roma, Gypsies and Travelling people, disabled people, those within the criminal justice system, people who are chronically poor and more - he makes an argument that law segregates individuals' problems into isolated incidences, but rather than solving problems, this segregation exacerbates disadvantage. Injustice is clustered, it is interconnected and law, policy and bureaucracies' failure to recognise this keeps people in positions of relative disadvantage and limits their opportunities to flourish in their own conception of the good life. However, it is not all bad news. building on a wealth of professional experience and theoretical insight, Luke offers a roadmap for reform. He seeks to imagine a better system which would be better not just for those who face disadvantage, but for all members of the community. Luke is the Cerebra Professor of Law and Social Justice at the School of Law, Leeds University. He practised as a solicitor between 1981 and 2021 and in that capacity had conduct of a number of cases before the European Commission and Court of Human Rights. In 1996 he was the solicitor who took the first Roma case to reach the Strasbourg Court Buckley v. UK (1996) Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
There is romance in stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but how does that change when those perceived rich are elderly white North Americans and the poor are young Black Jamaicans? In this innovative ethnography, Jovan Scott Lewis tells the story of Omar, Junior, and Dwayne. Young and poor, they strive to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. Their experience of grinding poverty and drastically limited opportunity leads them to conclude that scamming is the best means of gaining wealth and advancement. Otherwise, they are doomed to live in “sufferation”—an inescapable poverty that breeds misery, frustration, and vexation. In the Jamaican lottery scam run by these men, targets are told they have qualified for a large loan or award if they pay taxes or transfer fees. When the fees are paid, the award never arrives, netting the scammers tens of thousands of U.S. dollars. Through interviews, historical sources, song lyrics, and court testimonies, Lewis examines how these scammers justify their deceit, discovering an ethical narrative that reformulates ideas of crime and transgression and their relationship to race, justice, and debt. Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (U Minnesota Press, 2020) describes how these young men, seeking to overcome inequality and achieve autonomy, come to view crime as a form of liberation. Their logic raises unsettling questions about a world economy that relegates postcolonial populations to deprivation even while expecting them to follow the rules of capitalism that exacerbate their dispossession. In this groundbreaking account, Lewis asks whether true reparation for the legacy of colonialism is to be found only through radical—even criminal—means. Jovan Scott Lewis is Associate Professor and Chair of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How did reproductive justice—defined as the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent—become recognized as a human rights issue? In Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice (New York University Press, 2020), Zakiya Luna highlights the often-forgotten activism of women of color who are largely responsible for creating what we now know as the modern-day reproductive justice movement. Focusing on SisterSong, an intersectional reproductive justice organization, Luna shows how, and why, women of color mobilized around reproductive rights in the domestic arena. She examines their key role in re-framing reproductive rights as human rights, raising this set of issues as a priority in the United States, a country hostile to the concept of human rights at home. An indispensable read, Reproductive Rights as Human Rights provides a much-needed intersectional perspective on the modern-day reproductive justice movement. Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. Twitter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today we are joined by Rebecca Joyce Kissane, Professor of Sociology at Lafayette University, and Sarah Winslow, Professor of Sociology at Clemson University, who together are the authors of Whose Game?: Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports (Temple University Press, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed why people play fantasy sports, how men and women experience fantasy sports differently, and what possibilities might exist for real transformation of the masculinist sports world. Whose Game is an incisive analysis of the classed and gendered politics of fantasy sports. Kissane and Winslow take fantasy sport seriously and unpack the ways in which fantasy sports reify and reproduce the class and gendered relations of power in social networks, workplaces and families. They argue that fantasy sports privilege behaviours typically coded male such as competitiveness, the pursuit of dominance, and the need for control. They examine how those elements of fantasy gameplay shape men’s and women’s experiences of playing fantasy sports. Kissane and Winslow develop the concept of jock statsculinity, as a mediated form of fantasy sports masculinity that challenges more normative notions of hegemonic masculinity. Through fantasy sports, a wider range of men can participate in traditionally masculinity activities, including competition and banter, without regard to their physical capabilities. Fantasy sports thus open normative masculinity to a wider range of people than hegemonic masculinity. At the same time, Kissane and Winslow stress that not all men have equal access to jock statsculinity – white, professional men are much more likely to take part in it. Women who want to participate in the fantasy sports world learn to navigate the space as a powerfully masculine and hetero normative space. Fantasy sports ostensibly offer women an opportunity to compete with men on a level playing field, but those spaces and the common behaviours there are coded as male. Women who play fantasy sports may face harassment, but they almost always experience marginalization and belittlement. Nevertheless, for many women, fantasy provides a way to win some of the social benefits of masculinity and/or transgress them. Fantasy sports offer both men and women new opportunities to build connections with their relatives, co-workers, and people with similar interests, but in the realm of fantasy sport, both men and women prioritize building relationships with other men. At the same time, as Kissane and Winslow point out, even though they occupy a privileged position in the fantasy sports world social structure, men also suffer from their engagement with jock statsculinity. Men report much higher rates of emotional impact from fantasy sport. Many men spend considerable amounts of time – perhaps too much time away from their loved ones - setting their line-ups and researching matchups. Whose Game is a wide-ranging analysis and discussion of many of the key issues facing both male and female fantasy sports fans from two leading sports sociologists. Their work will be of general interest to sports fans, but particularly useful for people teaching about sports sociology, gender and politics. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How has the use of big data and algorithms changed policing and police surveillance? On this episode, we speak with Dr. Sarah Brayne, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, about her new book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford UP, 2020). She explains how an interest in mass incarceration led her to study police surveillance and eventually do ethnographic research with the LAPD. She describes how her gender and status as potential “pencil geek” affected how police officers responded to her, and how officers themselves had mixed responses to the use of big data and algorithms in policing. She then talks about her ongoing relationships with research participants and the most impactful experiences in her fieldwork with police that didn’t make her book: the sadness of repeatedly dealing with people who are having the worst days of their life. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Michele Wucker about her new book You Are What You Risk: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World (Pegasus Books, 2021) Your risk fingerprint is a mixture of how personality traits, experiences, and social context have shaped how you approach risk and uncertainty in life. Also crucial is your risk empathy and the degree to which you are risk-savvy, both of which value reading your environment in analyzing the risk you and others face and how people are coping with unknowns. This episode explore risk in terms of a variety of situations and segments of the population. Are millennials risk-averse or risk savvy? Why are white male who are risk-takers people who tend to trust institutions and be anti-egalitarian? How should companies approach mergers and acquisitions when the two companies have very different risk cultures? And finally, which professions tend to be the most prone to over-confidence? In every case, “it depends” is a fair answer but by no means all that you will hear on these and other topics. Michele Wucker has been honored as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and a Guggenheim Fellow. Her third book, The Gray Rhino, inspired a popular TED talk and has influenced world markets, government policy and business strategies. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today, nearly any group or nation with violence in its past has constructed or is planning a memorial museum as a mechanism for confronting past trauma, often together with truth commissions, trials, and/or other symbolic or material reparations. In Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Amy Sodaro documents the emergence of the memorial museum as a new cultural form of commemoration, and analyzes its use in efforts to come to terms with past political violence and to promote democracy and human rights. Through a global comparative approach, Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global examination of the trend: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world. Amy Sodaro is an associate professor of sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On this episode, I have the great pleasure of finally getting to talk with one of the “unsung heroes” of cybernetics, whose work has finally begun to receive the critical attention it has long deserved, and upon which I have leaned quite heavily in my own work since I entered this field. With Cybernetics for the Social Sciences, out from Brill in 2021, Bernard Scott has met a long-felt need by authoring a book that shows the foundational relevance of cybernetics for such fields as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Scott provides user-friendly descriptions of the core concepts of cybernetics, with examples of how they can be used in the social sciences, and explains how cybernetics functions as a transdiscipline that unifies other disciplines and a metadiscipline that provides insights about how other disciplines function. He provides an account of how cybernetics emerged as a distinct field, following interdisciplinary meetings in the 1940s, convened to explore feedback and circular causality in biological and social systems and also recounts how encountering cybernetics transformed his thinking and his understanding of life in general. Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How much do new building codes reduce energy usage? How much and it what ways does it matter for an immigrant to be able to work legally? How has the Affordable Care Act affected people’s work decisions? How did the Great Recession affect women’s childbearing decisions? New statistical and econometric techniques give us better ways of distinguishing correlation from causation even when an experiment would be impossible or unethical. In Data and the American Dream: Contemporary Social Controversies and the American Community Survey, economist Matthew Holian provides a practical introduction to these techniques using publicly available data. Matthew Holian is a professor of economics at San Jose State University whose research focused on urban and energy economics. Host Peter Lorentzen is an economics professor at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Vania Smith-Oka follows a cohort of interns throughout their year of medical training in hospitals to understand how medical students become medical doctors. She ethnographically tracks their engagements with one another, interactions with patients, experiences with doctors, and presentations of cases to show how medical students undergo a nuanced process of accumulating knowledge and practical experience in shaping their medical selves. Smith-Oka illuminates the gendered aspects of this process, whereby the medical interns’ gender informs the kind of treatment they receive from other doctors and the kinds of possibilities they imagine for their careers and areas of medical practice. She documents the lives of the interns during which time they develop their medical selves and come to understand the tacit values of medical practice. The book is full of descriptive vignettes and ethnographic details that make it accessible to undergraduate students. It would be of interest to those in medical anthropology, hospital ethnography, medical education as well as people interested in how expertise is acquired and developed. The book examines medical interns’ transformations through ordinary and extraordinary moments, through active and passive learning where they not only acquire new knowledge but also new ways of being. Vania Smith-Oka is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She is the Director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at the John J. Reilly Center. Reighan Gillam is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand (Routledge, 2020) examines how young people in urban Chiang Mai construct an identity at the intersection of global capitalism, state ideologies, and local culture. Drawing on over 15 years of ethnographic research, the book explores the impact of rapid urbanisation and modernisation on contemporary Thai youth, focusing on conspicuous youth subcultures, drug use (especially methamphetamine use), and violent youth gangs. Anjalee Cohen shows how young Thai people construct a specific youth identity through consumerism and symbolic boundaries – in particular through enduring rural/urban distinctions. The suggestion is that the formation of subcultures and “deviant” youth practices, such as drug use and violence, are not necessarily forms of resistance against the dominant culture, nor a pathological response to dramatic social change, as typically understood in academic and public discourse. Rather, Cohen argues that such practices are attempts to “fit in and stick out” in an anonymous urban environment. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in:
Tanya Jakimow, Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia
Nicole Curato, Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action
Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia
Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Andrea Laurent-Simpson’s path in and out of and back into graduate school
The story of her college dog, who became her family
Why she became interested in looking at her pets as family members
How her human kids reacted to her research project
What her in-person research taught her about human-animal interactions
Our book is: Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household (NYU Press, 2021), which explores the expanding role of animals in what Dr. Laurent-Simpson calls “the multi-species family,” providing a window into a world where almost 95 percent of adults who share their homes with dogs and cats identify their animal companions as legitimate members of their families. She examines why and how these animals have increasingly become an important part of our households and in our lives, including as siblings to our existing children, as animal children themselves, and even as grandchildren, particularly as fertility rates decline and a growing number of younger couples choose to live a childfree lifestyle. Laurent-Simpson highlights how animals—and their place in our lives—have changed the structure of the American family in surprising ways. Our guest is: Dr. Andrea Laurent-Simpson, Research Assistant Professor and Lecturer in the department of sociology at Southern Methodist University. Her work engages identity theory, family and fertility, and human-nonhuman animal interaction. Her research uses original, qualitative, mixed methods data to examine how familial identities are impacted by human-nonhuman animal relationships; how household structure affects resulting identity formation; how this contributes to post-modern, cultural definitions of who or what counts as family; and how dropping fertility rates and delays of first birth characteristic of the second demographic transition aid in the emergence of a “multi-species” family post-1970’s in the U.S. Her newest project examines “pandemic” pets, family structure and health, and pet owner returns to work and school. Her work is award-winning and has appeared in Symbolic Interaction; Sociological Forum; Sociological Inquiry; Sociology of Health and Illness; and Sociological Spectrum. She is the author of Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life. Her college allowed her to live in a pet-dorm with her dog Riley; he quickly became the best friend of Ratty [the pet rat next door] and frenemy of Ivory [the neighboring dog who tried to steal his toys. Often.]. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
Arluke, Arnold and Andrew Rowan. (2020). Underdogs: Pets, People, and Poverty. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Canales, Alejandra. (2021). “SMU Sociologist’s Research Shows How Pets Have Become Part of the Family.” Dallas Morning News, August 23. Article here.
Grimm, David. (2014). Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs. New York, NY: Public Affairs.
Irvine, Leslie. (2004). If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection with Animals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Laurent-Simpson, Andrea. (2017). “They Make Me Not Want to Have a Child: Effects of Companion Animals on Fertility Intentions of the Childfree.” Sociological Inquiry 87(4):586-607. Article here.
Laurent-Simpson, Andrea. “All In the Family: The Modern Multispecies Household.” The Bark, August 2021. Article here.
This program model for “keeping pets with their people”
Animal Planet meets cats in pet dorms at Christina’s college
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among workers in meatpacking plants—and Americans feared for their meat supply. But the Midwest is not simply the place where animals are fed corn and then butchered. Native midwesterner Kristy Nabhan-Warren spent years interviewing Iowans who work in the meatpacking industry, both native-born residents and recent migrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In Meatpacking America, she digs deep below the stereotype and reveals the grit and grace of a heartland that is a major global hub of migration and food production—and also, it turns out, of religion.
Across the flatlands, Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims share space every day as worshippers, employees, and employers. On the bloody floors of meatpacking plants, in bustling places of worship, and in modest family homes, longtime and newly arrived Iowans spoke to Nabhan-Warren about their passion for religious faith and desire to work hard for their families. Their stories expose how faith-based aspirations for mutual understanding blend uneasily with rampant economic exploitation and racial biases. Still, these new and old midwesterners say that a mutual language of faith and morals brings them together more than any of them would have ever expected. Carlos Ruiz Martinez is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. He is also the Communications Assistant for the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA). His general interest is in American religious history, especially American Catholicism. Allison Isidore is a graduate of the Religion in Culture Masters program at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Exploring the relationship between gender and events, Doing Gender in Events: Feminist Perspectives in Critical Event Studies (Routledge, 2021) delivers an ethnographic analysis of the celebration of gender equality in the context of the culture-led event. Drawing upon Critical Event Studies, Anthropology of the Festive, and Gender Studies, it provides a comprehensive understanding of the entangled, conceptual entities of gender and events. Through a gendered analysis of the Hull UK City of Culture 2017, it expands epistemological perspectives relevant to the study of events. Dr. Barbara Grabher investigates the intersections of Gender, Urban and Critical Event Studies. She currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Geography and Regional Sciences at the University of Graz, Austria. Isabel Machado is Research Associate with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture hosted by the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Hungarian Marxist philosopher George Lukács has long occupied a complicated place in the Marxist canon of thinkers, both his lived and theoretical practice subject to much critical commentary and debate. While History and Class Consciousness is considered to be a classic of critical sociology, it has also often been held at arms length by Marxists, many of whom find it’s use of Hegelian speculative philosophy unhelpful, while others find the overemphasis on praxis at the expense of other forms of life and inquiry reductive. In spite of these hesitations, the text has maintained a canonical status for a century now, leaving philosophers on the left with a difficult set of questions about how to read it and what to do with it. Stepping into this difficult terrain is Daniel Andres Lopez with his massive book Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute (Haymarket Books, 2020). Lopez’s work reconstructs Lukács’ thought of the 1920’s by putting it back into it’s tumultuous context, allowing us not only to get a close look at the theory, but it’s purpose in maintaining political, historical and philosophical clarity in a world filled with war, revolution and upheaval. Much like our current moment, Lukács occupied a time where everything seemed possible, but translating the infinite possibilities into concrete realities was a formidable challenge, and would require not only the courage to step into physical danger, but also political confusion. Nothing in this moment was guaranteed, so rigorous philosophical speculation was required, and Lukács stepped in to provide communists with a rigorous theoretical framework. However, this book goes well beyond simply reconstructing Lukács theoretical output. Rather than be satisfied with writing a straightforward commentary, this book is interested in wrestling with Lukács’ successes as well as his limitations. To that effect, Lopez works through a number of critiques of Lukács, both of others as well as his own. This allows him to explore various other questions on the margins of Lukács’ work about the relation between philosophical theory and political practice, and the role of critical thinking in emancipatory movements. The scope and rigor of the text, as well as the various questions and themes it addresses, will make this an incredible resource not just for newcomers to Lukács, or those seasoned in his thought, but for all those interested in learning how to think, and how to translate that thinking into action. Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series. Daniel Andres Lopez is an honorary research associate with the Thesis Eleven Forum for Social and Political Theory. His work has appeared in a number of places, including the journal Historical Materialism. He is an editor at Jacobin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World (Louisiana State Press, 2019) examines what Ashley Hinck calls “fan-based citizenship”: civic action that blends with and arises from participation in fandom and commitment to a fan-object. Examining cases like Harry Potter fans fighting for fair trade, YouTube fans donating money to charity, and football fans volunteering to mentor local youth, Hinck argues that fan-based citizenship has created new civic practices wherein popular culture may play as large a role in generating social action as traditional political institutions such as the Democratic Party or the Catholic Church. Hinck considers the ways in which fan-based social engagement arises organically, from fan communities seeking to change their world as a group, as well as the methods creators use to leverage their fans to take social action. The modern shift to networked, fluid communities, Hinck argues, opens up opportunities for public participation that occurs outside of political parties, houses of worship, and organizations for social action. Politics for the Love of Fandom shows how fan-based citizenship performances help us understand the future possibilities of public engagement, as fans and creators alike tie the ethical frameworks of fan-objects to desired social goal, such as volunteering for political candidates, mentoring at-risk youth, and promoting environmentally friendly policy. Dr. Ashley Hinck (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Communication at Xavier University specializing in digital media, fandom, citizenship, social activism, rhetoric. Dr. Lee M. Pierce (they/them) is a rhetoric scholar and speech critic at SUNY Geneseo and host/ess of for New Books Network channels in Language and Media & Communications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Willi Braun's Jesus and Addiction to Origins: Towards an Anthropocentric Study of Religion (Equinox, 2020) constitutes an extended argument for an anthropocentric, human-focused study of religious practices. Part I presents the basic premise of the argument, which is that there is nothing special or extraordinary about human behaviors and constructs that are claimed to have uniquely religious status and authority. Instead, they are fundamentally human, and so the scholar of religion is engaged in nothing more or less than studying humans across time and place in all their complex existence-which includes creating more-than-human beings and realities. As an extended and detailed example of such an approach, Part II addresses practices, rhetoric, and other data in early Christianities within Greco-Roman cultures and religions. The underlying aim is to insert studies of the New Testament and non-canonical texts, most often presented as "biblical studies," into the anthropocentric study of religion proposed in Part I. How might we approach the study of "sacred texts" if they are nothing more or less than human documents deriving from situations that were themselves all too human? Braun's Jesus and Addiction to Origins addresses that question with clarity and insight. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I spoke to Nick R. Smith to talk about how China's expansive new era of urbanization threatens to undermine the foundations of rural life, which he writes about in his recently published book The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China (U Minnesota Press, 2021). Centered on the mountainous region of Chongqing, which serves as an experimental site for the country's new urban development policies, The End of the Village analyzes the radical expansion of urbanization and its consequences for China's villagers. It reveals a fundamental rewriting of the nation's social contract, as villages that once organized rural life and guaranteed rural livelihoods are replaced by an increasingly urbanized landscape dominated by state institutions. Throughout this comprehensive study of China's "urban-rural coordination" policy, Nick R. Smith traces the diminishing autonomy of the country's rural populations and their subordination to larger urban networks and shared administrative structures. Outside Chongqing's urban centers, competing forces are at work in reshaping the social, political, and spatial organization of its villages. While municipal planners and policy makers seek to extend state power structures beyond the boundaries of the city, village leaders and inhabitants try to maintain control over their communities' uncertain futures through strategies such as collectivization, shareholding, real estate development, and migration. As China seeks to rectify the development crises of previous decades through rapid urban growth, such drastic transformations threaten to displace existing ways of life for more than 600 million residents. Offering an unprecedented look at the country's contentious shift in urban planning and policy, The End of the Village exposes the precarious future of rural life in China and suggests a critical reappraisal of how we think about urbanization. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the future of care? In The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? (Verso, 2021), Emma Dowling, an associate professor at the Institute for Sociology University of Vienna, introduces the extent of the global crisis of care. Drawing on a feminist perspective, the book thinks through the multiple ways that care is rendered invisible in contemporary society, subject to a public storm of privatisation and austerity. The crisis is exacerbated by broader social trends, from the monitoring and exploitation of precarious workers to the individualisation of self-care. Most crucially, the book offers ways to properly value care, democratising and de-financialising this most important part of society. The book is essential reading. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Sue Unerman about her new book Belonging: The Key to Transforming and Maintaining Diversity, Inclusions and Equality at Work (Bloomsbury, 2020) How is it that $8 billion a year gets thrown at diversity training and yet next-to-nothing changes? One person who isn’t giving up is Sue Unerman, who along with her co-authors Kathryn Jacob and Mark Edwards favors a full-court press of changes in order to improve the degree to which women get represented in the ranks of senior management at companies. From how meetings are run, to how teams are built, and of course who gets promoted and receives how much in compensation, the scope of this episode is broad. A particular focus is detrimental “banter” that’s hardly as light-hearted as it’s made out to be. Add to that the Glass Slipper problem of people trying to fit into a culture that should, instead, be blown wide-open and allow all types, and you’ve got a feel for how Unerman is urging reforms. Sue Unerman is the Chief Transformation Office at MediaCom, the largest media agency in the UK with over 200 clients. Along with Kathryn Jacob, she is also the co-author of The Glass Wall. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Criminal Justice: An Examination is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Julian Roberts, Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford. Julian Roberts is an international expert on sentencing throughout the common-law world and is strongly involved in connecting scholars with practitioners as well as promoting greater public understanding of sentencing. This thought-provoking conversation covers a wide range of topics related to criminal justice, including plea bargaining, the involvement of victims in criminal sentencing procedures, victim impact statements, parole, sentencing multiple and repeat crimes, community-based sentencing, alternate dispute resolution, rehabilitation, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Katherine Young, Turbulent Transformations: Non-Brahmin Śrīvaiṣṇavas on Religion, Caste and Politics in Tamil Nadu (Orient Blackswan, 2021) studies the interlinking of religious, social and political identities in modern Tamil Nadu. Through interviews with non-Brahmin Śrīvaiṣṇavas of many castes, but especially belonging to the lower-caste groups, it analyses their histories of discrimination, their negotiation of lived realities, and hopes for the future. In addition, the author also addresses colonial changes, Telugu connections, the non-Brahmin movement, Dalit mobilisation, post-Independence caste hierarchies, government policies, party politics, Brahmin reactions, court cases, and inter-religious competition. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Laurence Coderre’s Newborn Socialist Things: Materiality in Maoist China (Duke UP, 2021) is an exciting book that considers Chinese socialist culture seriously in terms of materiality and theory by tracing the contours of Maoist China through the heretofore unexpected lens of the commodity and consumerism. In Coderre’s book, the “newborn socialist thing,” a critical concept developed by theorists working to give shape to the coming utopia, is both a historical object and a model that provides the conceptual mapping for her project. Across six chapters that handle terrain as diverse as sounding practices, political theory textbooks, porcelainware, and mirrors, Coderre shows that the newborn socialist thing is much more than a discrete object but rather an “un-thing-like” constellation of objects and bodies that function in relation to each other. In her own words: “instead of distinguishing an object from its production, usage, and discursive apparatus, an old or newborn thing brought all these together into a single conceptual entity, comprising both human and nonhuman actors” (6). In attending to the expansiveness and ambiguity of the newborn socialist thing, the book innovatively explores the media environment of revolution as it negotiates the troubling, enduring fact of commodity culture. The project, of great worth in its own terms, is underscored by the author’s desire to understand Chinese contemporary consumer culture. Indeed, the book’s short conclusion is pregnant with suggestion, asking readers to consider postsocialism not merely in terms of rupture with a failed socialist project, but as an inheritor of the relationalities developed in the era of the newborn socialist thing. Interview conducted by Julia Keblinska, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The mass shooting at a queer Latin Night in Orlando in July 2016 sparked a public conversation about access to pleasure and selfhood within conditions of colonization, violence, and negation. Queer Nightlife (U Michigan Press, 2021) joins this conversation by centering queer and trans people of color who apprehend the risky medium of the night to explore, know, and stage their bodies, genders, and sexualities in the face of systemic and social negation. The book focuses on house parties, nightclubs, and bars that offer improvisatory conditions and possibilities for “stranger intimacies,” and that privilege music, dance, and sexual/gender expressions. Queer Nightlife extends the breadth of research on “everynight life” through twenty-five essays and interviews by leading scholars and artists. The book’s four sections move temporally from preparing for the night (how do DJs source their sounds, what does it take to travel there, who promotes nightlife, what do people wear?); to the socialities of nightclubs (how are social dance practices introduced and taught, how is the price for sex negotiated, what styles do people adopt to feel and present as desirable?); to the staging and spectacle of the night (how do drag artists confound and celebrate gender, how are spaces designed to create the sensation of spectacularity, whose bodies become a spectacle already?); and finally, how the night continues beyond the club and after sunrise (what kinds of intimacies and gestures remain, how do we go back to the club after Orlando?). Dr. Kemi Adeyemi is assistant professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies and director of The Black Embodiments Studio at the University of Washington. Dr. Kareem Khubchandani is the Mellon Bridge assistant professor in theater, dance, and performance studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Tufts University. Dr. Ramón Rivera-Servera is Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin.
Isabel Machado is Research Associate with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture hosted by the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Muslim South Asia is widely characterized as a culture that idealizes female anonymity: women's bodies are veiled and their voices silenced. Challenging these perceptions, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, University of Sheffield, highlights an elusive strand of autobiographical writing dating back several centuries that offers a new lens through which to study notions of selfhood. In Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2018), she locates the voices of Muslim women who rejected taboos against women speaking out, by telling their life stories in written autobiography. To chart patterns across time and space, materials dated from the sixteenth century to the present are drawn from across South Asia – including present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Lambert-Hurley uses many rare autobiographical texts in a wide array of languages to elaborate a theoretical model for gender, autobiography, and the self beyond the usual Euro-American frame. In doing so, she works toward a new, globalized history of the field. Ultimately, Elusive Lives points to the sheer diversity of Muslim women's lives and life stories, offering a unique window into a history of the everyday against a backdrop of imperialism, reformism, nationalism and feminism. In our conversation we discuss autobiographical writing, travelogues, letters, diaries, interviews, low literacy rates, the social and physical geographies of authors, reasons Muslim women narrated their life, the role of editors, translators, on publishers, intended and unintended audiences, the actress Begum Khurshid Mirza, and gender difference across autobiographies. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir, Medicine, and Crip Positionalities (Ohio State UP, 2021), Ally Day offers a compelling critique of neoliberal medical practices in the US by coupling an analysis of HIV memoir with a critical examination of narrative medicine practice. Using insights from feminist disability studies and crip theory, Day argues that stories of illness and disability—such as HIV memoirs—operate within a political economy of stigma, which she defines as the formal and informal circulation of personal illness and disability narratives that benefits some while hindering others. On the one hand, this system decreases access to appropriate medical care for those with chronic conditions by producing narratives of personal illness that frame one’s relationship to structural inequality as a result of personal failure. On the other hand, the political economy of stigma rewards those who procure such narratives and circulate them for public consumption. The political economy of stigma is theorized from three primary research sites: a reading group with women living with HIV, a reading group with AIDS service workers, and participant observation research and critical close reading of practices in narrative medicine. Ultimately, it is the women living with HIV who provide an alternative way to understand disability and illness narratives, a practice of differential reading that can challenge stigmatizing tropes and reconceptualize the creation, reception, and circulation of patient memoir. Dr. Ally Day is Associate Professor in Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach. Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining. Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity (Princeton UP, 2021) explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
The field of reproductive health studies
The data on contraceptive access and effectiveness [even when used correctly]
Why we need to trust women
What happens when a pregnant person seeking an abortion is turned away
The long-term outcomes for people who have had abortions
The consequences for people denied abortions
A discussion of the book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion
Today’s book is: The Turnaway Study, which asks what happens when a person seeking an abortion is turned away. Dr. Diane Greene Foster and a team of scientists, psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nurses, physicians, economists, sociologists, and public health researchers conducted a ten-year study on the outcomes of a thousand pregnant people across America, studying both those who received abortions, and those who were turned away. Dr. Foster analyzes impacts on mental and physical health, careers, and romantic relationships, offering the first data-driven examination of the negative consequences for pregnant people who are denied abortions. Our guest is: Dr. Diana Greene Foster, a professor and demographer who uses quantitative models and analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of family planning policies and the effect of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. She led the Turnaway Study in the US, and is collaborating with scientists on a Nepal Turnaway Study. Dr. Foster also worked on the evaluation of the California State family planning program, Family PACT, demonstrating the effectiveness of the program in reducing the incidence of unintended pregnancy and the effect of dispensing a one-year supply of contraception. Dr. Foster created a new methodology for estimating pregnancies averted based on a Markov model and a microsimulation to identify the cost-effectiveness of advance provision of emergency contraception. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advocacy webpage
The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion, by Diana Greene Foster
Advancing New Studies in Reproductive Health
You’re Doing it Wrong: Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise by Bethany L. Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan
A discussion of the book You’re Doing it Wrong,
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Some fields have an easier time describing themselves than others. "History is the study of past events." "Biology is the study of living organisms." But art? Is art a discipline? Is it a practice? Who gets to answer this most fundamental of questions, and why do we prefer not to try? Between Discipline and a Hard Place, written from the perspective of a practising artist, proposes that, against a groundswell of historians, museums and commentators claiming to speak on behalf of art, it is artists alone who may define what art really is. Between Discipline and a Hard Place is a passionate treatise arguing for a new way of understanding art that forefronts the role of the artist and the importance of inclusion within both the concept of art and the art world. Alana Jelinek speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about a disciplined and disciplinary approach to thinking about art and its value outside the current preoccupation with economic considerations and the great potential of interdisciplinary working. Alana Jelinek is an artist and a researcher at the University of Hertfordshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Imaginaries of Connectivity: The Creation of Novel Spaces of Governance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) addresses the problem of how the creation of novel spaces of governance relates to imaginaries of connectivity in time. While connectivity seems almost ubiquitous today, it has been imagined and practiced in various ways and to varying political effects in different historical and geographical contexts. Often the conception of new connectivities also gives birth to new spaces of governance. The political denomination of spaces – whether maritime, continental, social, or virtual – reflects the situatedness of power. Yet, such crafting of new spaces also expresses particular imaginaries and technologies of connectivity that make governance possible. Whereas the study of international relations has traditionally focused on the role of agency and structure in power relations, the affects, beliefs, attitudes, and practices that intervene in how groups of people connect in given times have not attracted much scholarly attention Overall, the detailed and original case studies examined in the book range from the 16th century, to the 19th century, to the present, and from Spain, to the Maritime Alps, to Germany, to the Mediterranean, to China, to East Asia. The historical and geographical variety of the cases serves to highlight the diversity of the meaning and function of connectivity in the constitution of novel spaces of governance. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe, the Spanish Empire, and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
An event-by-event look at how institutionalized racism harms the health of African Americans in the twenty-first century A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States (U Minnesota Press, 2021) examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis--and even the life-threatening childbirth experience for tennis star Serena Williams--author Anne Pollock takes readers on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare. She goes beneath the surface to deconstruct the structures that make these events possible, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and the hypervisibility of Black athletes' bodies. Ultimately, Sickening shows what these shocking events reveal about the everyday racialization of health in the United States. Concluding with a vital examination of racialized healthcare during the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2020, Sickening cuts through the mind-numbing statistics to vividly portray healthcare inequalities. In a gripping and passionate style, Pollock shows the devastating reality and consequences of systemic racism on the lives and health of Black Americans. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Soo Bong Peer about her new book The Essential Diversity Mindset: How to Cultivate a More Inclusive Culture and Environment (Career Press, 2021) In 1967, bans on interracial marriages were finally declared unconstitutional in America. Only a decade earlier than that, merely 4% of Americans endorsed them. Today, the figure is 87% approval. So clearly, progress has been made in a country whose citizens are often multiracial as well as in interracial marriages and relationships. How can the momentum to accepting people as they are and not by dividing us based on race, gender and sexual orientation be reignited in these divisive times? Soo Bong Peer’s suggestions are of both a personal and systemic nature, ranging from practicing greater empathy to having leaders seek to be more open to dialogue with employees with distinctly different perspectives and experiences from theirs. One idea, inspired by this book: to cite Roger Ebert, movies “are like a machine that generates empathy.” So instead of movie night at home or lecture-style, lunch-’n-learn sessions at company headquarters, maybe movies-at-lunch should become a Friday feature! Soo Bong Peer is a strategy consultant and executive coach for Fortune 500 companies. The daughter of a prominent South Korean general and ambassador to Mexico, she has lived in multiple countries, including the U.S. for the past 50 years. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Complaint! (Duke UP, 2021), Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary. Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Nature of Space (Duke UP, 2021) is a translation (by Brenda Baletti) of pioneering geographer Milton Santos' A Natureza do Espaço, originally published in Brazil in 1996. The book offers a theory of human space based on relationships between time and ontology, producing a system of ideas that can catalyze a descriptive and interpretive system of geography. Santos argues that when geographers consider the inseparability of time and space, they can then transcend fragmented realities and partial truths without trying to philosophize or theorize their way around them. Based on these premises, The Nature of Space seeks to examine the role of space, defined as indissoluble systems of objects and systems of actions in social processes, and provide a geographic contribution to the production of a critical social theory Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Susanne Klien's book Urban Migrants in Rural Japan: Between Agency and Anomie in a Post-growth Society (SUNY Press, 2020) provides a fresh perspective on theoretical notions of rurality and emerging modes of working and living in post-growth Japan. By exploring narratives and trajectories of individuals who relocate from urban to rural areas and seek new modes of working and living, this multi-sited ethnography reveals the changing role of rurality, from postwar notions of a stagnant backwater to contemporary sites of experimentation. The individual cases presented in the book vividly illustrate changing lifestyles and perceptions of work. What emerges from Urban Migrants in Rural Japan is the emotionally fraught quest of many individuals for a personally fulfilling lifestyle and the conflicting neoliberal constraints many settlers face. In fact, flexibility often coincides with precarity and self-exploitation. Klien shows how mobility serves as a strategic mechanism for neophytes in rural Japan who hedge their bets; gain time; and seek assurance, inspiration, and courage to do (or further postpone doing) what they ultimately feel makes sense to them. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Vigilante action. Renegades. Human intrigue and the future at stake in New York City. In Urbanism without Guarantees, Christian M. Anderson offers a new perspective on urban dynamics and urban structural inequality based on an intimate ethnography of on-the-ground gentrification. The book is centered on ethnographic work undertaken on a single street in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen in New York City—once a site of disinvestment, but now rapidly gentrifying. Anderson examines the everyday strategies of residents to preserve the quality of life of their neighborhood and to define and maintain their values of urban living—from picking up litter and reporting minor concerns on the 311 hotline to hiring a private security firm to monitor the local public park. Anderson demonstrates how processes such as investment and gentrification are constructed out of the collective actions of ordinary people, and challenges prevalent understandings of how place-based civic actions connect with dominant forms of political economy and repressive governance in urban space. Examining how residents are pulled into these systems of gentrification, Anderson proposes new ways to think and act critically and organize for the transformation of a place—in actions that local residents can start to do wherever they are. Christian M. Anderson is associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington at Bothell. Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Perspectives on Mass Communication is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Denis McQuail (1935-2017), who was Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential scholars in the history of mass communication studies. This wide-ranging conversation provides detailed insights into how examining the media, and in particular mass media, necessarily involves a careful, probing look at our societal values; the concepts, metrics and ideas that McQuail developed to measure the sociological influence of the media; the critical role of journalism in society and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we best understand ethnic armed organizations on the borderlands of Myanmar? Why did the Karen embrace the military-initiated peace process in 2012, shortly after the Kachin had rejected ceasefire proposals? How can ethnographic fieldwork inform studies of insurgent movements? And what does the February 2021 military coup mean for the future of ethnic conflicts in Myanmar In this wide-ranging conversation, David Brenner – a lecturer in global insecurities at the University of Sussex – discusses these questions with Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. He makes the case for an understanding of insurgent groups based on their specific internal political dynamics, which cannot be readily reduced to rational, economics-related incentives and obstacles. Rebel Politics: A Political Sociology of Armed Struggle in Myanmar's Borderlands (Cornell UP, 2019) analyzes the changing dynamics of the civil war in Myanmar, one of the most entrenched armed conflicts in the world. Since 2011, a national peace process has gone hand-in-hand with escalating ethnic conflict. The Karen National Union (KNU), previously known for its uncompromising stance against the central government of Myanmar, became a leader in the peace process after it signed a ceasefire in 2012. Meanwhile, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) returned to the trenches in 2011 after its own seventeen-year-long ceasefire broke down. To understand these puzzling changes, Brenner conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the KNU and KIO, analyzing the relations between rebel leaders, their rank-and-file, and local communities in the context of wider political and geopolitical transformations. Drawing on political sociology perspectives, Rebel Politics explains how revolutionary elites capture and lose legitimacy within their own movements and how these internal contestations drive the strategies of rebellion in unforeseen ways. Brenner presents a novel perspective that contributes to our understanding of contemporary politics in Southeast Asia, and to the study of conflict, peace and security, by highlighting the hidden social dynamics and everyday practices of political violence, ethnic conflict, rebel governance and borderland politics. Interested in this topic? You might also like these recent NBN podcasts: Karen Sanctuaries: Memory, Biodiversity and Political Sovereignty Ruth Streicher, "Uneasy Military Encounters: The Imperial Politics of Counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand" (Cornell UP, 2020) Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels (University of Chicago Press, 2021) by Pamela J. Prickett is an ethnographic study of an African American Muslim community in South Central Los Angeles. The accessible study follows the believers of Masjid al-Quran (MAQ) as they live their Islam in and around the mosque community, such as during prayers or Ramadan, but also while conducting business or interacting with one another. Masjid al-Quran’s institutional history dates back to the Nation of Islam, which then later transitioned to Sunni Islam through the leadership of W. D. Mohammad. MAQ is also located in South Central, a community that has changed demographically and socio-economically overtime. Embedded in this complex urban geography, Prickett's study masterfully illuminates the deep entanglements of class, race, and gender in the defining of faith and ritual for members of MAQ. The study interrogates tenuous realities of giving and receiving charity, the intricate agentic Muslim expressions of African American femininity and womanhood, and the positionality of African American Muslims and diasporic Muslim Americans. This book is also a stunning ethnography. It is attentive to many methodological concerns of positionality, access, and immersive fieldwork, but it is also a story of friendship, love, and loss. This book will be of interest to those who think and reflect on Islam in America, African American Islam, and race, gender, class, and lived religion, but it will also be a productive text to incorporate into methods courses, especially on ethnography. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Films about chainsaw killers, demonic possession, and ghostly intruders. Screaming audiences with sleepless nights or sweat-drenched nightmares in their immediate future. Presumably, almost everybody has experience with horror films. Some people would even characterize themselves as horror fans. But what about the others—the ones who are curious about horror films, but also very, very nervous about them? In A Very Nervous Person's Guide to Horror Movies (Oxford University Press, 2021), Mathias Clasen, Associate Professor of Literature and Media Studies at Aarhus University, delves into the science of horror cinema in an attempt to address common concerns about the genre. He also asks whether horror films can be a force for good—do horror films have health benefits, can they be aesthetically and morally valuable, and might they even have therapeutic psychological and cultural effects? The book addresses these questions in short, readable chapters, peppered with vivid anecdotes and examples and supported by scientific findings. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Kimiko Tanaka and Nan E. Johnson's Successful Aging in a Rural Community in Japan (Carolina Academic Press, 2021) discusses population aging in rural Japan and shows how rural communities have changed socially and demographically in recent years. The authors explain how rural depopulation has led to political consolidation and how the welfare system in Japan is placing more responsibility and autonomy on municipalities. Some rural towns in Japan, such as the study community of Kawanehonchō, are actively responding to the demographic challenges through programs initiated by municipal governments that reflect the interests and voices of local residents. The authors review theoretical frameworks (collective efficacy theory and social capital) to understand the inseparability of successful aging from the social and political environments of neighborhoods and communities and discuss the ongoing challenges people living in rural Japan face as populations continue to shrink. This is an interesting and important book of interest to scholars and others concerned with issues in gerontology and rural health. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How does emigration affect those left behind? The fall of Yugoslavia in the 1990s led citizens to look for a better, more stable life elsewhere. For the older generations, however, this wasn't an option. In this powerful and moving work, Ivana Bajic-Hajdukovic reveals the impact that waves of emigration from Serbia had on family relationships and, in particular, on elderly mothers who stayed. With nowhere to go, and any savings given to their children to help establish new lives, these seniors faced the crumbling country, waves of refugees from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, NATO bombing, the failing economy, and the trial and ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. Can You Run Away from Sorrow?: Mothers Left Behind in 1990s Belgrade (Indiana UP, 2020) poignantly depicts the intimacy of family relationships sustained through these turbulent times in Serbia and through the next generation's search for a new life. Bajic-Hajdukovic explores transformations in family intimacy during everyday life practices-in people's homes, in their food and cooking practices, in their childcare, and even in remittances and the exchange of gifts. "Can You Run Away from Sorrow?" illustrates not only the tremendous sacrifice of parents, but also their profound sense of loss-of their families, their country, their stability and dignity, and most importantly, of their own identity and hope for what they thought their future would be. Anna Domdey, M.A., studied Cultural Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Goettingen and is currently doing professional training in the field of museology, but she still likes to engage with compelling anthropological research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On the podcast today, I am joined by Minhua Ling, Assistant Professor in the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong to talk about her book, The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant youth coming of age on Shanghai’s edge, which was published in 2019 by Stanford University Press. After three decades of massive rural-to-urban migration in China, a burgeoning population of over 35 million second-generation migrants living in its cities poses a challenge to Chinese socialist modes of population management and urban governance. In The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on Shanghai's Edge (Stanford UP, 2019), Minhua Ling offers the first longitudinal study of these migrant youth as they come of age at a time of competing economic and social imperatives. Through richly textured ethnography probing into the policy-making behind urban governance and its segmented inclusion, Minhua Ling offers an earnest voice to the aspirations and experiences of second-generation young men and women migrants against the backdrop of a re-emergent global Shanghai. Minhua Ling’s book is an excellent companion for anyone interested in the politics of citizenship in late socialist China, and an ideal text for more general courses in the anthropology of China and urban studies. Beyond China, The Inconvenient Generation will interest anyone concerned about the inequalities of segmented inclusion that migrants face around the world. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In her phenomenal new book God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State (U California Press, 2021), Nada Moumtaz charts the historical continuities and disjunctures as well contemporary paradoxes shadowing the intellectual and sociological career of waqf or Islamic charity/endowment in modern Lebanon. Nimbly moving between layered textual analysis, riveting ethnography, and formidable historical inquiry, Moumtaz demonstrates the secularization and sectarianization of waqf in Lebanon premised on the attempted state separation between the spheres of the public/private and religion/economy. While exploring the workings of waqf historically, intellectually, and as part of everyday life with meticulous detail, Moumtaz constantly connects the details of her study to its broader argument centered on critiquing the secular promise of separating religion and economy as distinct domains of life. This beautifully written book will be widely read and taught in multiple disciplines including anthropology, Religion, Islamic Studies, and History. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform (Duke UP, 2021), Priya Kandaswamy analyzes how race, class, gender, and sexuality shaped welfare practices in the United States alongside the conflicting demands that this system imposed upon Black women. She turns to an often-neglected moment in welfare history, the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and highlights important parallels with welfare reform in the late twentieth century. Kandaswamy demonstrates continuity between the figures of the "vagrant" and "welfare queen" in these time periods, both of which targeted Black women. These constructs upheld gendered constructions of domesticity while defining Black women's citizenship in terms of an obligation to work rather than a right to public resources. Pushing back against this history, Kandaswamy illustrates how the Black female body came to represent a series of interconnected dangers-to white citizenship, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist ideals of productivity -and how a desire to curb these threats drove state policy. In challenging dominant feminist historiographies, Kandaswamy builds on Black feminist and queer of color critiques to situate the gendered afterlife of slavery as central to the historical development of the welfare state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences (Princeton UP, 2021) reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models. Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the “city-as-computer” metaphor, which undergirds much of today’s urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city’s many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs. Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design. Shannon Mattern is professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her books include Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media and The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities. She lives in New York City. Website wordsinspace.net Instagram @atlas.sounds Twitter @shannonmattern Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Koli community in Mumbai-which has been practicing fishing for centuries-has experienced rapid changes over the last few decades, in the forms of increased mechanization, export of fish to global markets, and the pressure of urbanization on their living and workspaces. The capitalist transformation in fishing has altered what was once a caste-based practice to one that brought to it investors from outside the community, migrant workers, and ecological degradation. The resultant loss of revenue, jobs, and catch for artisanal fishers has led to movements demanding fishing rights to be granted to traditional fisher communities alone and for a return to older fishing practices. This call found resonance with populist politics in the city: Koli women organized themselves to stridently resist the entry of migrant men into the sector and Koli men-particularly the young-became inclined to move out of the practice of fishing. Through an examination of the lives and struggles of fishers in one of India's wealthiest cities, Set Adrift: Capitalist Transformations and Community Politics along Mumbai's Shores (Oxford UP, 2021) looks at how contestations around livelihoods map out in the shadow of significant encounters between capitalism and ecology. Gayatri Nair is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India. Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
There's a lot of hype about robots; some of it is scary and some of it utopian. In this accessible book, two robotics experts reveal the truth about what robots can and can't do, how they work, and what we can reasonably expect their future capabilities to be. It will not only make you think differently about the capabilities of robots; it will make you think differently about the capabilities of humans. Ruth Aylett and Patricia Vargas discuss the history of our fascination with robots—from chatbots and prosthetics to autonomous cars and robot swarms. They show us the ways in which robots outperform humans and the ways they fall woefully short of our superior talents. They explain how robots see, feel, hear, think, and learn; describe how robots can cooperate; and consider robots as pets, butlers, and companions. Finally, they look at robots that raise ethical and social issues: killer robots, sexbots, and robots that might be gunning for your job. Living with Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know (MIT Press, 2021) equips readers to look at robots concretely—as human-made artifacts rather than placeholders for our anxieties. Find out: •Why robots can swim and fly but find it difficult to walk •Which robot features are inspired by animals and insects•Why we develop feelings for robots •Which human abilities are hard for robots to emulate. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Focusing on the world of Norwegian Opioid Substitution Treatment (OST) in the aftermath of significant reforms, Aleksandra Bartoszko's book Treating Heroin Addiction in Norway: The Pharmaceutical Other (Routledge, 2021) casts a critical light on the intersections between medicine and law, and the ideologies infusing the notions of "individual choice" and "patient involvement" in the field of addiction globally. With ethnographic attention to the encounters between patients, clinicians, and bureaucrats, the volume shows that OST sustains the realities it is meant to address. The chapters follow one particular patient through complex clinical and legal battles as they fight to achieve a better quality of life. The study provides ethnographic insight that captures the individual, experiential aspects of addiction treatment, and how these experiences find a register within different domains of treatment and policy, including the familial, social, legal, and clinical. Offering a rare view of addiction treatment in a Scandinavian welfare state, this book will be of interest to scholars of medical and legal anthropology and sociology, and others with an interest in drug policy and addiction treatment. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Few figures stand as prominently in Marxist theory and history as V.I. Lenin. The revolutionary who played a pivotal role in one of the most important events in world history has received reverence, damnation, and everything in between, but much of that response depends on deep misunderstandings of both what he thought and what he did. This misunderstanding was deep enough that even he took notice of it at several points, remarking that readers tended to take his theories out of their context and misunderstanding the underlying points. Understanding Lenin, then, will not just mean rereading his work, but understanding the world Lenin was working in, the what’s impossible to understand without considering the where’s, when’s and why’s. To that effect, Alan Shandro has stepped in with a book that seeks to do just that. Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle (Haymarket Books, 2015) is a sustained attempt to reread Lenin in light of Gramsci’s oft-ignored remark that Lenin was one of his biggest influences in developing his own theories of hegemony. The book spends the first couple chapters contextualizing Lenin by looking at some of his contemporaries, particularly Kautsky, Bernstein and Plekhanov, before turning to Lenin’s own works, and reading through them slowly and meticulously. The result is a study that works its way from Lenin’s writings in the 1890’s all the way to the end of his life in the 1920’s, giving us the ability to see Lenin’s development of ontological and epistemological themes that run throughout his life and work. While Shandro is not always easy to read, the book has a number of crucial insights for political organizers, and will repay serious effort. Many books have been written on Lenin over the years, but few have bothered to study his own work so meticulously and thoroughly. Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series. Alan Shandro is a professor of political theory, previously at Laurentian University, and is currently a visiting professor at York. He is on the editorial board for Science & Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why are white evangelicals the most skeptical major religious group in America regarding climate change? Previous scholarship has pointed to cognitive factors such as conservative politics, anti-science attitudes, aversion to big government, and theology. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, Robin Veldman's book The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change (U California Press, 2019) reveals the extent to which climate skepticism and anti-environmentalism have in fact become embedded in the social world of many conservative evangelicals. Rejecting the common assumption that evangelicals’ skepticism is simply a side effect of political or theological conservatism, the book further shows that between 2006 and 2015, leaders and pundits associated with the Christian Right widely promoted skepticism as the biblical position on climate change. The Gospel of Climate Skepticism offers a compelling portrait of how during a critical period of recent history, political and religious interests intersected to prevent evangelicals from offering a unified voice in support of legislative action to address climate change. Brady McCartney is a Ph.D. student and scholar of religion, Indigenous studies, and environmental history at the University of Florida.Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Oklahoma's Black towns aren't just places of the past - they maintain an enduring allure, and look toward the future, argues Karla Slocum in her new book, Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West (UNC Press, 2019). Dr. Slocum, the Thomas Willis Lambeth Chair of Public Policy and a professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, traveled extensively through Oklahoma and conducted many interviews in researching this book, and the result is a vibrant and at times personal look at the past, present, and future of Black places in Oklahoma and the West. From rodeos to heritage tourism, these towns offer a fascinating case study in the relationship between storytelling, Blackness, and Americanness in the 21st century West, and affirm the place of Black communities in the region's history. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
All regions and places are unique in their own way, but the Ozarks have an enduring place in American culture. Studying the Ozarks offers the ability to explore American life through the lens of one of the last remaining cultural frontiers in American society. Perhaps because the Ozarks were relatively isolated from mainstream American society, or were at least relegated to the margins of it, their identity and culture are liminal and oftentimes counter to mainstream culture. Whatever the case, looking at the Ozarks offers insights into changing ideas about what it means to be an American and, more specifically, a special type of southerner. In Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Dr. Thomas Michael Kersen explores the people who made a home in the Ozarks and the ways they contributed to American popular culture. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Kersen argues the area attracts and even nurtures people and groups on the margins of the mainstream. These include UFO enthusiasts, cults, musical troupes, and back-to-the-land groups. Kersen examines how the Ozarks became a haven for creative, innovative, even nutty people to express themselves―a place where community could be reimagined in a variety of ways. It is in these communities that communitas, or a deep social connection, emerges. Each of the nine chapters focuses on a facet of the Ozarks, and Kersen often compares two or more cases to generate new insights and questions. Chapters examine real and imagined identity and highlight how the area has contributed to popular culture through analysis of the Eureka Springs energy vortex, fictional characters like Li’l Abner, cultic activity, environmentally minded communes, and the development of rockabilly music and near-communal rock bands such as Black Oak Arkansas. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Tug Cities: Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at a Tug of War Festival. This book is about the media representations of place and identity at an annual interstate tug of war festival where cities in two states across the Mississippi River from each other come together one week during the summer as rivals to duke it out on the rope. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Drawing from forty years of experience, Julia Brannen offers an invaluable account of how research in family studies is conducted and 'matters' at particular times. Social Research Matters: A Life in Family Sociology (Bristol UP, 2019) covers key developments in the field and vital issues which remain of pressing concern to Britain and the world. Brannen shows how social research is an art as well as a science - a process that involves craft and creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
To envision and create the futures we want, society needs an appropriate understanding of the likely impact of alternative actions. Data models and visualizations offer a way to understand and intelligently manage complex, interlinked systems in science and technology, education, and policymaking. Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures (MIT Press, 2021), from the creator of Atlas of Science and Atlas of Knowledge, shows how we can use data to predict, communicate, and ultimately attain desirable futures. Using advanced data visualizations to introduce different types of computational models, Atlas of Forecasts demonstrates how models can inform effective decision-making in education, science, technology, and policymaking. The models and maps presented aim to help anyone understand key processes and outcomes of complex systems dynamics, including which human skills are needed in an artificial intelligence–empowered economy; what progress in science and technology is likely to be made; and how policymakers can future-proof regions or nations. This Atlas offers a driver's seat-perspective for a test-drive of the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The COVID-19 pandemic is changing how we think about care. Care work has long been devalued – the daily labors of sustaining the well-being of individuals and community members were seen as natural duties belonging to women, and did not receive recognition as labor. However, with the COVID-19 crisis, the popular media is increasingly valorizing care workers as essential workers because of the growing need for care from our vulnerable populations. The question remains whether we as society are ensuring care for both workers and recipients of state-funded domestic personal support, who are also marginalized from society because of their age, disability, class, and race. Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances (ILR Press, 2020) makes a timely intervention – the scholarship on care work focuses either on workers, recipients, policies, or private sectors. In her important sociological investigation, Cynthia Cranford examines both the workers’ and recipients’ perspectives through in-depth interviews with over 300 people in Canada and the US to understand how we can improve the workers’ security with recipients’ flexibility (often seen in opposition from one another) at levels of labor process, labor market, and state. Through case studies of Toronto’s Direct Funding Program, Los Angeles’s In-Home Supportive Services program, Toronto’s Home Care program, and Toronto’s Attendant Services program, Cranford evaluates the potential of co-ethnic alliances, union organizing, and state-funded model in mediating the tension between security and flexibility. Drawing from a wide range of scholarship on domestic labor, migration, and unions, Cranford proposes a three-pronged model of intimate community unionism to ensure flexible and secure working environments for both workers and recipients where they can democratically contribute their knowledges and form alliances. Cranford’s in-depth, thought-provoking, and insightful work is an important read not only for scholars of care work and labor, but also for activists, social workers, and organizers outside of academia who are interested in building alliances of care. Cynthia Cranford is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where she studies inequalities of gender, work and migration, and collective efforts to resist them. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Howard speaks to Juha Kaakinen, CEO of Y-Foundation, a global leader in implementing the "Housing First principle" and a clear example of how genuine progress can be made in concretely addressing homelessness. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Despite promises from politicians, nonprofits, and government agencies, Chicago's most disadvantaged neighborhoods remain plagued by poverty, failing schools, and gang activity. In Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment, Dr. Teresa Irene Gonzales shows us how, and why, these promises have gone unfulfilled, revealing tensions between neighborhood residents and the institutions that claim to represent them. Focusing on Little Village, the largest Mexican immigrant community in the Midwest, and Greater Englewood, a predominantly Black neighborhood, Gonzales gives us an on-the-ground look at Chicago’s inner city. She shows us how philanthropists, nonprofits, and government agencies struggle for power and control—often against the interests of residents themselves—with the result of further marginalizing the communities of color they seek to help. But Gonzales also shows how these communities have advocated for themselves and demanded accountability from the politicians and agencies in their midst. Building a Better Chicago explores the many high-stakes battles taking place on the streets of Chicago, illuminating a more promising pathway to empowering communities of color in the twenty-first century. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Tug Cities: Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at a Tug of War Festival. This book is about the media representations of place and identity at an annual interstate tug of war festival where cities in two states across the Mississippi River from each other come together one week during the summer as rivals to duke it out on the rope. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Cultural Impact of RuPaul's Drag Race: Why are we all Gagging? (Intellect, 2021) Cameron Crookston has compiled chapters from scholars in theatre and performance studies, English literature, cultural anthropology, media studies, linguistics, sociology, and marketing. The collection analyzes the global impact of RuPaul's drag race on local, live cultures, fan cultures, queer representation, and the very fabric of drag as an art form in popular cultural consciousness. The collection goes beyond the mere analysis of the show itself and examines the profound effect that RuPaul's Drag Race has had on the cultures that surround it: audience cultures, economics, branding, queer politics, and all points in between. What was once a cult show marketed primarily to gay men, Drag Race has drawn both praise and criticism for its ability to market itself to broader, straighter, and increasingly younger fans. The show's depiction of drag as both a celebrated form of entertainment and as a potentially lucrative career path has created an explosion of aspiring queens in unprecedented numbers and had far-reaching impacts on drag as both an art form and a career. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Resolving the Contemporary Tensions of Regional Places: What Japan Can Teach Us offers a fresh and unique view of regional society, regional economies and the future of regional places. Anthony S. Rausch takes up contemporary and fundamentally universal regional-place tensions-regional relocation, local finance, and leadership, local economies together with specifically regional economic and cultural revitalization, and the potential in higher education and resident volunteerism for regional places-and outlines how these tensions are unfolding in regional Japan. The objectives inherent in these themes are increasingly important for regional areas: drawing urbanites to relocate in regional municipalities, dealing with the instability of regional banking, addressing tax inequalities across geographically regional economies, responding to the potential loss of cultural history, and understanding the changing dynamics of higher education and local volunteerism in regional society. The responses proposed by the author build on uniquely Japanese approaches: better utilizing an akiya vacant house information bank, activating and connecting regional think tanks with regional banking, articulating the geographic inequality of a hometown tax scheme (furusato nozei) and proposing a way to achieve the objectives of the furusato nozei scheme through cultivation of regional cultural economies, and responding to policy trends in education and increasing individual interest in volunteering by turning these into resources for regional revitalization. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Each summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: “Let’s hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!” Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps, by Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni (Rutgers University Press, 2020), explains how camp directors and staff came to infuse Hebrew in creative ways and how their rationales and practices have evolved from the early 20th century to today. Some Jewish leaders worry that Camp Hebraized English impedes Hebrew acquisition, while others recognize its power to strengthen campers’ bonds with Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people. Hebrew Infusion explores these conflicting ideologies, showing how hybrid language can serve a formative role in fostering religious, diasporic communities. The insightful analysis and engaging descriptions of camp life will appeal to anyone interested in language, education, or American Jewish culture. Interviewees: Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College and courtesy Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. Jonathan Krasner is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Education Research at Brandeis University. Sharon Avni is Professor of Literacy and Linguistics at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and a Research Associate at the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do religious groups reinvent themselves in order to attract new audiences? How do they rebrand their messages and recast their rituals in order to make their followers more diverse? In Branding Bhakti: Krishna Consciousness and the Makeover of a Movement (Indiana UP, 2021), Nicole Karapanagiotis considers the new branding of the Hare Krishna Movement, or the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). Branding Bhakti not only investigates the methods the ISKCON movement uses to position itself for growth but also highlights devotees' painful and complicated struggles as they work to transform their shrinking, sectarian movement into one with global religious appeal. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Stigma about mental illness makes life doubly hard for people suffering from mental or emotional distress. In addition to dealing with their conditions, they must also contend with social shame and secrecy. But by examining how mental illness is conceived of and treated in other cultures, we can improve our own perspectives in the Western world. In his new book, Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (Norton, 2021), anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker offers a critique of our current mental health system based on cross-cultural observations as well as suggestions for improving upon it. In our interview, we talk about the impact of stigma on mental health treatment and his ideas about where it comes from. He also explains why he feels optimistic about recent trends in the way individuals speak about their mental health challenges. Roy Richard Grinker is professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. His specialties include ethnicity, nationalism, and psychological anthropology, with topical expertise in autism, Korea, and sub-Saharan Africa. He is also the director of George Washington University’s Institute for Ethnographic Research and editor-in-chief of the journal Anthropological Quarterly. He is author of several books, including Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism. He lives in Washington, DC. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Tanya Jakimow's book Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia (Oxford UP, 2020) offers a novel approach to understanding power in development through theories of affect and emotion. Development agents - people tasked with designing or delivering development - are susceptible to being affected in ways that may derail or threaten their 'sense of self'. This susceptibility is in direct relation to the capacity of others to engender feelings in development agents: an overlooked form of power. Susceptibility in Development proposes a new analytical framework to enable new readings of power relations and their consequences for development. Susceptibility in Development offers a comparative ethnography of two types of local development agents: volunteers in a community development program in Medan, Indonesia, and women municipal councillors in Dehradun, India. Ethnographic accounts that are attentive to the emotions and affects engendered in encounters between individuals provide a fresh reading of the relations shaping local development. Local development agents may be more 'susceptible' than workers and volunteers from the global North, yet the capacity/susceptibility to affect/be affected orders relations and shapes outcomes of development more broadly. In theorising from the local, Susceptibility in Development offers fresh insights into power dynamics in development. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in:
Nicole Curato, Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action
Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia
Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Over the past five years, medical aid-in-dying (also known as assisted suicide) has expanded rapidly in the United States, and is now legally available to one in five Americans. This growing social and political movement heralds the possibility of a new era of choice in dying. Yet very little is publicly known about how medical aid-in-dying laws affect ordinary citizens once they are put into practice. Sociological studies of new health policies have repeatedly demonstrated that the realities often fall short of advocacy visions, raising questions about how much choice and control aid-in-dying actually affords. Scripting Death: Stories of Assisted Dying in America (U California Press, 2021) chronicles two years of ethnographic research documenting the implementation of Vermont's 2013 "Patient Choice and Control at End of Life" Act. Author Mara Buchbinder weaves together stories collected from patients, caregivers, health care providers, activists, and legislators to illustrate how they navigate aid-in-dying as a new medical frontier in the aftermath of legalization. Scripting Death explains how medical aid-in-dying works, what motivates people to pursue it, and ultimately, why upholding the "right to die" is very different from ensuring access to this life-ending procedure. This unprecedented, in-depth account uses the case of assisted death as an entry point into ongoing cultural conversations about the changing landscape of death and dying in the United States. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Penguin Random House, 2021), Cornell philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny. Ranging widely across the culture, from Harvey Weinstein and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to “Cat Person” and the political misfortunes of Elizabeth Warren, Manne’s book shows how privileged men’s sense of entitlement—to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power—is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences. In clear, lucid prose, Manne argues that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are “unelectable.” Moreover, Manne implicates each of us in toxic masculinity: It’s not just a product of a few bad actors; it’s something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural mores of our time. The only way to combat it, she says, is to expose the flaws in our default modes of thought while enabling women to take up space, say their piece, and muster resistance to the entitled attitudes of the men around them. With wit and intellectual fierceness, Manne sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to our collective care and concern. Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in art and culture from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana arrived in Africa to study the so-called explosion of Pentecostalism, the spread of which has indeed been massive. It is the continent's fastest growing form of Christianity and one of the world's fastest growing religious movements. Yet Premawardhana found no evidence for this in the province of Mozambique where he worked. His research suggests that much can be gained by including such outliers in the story of global Christianity, by shifting attention from the well-known places where Pentecostal churches flourish to the unfamiliar places where they fail. In Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Premawardhana documents the ambivalence with which Pentecostalism has been received by the Makhuwa, an indigenous yet historically mobile people of northern Mozambique. The Makhuwa are not averse to the newly arrived churches--many relate to them powerfully. Few, however, remain in them permanently. Pentecostalism has not firmly taken root because it is seen as one potential path among many--a pragmatic and pluralistic outlook befitting a people accustomed to life on the move. This religious phenomenon parallels other historical developments, from responses to colonial and postcolonial intrusions to patterns of circular migration between rural villages and rising cities. But Premawardhana primarily attributes the religious fluidity he observed to an underlying existential mobility, an experimental disposition cultivated by the Makhuwa in their pre-Pentecostal pasts and carried by them into their post-Pentecostal futures. Faith in Flux aims not to down play the influence of global forces on local worlds, but to recognize that such forces, "explosive" though they may be, never succeed in capturing the everyday intricacies of actual lives. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. Student from South Korea in the Department of History & Ecumenics, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Home to over 730,000 people, with close to four million people living in the metropolitan area, Seattle has the third-highest homeless population in the United States. In 2018, an estimated 8,600 homeless people lived in the city, a figure that does not include the significant number of "hidden" homeless people doubled up with friends or living in and out of cheap hotels. In Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Josephine Ensign digs through layers of Seattle history—past its leaders and prominent citizens, respectable or not—to reveal the stories of overlooked and long-silenced people who live on the margins of society. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Every year millions of high school seniors in China take the gaokao, China’s standardized college entrance exam. Students, parents, and head teachers all devote years, sweat, and tears to this consequential and chancy exam — even though the ideal of the gaokao as a fair, objective, and scientific measure of individual merit is known to be something of a myth. Why examinees and their families continue to believe in the relative fairness of the gaokao is what Zachary Howlett’s book, Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China (Cornell University Press, 2021), seeks to explore. Based on fieldwork conducted in China’s Fujian province, this rich and engaging book looks at what it means for individuals and communities to believe in both the gaokao and the myth of meritocracy that it engenders. Accessible to both experts and those entirely unfamiliar with the gaokao, this book offers a fresh perspective on the role of examinations in the lives of individuals and in their communities, as well as a useful comparative tool, that of ‘fateful rites of passage,’ for future work. It is also filled with stories of examination candidates, their hopes, dreams, and the lengths that they (and their teachers and parents) go to in order to succeed, all of which should be of interest to anyone who has ever experienced a fateful right of passage of their own. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Do you trust corporations? Do you trust politicians? Do you trust the science? Does anyone trust anyone anymore? In Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties That Bind Us (Columbia UP, 2021), Professor Ben Ho reveals the surprising importance of trust to how we understand our day-to-day economic lives. Starting with the earliest societies and proceeding through the evolution of the modern economy, he explores its role across an astonishing range of institutions and practices, surveying and synthesizing research across economics, political science, psychology, and other disciplines, and presents his own cutting-edge behavioral economics research on the role of apologies in restoring trust. He argues that we trust far more than we may realize, and that mostly this is a good thing. Check out the New Yorker's review of the book. Ben Ho is an associate professor at Vassar College. Ho applies economic tools like game theory and experimental design to topics like apologies, trust, identity, inequality and climate change. Before Vassar, he taught MBA students at Cornell, served as lead energy economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and worked/consulted for Morgan Stanley and several tech startups. Professor Ho also teaches at Columbia University where he is a faculty affiliate for the Center for Global Energy Policy. His work has been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Ho holds seven degrees from Stanford and MIT in economics, education, political science, math, computer science and electrical engineering. Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ella L. J. Bell Smith and Stella M. Nkomo, Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity (Harvard Business Press, 2021) Ella Bell Smith is a professor of business administration at the Tuck School of Business. She’s also the founder and president of ASCENT: Leading Multicultural Women to the Top. Stella M. Nkomo is a professor in the Department of Human Resource Management at the University of Pretoria. She was the founding president of the Africa Academy of Management. A “glass ceiling” that holds women back from attaining the top levels of management within a company is a familiar term. But how about a “cement wall”? That’s how these two authors describe the struggle that confronts women of color and often African-American women particularly as they try to rise through the ranks. What black women must deal with is often a lack of both visibility and authority. This episode explores why it is that so little progress has been made so far in the 21st century. While white female professionals now occupy about 1/3rd of all management roles (still not enough), black women’s share amounts to 4%. How can diversity be realized more organically, rather than through a series of lectures that likely won’t “move the needle”? Listen to this episode to find out. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) helps us to understand not only the history of the “sex wars” in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but it also helps to guide our understanding of the contemporary #MeToo Movement and the complexity of critiques about sex positivity in historical and current contexts. Bracewell revisits the history of the sex wars in the United States, and the different critiques and layers that made those battles much more complex and nuanced than the simplistic two sided “cat fight” that is often cast as the only dimensions of those debates. Why We Lost The Sex Wars re-examines the history of the debates in the late 1970s about pornography that would come to divide feminism as a movement. This history, especially the way that the narrative became entrenched as this two-sided fight effectively erased the voices and positions of feminists of color and international feminists, who had other perspectives on sexual politics that were voiced at the time but were not integrated into the history of the sex wars. Bracewell’s discussion is a clear critique of the way that these other, more marginalized voices were written out of the sex wars debate. She reintegrates these perspectives and voices, building more dimensions to the debates around sex and feminism during the period that spans the so-called second and third waves of feminism. At the basis of Bracewell’s analysis is a framework grounded in the ideas of classical liberalism and this commitment to individual rights and autonomy. Bracewell asks “[h]ow did sexual-political possibilities not tethered to liberal notions of individual rights, civil liberties, due process, and personal privacy come to be as anathema to sex-positive progressives and feminists as they are to traditionalists and conservatives?” (Bracewell 4). This question also arises in context of the #MeToo Movement. In discussing the #MeToo movement—which is predicated on the concept that so many women (and some men) have experienced sexual harassment, inappropriate sexual advances, or rape, and that by disclosing that they too have this experience, others will come forward with their own experiences—Bracewell notes that this more contemporary movement about sexual autonomy and freedom does not always encompass everyone it necessarily should, explaining that many celebrities who have disclosed their experiences receive support for coming forward, but those harassed or assaulted who are not celebrities, those who have much more precarious jobs or positions, remain unnoticed and they may well suffer job loss or other detrimental consequences. Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era knits together the actual sex wars during the earlier years of the contemporary feminist movement and the more recent debates that have surrounded the #MeToo Movement, teasing out why these dialogues about sex are connected to each other and still quite relevant today. Eli Levitas-Goren assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik's edited volume Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis (Duke UP, 2021) collects twenty-one essays that open new paths for doing ethnographic analysis. The contributors—who come from a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions—enliven analysis by refusing to take it as an abstract, disembodied exercise. Rather, they frame it as a concrete mode of action and a creative practice. Encompassing topics ranging from language and the body to technology and modes of collaboration, the essays invite readers to focus on the imaginative work that needs to be performed prior to completing an argument. Whether exchanging objects, showing how to use drawn images as a way to analyze data, or working with smartphones, sound recordings, and social media as analytic devices, the contributors explore the deliberate processes for pursuing experimental thinking through ethnography. Practical and broad in theoretical scope, Experimenting with Ethnography is an indispensable companion for all ethnographers. The open-access copy of the book is available in many platforms, including here: https://andreaballestero.com/e... Fulya Pinar is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on alternative economies, refugee care, and migration in Turkey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How is it possible for a town to exist where the median household income is about $73,000, but the median home price is about $4,000,000? In Aspen and the American Dream: How One Town Manages Inequality in the Era of Supergentrification (U California Press, 2021), Dr. Jenny Stuber digs into the "impossible" math of Aspen, Colorado by exploring how middle-class people have found a way to live in this supergentrified town. Interviewing a range of residents, policymakers, and officials, Stuber shows that what resolves the math equation between incomes and home values in Aspen, Colorado—the X-factor that makes middle-class life possible—is the careful orchestration of diverse class interests within local politics and the community. She explores how this is achieved through a highly regulatory and extractive land use code that provides symbolic and material value to highly affluent investors and part-year residents, as well as less-affluent locals, many of whom benefit from an array of subsidies—including an extensive affordable housing program—that redistribute economic resources in ways that make it possible for middle-class residents to live there. Stuber further examines how Latinos, who provide much of the service work in Aspen and who tend to live outside the town, fit into the social geography of one of the most unequal places in the country. Overall, Stuber argues that the Aspen's ability to balance the interests of its diverse class constituencies is not a foregone conclusion; rather, it is the result of efforts by local stakeholders—citizens, government, developers, and vacationers—to preserve the town’s unique feel and value, and "keep Aspen, Aspen" in all its complex dynamics. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social life. He is currently studying the social representations that media create and reconstruct about two annual festivals that occur during the summer months along the banks of the Mississippi River. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawai‘i to Kahiki (U Hawaii Press, 2021), Emalani Case draws on her own life experiences to explore the politics and ethics of being Native Hawaiian today. Drawing on her own experiences as an activist on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, as well as her academic work on the Hawaiian concept of 'kahiki', Emalani describes the friction between settler regimes of recognition which value primordiality and indigenous modes of creativity which value novel expressions of autonomy and authenticity. In today's podcast Emalani Case and NBN host Alex Golub discuss Emalani's teacher Teresia Teaiwa and the Pacific Studies program at Victoria University, Wellington. Emalani, a Native Hawaiian teaching in Aotearoa/New Zealand, describes the complexities of being indigenous on another indigenous group's land. She also discusses her activism opposing the University of Hawai‘i's attempts to construct a telescope on the summit of the mountain Mauna Kea, and the concept of 'kahiki', a Hawaiian word which refers to the ancestral homeland of Hawaiian people but has deeper levels of meaning which Emalani explains to Alex. Associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
One of the most fundamental aspects of modern life is that much of it is lived on and through social media. We create profiles, post pictures, update stories, and even find new careers and lovers on various sites and apps. But is all this good for us? Our always-online way of living has been called into question for quite some time now, with many people, young and old, finding themselves burned out and disconnected in a world with no shortage of connections. So what does this prevalence of social media mean for our society at large? This question is one of the starting points for my guest today, Matthew Flisfeder, in his new book Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (Northwestern UP, 2021). While he is curious about the affects of social media on society, he also spends much of the book trying to flip the question around and ask: what does the structure of our society mean for social media? Flisfeder is interested in thinking of social media in it’s social, political and economic context, seeing the form our current social media takes as a gateway into broader social and economic structures. This broad Marxist vision is brought together with the theories of subjectivity developed in recent critical theory, particularly of Slavoj Žižek, to better understand both the ways social media hooks us into exploitative mechanisms, but it also gives us some offramps for possible resistance. Flisfeder is no luddite; not only is he himself an enthusiastic user of social media, but his critique here is meant as a course-correction rather than an all-out condemnation. If social media today produces alienation rather than true connection, then what does that tell us about society more broadly? And, more provocatively, what does it mean for broader social critique to take the social in social media seriously? Matthew Flisfeder is an associate professor of rhetoric and communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is also the author of Postmodern Theory and Bladerunner and The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. You can follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It is a familiar story: A recipient of public assistance funds is caught buying expensive steaks, seafood, or other luxury foods with food stamps at the grocery store. Or they wear designer clothes and drive extravagant cars, belying the need for government assistance. Or they game the system in order to buy drugs or alcohol. Or they continue to bear multiple children in the belief that it will increase the amount of government aid they receive so that they can avoid working. Tinged with racial dog whistles and demonizations of poverty, these stories are often circulated as factual accounts of welfare fraud when they seem to operate more closely as contemporary legends – circulated stories with recurring motifs that seem as if they might have actually happened, but its veracity or falseness can be difficult to verify. Contemporary legends often include the caveat of the story happening to a “friend of a friend” though in the case of welfare legends, they often include first-person accounts. While the specific details of contemporary welfare legends are often not verified, the stories themselves are taken as accurate accounts and can impact public policy. In Overthrowing The Queen: Telling Stories of Welfare In America (Indiana University Press, 2020), Dr. Tom Mould explores these stories about welfare in the context of contemporary legends and their influence on our perceptions of public assistance. In our conversation, he explains the origins of the “welfare queen” stereotype and its connection to a singular woman who defrauded public assistance programs in the 1970s and whose story was thereafter frequently recounted in racially coded terms by Ronald Reagan during his 1976 presidential campaign. We discuss the deep connection that welfare legends have to the idea of the American Dream, often serving as counternarrative or an embodiment of the fears about its attainability. Stereotypes about welfare recipients are so deeply embedded in the American consciousness that recipients feel as they must recount their stories as exceptions to the stereotype. Such stories about people who defraud government assistance programs are compelling and memorable because they confirm preconceived biases about recipients. We talk about why such stories spread so easily and how they are spread. While contemporary legends are often told in third person, welfare legends are also told in the first person, but as Dr. Mould explains, the stereotypes are so strong that the tellers may have internalized specific details into eyewitness accounts in a move that makes for a more compelling narrative. However, even genuine eyewitness accounts do not provide the entire story – the circumstances that surround the purchase of what may be perceived come across as luxury items (perhaps a special occasion?) or why someone is driving an expensive car (a remnant from a life before falling upon difficult times?). He suggests that we take a “doubt-centered approach” when we hear such stories where we ask ourselves about the parts that may raise doubt - is it factually true? Is our interpretation true? Can this one story be generalizable to all stories about welfare recipients? Such an approach is an important addition to our understanding of how legend works. As our conversation continues, Dr. Mould suggests ways that we can and should counter the welfare legends, and why it is important to reclaim the terms “welfare” as a positive term rather than one that connotes fraud and laziness. Dr. Tom Mould is Professor of History and Anthropology at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Noted for their haunting melodies and enigmatic lyrics, Bauls have been portrayed as spiritually enlightened troubadours traveling around the countryside in West Bengal in India and in Bangladesh. As emblems of Bengali culture, Bauls have long been a subject of scholarly debates which center on their esoteric practices, and middle class imaginaries of the category Baul. Adding to this literature, the intimate ethnography presented in Kristin Hanssen's book Women, Religion and the Body in South Asia: Living With Bengali Bauls (Routledge, 2020) recounts the life stories of members from a single family, shining light on their past and present tribulations bound up with being poor and of a lowly caste. It shows that taking up the Baul path is a means of softening the stigma of their lower caste identity in that religious practice, where women play a key role, renders the body pure. The path is also a source of monetary income in that begging is considered part of their vocation. For women, the Baul path has the added implication of lessening constraints of gender. While the book describes a family of singers, it also portrays the wider society in which they live, showing how their lives connect and interlace with other villagers, a theme not previously explored in literature on Bauls. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This innovative coursebook introduces students to interdisciplinary theoretical tools for understanding contemporary religiously diverse societies--both Western and non-Western. Using a case-study model, the text considers:
A wide and diverse array of contemporary issues, questions, and critical approaches to the study of religion relevant to students and scholars
A variety of theoretical approaches, including decolonial, feminist, hermeneutical, poststructuralist, and phenomenological analyses
Current debates on whether the term "religion" is meaningful
Many key issues about the study of religion, including the insider-outsider debate, material religion, and lived religion
Plural and religiously diverse societies, including the theological ideas of traditions and the political and social questions that arise for those living alongside adherents of other religions
Paul Michael Hedges's Understanding Religion: Theories and Methods for Studying Religiously Diverse Societies (U California Press, 2021) is designed to provide a strong foundation for instructors to explore the ideas presented in each chapter in multiple ways, engage students in meaningful activities in the classroom, and integrate additional material into their lectures. Students will gain the tools to apply specific methods from a variety of disciplines to analyze the social, political, spiritual, and cultural aspects of religions. Its unique pedagogical design means it can be used from undergraduate- to postgraduate-level courses. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. Student from South Korea in the Department of History & Ecumenics, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
American society is rapidly secularizing – a radical departure from its historically high level of religiosity–and politics is a big part of the reason. Just as, forty years ago, the Religious Right arose as a new political movement, today secularism is gaining traction as a distinct and politically energized identity. Secular Surge: A New Faultline in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines the political causes and political consequences of this secular surge, drawing on a wealth of original data. The authors show that secular identity is in part a reaction to the Religious Right. However, while the political impact of secularism is profound, there may not yet be a Secular Left to counterbalance the Religious Right. Secularism has introduced new tensions within the Democratic Party while adding oxygen to political polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Still there may be opportunities to reach common ground if politicians seek to forge coalitions that encompass both secular and religious Americans. David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the former chairperson of the political science department. His research focuses on civic and political engagement, with a particular focus on religion (and secularism) and young people. Geoff Layman serves as the chair of the Department of Political Science and is the co-editor of the journal Political Behavior. His research focuses on political behavior, political parties, and religion and politics, with a particular emphasis on long-term changes in the parties and their electoral coalitions. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on American Political Development (APD), federalism, education, and religion and politics. Her award-winning book America's Voucher Politics is out now with Cambridge University Press, and her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years (Penguin, 2021), Brown University professor of economics and mom of two Emily Oster offers a classic business school framework for data-driven parents to think more deliberately about the key issues of the elementary years: school, health, extracurricular activities, and more. In our interview, she walks me through a “case study” exercise on the decision of whether to delay kindergarten entry, discusses what (if anything) differs between the approach in her approach and what a family therapist might recommend, and reminds us that when making family decisions, we should always be careful to ask “What are our dreams and what are our kids’ dreams?” and remember these may not be the same. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco. His researches governance and decision-making within the Chinese Communist Party but does not recommend that parents apply any of his research findings on censorship, purges, or riots to managing their family life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As ongoing controversies over commercial sex attest, the relationship between capitalism and sexuality is deeply contentious. Economic and sexual practices are assumed to be not only separable but antithetical, hence why paid sex is so often criminalized and morally condemned. Yet, while sexuality is highly politicized in moral terms, it has largely been overlooked in the discipline devoted to the study of global capitalism, international political economy (IPE). Likewise, the prevailing field in sexuality studies, queer theory, has frequently sidelined questions of political economy. Nicola J. Smith's Capitalism's Sexual History (Oxford UP, 2020) calls for critical scholarship to challenge the dichotomy as it not only structures disciplinary debates but is part and parcel of capitalism itself. By exposing the historical mechanisms through which the economy/sexuality dichotomy has been constituted, the book opens up new space for critical inquiry into the intersections between sex, work, and economic and sexual injustice. Nicola Smith is senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and a political economist working on feminist and queer theory, neoliberalism and austerity, sex work and reproductive labour, and the history of the British body politic. Victoria Holt is a PhD student and a sex worker activist. Her research explores sex workers' experiences of domestic violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the digitization of everyday life made possible by innovations in media, information, and communication technology. In The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now (MIT Press, 2021), Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein offer a new way to understand the role of the digital in our daily lives, calling on us to turn our attention from our discrete devices and apps to the array of artifacts and practices that make up the digital environment that envelops every aspect of our social experience. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein explore a series of issues raised by the digital takeover of everyday life, drawing on interviews with a variety of experts. They show how existing inequities of gender, race, ethnicity, education, and class are baked into the design and deployment of technology, and describe emancipatory practices that counter this--including the use of Twitter as a platform for activism through such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. They discuss the digitization of parenting, schooling, and dating--noting, among other things, that today we can both begin and end relationships online. They describe how digital media shape our consumption of sports, entertainment, and news, and consider the dynamics of political campaigns, disinformation, and social activism. Finally, they report on developments in three areas that will be key to our digital future: data science, virtual reality, and space exploration. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (U Michigan Press, 2021) focuses on drag and transgender performance and activism in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Arguing for its political potential, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes explores the social and cultural disruptions caused by Latin American and Latinx “locas” (effeminate men, drag queens, transgender performers, and unruly women) and the various forms of violence to which queer individuals in Puerto Rico and the U.S. are subjected. This interdisciplinary, auto-ethnographic, queer-of-color performance studies book explores the lives and work of contemporary performers and activists including Sylvia Rivera, Nina Flowers, Freddie Mercado, Javier Cardona, Jorge Merced, Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, Monica Beverly Hillz, Lady Catiria, and Barbra Herr; television programs such as RuPaul’s Drag Race; films such as Paris Is Burning, The Salt Mines, and Mala Mala; and literary works by authors such as Mayra Santos-Febres and Manuel Ramos Otero. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a drag performer himself, demonstrates how each destabilizes (and sometimes reifies) dominant notions of gender and sexuality through drag and their embodied transgender expression. These performances provide a means to explore and critique issues of race, class, poverty, national identity, and migratory displacement while they posit a relationship between audiences and performers that has a ritual-like, communal dimension. The book also analyzes the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret in Puerto Rico, and invites readers to challenge, question, and expand their knowledge about queer life, drag, trans performance, and Puerto Rican identity in the Caribbean and the diaspora. The author also pays careful attention to transgender experience, highlighting how trans activists and performers mold their bodies, promote social change, and create community in a context that oscillates between glamour and objection. Dr. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Rewriting Our Stories: Education, Empowerment, and Well-Being (Atrium, 2020) harnesses the therapeutic power of storytelling to convert feelings of fear and powerlessness into affirmative life narratives. Rather than seeing fear as an outcome, we can view it as a feeling in the moment largely governed by narratives. Many of our fears are stories we tell ourselves, even if they are largely fictional and rooted in sociocultural belief systems. The result is that we often feel helpless in the face of those fears. This transformational book considers a potent antidote: by recognising our recurring negative stories, we can rewrite and transform them to achieve greater empowerment and well-being in our lives. Throughout human existence, no matter where our place of origin or when in history, storytelling shapes our societies, influencing personal, sociocultural, educational, and public discourses that impact how we live. Creating and communicating the language of stories - to ourselves and others - enhances our innate voices and can empower us to engage in greater empathy, compassion, and possibility. Intended for educators, leaders, therapists, mental health professionals, and youth organisations, as well as the general public, Derek Gladwin offers practical and positive tools for everyone to re-author their lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Hannah Wohl speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged (U Chicago Press, 2021), her ethnographic study of the New York contemporary art scene that reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions and how aesthetic judgment evolves between artist studios, galleries, art fairs, and collectors’ houses. We mention Paula Cooper Gallery and the work of artists Lucky DeBellevue and Gina Beavers. The Armory Show takes place in NY in early September 2021. Hannah Wohl is an assistant professor in sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to David Potter about his new book Disruption: Why Things Change (Oxford UP, 2021). Disruption is about radical change-why it happens and how. Drawing on case studies ranging from the fourth century AD through the twentieth century, we look at how long-established systems of government and thought are challenged, how new institutions are created and new ideas become powerful. While paying attention to the underlying political, intellectual, economic and environmental sources of social disruption, we will see that no matter what similarities there might be between forces that shake different societies, these underlying factors do not dictate specific outcomes. The human actors are ultimately the most important, their decisions drive the conclusions that we see over time. Through our case studies we can explore successful and unsuccessful decision making, and the emergence of the ideas that conditioned human actions. We'll explore the development of Islam and of Christian doctrine, of constitutional thought, of socialism and social Darwinism. We'll look at how these ideas, all of them emerging on the fringes of society became central. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern Eureaopn history at the University of Florida. He can be reached at crsbb32@ufl.edu or on twitter @craig_sorvillo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Most development histories focus on large-scale projects and multi-year plans. But how would we understand development differently if we chose a different starting point? In Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Ohio UP, 2021), Alice Wiemers exchanges the center for the periphery. Writing outwards from Kpasenpke, a village in northern Ghana, Wiemers shows how the daily labor of rural people, local officials and family networks have all shaped a practice of rural statecraft centered on developmentalism. By insisting on the specificity of the hinterland and interchangeability of its so-called “developers”, Village Work proposes a new framework for approaching Ghana’s twentieth century. Elisa Prosperetti is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African history at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at: www.elisaprosperetti.net. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has written an intriguing new book on our understanding of American demographic data, and how we, as citizens, see each other as part of the fabric of the United States. The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream (Princeton UP, 2020) examines the long historical narrative of the experience of immigrants to the United States while also mapping out various forms of data to help us understand the actual experience of immigrants, over time, in the U.S. Part of Alba’s research in this project is highlighting the issue of what kind of assimilation actually happened in the U.S., especially in the post-World War II period. He explains that there was mass assimilation, after World War II, of the children of immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. in the earlier waves of immigration, prior to WWII. But Alba is not only interested in the immigrant experience, what he is really digging into is the experience of those who are not white, or who were not considered white initially but subsequently were seen as white citizens of the U.S. Alba is examining the reality and interrogating the narrative that has come to be associated with particular waves of immigrants to the U.S. In order to unpack the reality of these immigration narratives, Alba is also digging into the demographic data about where people live, who they marry, and the way that children are categorized according to the United States’ census. The census generates a lot of data, which is used in a host of different ways, including in a traditional political fashion, in the allocation of goods and services. This is not the story that Alba is telling in The Great Demographic Illusion, which is mining the census data to determine what assimilation actually looks like in the U.S., and how citizens perceive themselves, and how they go on to raise their children, where they choose to live, and the kinds of communities to which they are connected. The Great Demographic Illusion also highlights the problems with the census data, in the aggregation of the data that is compiled in the survey, especially in regard to the questions of racial identification. While the census has innovated by expanding the capacity for individuals to indicate more than one race, thus adapting to the individuals who have parents of different races. In order to tease out the problems in the ways that the census data is reported, Alba compared the information from the census in terms of racial identification with what birth certificates indicate about the racial identity of parents of the child; he also compared the census data to the Pew Research data on intermarriage. This really gets at the heart of what Alba is calling the “great demographic illusion” – since the reporting of the census data is indicative of a greater and faster racial change in the country, which Alba has noted is not exactly accurate. Another dimension of the research that Alba finds particularly engaging is the sociological position of these individuals who come from mixed backgrounds, since they are socially flexible in ways that their parents and grandparents were unable to be. This is a sophisticated and multi-dimensional study of what we know, assume, and possibly are misguided about, in regard to the tapestry of the American citizenry and all those who live in the U.S. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Historic preservation is typically regarded as an elitist practice. In this view, designating a neighborhood as historic is a project by and for affluent residents concerned with aesthetics, not affordability. It leads to gentrification and rising property values for wealthy homeowners, while displacement afflicts longer-term, lower-income residents of the neighborhood, often people of color. Through rich case studies of Baltimore and Brooklyn, Aaron Passell complicates this story, exploring how community activists and local governments use historic preservation to accelerate or slow down neighborhood change. He argues that this form of regulation is one of the few remaining urban policy interventions that enable communities to exercise some control over the changing built environments of their neighborhoods. In Baltimore, it is part of a primarily top-down strategy for channeling investment into historic neighborhoods, many of them plagued by vacancy and abandonment. In central Brooklyn, neighborhood groups have discovered the utility of landmark district designation as they seek to mitigate rapid change with whatever legal tools they can. The contrast between Baltimore and Brooklyn reveals that the relationship between historic preservation and neighborhood change varies not only from city to city, but even from neighborhood to neighborhood. In speaking with local activists, Passell finds that historic district designation and enforcement efforts can be a part of neighborhood community building and bottom-up revitalization. Featuring compelling narrative interviews alongside quantitative data, Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn (Columbia UP, 2021) is a nuanced mixed-methods study of an important local-level urban policy and its surprisingly varied consequences. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why has secularism faced such challenges in the Middle East and in Lebanon in particular? In light of dominating headlines about the spread of sectarianism and the so-called death of Arab secularism, Mark Farha addresses the need for a thorough examination of the history of secular thought and practice in the region. In Lebanon: The Rise and Fall of a Secular State under Siege (Cambridge UP, 2019), Farha provides a new understanding of the historical roots of secularism as well as the potential causes for the continued resistance a fully deconfessionalized state faces both in Lebanon and in the region at large. Drawing on a vast corpus of primary and secondary sources to examine the varying political parties and ideologies involved, this book provides a fresh approach to the study of religion and politics in the Arab world and beyond. Mark Farha is currently in the Department of Sociology at the University of Zurich; he also teaches a masterclass for Macat.com. Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the mid-1990s, experts predicted that India would face the world's biggest AIDS epidemic by 2000. Though a crisis at this scale never fully materialized, global public health institutions, donors, and the Indian state initiated a massive effort to prevent it. HIV prevention programs channeled billions of dollars toward those groups designated as at-risk—sex workers and men who have sex with men. At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Response (Stanford UP, 2021) captures this unique moment in which these criminalized and marginalized groups reinvented their "at-risk" categorization and became central players in the crisis response. The AIDS crisis created a contradictory, conditional, and temporary opening for sex-worker and LGBTIQ activists to renegotiate citizenship and to make demands on the state. Working across India and Kenya, Gowri Vijayakumar provides a fine-grained account of the political struggles at the heart of the Indian AIDS response. These range from everyday articulations of sexual identity in activist organizations in Bangalore to new approaches to HIV prevention in Nairobi, where prevention strategies first introduced in India are adapted and circulate, as in the global AIDS field more broadly. Vijayakumar illuminates how the politics of gender, sexuality, and nationalism shape global crisis response. In so doing, she considers the precarious potential for social change in and after a crisis. Gowri Vijayakumar is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is iconic in the landscape of Indian healthcare. Established in the early years of independence, this enormous public teaching hospital rapidly gained fame for the high-quality treatment it offered at a nominal cost; at present, an average of ten thousand patients pass through the outpatient department each day. With its notorious medical program acceptance rate of less than 0.01%, AIIMS also sits at the apex of Indian medical education. To be trained as a doctor here is to be considered the best. In what way does this enduring reputation of excellence shape the institution's ethos? How does elite medical education sustain India's social hierarchies and the health inequalities entrenched within? In Special Treatment: Student Doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (Stanford UP, 2021), Anna Ruddock considers prestige as a byproduct of norms attached to ambition, aspiration, caste, and class in modern India, and illustrates how the institution's reputation affects its students' present experiences and future career choices. Ruddock untangles the threads of intellectual exceptionalism, social and power stratification, and health inequality that are woven into the health care taught and provided at AIIMS, asking what is lost when medicine is used not as a social equalizer but as a means to cultivate and maintain prestige. Anna Ruddock is a medical anthropologist, writer, and disability activist. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Property rights are important for economic exchange, but many governments don't protect them. Private market organizations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort group members. Under what circumstances, then, will private organizations provide a stable environment for economic activity? Based on market case studies and a representative survey of traders in Lagos, Nigeria, this book argues that threats from the government can force an association to behave in ways that promote trade. The findings challenge the conventional wisdom that private good governance in developing countries thrives when the government keeps its hands off private group affairs. Instead, the author argues, leaders among traders behave in ways that promote trade primarily because of the threat of government intrusion. Shelby Grossman is a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Dr. Grossman's primary research interests are in comparative politics and sub-Saharan Africa. She was previously an assistant professor of political science at the University of Memphis and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Dr. Grossman earned her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2016. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. His primary research interest is in the political economy of governance and development, particularly in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Welcome to Cover Story, a podcast by New Books Network devoted to long form journalism. Today, we are talking to Texas-based writer Sarah Hepola. Hepola is most known from her brave writing about drinking and the 2015 bestselling memoir Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. She's appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air and published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, Salon and Texas Monthly, where she is a writer-at-large. Today we are talking about her recent story “In Mobile City Everybody Knows Your Name” from August 2021 Texas Monthly. A very fresh piece. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How are peoples' ideas about languages, ways of speaking and expressive styles shaped by their social positions and values? How is difference, in language and in social life, made - and unmade? How and why are some differences persuasive as the basis for action, while other differences are ignored or erased? Written by two recognised authorities on language and culture, Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life (Cambridge UP, 2019) argues that ideological work of all kinds is fundamentally communicative, and that social positions, projects and historical moments influence, and are influenced by, people's ideas about communicative practices. Neither true nor false, ideologies are positioned and partial visions of the world, relying on comparison and perspective; they exploit differences in expressive features - linguistic and otherwise - to construct convincing stereotypes of people, spaces and activities. Using detailed ethnographic, historical and contemporary examples, this outstanding book shows readers how to analyse ideological work semiotically. Amir Lehman is an MA student in linguistics at UCL. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Set in the eastern state of Odisha in a district known as the “Somalia of India,” Everyday State and Politics in India: Government in the Backyard in Kalahandi (Routledge 2018) studies a development project in a region iconic for development failure. Drawing on rich fieldwork with a watershed development project in district Kalahandi, anthropologist Sailen Routray moves beyond the question of success and failure to ask: how has the state itself transformed in the process of trying to develop Kalahandi? By analyzing the implementation of WORLP (Western Orissa Rural Livelihoods Project), the book shows the morphing of the state on the ground, and the ways in which it is perceived by the agents and objects of statist actions. It argues that since the 1980s, the state has come to not only be seen but also felt as it has made its way into the interstices of rural society through the mission-mode of state-fabrication. The book also identifies an increasing convergence in the everyday practices of governmental and non-governmental organizations, and the growth of ‘the social’ as a terrain and object of governmental actions, as two important effects of the process of deployment of these tactics. By providing an alternative analysis of state and politics in India, this book adds to the literature surrounding the everyday state by illuminating recent changes in state-society relations. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Political Science, Public Policy, Development Studies, and Social Anthropology. Sailen Routray is a researcher, writer and translator. His interests lie in the areas of anthropology of development, anthropology of the everyday state, culinary cultures, contemporary history of Odisha, and sociology of literature. He is the managing editor of Anwesha, an Odia quarterly of politics, culture and ideas. He currently serves as the Director of Centre for Human Sciences Bhubaneswar (CHSB), India. Aparna Gopalan is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University studying the reproduction of inequality through development projects in rural western India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What Is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia (Princeton UP, 2021) by Ismail Fajrie Alatas draws on groundbreaking anthropological insights to provide a new understanding of Islamic religious authority, showing how religious leaders unite diverse aspects of life and contest differing Muslim perspectives to create distinctly Muslim communities. Taking readers from the eighteenth century to today, Alatas traces the movements of Muslim saints and scholars from Yemen to Indonesia and looks at how they traversed complex cultural settings while opening new channels for the transmission of Islamic teachings. He describes the rise to prominence of Indonesia’s leading Sufi master, Habib Luthfi, and his rivalries with competing religious leaders, revealing why some Muslim voices become authoritative while others don’t. Alatas examines how Habib Luthfi has used the infrastructures of the Sufi order and the Indonesian state to build a durable religious community, while deploying genealogy and hagiography to present himself as a successor of the Prophet Muḥammad. Challenging prevailing conceptions of what it means to be Muslim, What Is Religious Authority? demonstrates how the concrete and sustained labors of translation, mobilization, collaboration, and competition are the very dynamics that give Islam its power and diversity. Ismail Fajrie Alatas is an assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and History at New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
While i find it pretty easy to recognize when i'm reading articles in complexity science, i've never been satisfied by definitions of complexity and related concepts. I'm not alone! Researchers' own attempts to define complex systems incorporate a mix of folk wisdom and fraught assumptions anchored to a menagerie of contested examples. The field was ripe for a 2013 article proposing a unified account of complexity, and it's no less ripe today for this book-length expansion. In What Is a Complex System? (Yale UP, 2020), philosopher of science James Ladyman and physicist and mathematician Karoline Wiesner systematically interrogate popular definitions. They break the most commonly cited features into three bins: truisms on which there is universal agreement, the conditions necessary for complexity to arise, and various emergent products of complexity. A key insight of their account, for me, was to understand emergence as a relation between features rather than one feature among many. The book is compact, accessible, and at times profound. Indeed, James and Karoline bring the lessons of their account to some of the most consequential complex systems of our time, including Earth's climate and biosphere as well as our global social media ecosystem. I was honored to host them in conversation on this episode, and i encourage listeners to pick up the book itself for deeper dives into the topics we discussed. James Ladyman is professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol and works mainly in the philosophy of science. Karoline Wiesner is professor of physics at the University of Potsdam and uses information theory to understand complex systems. Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Hijras, one of India’s third gendered or trans populations, have been an enduring presence in the South Asian imagination—in myth, in ritual, and in everyday life, often associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work. In more recent years hijras have seen a degree of political emergence as a moral presence in Indian electoral politics, and with heightened vulnerability within global health terms as a high-risk population caught within the AIDS epidemic. Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India (Fordham UP, 2021) recounts two years living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche. Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or comply with retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance, irresponsibility, or illiteracy but rather a specific idiom of erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics, economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of self-fashioning beyond the secular horizons of public health or queer theory. Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday—laughter, flirting, teasing—to impossible longings, kinship, and economies of property and substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today. Hijras, Lovers, Brothers is the winner of the 2021 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As projects like Manhattan's High Line, Chicago's 606, China's eco-cities, and Ethiopia's tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (U Chicago Press, 2021), Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany's Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was "greened" with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley's urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Development economists have been doing intensive research in recent years on conditional cash transfer programs as a tool to help get people out of poverty. Meanwhile in the US there has been a lot of talk about Universal Basic Income as a remedy for inequality and social disclocations. On paper, China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee, or Dibao, sounds a lot like Universal Basic Income. Jennifer Pan shows that this tool of poverty alleviation has instead been turned into a tool of surveillance and oppression. Ultimately, this focus on “stability” may backfire. Pan’s book Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for Its Rulers (Oxford UP, 2020) offers insights gleaned from a remarkable combination of in-person field interviews, surveys, online field experiments, and data generated from automated analyses of massive numbers of government documents and social media posts. Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Communication, and an Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University. She conducts research at the intersection of political communication and authoritarian politics, showing how authoritarian governments try to control society, how the public responds, and when and why each is successful. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Value of Voice is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. This wide-ranging conversation explores how the media can be used as a filter to examine power structures, political movements, economic interests, democracy and our evolving notion of culture, the importance of voice and the challenge posed by media institutions that order the social, political, cultural, economic, and ethical dimensions of our lives. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2017, Myanmar's military launched a campaign of widespread targeted violence against its Rohingya minority. The horrific atrocities was later described by United Nations experts as genocide. This had been building since 2012, when earlier ethnic violence erupted between Buddhists and Muslims in Western Myanmar. These very grave incidents leading to the deaths and also the flight of thousands of Rohingya to neighbouring Bangladesh was the most concentrated exodus of people since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In Myanmar's Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of the Muslim 'Other' (Zed Books, 2017, 2019), Francis Wade identifies the underlying causes which flamed division, segregation and resulted in a horrific loss of life and violence. Wade explores how the manipulations by a ruling elite turned prompted neighbours to take up arms against neighbour, by politicising ethnic identity. The crisis is contextualised in the legacy of British colonialism which calcified the previously fluid dynamics of cultural groups across the country.The military junta is shown to have exploited these divisions in its campaign which targeted the Rohingya minority. In the period of extreme violence, Wade draws out how the U.N., and more broadly, how Western backers of the apparent political transition to democratisation contemporaneously ignored the unfolding situation. Through his on-the-ground accounts, Wade explores how citizens experiencing rights and freedoms unseen for half a century, under a much lauded civilian leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi, became complicit in this humanitarian catastrophe. Francis Wade is a journalist specialising in Myanmar and Southeast Asia. He began reporting on Myanmar in 2009 and went on to cover in-depth the transition from military rule and the violence which accompanied it. He has reported for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, TIME, New York Review of Books and more. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Many American Christians have come to understand their relationship to other Christian denominations and traditions through the lens of religious persecution. Jason Bruner's Imagining Persecution: Why American Christians Believe There Is a Global War Against Their Faith (Rutgers UP, 2021) provides a historical account of these developments, showing the global, theological, and political changes that made it possible for contemporary Christians to claim that there is a global war on Christians. This book, however, does not advocate on behalf of particular repressed Christian communities, nor does it argue for the genuineness (or lack thereof) of certain Christians’ claims of persecution. Instead, this book is the first to examine the idea that there is a “global war on Christians” and its analytical implications. It does so by giving a concise history of the categories (like “martyrs”), evidence (statistics and metrics), and theologies that have come together to produce a global Christian imagination premised upon the notion of shared suffering for one’s faith. The purpose in doing so is not to deny certain instances of suffering or death; rather, it is to reflect upon the consequences for thinking about religious violence and Christianity worldwide using terms such as a “global war on Christians.” Byung Ho Choi and Shalon Park are Ph.D. students in the Department of History & Ecumenics, focusing on World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Elite white women have branded feminism, promising an apolitical individual empowerment along with sexual liberation and satisfaction, LGBTQ inclusion, and racial solidarity. As Rafia Zakaria expertly argues in Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption (W. W. Norton, 2021), those promises have been proven empty and white feminists have leant on their racial privilege and sense of cultural superiority. Drawing on her own experiences as an American Muslim woman, as well as an attorney working on behalf of immigrant women, Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism that forges true solidarity by bringing Black and brown voices and goals to the fore. Ranging from the savior complex of British feminist imperialists to the condescension of the white feminist-led "development industrial complex" and the conflation of sexual liberation as the "sum total of empowerment," Zakaria presents an eye-opening indictment of how whiteness has contributed to a feminist movement that solely serves the interests of upper middle-class white women. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Practitioners from all professional domains are increasingly confronted with incidences of systemic failure, yet poorly equipped with appropriate tools and know-how for understanding such failure, and the making of systemic improvement. In our fragile Anthropocene world where ‘systems change’ is often invoked as the rallying call for purposeful alternative action, this book provides a toolkit to help constructively make systems that can change situations for the better. Reflecting on the decade that has passed since the publication of the first edition of Systems Approaches to Making Change: A Practical Guide (Springer, 2020), Reynolds writes: “Global turbulence and conflict associated with trade wars, terrorism and destabilization have been significantly accentuated in the last 10 years… issues of sustainability are prevalent (ranging) from extensive deforestation of Amazonia… to contentious fracking for continued fossil-fuel extraction amongst more industrialised nations predominantly in the northern hemisphere”. In other words, there has been no easing up when it comes to the big messes that plague us—in fact, the need for effective techniques for making systemic change has no doubt never been greater. Viable Systems Model, Soft Systems, SODA… oh my! Where should the practitioner start? Which approach should I deploy in my work? What about using more than one model—or perhaps a combination of models? The five approaches outlined in this book offer the systems thinking practitioner a range of interchangeable tools for pro-actively making systemic improvements amidst complex situations of change and uncertainty. Systems Approaches to Change offers an excellent introduction for those seeking to understand systems thinking and to enact systems thinking in practice. The book helps practitioners from all professions to better understand inter-relationships, engage with multiple perspectives, and reflect on boundary judgements that can inhibit or enhance improved purposeful change. Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Two experts of extremist radicalization take us down the QAnon rabbit hole, exposing how the conspiracy theory ensnared countless Americans, and show us a way back to sanity. In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women were among those who died that day. They, like millions of Americans, believed that a mysterious insider known as "Q" is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy. The QAnon conspiracy theory has ensnared many women, who identify as members of "pastel QAnon," answering the call to "save the children." With Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon (Redwood Press, 2021), Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of QAnon should not surprise us: believers have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. The authors track QAnon's unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi-mama Instagram, a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence. Pastels and Pedophiles connects the dots for readers, showing how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe—appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q's mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines. Finally, Pastels and Pedophiles lays out what can be done about QAnon's corrosive effect on society, to bring Q followers out of the rabbit hole and back into the light. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The 1980s saw the peak of a moral panic over fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. A coalition of moral entrepreneurs that included representatives from the Christian Right, the field of psychology, and law enforcement claimed that these games were not only psychologically dangerous but an occult religion masquerading as a game. Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (University of California Press, 2015) by Joseph Laycock, explores both the history and the sociological significance of this panic. Fantasy role-playing games do share several functions in common with religion. However, religion—as a socially constructed world of shared meaning—can also be compared to a fantasy role-playing game. In fact, the claims of the moral entrepreneurs, in which they presented themselves as heroes battling a dark conspiracy, often resembled the very games of imagination they condemned as evil. By attacking the imagination, they preserved the taken-for-granted status of their own socially constructed reality. Interpreted in this way, the panic over fantasy-role playing games yields new insights about how humans play and how they construct and maintain meaningful worlds together. Joseph Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. He has written several books on new religious movements and American religious history, including one on The Satanic Temple. He is also a co-editor for the journal Nova Religio. Carrie Lynn Evans is currently a PhD student of English Literature with Université Laval in Quebec. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why do we find pervasive gender-based discrimination, exclusion and violence in India when the Indian constitution builds an inclusive democracy committed to gender equality? This is the puzzle that animates Natasha Behl’s book, Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India (Oxford University Press, 2019), but it is, as we explore in episode eight of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, in no way merely an intellectual one. To the contrary, Gendered Citizenship is a book that is guided by Behl’s own bodily experiences of gendered politics in India and also in the academy. Through her study of India, Behl offers a persuasive critique of the existing literature on citizenship in political science, particularly in democratisation studies, as well as of her experiences as a graduate student in a hostile discipline. Along the way she develops an account of situated citizenship that not only serves as the methodological basis for her fieldwork, but, as we discuss, is itself a kind of empirical political theory. Congratulations to Natasha Behl for being awarded the soon-to-be-officially-announced 2021 Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence of the American Political Science Association! Listeners interested to know more about Lee Ann Fujii’s life and work can listen to the recent interview in this special series with two of her former students, Jessica Soedirgo and Aarie Glas. To download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (Duke UP, 2020), Rahul Mukherjee explores how the media coverage of nuclear power plants and cellular phone antennas in India—what he calls radiant infrastructures—creates environmental publics: groups of activists, scientists, and policy makers who use media to influence public opinion. In documentaries, lifestyle television shows, newspapers, and Bollywood films, and through other forms of media (including radiation-sensing technologies), these publics articulate contesting views about the relationships between modernity, wireless signals, and nuclear power. From testimonies of cancer patients who live close to cell towers to power plant operators working to contain information about radiation leaks and health risks, discussions in the media show how radiant infrastructures are at once harbingers of optimism about India's development and emitters of potentially carcinogenic radiation. In tracing these dynamics, Mukherjee expands understandings of the relationship between media and infrastructure and how people make sense of their everyday encounters with technology and the environment. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Distributing Condoms and Hope: The Racialized Politics of Youth Sexual Health (U California Press, 2020) is a feminist ethnographic account of how youth sexual health programs in the racially and economically stratified city of “Millerston” reproduce harm in the marginalized communities they are meant to serve. Chris Barcelos makes space for the stories of young mothers, who often recognize the narrow ways that public health professionals respond to pregnancies. Barcelos’s findings show that teachers, social workers, and nurses ignore systemic issues of race, class, and gender and instead advocate for individual-level solutions such as distributing condoms and promoting "hope." Through a lens of reproductive justice, Distributing Condoms and Hope imagines a different approach to serving marginalized youth—a support system that neither uses their lives as a basis for disciplinary public policies nor romanticizes their struggles. In our interview, Chris Barcelos explains how they use the framework of a “teen pregnancy prevention industrial complex” to illuminate the webs of power that ultimately serve to perpetuate the systemic social inequities leading to teen pregnancy. They describe the concept of “messiness” as it applies to deviations from social normativity, and how such deviations “mess up” society’s ideas of what is right and normal. Distributing Condoms and Hope forthrightly engages with messiness. One hopes it will have a real-world impact – for, as Barcelos observes, “It is easy to critique social structures while nonetheless continuing on with your day-to-day work in ways that do not incorporate those critiques.” Rachel Pagones teaches preventive medicine and public health in the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego, and she is a licensed acupuncturist. Her book about acupuncture as a tool of medical, social, and political revolution in the United States will be published later this year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The city that sits on the River Foyle on the North side of the Irish isle in many ways has stood as a microcosm of the conflicts in Northern Ireland, even to the contestation over the name of Derry/Londonderry. In Derry City: Memory and Political Struggle in Northern Ireland (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), Margo Shea examines the popular and cultural identity formations in this emblematic city over the century leading up to the sectarian clash known commonly as as "The Troubles." Throughout the period Shea examines, Irish nationalist communities developed a cultural memory that fostered a social identity and shared heritage as an alternative to the loyalist sanctioned commemorations, festivals, and community histories. Shea's study models a fruitful method of reading cultural history, especially of communities without recourse to political power and the usual means of archival representation. This book will be of interest for those interested in the formation of cultural identity and the development of Northern Ireland. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked Gordon Glenister about his new book Influencer Marketing Strategy: How to Crate Successful Influencer Marketing (Kogan-Page, 2021) Gordon Glenister is the Global Head of Influencer Marketing for the Brand Content Marketing Association. He’s also the host of the Influence podcast, and was formerly the Director General of the British Promotional Merchandise Association for over a decade. Why are 77% of influencers female, and are so young (averaging 28 years of age)? Part of the answer may be that women rarely attract venture capitalist funding and yet are the majority of buyers in most categories. So they are close to the action of what’s going on commercially without being invited to partake. Their response has been to become, in effect, not only their own brands but their own media companies. In the process, they challenge and may replace to a degree both advertising agencies and traditional retailers as they help companies reach committed, niche audiences that aren’t necessarily small at all. This episode covers those topics, and more. The degree to which trust has leached from companies and moved over to more authentic influencers is one key. Another is that companies would be wise to consider employees as brand advocates, i.e. internally-based influencers in their own right. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What makes some cities world class? Increasingly, that designation reflects the use of a toolkit of urban planning practices and policies that circulates around the globe. These strategies—establishing creative districts dedicated to technology and design, “greening” the streets, reinventing historic districts as tourist draws—were deployed to build a globally competitive Buenos Aires after its devastating 2001 economic crisis. In this richly drawn account, Jacob Lederman explores what those efforts teach us about fast-evolving changes in city planning practices and why so many local officials chase a nearly identical vision of world-class urbanism. Lederman explores the influence of Northern nongovernmental organizations and multilateral agencies on a prominent city of the global South. Using empirical data, keen observations, and interviews with people ranging from urban planners to street vendors he explores how transnational best practices actually affect the lives of city dwellers. His research also documents the forms of resistance enacted by everyday residents and the tendency of local institutions and social relations to undermine the top-down plans of officials. Most important, Lederman highlights the paradoxes of world-class urbanism: for instance, while the priorities identified by international agencies are expressed through nonmarket values such as sustainability, inclusion, and livability, local officials often use market-centric solutions to pursue them. Further, despite the progressive rhetoric used to describe urban planning goals, in most cases their result has been greater social, economic, and geographic stratification. Chasing World-Class Urbanism: Global Policy Versus Everyday Survival in Buenos Aires (U Minnesota Press, 2020) is a much-needed guide to the intersections of culture, ideology, and the realities of twenty-first-century life in a major Latin American city, one that illuminates the tension between technocratic aspirations and lived experience. Dr. Lederman is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Michigan-Flint and his research interests span Urban sociology, development and globalization, political economy. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Building on work in feminist studies, queer studies and critical race theory, this volume challenges the universality of propositions about human nature, by questioning the boundaries between predominant neurotypes and 'others', including dyslexics, autistics and ADHDers. Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm (Routledge, 2020) is the first work of its kind to bring cutting-edge research across disciplines to the concept of neurodiversity. It offers in-depth explorations of the themes of cure/prevention/eugenics; neurodivergent wellbeing; cross-neurotype communication; neurodiversity at work; and challenging brain-bound cognition. It analyses the role of neuro-normativity in theorising agency, and a proposal for a new alliance between the Hearing Voices Movement and neurodiversity. In doing so, we contribute to a cultural imperative to redefine what it means to be human. To this end, we propose a new field of enquiry that finds ways to support the inclusion of neurodivergent perspectives in knowledge production, and which questions the theoretical and mythological assumptions that produce the idea of the neurotypical. Working at the crossroads between sociology, critical psychology, medical humanities, critical disability studies, and critical autism studies, and sharing theoretical ground with critical race studies and critical queer studies, the proposed new field - neurodiversity studies - will be of interest to people working in all these areas. Christina Anderson Bosch is faculty at the California State University, Fresno. She is curious about + committed to public, inclusive education in pluralistic societies where critical perspectives on questions of social and ecological justice are valued enough to enact material dignity and metaphysical wellbeing on massive scales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki (U Hawaii Press, 2021), Emalani Case explores Indigenous persistence through the concept of Kahiki, a term that is at once both an ancestral homeland for Kānaka Maoli (Hawaiians) and the knowledge that there is life to be found beyond Hawaiʻi’s shores. It is therefore both a symbol of ancestral connection and the potential that comes with remembering and acting upon that connection. Tracing physical, historical, intellectual, and spiritual journeys to and from Kahiki, Emalani frames it as a place of refuge and sanctuary, a place where ancient knowledge can constantly be made anew. It is in Kahiki, she argues, and in the sanctuary it creates, that today’s Kānaka Maoli can find safety and reprieve from the continued onslaught of settler colonial violence, while also confronting some of the often uncomfortable and challenging realities of being Indigenous in Hawaiʻi, in the Pacific, and in the world. In writing that is both personal and theoretical, Emalani weaves the past and the present together, reflecting on ancient concepts and their continued relevance in movements to protect lands, waters, and oceans; to fight for social justice; to reexamine our responsibilities and obligations to each other across the Pacific region; and to open space for continued dialogue on what it means to be Indigenous both when at home and when away. Combining personal narrative and reflection with research and critical analysis, Everything Ancient Was Once New journeys to and from Kahiki, the sanctuary for reflection, deep learning, and continued dreaming with the past, in the present, and far into the future. Emalani Case is a Kanaka Maoli Lecturer in Pacific Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I interviewed Kailing Xie on her recently published book, Embodying Middle Class Gender Aspirations: Perspectives from China's Privileged Young Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). This book takes a feminist approach to analyse the lives of well-educated urban Chinese women, who were raised to embody the ideals of a modern Chinese nation and are largely the beneficiaries of the policy changes of the post-Mao era. It explores young women’s gendered attitudes to and experiences of marriage, reproductive choices, careers and aspirations for a good life. It sheds light on what keeps mainstream Chinese middle-class women conforming to the current gender regime. It illuminates the contradictory effects of neoliberal techniques deployed by a familial authoritarian regime on these women’s striving for success in urban China, and argues that, paradoxically, women’s individualistic determination to succeed has often led them onto the path of conformity by pursuing exemplary norms which fit into the party-state’s agenda. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars. With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America (U Chicago Press, 2021) makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How Social Science Creates the World is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and UC Berkeley political scientist Professor Mark Bevir. Mark Bevir is an internationally acclaimed expert in the theory of governance. This thought-provoking conversation explores how attempts to shoehorn political science into a natural science framework commonly fail and how correctly appreciating what social science is and does has a direct bearing on our everyday social lives. By adopting the false belief that the social world is composed of some unchanging, fundamental entities on par with atoms or molecules—be they markets or classes or what have you—we will have no means of recognizing, or even describing, what happens when circumstances change and a new social dynamic is created. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The rights of pregnant workers as well as (the lack of) paid maternity leave have increasingly become topics of a major policy debate in the United States. Yet, few discussions have focused on the U.S. military, where many of the latest policy changes focus on these very issues. Despite the armed forces' increases to maternity-related benefits, servicewomen continue to be stigmatized for being pregnant and taking advantage of maternity policies. In Militarized Maternity: Experiencing Pregnancy in the U.S. Armed Forces (U California Press, 2021) , Megan McFarlane analyzes military documents and conducts interviews with enlisted servicewomen and female officers. She finds a policy/culture disparity within the military that pregnant servicewomen themselves often co-construct, making the policy changes significantly less effective. McFarlane ends by offering suggestions for how these policy changes can have more impact and how they could potentially serve as an example for the broader societal debate. Dr. Megan McFarlane is an Assistant Professor at Marymount University. Her most recent research centers on women’s reproductive health care policies, with a particular focus on maternity (pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, and postpartum). Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at SUNY Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Recent protests around the world (such as the Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy Wall Street movements) have drawn renewed interest to the study of social change and, especially, to the manner in which words, images, events, and ideas associated with protestors can "move the social." What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics (U Alabama Press, 2017) is an attempt to foster a more coherent understanding of social change among scholars of rhetoric and communication studies by juxtaposing the ideas of social movements and counterpublics--historically two key factors significant in the study of social change. Foust, Pason, and Zittlow Rogness's volume compiles the voices of leading and new scholars who are contributing to the history, application, and new directions of these two concepts, all in conversation with a number of acts of resistance or social change. The theories of social movements and counterpublics are related, but distinct. Social movement theories tend to be concerned with enacting policy and legislative changes. Scholars flying this flag have concentrated on the organization and language (for example, rallies and speeches) that are meant to enact social change. Counterpublic theory, on the other hand, focuses less on policy changes and more on the unequal distribution of power and resources among different protest groups, which is sometimes synonymous with subordinated identity groups such as race, gender, sexuality, and class. Nonetheless, contributors argue that in recent years the distinctions between these two methods have become less evident. By putting the literatures of the two theories in conversation with one another, these scholars seek to promote and imagine social change outside the typical binaries.
Christina Foust is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Amy Pason is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, and currently spends most of her time as Faculty Senate Chair and most recently, been elected to represent all Faculty Senate Chairs for the Nevada System of Higher Education. Kate Zittlow Rogness, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Department of Communication at Minneapolis College. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The identity of contemporary Jews is multifaceted, no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God’s commandments. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are no longer exclusively Jewish. They are affiliated with a host of complementary and sometimes clashing communities—vocational, professional, political, and cultural—whose interests may not coincide with that of the community of their birth and inherited culture. In Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities (U Chicago Press, 2021), Paul Mendes-Flohr explores the possibility of a spiritually and intellectually engaged cosmopolitan Jewish identity for our time. Reflecting on the need to participate in the spiritual life of Judaism so that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders and allows one to balance Jewish commitment with a genuine obligation to the universal, Mendes-Flohr lays out what this delicate balance can look like for contemporary Jews, both in Israel and in diasporic communities worldwide. Cultural Disjunctions walks us through the labyrinth of twentieth-century Jewish cultural identities and commitments. Ultimately, Mendes-Flohr calls for Jews to remain “discontent,” not just with themselves but also and especially with the reigning social and political order, and to fight for its betterment. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In today’s interview, we speak with Dr. Jon Gordon, incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at Appalachian State University, who tells us about his research with criminalized men in an armed group in a marginal neighborhood in Medellín, Colombia. Jon tells us how his experiences as a teacher in both Chicago and Medellín got him interested in studying gangs and violence. He explains how doing 45 months of fieldwork allowed him to track changes in the group he studied and talks about the value—and marginalization—of long-term ethnographic fieldwork. He also reflects on how he dealt with the psychological toll of witnessing violence, and how the men he studied subverted traditional gender roles in surprising ways. Finally, he describes what happened when his mother and partner entered his field site, and the ethnographic importance of a bologna sandwich. Learn more about Dr. Gordon’s research here. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Gorick Ng about his new book The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right (HBR, 2021). This book takes you through one’s career, from getting hired and oriented to trying to gain promotions. The interview follows a similar path, emphasizing how to get along with colleagues and one’s boss most of all. The “north star” of Ng’s advice gleaned from interviewing 500 people across professions and roles is to demonstrate competence (ability), commitment (excitement) and compatibility (pleasant to be around). Get the 3-C’s model right, and you can avoid coming across as too overbearing or threatening as you form work connections, figure out what’s missing and needs to be addressed in a meeting, and how to resolve conflicts. Speaking of conflicts, is a conflict deep down mostly about the people involved, the position one holds, or is it about the place? If the latter, then maybe it’s time to move on to another organization instead. Gorick Ng is a career adviser at Harvard College, specializing in coaching first-generation, low-income students. He’s also managed new employees at Boston Consulting Group and worked in investment banking at Credit Suisse. His work has been featured on “The Today Show,” and in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Every Harvard Business School student received a copy of Ng’s book this past year to aid their careers. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Being Social is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Roy Baumeister, Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland. This extensive conversation explores Roy Baumeister’s unique combination of biological and psychological thinking from recognizing essential energetic factors involved with willpower and decision-making, to framing free will in evolutionary biological terms to measuring the numbness associated with social rejection as a form of analgesic response, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today on New Books in Gender Studies Jana Byars talks with Lindy McDougall, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia about her new book, The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic Surgery in the Twenty-First Century, out this year, 2021, with Indiana University Press. In The Perfect Vagina, Lindy McDougall provides an ethnographic account of women who choose FGCS in Australia and the physicians who perform these procedures, both in Australia and globally, while also examining the environment in which surgeons and women come together. Physicians have a vested interest in establishing this surgery as valid medical intervention, despite majority medical opinion explicitly acknowledging that a wide range of genital variation is normal. McDougall offers a nuanced picture of why and how these procedures are performed and draws parallels between FGCS and anthropological discussions of female genital circumcision (cutting). Using the neologism biomagical, she argues that cosmetic surgery functions as both ritual and sacrifice due to its promise of transformation while simultaneously submitting the body to the risks and pain of surgery, thus exposing biomedicine as an increasingly cultural and commercial pursuit. The Perfect Vagina highlights the complexities involved with FGCS, its role in Western beauty culture, and the creation and control of body image in countries where self-care is valorized and medicine is increasingly harnessed for enhancement as well as health. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia (Cornell UP, 2020), Teo Ballvé challenges the notion that in Urabá, Colombia, the cause of the region's violent history and unruly contemporary condition is the absence of the state. Although he takes this locally oft-repeated claim seriously, he demonstrates that Urabá is more than a case of Hobbesian political disorder. Through his insightful exploration of war, paramilitary organizations, grassroots support and resistance, and drug-related violence, Ballvé argues that Urabá, rather than existing in statelessness, has actually been an intense and persistent site of state-building projects. Indeed, these projects have thrust together an unlikely gathering of guerilla groups, drug-trafficking paramilitaries, military strategists, technocratic planners, local politicians, and development experts each seeking to give concrete coherence to the inherently unwieldy abstraction of "the state" in a space in which it supposedly does not exist. By untangling this odd mix, Ballvé reveals how Colombia's violent conflicts have produced surprisingly coherent and resilient, if not at all benevolent, regimes of rule. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary (Routledge, 2021), William Walters calls for secrecy to be given a more central place in critical security studies and elevated to become a core concept when theorising power in liberal democracies. Through investigations into such themes as the mobility of cryptographic secrets, the power of public inquiries, the connection between secrecy and place-making, and the aesthetics of secrecy within immigration enforcement, Walters challenges commonplace understandings of the covert and develops new concepts, methods and themes for secrecy and security research. Walters identifies the covert imaginary as both a limit on our ability to think politics differently and a ground to develop a richer understanding of power. State Secrecy and Security offers readers a set of thinking tools to better understand the strange powers that hiding, revealing, lying, confessing, professing ignorance and many other operations of secrecy put in motion. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of security, secrecy and politics more broadly. William Walters is Professor of Politics and Faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence Chair at Carleton University, Ottawa. His current research concerns secrecy, migration and deportation infrastructures. He has published widely in the areas of political sociology, political geography, citizenship studies, security and insecurity, and Foucault studies. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office; she has previously published on US Africa Command and the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Based on sweeping research in six languages, Sebastian N. Page's Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2021) offers the first comprehensive, comparative account of nineteenth-century America's greatest road not taken: the mass resettlement of African Americans outside the United States. Building on resurgent scholarly interest in the so-called 'colonization' movement, the book goes beyond tired debates about colonization's place in the contest over slavery, and beyond the familiar black destinations of Liberia, Canada, and Haiti. Striding effortlessly from Pittsburgh to Panama, Toronto to Trinidad, and Lagos to Louisiana, it synthesizes a wealth of individual, state-level, and national considerations to reorient the field and set a new standard for Atlantic history. Along the way, it shows that what haunted politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln was not whether it was right to abolish slavery, but whether it was safe to do so unless the races were separated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Eating One’s Own: Examining Civil War is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and intellectual historian David Armitage, the Lloyd C. Blanfein Professor of History at Harvard University. This conversation covers Prof. Armitage’s extensive research on the history of ideas of civil war from Ancient Rome to the present. A salient feature of his work is a strong focus on etymology as it relates to our understanding of how people interpreted (or misinterpreted) and perceived events in history which results in a fascinating exploration of how our understanding of various concepts has been prejudiced by past societies and past beliefs that we might not even be aware of, and how they, in turn, go on to influence other societies; and how this cumulative process frames our understanding of these ideas. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Cooperation is the means by which life arose in the first place. It’s how we progressed through scale and complexity, from free-floating strands of genetic material, to nation states. But given what we know about the mechanisms of evolution, cooperation is also something of a puzzle. How does cooperation begin, when on a Darwinian level, all that the genes in your body care about is being passed on to the next generation? Why do meerkat colonies care for one another’s children? Why do babbler birds in the Kalahari form colonies in which only a single pair breeds? And how come some coral wrasse fish actually punish each other for harming fish from another species? A biologist by training, Raihani looks at where and how collaborative behavior emerges throughout the animal kingdom, and what problems it solves. In The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World (St. Martin's Press, 2021), she reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behavior–teaching, helping, grooming, and self-sacrifice–most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved. And we can also understand what it is about the way we cooperate that has made humans so distinctive–and so successful. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Faith in Freedom: Muslim Immigrant Women’s Experiences of Domestic Violence (Melbourne University Press, 2019), Nafiseh Ghafournia explores questions of domestic violence in the context of Muslim immigrant women in Australia. Aiming to correct existing accounts of Muslim women’s lives and experiences particularly as immigrants, the study uses an intersectional framework to deepen our understanding of the ways that immigrant Muslim women understand, experience, and respond to domestic violence. Among the themes that the book covers are the relationships between culture, religion, gender, and immigration status in the context of domestic violence; why and when, if at all, might women leave abusive relationships; the various kinds of domestic violence that immigrant Muslim women experience, including physical, psychological, financial, spiritual, sexual, in-laws, and immigration-related violence; services available to victims and survivors of abuse; and essential information for service providers and policy makers. The book will appeal to anyone interested in immigrant experiences, domestic violence from an intersectional perspective, Muslim women; and because of its practical value, it should also be read by service providers, policymakers, ESL educators, and others who interact with immigrants on a regular basis. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She is currently working on a book project on Muslim women's marriage to non-Muslims in Islam. Shehnaz runs a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy?!, where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy and uproot it from Islam (ambitious, she knows). She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix—and control—society. The essays in Your Computer Is on Fire (MIT Press, 2021) interrogate how our human and computational infrastructures overlap, showing why technologies that centralize power tend to weaken democracy. These practices are often kept out of sight until it is too late to question the costs of how they shape society. From energy-hungry server farms to racist and sexist algorithms, the digital is always IRL, with everything that happens algorithmically or online influencing our offline lives as well. Each essay proposes paths for action to understand and solve technological problems that are often ignored or misunderstood. Mathew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Chester Elton, coauthor of Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done (Harper Business, 2021). During my interview with Elton, the theme was really about the importance of creating a sense of psychological safety for employees, with gratitude being the other key in terms of providing social support. As to specific solution, quelling uncertainty, signaling that perfectionism can be harmful, and that a philosophy that less can be more when it comes to curbing burn-out were all keys. So too is normalizing conversations about anxiety on the job because, right now, 90% of workers don’t feel like this crucial topic is something they can discuss with their boss. Finally, employees can manage to be resilient more easily when these three motivators are in place: a job role that enables making an impact, ongoing learning, and doesn’t compromise the importance of family. The two lead authors have teamed up on three previous New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers and have sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide. Adrian Gostick is ranked among the top 10 global gurus in leadership and organizational culture. Chester Elton is ranked number 2 among organizational culture experts globally and in the top 10 for leadership. Anthony Gostick adds a millennial perspective to this work. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
There are more than 700,000 Bulgaristanlı migrants residing in Turkey. Immigrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically Turkish, they assume certain privileges because of these ethnic ties, yet access to citizenship remains dependent on the whims of those in power. Through vivid accounts of encounters with the police and state bureaucracy, of nostalgic memories of home and aspirations for a more secure life in Turkey, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey (Stanford UP, 2019) explores the tensions between ethnic privilege and economic vulnerability and rethinks the limits of migrant belonging among those for whom it is intimated and promised—but never guaranteed. In contrast to the typical focus on despair, Ayşe Parla studies the hopefulness of migrants. Turkish immigration policies have worked in lockstep with national aspirations for ethnic, religious, and ideological conformity, offering Bulgaristanlı migrants an advantage over others. Their hope is the product of privilege and an act of dignity and perseverance. It is also a tool of the state, reproducing a migration regime that categorizes some as desirable and others as foreign and dispensable. Through the experiences of the Bulgaristanlı, Precarious Hope speaks to the global predicament in which increasing numbers of people are forced to manage both cultivation of hope and relentless anxiety within structures of inequality. This interview is part of an NBN special series on Mobilities and Methods. Ayşe Parla is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspaces? Drawing from observations and interviews with more than 130 elite professionals, Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite (Princeton UP, 2021) examines how a range of underlying mechanisms-gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories-afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers. Juxtaposing findings on the legal profession with those on elite consulting firms, Swethaa Ballakrishnen reveals that parity arises not from a commitment to create feminist organizations, but from structural factors that incidentally come together to do gender differently. Simultaneously, their research offers notes of caution: while conditional convergence may create equality in ways that more targeted endeavors fail to achieve, "accidental" developments are hard to replicate, and are, in this case, buttressed by embedded inequalities. Ballakrishnen examines whether gender parity produced without institutional sanction should still be considered feminist. In offering new ways to think about equality movements and outcomes, Accidental Feminism forces readers to critically consider the work of intention in progress narratives. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Sergio Lopez-Pineiro about his new book, A Glossary of Urban Voids (2020). It's one of the more fascinating books I've encountered in some time. And I say "encountered" because it's not only a book, in the traditional sense of something you read, but also a keen intellectual and aesthetic experience: the very design of the book and its use of the glossary as a form open up exciting ways of thinking and seeing. And this is very much to the point for Lopez-Pineiro, because the urban void about which he writes is a phenomenon that resists definition. It is, in his words, "unspecified and underspecified." And that's exactly what makes it so intriguing. Join me in hearing Lopez-Pineiro show us how some of the most seemingly overlooked and neglected areas of our urban environments may end up being the most crucial for our freedoms and our possibilities. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020) maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts. This episode features a discussion between Sandeep Mertia (book editor and contributing author), Aakash Solanki (contributing author) and Noopur (host and contributing author). The discussion begins with the contents of the book but moves on to a broader conversation about STS as an interdisciplinary formation in India and the global South. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In many ways, divorce is a quintessentially personal decision—the choice to leave a marriage that causes harm or feels unfulfilling to the two people involved. But anyone who has gone through a divorce knows the additional public dimensions of breaking up, from intense shame and societal criticism to friends’ and relatives’ unsolicited advice. In Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Allison Alexy tells the fascinating story of the changing norms surrounding divorce in Japan in the early 2000s, when sudden demographic and social changes made it a newly visible and viable option. Not only will one of three Japanese marriages today end in divorce, but divorces are suddenly much more likely to be initiated by women who cite new standards for intimacy as their motivation. As people across Japan now consider divorcing their spouses, or work to avoid separation, they face complicated questions about the risks and possibilities marriage brings: How can couples be intimate without becoming suffocatingly close? How should they build loving relationships when older models are no longer feasible? What do you do, both legally and socially, when you just can’t take it anymore?
Relating the intensely personal stories from people experiencing different stages of divorce, Alexy provides a rich ethnography of Japan while also speaking more broadly to contemporary visions of love and marriage during an era in which neoliberal values are prompting wide-ranging transformations in homes across the globe. This book is available open access. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Unlike other athletes, the rock climber tends to disregard established norms of style and technique, doing whatever she needs to do to get to the next foothold. This figure provides an apt analogy for the scholar at the center of this unique book. In Rocking Qualitative Social Science, Dr. Ashley T. Rubin provides an entertaining treatise, corrective vision, and rigorously informative guidebook for qualitative research methods that have long been dismissed in deference to traditional scientific methods. Recognizing the steep challenges facing many, especially junior, social science scholars who struggle to adapt their research models to narrowly defined notions of "right," Rubin argues that properly nourished qualitative research can generate important, creative, and even paradigm-shifting insights. This book is designed to help people conduct good qualitative research, talk about their research, and evaluate other scholars' work. Drawing on her own experiences in research and life, Rubin provides tools for qualitative scholars, synthesizes the best advice, and addresses the ubiquitous problem of anxiety in academia. Ultimately, this book argues that rigorous research can be anything but rigid. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, meaning-making, and identity work as it is presented in everyday social interactions. He is currently studying the use of festivals by small-towns to make-meaning and do identity work. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media (Vernon Press, 2020) examines the social phenomenon of construction and dissemination of colonial-like racist discourses fostered against upwardly-mobile black women through disparagement humour on social media platforms, adopting a fresh and innovative perspective. In this book, Luiz Valério P. Trindade explores the idea that disparagement humour might not be as exempt of social impact as the jokers might believe, and that, in fact, this kind of humour reveals the hidden facet of deep-seated colonial ideologies still present in Brazilian society despite being hailed as a unique model of a post-racial society. The author argues that these ideologies establish and naturalise superior social positions and symbolic privileges to whites while undermining and delegitimising black women's upward social mobility. Social media platforms enable the proponents of these beliefs not only to engage in the practice of online hate speech but also to attract a considerable number of like-minded people, creating a long-lasting echo chamber effect in the cyberspace. This way, they manage to amplify the reach and reverberation of their racist discourses in the online environment in ways not commonly seen in Brazilian offline social contexts. Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal government’s largest and most important ongoing health surveys that tracks Americans’ use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Cambridge UP, 2018), written after he retired, shows where the survey came from, details how it gathers information, and tracks the impact that the shifting cultural and political climate surrounding drug use played on how these statistics were understood. Gfroerer provides necessary insight on what drug use statistics have meant, how they’ve been used (and misused), and what this means for our understanding of drug use in America today. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Nicole Curato's Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action (Oxford UP, 2019) investigates how democratic politics can unfold in creative and unexpected of ways even at the most trying of times. Drawing on three years of fieldwork in disaster-affected communities in Tacloban City, Philippines, this book presents ethnographic portraits of how typhoon survivors actively perform their suffering to secure political gains. Each chapter traces how victims are transformed to 'publics' that gain voice and visibility in the global public sphere through disruptive protests, collaborative projects, and political campaigns that elected the strongman Rodrigo Duterte to presidency. It also examines the micropolitics of silencing that lead communities to withdraw and lose interest in politics. These ethnographic descriptions come together in a theoretical project that makes a case for a multimodal view of deliberative action. It underscores the embodied, visual, performative and subtle ways in which affective political claims are constructed and received. It concludes by arguing that while emotions play a role in amplifying marginalized political claims, it also creates hierarchies of misery that renders some forms of suffering more deserving of compassion than others. The book invites readers to reflect on challenging ethical issues when examining political contexts defined by widespread depravity and dispossession, and the democratic ethos demanded of global publics in responding to others' suffering. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's north- and southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2020), C. Patterson Giersch provides a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to the very beginnings of China's modern development. Focusing on the emergence of private and state corporations in Yunnan Province during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the book reveals how entrepreneurs centralized corporate power even as they expanded their businesses throughout the Southwest and into Tibet, Southeast Asia, and eastern China. Bringing wealth and cosmopolitan lifestyles to their hometowns, the merchant-owners also gained greater access to commodities at the expense of the Southwest's many indigenous minority communities. Meanwhile, new concepts of development shaped the creation of state-run corporations, which further concentrated resources in the hands of outsiders. The book reveals how important new ideas and structures of power, now central to the Communist Party's repertoire of rule and oppression, were forged, not along China's east coast, but along the nation's internal borderlands. It is a must-read for anyone wishing to learn about China's unique state capitalism and its contribution to inequality. Huiying Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Illinois at Chicago. She researches on the history of travel in eighteenth-century China. She can be reached at hchen87 AT uic.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Since the 2008 financial crisis, complex capital flows have ravaged everyday communities across the globe. Housing in particular has become increasingly precarious. In response, many movements now contest the long-held promises and established terms of the private ownership of housing. Immigrant activism has played an important, if understudied, role in such struggles over collective consumption. In Dispossession and Dissent: Migrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid (Stanford UP, 2021), Sophie Gonick examines the intersection of homeownership and immigrant activism through an analysis of Spain's anti-evictions movement, now a hallmark for housing struggles across the globe. Madrid was the crucible for Spain's urban planning and policy, its millennial economic boom (1998–2008), and its more recent mobilizations in response to crisis. During the boom, the city also experienced rapid, unprecedented immigration. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Gonick uncovers the city's histories of homeownership and immigration to demonstrate the pivotal role of Andean immigrants within this movement, as the first to contest dispossession from mortgage-related foreclosures and evictions. Consequently, they forged a potent politics of dissent, which drew upon migratory experiences and indigenous traditions of activism to contest foreclosures and evictions. This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Sophie L. Gonick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the future for the museum? In The Museum as a Space of Social Care (Routledge, 2020), Nuala Morse, a Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, rethinks the museum by foregrounding the importance of care, and though the framework of care thinking. Using a detailed ethnographic case study, the book explores participatory practice and community engagement, thinking through the rise of key professions within the museum, along with the auditing and management regimes shaping care by and in the museum. As cultural organisations re-emerge following the impact of the global pandemic, the book provides a starting point to reassess and reimagine the museum, and will be essential reading across arts, humanities, social sciences, and for cultural sector professionals. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim "frontier peasants," "savage mountaineers," and Christian "ethnic minorities," suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences. Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape the life-worlds of deportees, refugees, farmers, smugglers, migrants, bureaucrats, lawyers, clergy, and border troops, she reveals how reciprocity and kinship and the enforcement of state violence, illegality, and border infrastructures shape the margins of life and death. Combining years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, her thoughtful and evocative book is a poignant testament to the force of life in our era of closed borders, insularity, and "illegal migration." This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Malini Sur is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” -Isaiah 2:4 The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject, not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity.
Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Random House, 2020) explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control?
Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As our research subjects increasingly live their social lives on and through virtual platforms, how can ethnographers incorporate digital methods into our research? On this episode we speak with Dr. Marta-Marika Urbanik, Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta, who has written extensively about integrating social media ethnography into her research on Toronto street gangs, including a fascinating article in Qualitative Sociology with Robert A. Roks entitled “GangstaLife: Fusing Urban Ethnography with Netnography in Gang Studies”. Marta explains how she began engaging in digital ethnography after seeing the importance of social media to her participants’ lives and rivalries. She also talks about the choices digital ethnographers make between silently observing as if through a “One Way Mirror” or openly participating and sharing their own lives through the “Glass Window” approach. She describes some of the dilemmas and issues she faced by sharing her personal social media with participants. Finally, she discusses some of the ethical issues raised by digital ethnography, including the question of what constitutes informed consent. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Electricity is a quirky commodity: more often than not, it cannot be stored, easily transported, or imported from overseas. Before lighting up our homes, it changes hands through specialized electricity markets that rely on engineering expertise to trade competitively while respecting the physical requirements of the electric grid. The Current Economy: Making Energy and Markets in the United States (Stanford UP, 2021) is an ethnography of electricity markets in the United States that shows the heterogeneous and technologically inflected nature of economic expertise today. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among market data analysts, electric grid engineers, and citizen activists, this book provides a deep dive into the convoluted economy of electricity and its reverberations throughout daily life. Canay Özden-Schilling argues that many of the economic formations in everyday life come from work cultures rarely suspected of doing economic work: cultures of science, technology, and engineering that often do not have a claim to economic theory or practice, yet nonetheless dictate forms of economic activity. Contributing to economic anthropology, science and technology studies, energy studies, and the anthropology of expertise, this book is a map of the everyday infrastructures of economy and energy into which we are plugged as denizens of a technological world. This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Canay Özden-Schilling is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an urban anthropologist focusing on futurity, care, and migration in Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What does it mean to belong somewhere? For many of Prague's inhabitants, belonging has been linked to the nation, embodied in the capital city. Grandiose medieval buildings and monuments to national heroes boast of a glorious, shared history. Past governments, democratic and Communist, layered the city with architecture that melded politics and nationhood. Not all inhabitants, however, felt included in these efforts to nurture national belonging. Socialists, dissidents, Jews, Germans, and Vietnamese--all have been subject to hatred and political persecution in the city they called home. In Prague: Belonging in the Modern City (Harvard University Press, 2021), Chad Bryant tells the stories of five marginalized individuals who, over the last two centuries, forged their own notions of belonging in one of Europe's great cities. An aspiring guidebook writer, a German-speaking newspaperman, a Bolshevik carpenter, an actress of mixed heritage who came of age during the Communist terror, and a Czech-speaking Vietnamese blogger: none of them is famous, but their lives are revealing. They speak to tensions between exclusionary nationalism and on-the-ground diversity. In their struggles against alienation and dislocation, they forged alternative communities in cafes, workplaces, and online. While strolling park paths, joining political marches, or writing about their lives, these outsiders came to embody a city that, on its surface, was built for others. A powerful and creative meditation on place and nation, the individual and community, Prague envisions how cohesion and difference might coexist as it acknowledges a need common to all. Chad Bryant is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Raven Bowen's Work, Money and Duality: Trading Sex As a Side-Hustle (Policy Press, 2021) is a rare and valuable exploration of work duality. It calls on practitioners, policymakers and researchers to recognise the experiences of sex workers and to address race, culture and sex work in the UK against the backdrop of Brexit. Based on extensive empirical work, it illustrates contemporary accounts of individuals who take extraordinary risks to hold jobs in both sex industries and non-sex work employment. Raven is the CEO of Ugly Mugs - check them out here. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
If opposite-gender partnerships remain the societal ideal, then why are so many straight couples miserable? Author Jane Ward has been studying this question for some time and outlines her ideas about the tragic effects of heteronormativity in her new book, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (New York University Press, 2020). In our interview, we discuss her compelling case for why queer people, and lesbian feminism in particular, have much relational wisdom to offer their heterosexual counterparts, and why only a deepening—rather than queering—of their sexuality can save them. Jane Ward is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California, Riverside. Her prior books include Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men and Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Heterosexuality is in crisis. Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couple’s therapy in a search for happiness. In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (NYU Press, 2020), Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the twenty-first century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good. She shows how straight women, and to a lesser extent straight men, have tried to mend a fraught patriarchal system in which intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and mutual respect are expected to coexist alongside enduring forms of inequality, alienation, and violence in straight relationships. Ward also takes an intriguing look at the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, which markets goods and services to help heterosexual couples without addressing the root of their problems. Ultimately, she encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them “about the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.” Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A vivid ethnography of Egyptian migrants to the Arab Gulf states, Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States (AU in Cairo Press, 2020) is about the imagination which migration thrives on, and the hopes and ambitions generated by the repeated experience of leaving and returning home. What kind of dreams for a good or better life drives labor migrants? What does being a migrant worker do to one’s hopes and ambitions? How does the experience of migration to the Gulf, with its attendant economic and legal precarities, shape migrants’ particular dreams of a better life? What do those dreams—be they realistic and productive, or fantastic and unlikely—do to the social worlds of the people who pursue them, and to their families and communities back home upon their return? Based on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork and conversations with Egyptian men from mostly low-income rural backgrounds who migrated as workers to the Gulf, returned home, and migrated again over a period of about a decade, this fine-grained study explores and engages with these questions and more, as the men reflect on their strivings and the dreams they hope to fulfill. Throughout the book, Samuli Schielke highlights the story of one man, Tawfiq, who is particularly gifted at analyzing his own situation and struggles, resulting in a richly nuanced account that will appeal not only to Middle East scholars, but to anyone interested in the lived lives of labor migrants and what their experiences ultimately mean to them. A social and cultural anthropologist, Samuli Schielke works as a senior researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He is the author or co-editor of The Perils of Joy (2012), Global Horizon (2012, with Knut Graw), Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes (2012, with Liza Debevec), Egypt in the Future Tense(2015) and Migrant Dreams (2020). Fulya Pinar is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on alternative economies, refugee care, and migration in Turkey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Based on longitudinal ethnographic work on migration between the United States and Taiwan, Time and Migration: How Long-Term Taiwanese Migrants Negotiate Later Life (Cornell UP, 2021) interrogates how long-term immigrants negotiate their needs as they grow older and how transnational migration shapes later-life transitions. Ken Chih-Yan Sun develops the concept of a "temporalities of migration" to examine the interaction between space, place, and time. He demonstrates how long-term settlement in the United States, coupled with changing homeland contexts, has inspired aging immigrants and returnees to rethink their sense of social belonging, remake intimate relations, and negotiate opportunities and constraints across borders. The interplay between migration and time shapes the ways aging migrant populations reassess and reconstruct relationships with their children, spouses, grandchildren, community members, and home, as well as host societies. Aging, Sun argues, is a global issue and must be reconsidered in a cross-border environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This collection of narrative essays by sex workers presents a crystal-clear rejoinder: there's never been a better time to fight for justice. Responding to the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, sex workers from across the industry--hookers and prostitutes, strippers and dancers, porn stars, cam models, Dommes and subs alike--complicate narratives of sexual harassment and violence, and expand conversations often limited to normative workplaces. Writing across topics such as homelessness, motherhood, and toxic masculinity, We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival (Feminist Press, 2021) gives voice to the fight for agency and accountability across sex industries. With contributions by leading voices in the movement such as Melissa Gira Grant, Ceyenne Doroshow, Audacia Ray, femi babylon, April Flores, and Yin Q, this anthology explores sex work as work, and sex workers as laboring subjects in need of respect--not rescue. A portion of this book's net proceeds will be donated to SWOP Behind Bars (SBB). Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. Veronika Pehe's Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture (Berghahn Books, 2020) locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Post-socialist China has seen extensive labor unrest in the form of strikes, protests, and riots. The party-state has responded, sometimes with greater repression, sometimes with institutional changes to better channel and represent worker interests, and sometimes with both. Manfred Elfstrom’s Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness (Cambridge UP, 2021) explores the feedback loop between citizen unrest and state response, using both extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis of strike locations. Manfred Elfstrom is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, Philosophy, and Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Previously, he served as a Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow at the University of Southern California’s School of International Relations and a China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. He received his PhD from Cornell University’s Department of Government. Before entering academia, he worked in the non-profit world, supporting workers’ rights and improved grassroots governance in China. Recommendations from Professor Elfstrom, reflecting his current interests in learning more about workers and labor activism beyond China: Stoll, Steven. 2017. Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, explores the economic and political forces that over centuries turned Appalachia from Daniel Boone’s pioneer paradise to one of America’s most deeply impoverished regions. The Labor Action Tracker is a new initiative at Cornell University to collect comprehensive national data on strikes and labor protests in the US. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Victoria Canning and Steve Tombs' book From Social Harm to Zemiology: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2021) outlines key developments in understanding social harm by setting out its historical foundations and the discussions which have proliferated since. It examines various attempts to conceptualise social harm and highlights key sites of contestation in its relationship to criminology to argue that these act as the basis for an activist zemiology, one directed towards social change for social justice. The past two decades have seen a proliferation of debate related to social harm in and around criminology. From climate catastrophe and a focus on environmental harms, unprecedented deaths generating focus on border harms and the coronavirus pandemic revealing the horror of mass and arguably avoidable deaths across the globe, critical studies in social harm appear ever more pressing. Drawing on a range of international case studies of cultural, emotional, physical and economic harms, From Social Harm to Zemiology locates the study of social harm in an accessible fashion. In doing so it sets out how a zemiological lens can moves us beyond many of the problematic legacies of criminology. This book rejects criminologies which have disproportionately served to regulate intersectional groups, and which have arguably inflicted as much or more harm by bolstering the very ideologies of control in offering minor reforms that inadvertently expand and strengthen states and corporations. It does this by sketching out the contours, objects, methods and ontologies of a disciplinary framework which rejects commonplace assumptions of 'value freedom'. From Social Harm to Zemiology advocates social change in accordance with groups who are most disenfranchised, and thus often most socially harmed. An accessible and compelling read, this book is essential reading for all zemiologists, critical criminologists, and those engaged with criminological and social theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Contrary to claims that socialism opposed the family unit, in Laboring for the State : Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959-1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Rachel Hynson argues that the revolutionary Cuban government engaged in social engineering to redefine the nuclear family and organize citizens to serve the state. Drawing on Cuban newspapers and periodicals, government documents and speeches, long-overlooked laws, and oral histories, Hynson reveals that by 1961, and increasingly throughout this decade, revolutionary citizenship was earned through labor. While men were to work outside the home in state-approved jobs, women found their citizenship tied to affording the state control over their reproduction and sexual labor. Through all four campaigns examined in this book - the projects to control women's reproduction, promote marriage, end prostitution, and compel men into state-sanctioned employment - Hynson shows that the state's progression toward authoritarianism and its attendant monopolization of morality were met with resistance and counter-narratives by citizens who so opposed the mandates of these campaigns that Cuban leadership has since reconfigured or effaced these programs from the Revolution's grand narrative. Dr. Hynson and I sat down to talk about her important book, our positionality as researchers, navigating the challenges and politics of the Cuban archives, living your values, and so much more. Enjoy! Rozzmery Palenzuela Vicente is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Florida International University. Her dissertation examines the cultural and intellectual politics surrounding black motherhood in twentieth-century Cuba. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Whether referring to a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a unique expression of life. Yet two contrasting ideas about wild nature permeate contemporary discussions: either that nature is most wild in the absence of a defiling human presence, or that nature is completely humanized and nothing is truly wild. Wildness: Relations of People and Place (University of Chicago Press, 2017) charts a different path. Exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work, and play, Wildness brings together esteemed authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories about the interdependence of everyday human lifeways and wildness. With this book, we gain insight into what wildness is and could be, as well as how it might be recovered in our lives—and with it, how we might unearth a more profound, wilder understanding of what it means to be human. Gavin Van Horn is the Director of Cultures of Conservation at the Center for Humans and Nature. John Hausdoerffer is Professor of Environment, Sustainability, and Philosophy at Western State Colorado University. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality (Duke University Press, 2021) by Todne Thomas takes a deep dive into the social and religious lives of two black evangelical churches in the Atlanta metro area. Thomas ethnographically renders the ways in which black evangelicals engage in a process of producing kin or crafting relatedness through bible study, socializing, talking, and forming prayer partnerships. She argues that they produce kincraft or construct themselves as brothers and sisters in Christ. In so doing, they "closed the gap between the presumably 'real' family relationships of biology and those of spiritual kin" (3). Examining the lives and activities of black evangelicals illuminates these communities which are often obscured by evangelicals who are racialized as white and the protestant orientation associated with the black church. Outlining the processes through which black evangelicals make kin, calls into question ideas of fictive kinship, a concept commonly used to characterize kinship ties that are not biological or through marriage. Kincraft locates black evangelicals and their practices of kinship formation at the center of their own story. Todne Thomas is an Assistant Professor of African American Religions in the Harvard Divinity School. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the future of the book? In Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (Polity, 2021) John Thompson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, examines the impact of digital technology on the publishing industry. The book grapples with broad questions of the changing nature of capitalism, the idea of information capital, and offers a detailed engagement with the development of the e-book, the rise of Google and Amazon, and new business models such as crowdfunding. A fascinating study of the past, present, and future of publishing, the book will be essential reading for all New Books Network listeners, and anyone interested in books! Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How does the record industry work? In Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), David Arditi, Associate Professor in Sociology and Anthropology at University of Texas at Arlington, analyses the ideology of getting signed and getting a record contract to show the alienating and exploitative effects of the record industry on musicians and the making of music. The book blends ethnographic fieldwork with critical theoretical analysis, looking at a range of issues in music, from the ‘strained solidarity’ of being in a band, the negative impact of competition and competitiveness in the music industry and in society, to longstanding issues about copyright. The book is essential reading across arts, humanities and the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in music today. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It is almost twenty years since contemporary art took a ‘participation turn’. Now, just about every museum or theatre company has a participation or engagement department. It is nothing short of orthodoxy that one of art’s core roles is to reach out to audiences beyond art institutions - and paradoxically it is often art institutions that mandate this function. How can we reconcile the somewhat forgotten history - and ongoing practice - of the community arts with the recent rise of participatory art, social practice, or outreach and engagement? François Matarasso speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about his long-term engagement in community art practice, the meanings of participation and cultural democracy, and his proposals for thinking about cultural and artistic participation as a fundamental human right. We talk about the history of the community arts movement in the UK, his influential 1997 paper Use or Ornament, ways of supporting cultural democracy through projects like Fun Palaces, and reaching peak culture. François Matarasso is a community artist, writer, and researcher, and one of the co-creators of the 2020 Rome Charter. A Restless Art is available as an open-access download here and in print here. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
With thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On the island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social justice. Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2021) sheds light on the emergence of social solidarity initiatives and networks forged between citizens and noncitizens who work together to improve local livelihoods and mobilize for radical political change. Basing her argument on years of ethnographic fieldwork with frontline communities in Sicily, anthropologist Megan Carney asserts that such mobilizations hold significance not only for the rights of migrants, but for the material and affective well-being of society at large. Megan A. Carney is Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona. Her writing has appeared in The Hill, The Conversation, and Civil Eats. She is the author of the award-winning book The Unending Hunger. Fulya Pinar is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on the refugee women's commoning practices to build sustainable futures in Turkey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why is the term "openly gay" so widely used but "openly straight" is not? What are the unspoken assumptions behind terms like "male nurse," "working mom," and "white trash"? Offering a revealing and provocative look at the word choices we make every day without even realizing it, Taken for Granted exposes the subtly encoded ways we talk about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, social status, and more. In Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable (Princeton UP, 2018), Eviatar Zerubavel describes how the words we use―such as when we mark "the best female basketball player" but leave her male counterpart unmarked―provide telling clues about the things many of us take for granted. By marking "women's history" or "Black History Month," we are also reinforcing the apparent normality of the history of white men. When we mark something as being special or somehow noticeable, that which goes unmarked―such as maleness, whiteness, straightness, and able-bodiedness―is assumed to be ordinary by default. Zerubavel shows how this tacit normalizing of certain identities, practices, and ideas helps to maintain their cultural dominance―including the power to dictate what others take for granted. A little book about a very big idea, Taken for Granted draws our attention to what we implicitly assume to be normal―and in the process unsettles the very notion of normality. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Many believe the solution to ongoing crises in the news industry — including profound financial instability and public distrust — is for journalists to improve connections to their audiences. Conversations about the proper relationship between the media and the public go back to Walter Lippmann and John Dewey and through the public journalism movement of the 1990s to today and what's come to be known as engaged journalism. In Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public (Oxford UP, 2021), Jacob L. Nelson examines the role that audiences have traditionally played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public. The result is a comprehensive study of both news production and reception at a moment when the relationship between the two has grown more important than ever before. Beyond the arguments in Imagined Audiences, Nelson talks with New Books in Journalism host Jenna Spinelle about how journalism researchers and practitioners can work more closely together, as well as how Nelson's students perceive engaged journalism in relationship to their own media habits. This conversation is also in many ways a companion to the recent episode with Andrea Wenzel on her book "Community-Centered Journalism." Nelson and Wenzel work together on the Engaged Journalism Exchange, a series of gatherings aiming to bridge the divide between journalism scholars and innovators. Nelson is an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Most of us have had this experience: browsing through countless options on Netflix, unable to commit to watching any given movie—and losing so much time skimming reviews and considering trailers that it’s too late to watch anything at all. In a book borne of an idea first articulated in a viral commencement address, Pete Davis argues that this is the defining characteristic of the moment: keeping our options open. We are stuck in “Infinite Browsing Mode”—swiping through endless dating profiles without committing to a single partner, jumping from place to place searching for the next big thing, and refusing to make any decision that might close us off from an even better choice we imagine is just around the corner. This culture of restlessness and indecision, Davis argues, is causing tension in the lives of young people today: We want to keep our options open, and yet we yearn for the purpose, community, and depth that can only come from making deep commitments. In Dedicated: The Case for Commitment In An Age of Infinite Browsing (Simon and Schuster, 2021), Davis examines this quagmire, as well as the counterculture of committers who have made it to the other side. He shares what we can learn from the “long-haul heroes” who courageously commit themselves to particular places, professions, and causes—who relinquish the false freedom of an open future in exchange for the deep fulfillment of true dedication. Weaving together examples from history, personal stories, and applied psychology, Davis’s candid and humble words offer a meaningful answer to our modern frustrations and a practical path to joy. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2014 and 2015, students at dozens of colleges and universities held protests demanding increased representation of Black and Latino students and calling for a campus climate that was less hostile to students of color. Their activism recalled an earlier era: in the 1960s and 1970s, widespread campus protest by Black and Latino students contributed to the development of affirmative action and open admissions policies. Yet in the decades since, affirmative action has become a magnet for conservative backlash and in many cases has been completely dismantled. In To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press, 2019), Amaka Okechukwu offers a historically informed sociological account of the struggles over affirmative action and open admissions in higher education. Through case studies of policy retrenchment at public universities, she documents the protracted―but not always successful―rollback of inclusive policies in the context of shifting race and class politics. To Fulfill These Rights provides a new analysis of the politics of higher education, centering the changing understandings and practices of race and class in the United States. Amaka Okechukwu is an Assistant Professor of sociology at George Mason University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Outside: Migration as Life in Morocco (Indiana UP, 2021) traces how migration has come to occupy a striking place in the lives of many Moroccans. A full 10 percent of the population now lives outside the country, affecting individual and collective life in countless unanticipated ways. In this intimate ethnography of rural Morocco, Alice Elliot considers the experience of migration from the point of view of the families and people, mostly women, who have not (yet) left. Elliot shows how the specter of migration has permeated life, from kinship relations to intimacy between spouses and to the imagination of the future. The Outside seeks to answer the question, what is migration when it becomes the very foundation on which forms of social and individual life are built? New understandings of migration emerge through its intimate textures as Elliot shows how it has become, in some parts of the world, a distinctive condition of everyday life. Alice Elliot is Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She edited (with Roger Norum and Noel B. Salazar) Methodologies of Mobility: Ethnography and Experiment. Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We are here today with Manon Garcia, the author of We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives, published this year, 2021, by Princeton University Press. The book was originally published in 2018 by Climats as On ne naît pas soumise, on le devient. This book was a phenomenon and a runaway bestseller when released in France. We are lucky to have outstanding translation from the author herself in English suited to an American and English audience. What role do women play in the perpetuation of patriarchy? On the one hand, popular media urges women to be independent, outspoken, and career-minded. Yet, this same media glorifies a specific, sometimes voluntary, female submissiveness as a source of satisfaction. In philosophy, even less has been said on why women submit to men and the discussion has been equally contradictory—submission has traditionally been considered a vice or pathology, but female submission has been valorized as innate to women’s nature. Is there a way to explore female submission in all of its complexity—not denying its appeal in certain instances, and not buying into an antifeminist, sexist, or misogynistic perspective?
We Are Not Born Submissive offers the first in-depth philosophical exploration of female submission, focusing on the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, and more recent work in feminist philosophy, epistemology, and political theory. Manon Garcia argues that to comprehend female submission, we must invert how we examine power and see it from the woman’s point of view. Historically, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and even some radical feminists have conflated femininity and submission. Garcia demonstrates that only through the lens of women’s lived experiences—their economic, social, and political situations—and how women adapt their preferences to maintain their own well-being, can we understand the ways in which gender hierarchies in society shape women’s experiences. Ultimately, she asserts that women do not actively choose submission. Rather, they consent to—and sometimes take pleasure in—what is prescribed to them through social norms within a patriarchy.
Moving beyond the simplistic binary of natural destiny or moral vice, We Are Not Born Submissive takes a sophisticated look at how female submissiveness can be explained. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Paul Davis about her new book Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being and Resilience (Wharton School, 2021) What if companies held executives responsible for the turn-over rate, absenteeism rate, and the degree to which employees in the department they direct had higher-than-usual chronic mental and physical health issues? Might that be a different, more humane world of work? The answer is yes, most likely; and Davis’s book and this episode explores what causes stress and burn-out as well as solutions. Adjusting the workload, providing a sense of recognition and rewards, allowing for flexibility as opposed to micro-managing, and building teams that foster a feeling of trust and belonging are among the keys. The bottom line here is that managing people by offering support and imposing control is the single best recipe for lowering the level of burnout for staffs everywhere. Paula Davis, JD, MAPP, is the founder and CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute. A former lawyer, Paula earned a M.A. in applied psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She’s been featured in The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, and The Washington Post, and she contributes to Forbes, Fast Company and Psychology Today. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What happens to rural communities when their traditional economic base collapses? When new money comes in, who gets left behind? Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West (U Washington Press, 2021) offers a rich portrait of Dover, Idaho, whose transformation from "thriving timber mill town" to "economically depressed small town" to "trendy second-home location" over the past four decades embodies the story and challenges of many other rural communities. Sociologist Ryanne Pilgeram explores the structural forces driving rural gentrification and examines how social and environmental inequality are written onto these landscapes. Based on in-depth interviews and archival data, she grounds this highly readable ethnography in a long view of the region that takes account of geological history, settler colonialism, and histories of power and exploitation within capitalism. Pilgeram's analysis reveals the processes and mechanisms that make such communities vulnerable to gentrification and points the way to a radical justice that prioritizes the economic, social, and environmental sustainability necessary to restore these communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Many people think prisons are all the same-rows of cells filled with violent men who officials rule with an iron fist. Yet, life behind bars varies in incredible ways. In some facilities, prison officials govern with care and attention to prisoners' needs. In others, officials have remarkably little influence on the everyday life of prisoners, sometimes not even providing necessities like food and clean water. Why does prison social order around the world look so remarkably different? In The Puzzle of Prison Order: Why Life Behind Bars Varies Around the World (Oxford UP, 2020), David Skarbek develops a theory of why prisons and prison life vary so much. He finds that how they're governed-sometimes by the state, and sometimes by the prisoners-matters the most. He investigates life in a wide array of prisons-in Brazil, Bolivia, Norway, a prisoner of war camp, England and Wales, women's prisons in California, and a gay and transgender housing unit in the Los Angeles County Jail-to understand the hierarchy of life on the inside. Drawing on economics and a vast empirical literature on legal systems, Skarbek offers a framework to not only understand why life on the inside varies in such fascinating and novel ways, but also how social order evolves and takes root behind bars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
After a cascade of failures left residents of Flint, Michigan, without a reliable and affordable supply of safe drinking water, citizens spent years demanding action from their city and state officials. Complaints from the city's predominantly African American residents were ignored until independent researchers confirmed dangerously elevated blood lead levels among Flint children and in the city's tap water. Despite a 2017 federal court ruling in favor of Flint residents who had demanded mitigation, those efforts have been incomplete at best. Assessing the challenges that community groups faced in their attempts to advocate for improved living conditions, Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery (UNC Press, 2021) offers a rich analysis of conditions and constraints that created the Flint water crisis. Katrinell Davis contextualizes the crisis in Flint's long and troubled history of delivering essential services, the consequences of regional water-management politics, and other forms of systemic neglect that impacted the working-class community's health and well-being. Using ethnographic and empirical evidence from a range of sources, Davis also sheds light on the forms of community action that have brought needed changes to this underserved community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Neil Altman’s White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Routledge, 2020) is a slip (80 pages including references and the index) of a book that reads as both addendum and antidote to some of the literature aimed at waking white people (Ta-Nahesi-Coates’ “dreamers”) up to the realities of racism. I say antidote as some of that literature (the work of Robin Di Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi come to mind) seems to depend on commands from the super ego to shed the scales from white eyes. On finishing Di Angelo’s White Fragility (which was required reading last summer) I felt both paranoid and ashamed and had to wonder how self-policing was going diminish my racism? Altman’s book intervenes precisely in this potentially deleterious cycle arguing that anti-racist thinking that relies on “should” and “oughts”, are potentially doomed to fail. By attacking the defenses rather than softening them, such efforts run the risk of hardening the racism they set out to transform. Humans hate. Freud tells us it is our first feeling. Undeniably, hating can fill us with great and solidifying pleasure. Racism is one form of hatred. When acted on, it can and does destroy lives. Fully loaded with white privilege, white people are apt to act on our racism, and also to shudder, deny or dissociate when encountering our racist thoughts and feelings. When confronted with our racism and its impact, with our awareness that we in fact rely on denigrating stereotypes to feel a little better about ourselves, states of mortification (deathliness) emerge that do no one any good. Such a state is a purely narcissistic one where the other has been snuffed out. If you are white, as I am, you have likely found yourself more than once tossing the hot potato of your own racism as far away as from yourself as you can. And some part of you feels weakened by being this way but it is practically an involuntary reflex. Thinking about this reflex, Altman employs Melanie Klein’s thinking about what it means to be human, which highlights our ineluctable destructiveness. If hate is a human feeling, not one to be gotten rid of but rather one to be accepted and contended with, there may be a way for us to take responsibility for being hurtful, for being racist. Hating hate or hating our racism can maintain the status quo. In fact, hidden hateful feelings seek justification and become reified, rather than being fleeting—as all feelings truly are. Altman highlights the difference between making reparations based on guilt versus the descent into guiltiness. Guilt implies that one is interested in our impact on others because we know that in living, we will hurt many people along the way. Guiltiness, which we can see in white virtue signaling around racism, has much more to do with returning the self that has harmed to its happy and perfect place without addressing the harm done. While white people are primed, particularly in an American context, to say and do horrible and hurtful racist things, it is the disavowal of the destructiveness that perhaps does, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the most harm in the end. Altman quotes the journalist Leonard Pitts who captures the experience of white negation succinctly, writing, “If people who hate you would stand up and declare it you would not have to go through with your day on guard against the world.” The refusal to take responsibility for the harm we do—and Altman makes the strong point that whiteness can be defined as an identity that is principally based on dehumanization—keeps white people on the run from reality. When we depend on delusions to shore us up, a part of us knows we are in real bad shape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul (Syracuse UP, 2020) examines spor merakı as an object of desire shared by a broad and diverse group of Istanbulite women. Sehlikoglu follows the latest anthropological scholarship that defines desire beyond the moment it is felt, experienced, or even yearned for, and as something that is formed through a series of social and historical makings. She traces Istanbulite women’s ever-increasing interest in exercise not merely to an interest in sport, but also to an interest in establishing a new self—one that attempts to escape from conventional feminine duties—and an investment in forming a more agentive, desiring, self. Working Out Desire develops a multilayered analysis of how women use spor merakı to take themselves out of the domestic zone physically, emotionally, and also imaginatively. Sehlikoglu pushes back against the conventional boundaries of scholarly interest in Muslim women as pious subjects. Instead, it places women’s desiring subjectivity at its center and traces women’s agentive aspirations in the way they bend the norms which are embedded in the multiple patriarchal ideologies (i.e. nationalism, religion, aesthetics) which operate on their selves.
Working out Desire presents the ways in which women’s changing habits, leisure, and self-formation in the Muslim world and the Middle East are connected to their agentive capacities to shift and transform their conditions and socio-cultural capabilities. Sertaç Sehlikoğlu is a Senior Research Associate and Primary Investigator at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an urban anthropologist focusing on futurity, care, and migration in Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Doctors of the World, also known as Médecins du Monde, is an international network of more than 400 programmes across 80 different countries, providing emergency and long term medical care to the world's most vulnerable people. Whether it's urgent response in the Ukraine, mental healthcare to refugees in Calais, or strengthening the health systems in west Africa, DOTW respond based on the needs of the people they work with. In the UK, Doctors of the World run clinic and advocacy programmes in London that provide medical care, information and practical support to people often excluded from wider society such as destitute migrants, sex workers and people with no fixed abode. Their recent report Left out in the Cold: The extreme unmet health and service needs of street sex workers in East London before and during the Covid-19 pandemic highlights the devastating challenges that street sex workers have in accessing essential healthcare services, resulting in poor health outcomes. Rachel Stuart, one of the report's researchers and authors, spent 18 months speaking to women in Newham, East London, and she talks about the senseless violence and avoidable health issues faced by the women sex working there. Victoria Holt is a PhD student at the University of Roehampton researching sex workers' experiences of domestic violence. I'm co-convenor for the British Sociological Association's Violence Against Women and Girls study group, and a board member for the Sex Work Research Hub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In his pioneering study, Men in Metal: A Topography of Public Bronze Statuary in Modern Japan (Brill, 2020), Sven Saaler examines Japanese public statuary as a central site of historical memory from its beginnings in the Meiji period through the twenty-first century. Saaler shows how the elites of the modern Japanese nation-state went about constructing an iconography of national heroes to serve their agenda of instilling national (and nationalist) thinking into the masses. Based on a wide range of hitherto untapped primary sources, Saaler combines data-driven quantitative analysis and in-depth case studies to identify the categories and historical figures that dominated public space. Men in Metal also explores the agents behind this visualized form of the politics of memory and introduces historiographical controversies surrounding statue-building in modern Japan. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
An elected politician is assassinated in the street by a terrorist associated with extreme political groups, and the national response is to encourage picnics. Thousands of people are held in prison-like conditions without judicial oversight or any time-limit on their sentence. An attempt to re-assert national sovereignty and borders leads thousands of citizens to register for dual citizenship with other countries, some overcoming family associations with genocide in their second country of nationality to do so. This is life in the UK today. How then are things still continuing as 'normal'? How can we confront these phenomena and why do we so often refuse to? What are the practices that help us to accommodate the unconscionable? How might we contend with the horrors that meet us each day, rather than becoming desensitized to them? Violent Ignorance: Confronting Racism and Migration Control (Zed Books, 2021) sets out to examine these questions through an understanding of how the past persists in the present, how trauma is silenced or reappears, and how we might reimagine identity and connection in ways that counter - rather than ignore - historic violence. In particular Hannah Jones shows how border controls and enforcement, and its corollary, racism and violence, have shifted over time. Drawing on thinkers from John Berger to Ben Okri, from Audre Lorde to Susan Sontag, the book questions what it means to belong, and discusses how hierarchies of belonging are revealed by what we can see, and what we can ignore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05(at)gmail.com or dr.danamalone(at)gmail.com or find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: the importance of expanding the boundaries of academic theory through interdisciplinary studies, why you need to build and acknowledge your own support network, the social construction of race and racism, and a discussion of the book Relative Races. Our guest is: Dr. Brigitte Fielder, an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is (with Jonathan Senchyne) co-editor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African-American Print and author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America. Her work has been published in various journals and edited collections. She is currently writing a book on racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century, which shows how childhood becomes a key site for (often simultaneous) humanization and racialization. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Turns out "objectivity" has a not-so clear-cut definition across time. In this podcast, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison to discuss their work, Objectivity (Zone Books, 2010). This work traces the historical and cultural developments of the word “objective” as it acquired different meanings and associated practices. Similarly, they consider the changing relationship of objectivity as it relates to the subjectivity of the researcher, as the “scientific self.” This deep philosophical work, diving into the cultural and historical shifts of epistemology within the past few centuries, is told through atlas making and image generation. In this conversation, we discuss the evolving processes of research and atlas making and how they co-evolved with the fears, virtues, and ideals of the time of their emergence. Additionally, we talk about the role of the self and aesthetics in categorizing and publishing the collections of working objects in atlases. We end looking at the current trajectories of image production as they try to pragmatically predict what's to come. Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) is an acquisition editor for an open scholarship publishing platform, a freelance science writer, and loves baking bread. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The phenomenon of friendship is universal and elemental. Friends, after all, are the family we choose. But what makes these bonds not just pleasant but essential, and how do they affect our bodies and our minds? In Friendship: The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond (Bloomsbury, 2020), science journalist Lydia Denworth takes us in search of friendship's biological, psychological, and evolutionary foundations. She finds friendship to be as old as early life on the African savannas--when tribes of people grew large enough for individuals to seek fulfillment of their social needs outside their immediate families. Denworth sees this urge to connect reflected in primates, too, taking us to a monkey sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a baboon colony in Kenya to examine social bonds that offer insight into our own. She meets scientists at the frontiers of brain and genetics research and discovers that friendship is reflected in our brain waves, our genomes, and our cardiovascular and immune systems; its opposite, loneliness, can kill. At long last, social connection is recognized as critical to wellness and longevity. With insight and warmth, Denworth weaves past and present, field biology and neuroscience, to show how our bodies and minds are designed for friendship across life stages, the processes by which healthy social bonds are developed and maintained, and how friendship is changing in the age of social media. Blending compelling science, storytelling, and a grand evolutionary perspective, Denworth delineates the essential role that cooperation and companionship play in creating human (and nonhuman) societies. Friendship illuminates the vital aspects of friendship, both visible and invisible, and offers a refreshingly optimistic vision of human nature. It is a clarion call for putting positive relationships at the center of our lives. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In recent years the phrase “revisionist history” has emerged as a label for politically-correct reexaminations of an unalterable understanding of our past. As James M. Banner, Jr. demonstrates in his book The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History (Yale UP, 2021), such a definition ignores how historical knowledge in the West has always been fluid and subject to reinterpretation by scholars. As Banner illustrates, such revisionism occurs in a variety of ways and can reflect everything from the discovery of new information to the reconsideration of the past from different perspectives the present. These approaches are evident even in the earliest works of history, and reflect the changes that have taken place in civilization over time. By addressing recent public controversies at which revisionism was at the heart, Banner shows that It is through this process that we better understand who we are today and the course we will take as a society going forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
At a time when trust in the media is low and "news deserts" are increasing across the United States, engaged journalism offers a framework for connecting people, community organizations, and news organizations in ways that aim to rebuild trust and ensure that news coverage is inclusive and representative of the entire community. Andrea Wenzel's book Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust (University of Illinois Press, 2020) offers useful case studies of how media outlets across the country are breaking down silos and reaching new audiences in innovative ways. The book also explores how emerging fields like engagement journalism and solutions journalism require rethinking previously-held industry norms around objectivity and the relationship between reporters and the people they cover. Envisioning a portable, rather than scalable, process, Wenzel proposes a community-centered journalism that, once implemented, will strengthen lines of local communication and reinvigorate civic participation. Andrea Wenzel is an assistant professor of journalism, media, and communications at Temple University. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Francine Tremblay's book Organizing for Sex Workers’ Rights in Montréal: Resistance and Advocacy (Lexington Books, 2020) is based on a case study about Stella, l’amie de Maimie a Montréal sex workers' rights organization, founded by and for sex workers. It explores how a group of ostracized female-identified sex workers transformed themselves into a collective to promote the health and well-being of women working in the sex industry. Weighed down by the old and tenacious whore symbol, the sex workers at Stella had to find a way to navigate the criminality of sex work and sex workers, in order to do advocacy and support work, and create safer spaces for sex workers to engage in such advocacy. This book focuses on sex workers, but the advocacy challenges and strategies it outlines can also apply to the lives of other marginalized groups who are often ignored, pitied, or reviled, but who are seldom seen as fully human. Listeners may also be interested in this article by Tromblay and a report for The Doctors of The World. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Jon Keune's book Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the deceptively simple question: when Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people-women, low castes, and Dalits-were they promoting social equality? This the modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question. It is what Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had in mind when he concluded that the saints promoted spiritual equality but did not transform society. While taking Ambedkar's judgment seriously, when viewed in the context of intellectual history and social practice, the bhakti-caste question is more complex. This book dives deeply in Marathi sources to explore how one tradition in western India worked out the relationship between bhakti and caste on its own terms. Food and eating together were central to this. As stories about saints and food changed while moving across manuscripts, theatrical plays, and films, the bhakti-caste relationship went from being a strategically ambiguous riddle to a question that expected-and received-answers. Shared Devotion, Shared Food demonstrates the value of critical commensality to understand how people carefully negotiate their ethical ideals with social practices. Food's capacity to symbolize many things made it made an ideal site for debating bhakti's implications about caste differences. In the Vārkarītradition, strategically deployed ambiguity and the resonating of stories across media over time developed an ideology of inclusive difference-not social equality in the modern sense, but an alternative holistic view of society. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Children and youth are front and center in the context of global mass migration and the social discord around questions of multicultural inclusion that it often ignites. Imprecise portrayals of their inclination to either embrace diversity or to incite racism are used to exemplify both the success and failures of the multicultural project. In the context of young people’s heightened politicization, Belonging and Becoming in a Multicultural World: Refugee Youth and the Pursuit of Identity (Rutgers UP, 2019) shifts the focus to a group of Sudanese and Karen refugee youth’s own insights, explanations and practices as they attempt to create a sense of identity and belonging in Australia. These young people engage race, racism and national identity in creative and unexpected ways as they are confronted with the social and moral implications of multiculturalism. Laura Moran is a cultural anthropologist who researches issues of youth and identity, race and ethnicity, the refugee experience, and multicultural inclusion. She lives in the northeastern United States. Fulya Pinar is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on alternative economies, refugee care, and migration in Turkey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this richly observed account of migrant shopkeepers in five cities in the United Kingdom, Suzanne Hall examines the brutal contradictions of sovereignty and capitalism in the formation of street livelihoods in the urban margins. Hall locates The Migrant's Paradox: Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) on streets in the far-flung parts of de-industrialized peripheries, where jobs are hard to come by and the impacts of historic state underinvestment are deeply felt. Drawing on hundreds of in-person interviews on streets in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London, and Manchester, Hall brings together histories of colonization with current forms of coloniality. Her six-year project spans the combined impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, austerity governance, punitive immigration laws and the Brexit Referendum, and processes of state-sanctioned regeneration. She incorporates the spaces of shops, conference halls, and planning offices to capture how official border talk overlaps with everyday formations of work and belonging on the street. Original and ambitious, Hall’s work complicates understandings of migrants, demonstrating how migrant journeys and claims to space illuminate the relations between global displacement and urban emplacement. In articulating “a citizenship of the edge” as an adaptive and audacious mode of belonging, she shows how sovereignty and inequality are maintained and refuted. Suzanne M. Hall is associate professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she codirects the Cities Programme. She is the author of City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (UNC Press, 2021) details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Carla Diana about her new book My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021). Carla Diana is a robot designer responsible for the creative aspects of Diligent Robotics’ new hospital service robot named Moxi. She created and leads the 4D Design masters program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, wrote the world’s first children’s book on 3D printing, LEO the Maker Prince, and she cohosts the Robopsych Podcast. The author is intrigued by where technology is headed—the “electronic guts” of high-tech offerings--at the same time that she never loses focus on what kind of gut reaction a user will have in interacting with a product. This episode therefore ranges from discussing modalities central to Diana’s work (sound, movement, and lighting) to addressing how important it is for designers and engineers alike to engage in “bodystorming” exercises that align everyone around what the user’s experience will be like. Delight and ease of use are both key criteria in achieving success. If there’s a Frankenstein aspect to helping bring robots “alive,” fortunately Diana is somebody concerned with all the ethical challenges that arise. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this interview, I talked with Professor Sonia Livingstone about her book Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives (Oxford UP, 2020). The book is co-authored with Alicia Blum-Ross who is the Public Policy Lead for Kids & Families at Google. Professor Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, specifically focusing on children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Professor Livingstone currently directs the Digital Futures Commission with the 5Rights Foundation and the Global Kids Online project with UNICEF along with various other prestigious affiliations. Najarian R. Peters is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kansas and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her research interests and teaching areas focus on privacy and emerging technology. Email her at: npeters@law.harvard.edu or Najarian.peters@ku.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Eve Rosen's The Voucher Promise: 'Section 8' and the Fate of an American Neighborhood (Princeton UP, 2020) examines the Housing Voucher Choice Program, colloquially known as "Section 8," and the effect of the program on low-income families living in Park Heights in Baltimore. In a new era of housing policy that hopes to solve poverty with opportunity in the form of jobs, social networks, education, and safety, the program offers the poor access to a new world: safe streets, good schools, and well-paying jobs through housing vouchers. The system should, in theory, give recipients access to housing in a wide range of neighborhoods, but in The Voucher Promise, Rosen examines how the housing policy, while showing great promise, faces critical limitations. Rosen spent over a year living in a Park Heights neighborhood, getting to know families, accompanying them on housing searches, spending time on front stoops, and learning about the history of the neighborhood and the homeowners who had settled there decades ago. She examines why, when low-income renters are given the opportunity to afford a home in a more resource-rich neighborhood, they do not relocate to one, observing where they instead end up and other opportunities housing vouchers may offer them. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today on New Books in History, Juergen Martschukat, professor of North American History at Universitat Erfurt, talks about his new book, The Age of Fitness: How the Body Became a Sign of Success and Performance (Polity Press, 2021), to celebrate its translation into and publication in English with Polity Press, this year, 2021. The book was originally published in 2019, by S. Fischer, in German. We live in the age of fitness. Hundreds of thousands of people run marathons and millions go jogging in local parks, work out in gyms, cycle, swim, or practice yoga. The vast majority are not engaged in competitive sport and are not trying to win any medals. They just want to get fit. Why this modern preoccupation with fitness? In this new book, Jurgen Martschukat traces the roots of our modern preoccupation with fitness back to the birth of modern societies in the eighteenth century, showing how the idea of fitness was interwoven with modernity's emphasis on perpetual optimization and renewal. But it is only in the period since the 1970s, he argues, that the age of fitness truly emerged, as part and parcel of our contemporary neoliberal era. Neoliberalism enjoins individuals to work on themselves, to cultivate themselves in body and mind. Fitness becomes a guiding principle of social life, an era-defining network of discourses and practices that shape individuals' actions and self-conceptions. The pursuit of fitness becomes a cultural repertoire that is deeply ingrained in our institutions and way of life. This wide-ranging book shows how deeply fitness is inscribed in modern societies, and how important fitness has become to success or failure, recognition or exclusion, in a society that sets great store by self-responsibility, performance, market, and competition. It will be of great value not only to those interested in sport and fitness, but also to anyone concerned with the conditions of success and failure in our societies today. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Critical philosophy has always challenged the division between theory and practice. At its best, it aims to turn contemplation into emancipation, seeking to transform society in pursuit of equality, autonomy, and human flourishing. Yet today’s critical theory often seems to engage only in critique. These times of crisis demand more. In Critique and Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action (Columbia University Press, 2020), Bernard E. Harcourt challenges us to move beyond decades of philosophical detours and to harness critical thought to the need for action. In a time of increasing awareness of economic and social inequality, Harcourt calls on us to make society more equal and just. Charting a vision for political action and social transformation, Harcourt argues that instead of posing the question, “What is to be done?” we must now turn it back onto ourselves and ask, and answer, “What more am I to do?”. The book advocates for a new path forward that constantly challenges each and every one of us to ask what more we can do to realize a society based on equality and justice. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In a global context of widespread fears over Islamic radicalization and militancy, poor Muslim youth, especially those socialized in religious seminaries, have attracted overwhelmingly negative attention. In northern Nigeria, male Qur'anic students have garnered a reputation of resorting to violence in order to claim their share of highly unequally distributed resources. Drawing on material from long-term ethnographic and participatory fieldwork among Qur'anic students and their communities, Quranic Schools in Northern Nigeria: Everyday Experiences of Youth, Faith, and Poverty (Cambridge University Press, 2018) offers an alternative perspective on youth, faith, and poverty. Mobilizing insights from scholarship on education, poverty research and childhood and youth studies, Hannah Hoechner, lecturer at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia, describes how religious discourses can moderate feelings of inadequacy triggered by experiences of exclusion, and how Qur'anic school enrollment offers a way forward in constrained circumstances, even though it likely reproduces poverty in the long run. In our conversation we discuss the rural economy of Northern Nigeria, educational options for young boys, the activities of the Qur’anic school, how boys support themselves through domestic service, youth masculinity, poverty and economic instability, politics of respectability, the “prayer economy” and spiritual services, and participatory research and video production. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2020) takes on the circulation of Brazilian music in the Global North since the 1960s. The challenge faced by Brazilian musicians who wish to break into Anglophone markets is formidable. They must deal with the demoralizing effects of the exoticization of the music and the performers, while also struggling with networks of distribution that create fads and just as quickly drop them. K. E. Goldschmitt focuses on watershed moments of Brazil's musical breakthrough, exploring what the music may have represented in a particular historical moment alongside its deeper cultural impact. Through a discussion of the political meaning of mass-mediated music, they argue for a shift in scholarly focus--from viewing music as simply a representation of Otherness to taking into account the broader media environment where listeners and intermediaries often have conflicting priorities. Throughout the book, Goldschmitt traces several lines of inquiry including the changes over time in the different kinds of tastemakers that introduce and mediate Brazilian music to Anglophone listeners, the role of significant films and film scores in shaping both the music that comes to the international marketplace and the framework by which Anglophones understand what they are hearing, as well as the influence of Brazil’s national branding priorities on the music industry. Featuring interviews with key figures in the transnational circulation of Brazilian music, and in-depth discussions of well-known Brazilian musicians alongside artists who redefine what it means to be a Brazilian musician in the twenty-first century, Bossa Mundo shows the pernicious effects of branding racial diversity on musicians and audiences alike. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life (Wayne State University Press, 2020), by Zev Eleff, challenges the current historical paradigm in the study of Orthodox Judaism and other tradition-bound faith communities in the United States. Paying attention to "lived religion," the book moves beyond sermons and synagogues and examines the webs of experiences mediated by any number of American cultural forces. Eleff lucidly explores Orthodox Judaism's engagement with Jewish law, youth culture and gender, and how this religious group has been affected by its indigenous context. To do this, the book makes ample use of archives and other previously unpublished primary sources. Eleff explores the curious history of Passover peanut oil and the folkways and foodways that battled in this culinary arena to both justify and rebuff the validity of this healthier substitute for other fatty ingredients. He looks at the Yeshiva University quiz team's fifteen minutes of fame on the nationally televised College Bowl program and the unprecedented pride of young people and youth culture in the burgeoning Modern Orthodox movement. Another chapter focuses on the advent of women's prayer groups as an alternative to other synagogue experiences in Orthodox life and the vociferous opposition it received on the grounds that it was motivated by "heretical" religious and social movements. Whereas past monographs and articles argue that these communities have moved right toward a conservative brand of faith, Eleff posits that Orthodox Judaism-like other like-minded religious enclaves-ought to be studied in their American religious contexts. The microhistories examined in Authentically Orthodox are some of the most exciting and understudied moments in American Jewish life and will hold the interest of scholars and students of American Jewish history and religion. Zev Eleff is chief academic officer of Hebrew Theological College and associate professor of Jewish History at Touro College. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we develop solutions to the housing crisis? In Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives (Liverpool UP, 2020), Matthew Thompson, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, University of Liverpool, offers a history of collective alternatives to state and market driven housing in Liverpool, drawing out the practical and theoretical lessons from the rich history of the city. The book uses detailed case studies of key developments, from the original experiments in resistance to ‘slum’ clearances to recent examples from the now famous Homebaked in Anfield and the Granby Community Land Trust, which is home to a Turner Prize winning project. The book is open access and will be essential reading across arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for readers interested in housing, the history of Liverpool, and lessons on how to think beyond states and markets to address social issues. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Balut is a fertilized chicken or duck egg that is boiled at the seventeenth day and sold as a common street snack in the Philippines. While it is widely eaten in the Filipino community, balut is frequently used in eating “challenges” on American reality TV shows. At seventeen days, the balut egg already contains a partially developed embryo, and this aspect is sensationalized with exaggerated “performances of disgust” during these challenges. In her book Balut: Fertilized Eggs and the Making of Culinary Capital in the Filipino Diaspora (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Dr. Margaret Magat explores balut as a site of culinary nationalism and identity-making, and its rise in the American consciousness. First, Dr. Magat describes how to eat balut and sip the warm broth inside the egg. In the Philippines, balut vendors sell them in the evening or early morning as snacks at malls, transportation hubs, markets, and just about everywhere. However, Americans were primarily introduced to balut via reality tv shows where contestants were “challenged” to eat it. Dr. Magat explains that like many foods of Asian immigrants, balut was decontextualized and framed through a lens of disgust in these eating “challenges.” But in response, Filipino communities sponsored balut-eating contests that promoted balut with more cultural context and pride in Filipino heritage and identity. More recently, balut has become culinary capital for foodies and celebrity chefs to gain recognition and status as someone with broad tastes. Lastly, we raise the issue of authenticity and its dangers in calling balut an authentic food of the Philippines but as also having an “authenticating” ability to signify membership of a group. Dr. Margaret Magat an Asian American folklorist based in Sacramento, CA. Her research focuses on the folk practices of the Filipino diaspora. Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why do people give to charity? In The Good Glow Charity and the Symbolic Power of Doing Good (Policy Press, 2020), Jon Dean, Associate Professor in Politics and Sociology at Sheffield Hallam University offers a new sociology of charity to explain how charities ask and the motivations of donors. The book situates charity in the context of the global and digital age, as well as thinking through the impact of controversies and political agendas on both charitable organisations, individuals, and society more generally. Rich with theoretical and case study detail, the book will be essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding charity. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Yinghong Cheng's book Discourses of Race and Rising China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) is a critical study of the development of a racialised nationalism in China, exploring its unique characteristics and internal tensions, and connecting it to other forms of global racism. The growth of this discourse is contextualised within the party-state’s political agenda to seek legitimacy, in various groups’ efforts to carve their demands in a divided national community, and has directly affected identity politics across the global diasporic Chinese community. While there remains considerable debate in both academic literature and popular discussion about how the concept of ‘race’ is relevant to Chinese expressions of identity, Cheng makes a forceful case for the appropriateness of biological and familial narratives of descent for understanding Chinese nationalism today. Grounded in a strong conceptual framework and substantiated with rich materials, Discourses of Race and Rising China will be an important contribution to international studies of racism, and will appeal to academics and students of contemporary China, historians of modern China, and those who work in the fields of critical race, ethnicity, and cultural studies. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist specializing in Chinese society and history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Linda Colley is a luminary in the fields of British and imperial history, and the Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Her captivating new book The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (Liveright, 2021) narrates a sweeping global history of written constitutions from the 18th to the 21st century. Bold, imaginative, and strikingly original, it challenges established accounts and uncovers the close connection between constitution-making and warfare. Colley brings to the fore historiographically neglected sites and actors, from Catherine the Great to Sierra Leone's James Africanus Beale Horton and Tunisia's soldier-constitutionalist Khayr-al-Din. The monograph focuses on the myriad ways in which constitutions crossed boundaries and intersected with wider political, cultural, and socioeconomic forces in all corners of the globe. By displaying both the emancipatory and the repressive effects of modern constitutions, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen retells the serpentine story of successful and failed attempts to redefine the functions and limits of state governments. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Aggressors in Blue: Exposing Police Sexual Misconduct (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) presents a powerful and thorough investigation into police deviance and sexual misconduct in the US. Drawing on news reports, official government press releases and academic research sources, Tom Barker examines a wide array of cases including sexual harassment, sexual abuse, child molestation and police killings, including those of prisoners behind bars. Substantiated with additional cases from the UK, Russia and beyond, analysis is also conducted of the experiences of the victims of those crimes. Aggressors in Blue argues that this misconduct has its roots in the nature of the law enforcement occupation, and outlines the typical conditions which enables police sexual abuse to take place. This is a bold new investigation which speaks to students and academics in criminal justice, criminology and social justice in particular, as well as to scholars, social justice advocates, law enforcement professionals, policy-makers and academics in other related disciplines. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The UNESCO World Heritage Convention is one of the most widely ratified international treaties, and a place on the World Heritage List is a widely coveted mark of distinction. Building on ethnographic fieldwork at Committee sessions, interviews and documentary study, Christoph Brumann's book The Best We Share: Nation, Culture and World-Making in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena (Berghahn, 2021) links the change in operations of the World Heritage Committee with structural nation-centeredness, vulnerable procedures for evaluation, monitoring and decision-making, and loose heritage conceptions that have been inconsistently applied. Through richly textured ethnography that goes into the inner workings of one of the most powerful international organisations, The Best We Share is one of the most ambitious studies of the World Heritage arena and a crucial reading for anthropologists and scholars interested in the notion of ‘world-making’ and workings behind global governance. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist specializing in Chinese society and history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey (Stanford UP, 2021) tells the story of two Turkish coastal areas, both shaped by ecological change and political uncertainty. On the Black Sea coast and the shores of the Aegean, farmers, scientists, fishermen, and families grapple with livelihoods in transition, as their environment is bound up in national and international conservation projects. Bridges and drainage canals, apartment buildings and highways—as well as the birds, water buffalo, and various animals of the regions—all inform a moral ecology in the making. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in wetlands and deltas, Caterina Scaramelli offers an anthropological understanding of sweeping environmental and infrastructural change, and the moral claims made on livability and materiality in Turkey, and beyond. Beginning from a moral ecological position, she takes into account the notion that politics is not simply projected onto animals, plants, soil, water, sediments, rocks, and other non-human beings and materials. Rather, people make politics through them. With this book, she highlights the aspirations, moral relations, and care practices in constant play in contestations and alliances over environmental change. Caterina Scaramelli is Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Earth & Environment at Boston University. Alize Arıcan holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What if we could imagine hierarchy not as a social ill, but as a source of social hope? Taking us into a "caste of thieves" in northern India, Anastasia Piliavsky's book Nobody's People: Hierarchy as Hope in a Society of Thieves (Stanford UP, 2020) depicts hierarchy as a normative idiom through which people imagine better lives and pursue social ambitions. Failing to find a place inside hierarchic relations, the book's heroes are "nobody's people": perceived as worthless, disposable and so open to being murdered with no regret or remorse. Following their journey between death and hope, we learn to perceive vertical, non-equal relations as a social good, not only in rural Rajasthan, but also in much of the world—including settings stridently committed to equality. Challenging egalo-normative commitments, Anastasia Piliavsky asks scholars across the disciplines to recognize hierarchy as a major intellectual resource. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How rural areas have become uneven proving grounds for the American Dream. Small-town economies that have traditionally been based on logging, mining, farming, and ranching now increasingly rely on tourism, second-home ownership, and retirement migration. In Dividing Paradise: Rural Inequality and the Diminishing American Dream (University of California Press, 2021), Jennifer Sherman tells the story of Paradise Valley, Washington, a rural community where amenity-driven economic growth has resulted in a new social landscape of inequality and privilege, with deep fault lines between old-timers and newcomers. In this complicated cultural reality, "class blindness" allows privileged newcomers to ignore or justify their impact on these towns, papering over the sentiments of anger, loss, and disempowerment of longtime locals. Based on in-depth interviews with individuals on both sides of the divide, this book explores the causes and repercussions of the stark inequity that has become commonplace across the United States. It exposes the mechanisms by which inequality flourishes and by which Americans have come to believe that disparity is acceptable and deserved. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode David describes his childhood contact with entrepreneurship, and how he was looking for and found community and acceptance in the video game world. We learn how he discovered and almost invented the profession of “community manager” and created the CMX community of community managers. We also hear about the problems that community managers face in making their communities sustainable, and discuss his book: The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage (Wiley, 2021). We also learn about how CMX became part of Bevy and multiple other ups and downs in David’s life so far. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee. About our guest David Spinks launched his first online community at 14 years old for his favorite video game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. Today he's become a prominent leader in the community-driven business movement and has trained and advised community teams at companies like Google, Facebook, Udemy, Waze, and Airbnb. Spinks has long believed that community is the future of business and has made it his life's purpose to help others learn how to build thriving, meaningful communities. He is the cofounder of CMX, where over 20,000 community professionals gather to learn and support each other and is the host of CMX Summit, the largest conference in the community industry. In 2019, CMX was acquired by Bevy, where Spinks now serves as the VP of Community, helping companies launch and scale event-driven community programs. About the NBN The New Books Network was founded in 2007 as a podcast interviewing the authors of academic books, and has grown to the largest author interview podcast in the world publishing 12 podcasts a day in more than 90 specialist areas, with over a million downloads a month. Read about the founder Marshall Poe and the NBN here. In recent years it has expanded beyond its “author interview origins”. Historically NBN only did audio recordings. E&L is the first NBN podcast distributed on Youtube. About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here, About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What are digital inequalities? In The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities (Sage, 2021), Ellen Helsper, a Professor of Digital Inequalities in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, explores the unequal nature of our now digital world. The book introduces the corresponding fields theoretical framework, as a way of blending a huge range of empirical and theoretical material that provides the basis for a global analysis of digital’s relationship to economic, social, and cultural inequalities. Clear, engaging, and easy to follow, the book poses important questions as to who is valued in the digital world, as well as offering lessons for how we might address the causes and consequences of digital inequalities. The book will be essential reading across social science and humanities, and for anyone interested in understanding and changing the digital world. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is violence? In Violence Toby Miller, Stuart Hall Professor of Cultural Studies, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–Cuajimalpa, Mexico offers a reconsideration of the concept, along with an overview of how the idea matters across a range of disciplines and social settings. The book ranges from a detailed engagement with how we measure violence in historical and modern settings, through to contemporary cultural, media and sporting examples. Rich with examples draw from across the world, the book is essential reading across social science and humanities. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why do people participate in genocide? In The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (Rutgers UP, 2020), Timothy Williams presents an interdisciplinary model that shows how complex and diverse, but also how ordinary and mundane most motivations for participating in genocide are. The book draws on empirical examples from the Holocaust and Rwanda and introduces new data from interviews with perpetrators of genocide in Cambodia. On my latest episode, we discuss all this and more. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Breaking box office records, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has achieved an unparalleled level of success with fans across the world, raising the films to a higher level of narrative: myth. Michael D. Nichols's Religion and Myth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (McFarland, 2021) is first book to analyze the Marvel output as modern myth, comparing it to epics, symbols, rituals, and stories from world religious traditions. Nichols places the exploits of Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther, and the other stars of the Marvel films alongside the legends of Achilles, Gilgamesh, Arjuna, the Buddha, and many others. It examines their origin stories and rites of passage, the monsters, shadow-selves, and familial conflicts they contend with, and the symbols of death and the battle against it that stalk them at every turn. The films deal with timeless human dilemmas and questions, evoking an enduring sense of adventure and wonder common across world mythic traditions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why do so many conservative Christians continue to support Donald Trump despite his many overt moral failings? Why do many Americans advocate so vehemently for xenophobic policies, such as a border wall with Mexico? Why do many Americans seem so unwilling to acknowledge the injustices that ethnic and racial minorities experience in the United States? Why do a sizeable proportion of Americans continue to oppose women's equality in the workplace and in the home? Andrew Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry seek to answer these questions in Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2020), which explores the phenomenon of "Christian nationalism," the belief that the United States is-and should be-a Christian nation. Christian ideals and symbols have long played an important role in American public life, but Christian nationalism is about far more than whether the phrase "under God" belongs in the pledge of allegiance. At its heart, Christian nationalism demands that we must preserve a particular kind of social order, an order in which everyone--Christians and non-Christians, native-born and immigrants, whites and minorities, men and women recognizes their "proper" place in society. The first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in the United States, Taking America Back for God illustrates the influence of Christian nationalism on today's most contentious social and political issues. Drawing on multiple sources of national survey data as well as in-depth interviews, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry document how Christian nationalism shapes what Americans think about who they are as a people, what their future should look like, and how they should get there. Americans' stance toward Christian nationalism provides powerful insight into what they think about immigration, Islam, gun control, police shootings, atheists, gender roles, and many other political issues-very much including who they want in the White House. Taking America Back for God is a guide to one of the most important-and least understood-forces shaping American politics. Andrew Whitehead is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Clemson University and Assistant Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The word ‘data’ has entered everyday conversation, but do we really understand what it means? How can we begin to grasp the scope and scale of our new data-rich world, and can we truly comprehend what is at stake. In Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World (Policy Press, 2021), renowned social scientist Rob Kitchin explores the intricacies of data creation and charts how data-driven technologies have become essential to how society, government and the economy work. Creatively blending scholarly analysis, biography and fiction, he demonstrates how data are shaped by social and political forces, and the extent to which they influence our daily lives. He reveals our data world to be one of potential danger, but also of hope. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ethnic Mexicans living in the United States have always struggled to understand their position within the fabric of the nation-state. The groups that fall under the banner of “ethnic Mexican,” however, are complex. They include Mexican nationals fleeing war in the early 1900s, U.S.-born Mexican Americans asserting themselves as firstly American, and more radical communist and Chicanx leftists of the midcentury and postwar eras who challenged notions of belonging. While it may seem difficult to hold these histories alongside each other amidst the shifting sociopolitical landscape of the century, a recent book titled Homeland: Ethnic Mexican Belonging Since 1900 by Aaron E. Sánchez published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2021 completes this task. By recounting how different groups of ethnic Mexicans understood themselves in relation to each other, the nation, and the world, Sánchez provides readers with a strong understanding of homeland politics in the twentieth century. “Belonging is complex,” writes Sánchez as he underscored how different groups of ethnic Mexicans conformed to and resisted U.S. notions of citizenship. The chapters follow a roughly chronological order highlighting specific ethnic Mexican communities in each. Chapter one, for example, recounts the immigration of Mexican Nationals in the first decade of the 20th century and how they came to forge “México de Afuera,” therefore distancing themselves from the U.S.-born ethnic Mexicans. The following chapter charts the rise of Mexican Americanism whereas U.S. patriotism was central to claiming belonging and citizenship. Covering the same timeframe, chapter three tells the history of labor unionism and internationalism within and led by predominantly ethnic Mexican women such as Luisa Moreno up until the quelling of their efforts in the 1940s. The fourth and fifth chapters cover the second half of the twentieth century. In chapter four, Sánchez writes about how the postwar liberal machinations were taken up by ethnic Mexicans in attempts to find legal recourse for ethnic Mexican peoples discriminated against by the U.S. government. In turn, Chicana/o activists that makeup chapter five eventually posed a critique onto these liberalisms and sought more radical modes of belonging and relations to each other. This chapter recounts three kinds of Chicano cultural nationalism to underscore how even within this nomenclature, ideologies varied. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
'To be missing, you must be missed'. Erin Stewart's 2021 book examines missing for just about every point of view. In Australia 38,000 people are reported missing each year and in the US it's over 600,000. In the UK someone is reported missing every 90 seconds. Many of these cases are never resolved. Blending long-form journalism with true crime and philosophy, The Missing Among Us: Stories of Missing Persons and Those Left Behind (NewSouth, 2020) takes us from the Australian bush to the battlefields of Northern France and the perilous space of a refugee camp to explore the stories of the missing. Erin Stewart speaks to parents of missing children, former cult members, detectives and investigators, advocates working on the crisis of missing refugees, a child of the Stolen Generations and many more to trace the mysterious world of missing persons. Examining famous cases like that of Madeleine McCann to those who are lesser known yet equally loved and mourned, this unique book forces us to see the complex story behind each missing person and those they leave behind. Erin Stewart PhD in non-fiction writing, working as a freelance writer based in Canberra. Erin approaches writing with radical curiosity, always looking for fascinating stories incorporating strong analysis and reflection. Erin focus on stories and people that/who present the unexpected and make us see the world a little differently. Topics include the intersections of culture, tech, medicine, politics, and personal experiences. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The “smart” city of today looks little like what experts of yesteryear expected them to. In this book, Aaron Shapiro, Ph.D. takes readers on a behind the scenes tour of the smart city and shows the revolution in urban technology that is currently taking place in large metropolitan areas around the United States. Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. Throughout Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (U Minnesota Press, 2020), Shapiro develops a new lens called logistical governance in his effort to interpret and understand urban technologies. This lens was used to critique urban future based on extraction and rationalization. Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps readers peer through cracks of the façade that smart cities are bearing. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it is ultimately serving the ends of commercial media. Shapiro also builds on his experience as a bike courier delivering food for a startup company and examines how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy paves the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his discussion toward the current debates about police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are the answer to reforming the ongoing crises of criminal justice in large urban cities. Through these gripping accounts of new technology in urban areas, Shapiro and Design, Control, Predict make vital contributions to conversations about data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro provides a ground level account of a timely and important piece of research in Design, Control, Predict. This piece can be used when comprehending urbanism today and when identifying strategies to advance the critique and resistance to a dystopian future that is often viewed as inevitable. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. He is currently studying the social interactions that people engage in at two annual festivals that take place during the summer months along the banks of the Mississippi River. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Social media has become the front-and-center arena for feminist activism. Responding to and enacting the political potential of pain inflicted in acts of sexual harassment, violence, and abuse, Asian American and Asian Canadian feminist icons such as rupi kaur, Margaret Cho, and Mia Matsumiya have turned to social media to share their stories with the world. But how does such activism reconcile with the platforms on which it is being cultivated, when its radical messaging is at total odds with the neoliberal logic governing social media? Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie (NYU Press, 2021) troubles this phenomenon by articulating a "neoliberal self(ie) gaze" through which these feminist activists see and storify the self on social media as "good" neoliberal subjects who are appealing, inspiring, and entertaining. This book offers a fresh perspective on feminist activism by demonstrating how the problematic neoliberal logic governing digital spaces like Instagram and Twitter limits the possibilities of how one might use social media for feminist activism. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How has social media shaped contemporary society? In The Social Media Age (Sage, 2021), Zoetanya Sujon, a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director in Communications and Media at London College of Communication, analyses social media, from pre-history through to our more contemporary critical turn. The book considers a wide range of issues and perspectives, from platforms and power, through data and dating, to selfies and surveillance. Packed with a vast range of case study material, including reflections on #BlackLivesMatter, social credit systems in China, and influencer culture on YouTube, the book is essential reading across the arts and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in our current, social media, world. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton UP, 2020) by Matthew Clair is a powerful ethnographic study of the experiences and perspectives of criminal defendants. While many studies have demonstrated the existence of race and class disparities in the criminal justice system, Clair conducted a rare and compelling study that puts heart and emotion into these disparities. As he argues and shows, not only should we care about quantitative inequalities in criminal justice, but "[w]e should [also] be concerned about differences in the quality of the court experience" for so many defendants. Clair did extensive interviews with and observed criminal defendants, defense lawyers, judges, police officers, and others interact with each other in the Boston court system. What he shows is a system that operates differently for people of privilege compared to people without. While many criminal defendants face struggles of alienation from societal structures, the underprivileged often resort to crime out of necessity, whereas privileged defendants were more likely to enter the system because of pleasure-seeking or to avoid pain. Once in courtrooms, underprivileged defendants, especially racial minorities, develop profound mistrust of their court-appointed attorneys. These defendants face, and have often repeatedly been represented by overworked lawyers who often refuse to listen or to develop relationships of trust with their clients, which led many of these defendants to "withdraw," as Clair coins it, from the attorney-client relationship. Some resisted the lawyer or the court: complaining openly about the lack of diligence, asking the court to appoint new counsel, or taking it upon themselves (often with group support) to learn the law and make the arguments their lawyers refused to make. Others developed what Clair calls an attitude of resignation, recognizing the futility of their situation, and essentially giving up the fight. The experience is fundamentally different for privileged defendants. These defendants often have broad social circles that include the police or lawyers. Because of those connections, they are able to obtain counsel of their choice. The payment of fees engenders trust in the relationship. These defendants defer to their lawyers, trust their judgment, and feel genuinely satisfied with the representation. Clair argues that courts punish those defendants who withdraw from their lawyers and reward those who defer to them. He calls on lawyers to develop more trusting relationships with their clients and to work toward a more holistic style of defense that considers more than just the legal issues in the case. He encourages courts to allow defendants to choose their court-appointed attorney and to encourage a more participatory legal system in which defendants are not punished for expressing dissatisfaction with their lawyer. Clair's study is replete with compelling and personal examples. The narrative is what makes this study especially moving. Clair gives voice to those who repeatedly tried, but failed to get their lawyers and courts to listen. Because of Clair's work, we can now hear them. Samuel P. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Idaho. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Giulia Zampini about her research into drug taking, and particularly about the "People and Dancefloors" project. Based on a participatory action research methodology, People and Dancefloors involves knowledge co-creation with project partners and participants. Led by a team of researchers and impact experts, the project crosses the boundaries between research, film and activism. You can learn more on YouTube and in this article: Zampini, G. F., Buck-Matthews, E., Killick, A., & Salter, L. (2021). "We, ourselves and us: Tensions of identity, intersubjectivity and positionality stemming from the people and dancefloors project." International Journal of Drug Policy, 103096. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience", typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella-- astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields "pseudo" is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements--both of which display allegations of "pseudoscience" on all sides-- there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation. On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford UP, 2021) explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud? Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. On the Fringe provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Impossible Stories: On the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creation (Ohio State UP, 2021), John Murillo offers bold new readings of recent and canonical Black creative works within an Afro-pessimistic framework to excavate how time, space, and blackness intersect—or, rather, crash. Building on Michelle Wright’s ideas about dislocation from time and space as constitutive to being Black in America, as well as on W. E. B. DuBois’s theories of temporalization, he reconsiders the connections between physical phenomena and principles, literature, history, and the fragmented nature of Black time and space. Taking as his lens the fragment—fragmented bodies, fragments of memories, fragments of texts—Murillo theorizes new directions for Black identity and cultural production. Combining a critical engagement of physics and metaphysics with innovative readings of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Kiese Laymon’s Long Division, Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, he offers new ways to think about anti-Black racism and practice Black creativity. Ultimately, in his equally creative and analytical responses to depictions of Black people left out of history and barred from spaces, Murillo argues that through Afro-pessimism, Black people can fight the anti-Black cosmos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Doron Taussig invites us to question the American Dream. Did you earn what you have? Did everyone else? The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up, in our working lives, roughly where we deserve to be based on our efforts and abilities—in other words, the United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. When Americans think and talk about our lives, we grapple with this idea, asking how a person got to where he or she is, and whether they earned it. In What We Mean by the American Dream: Stories We Tell about Meritocracy (Cornell UP, 2021), Taussig tries to find out how we answer that question. Weaving together interviews with Americans from many walks of life—as well as stories told in American media about prominent figures from politics, sports, and business—What We Mean by the American Dream investigates how Americans think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. Taussig's frank assessment of the state of the American workforce and its dreams allows him to truly and meaningfully ask the question that underpins so many of our political debates and personal frustrations, did you earn it? By doing so, he sheds new light on what we mean by—and how we can deliver on—the American Dream of today. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: the three realms of college belonging, why “finding your place” is bad advice for first-gen students, how financial aid packages affect students’ experiences of belonging, “nice” and “not-so-nice” diversity, and the hypocrisy of white niceness on college campuses. Our guest is: Lisa M. Nunn, Ph.D., author of College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life and Professor of Sociology at the University of San Diego. She is the Director of her campus' Center for Educational Excellence. She is also the author of 33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students as well as a book on high school students, Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture. She didn't grow up knowing that she would become a sociologist and she graduated college as a literature and theater major, still not knowing that she would become a sociologist. It was during her years with the Peace Corps in Limbaži, Latvia in her early twenties when she started to recognize how fascinating cultural ideas and social structures are. How they shape who we are, who we want to become, and how they also constrain the paths available to us to get there. She hasn't stopped thinking about or talking about these dynamics since. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana enjoys engaging conversations, delicious food, practicing yoga, and wandering the Jersey shore. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students by Lisa M. Nunn
Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture by Lisa Nunn
The Cost of Inclusion: How Student Conformity Leads to Inequality on College Campuses by Blake R. Silver
The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students by Anthony Abraham Jack
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In Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen (Rutgers UP, 2020), S. Garnett Russell argues that although the Rwandan government makes use of global discourses in national policy documents, the way in which teachers and students engage with these global models distorts the curricular intentions of the government, resulting in unintended consequences and an undermining of sustainable peace. She is assistant professor of international and comparative education and the director of the George Clement Bond Center for African Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do women claim rights against violence in India and with what consequences? By observing how survivors navigate the Indian criminal justice system, Roychowdhury provides a unique lens on rights negotiations in the world's largest democracy. She finds that women interact with the law not by following legal procedure or abiding by the rules, but by deploying collective threats and doing the work of the state themselves. They do so because law enforcement personnel are incapacitated and unwilling to enforce the law. As a result, rights negotiations do not necessarily lead to more woman-friendly outcomes or better legal enforcement. Instead, they allow some women to make gains outside the law: repossess property and children, negotiate cash settlements, join women's groups, access paid employment, develop a sense of self-assurance, and become members of the public sphere. Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India (Oxford UP, 2020) shows how the Indian criminal justice system governs violence against women not by protecting them from harm, but by forcing them to become "capable": to take the law into their own hands and complete the hard work that incapable and unwilling state officials refuse to complete. Roychowdhury's book houses implications for how we understand gender inequality and governance not just in India, but large parts of the world where political mobilization for rights confronts negligent criminal justice systems throughout the world. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How Ten Global Cities Take on Homelessness: Innovations That Work (U California Press, 2021) provides a first-hand account of the challenges of homelessness and how cities have used innovation and local political coordination to take them on. Most importantly, it shares lessons from ten cities--Bogota, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Houston, Nashville, New York City, Baltimore, Edmonton, Paris, and Athens--and draws the common themes and strategies that have worked to overcome street homelessness. The authors have been involved in these cities through their work at Bloomberg Associates (as staff and consultants) and bring an interesting array of government, non-profit, and academic perspectives to analyze the efforts underway. From these authors' perspective, homelessness is not an insurmountable social condition, and their examples show that cities can lead the charge for better outcomes. Intended readers include municipal, regional, and national policy makers and managers, non-profit service providers, and community advocates and citizens interested in collaborating for real change. Policy students in public administration and social work would also benefit from such an up-to-date account of best practices on the homelessness front. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a leading neo-Kantian who developed a systematic view of how we construct and experience culture, widely construed to include mathematics, science, religion, myth, art, politics, ethics and other social endeavors. In Cassirer (Routledge 2021), Samantha Matherne explains how Cassirer updates Kant to develop his critical idealism in the form of a distinction between substance and function – the mind-dependent objects we cognize, and the structure of our minds that these objects depend on. He uses this view in his broad philosophy of symbolic forms, unpacking the way we build up the cultural world around us and our lived experience in that cultural world. Matherne, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard University, brings Cassirer’s work to life for those beyond his contemporary influences in the metaphysics of science, the philosophy of art, and the insertion of myth into the politics of fascism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Tetyana Lokot's new book Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) examines how citizens use digital social media to engage in public discontent and offers a critical examination of the hybrid reality of protest where bodies, spaces and technologies resonate. It argues that the augmented reality of protest goes beyond the bodies, the tents, and the cobblestones in the protest square, incorporating live streams, different time zones, encrypted conversations, and simultaneous translation of protest updates into different languages. Based on more than 60 interviews with protest participants and ethnographic analysis of online content in Ukraine and Russia, it examines how citizens in countries with limited media freedom and corrupt authorities perceive the affordances of digital media for protest and how these enable or limit protest action. The book provides a nuanced contribution to debates about the role of digital media in contentious politics and protest events, both in Eastern Europe and beyond. Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications, Dublin City University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Providing one of the first comprehensive, cross-cultural examinations of the dynamic market for sexual services, this book presents an evidence-based look at the multiple factors related to purchasing patterns and demand among clients who have used the internet. The data is drawn from two large surveys of sex workers' clients in the US and UK. The book presents descriptive baseline data on client engagement with online platforms, demographics and patterns of frequency in different markets, information on smaller niche markets and client reactions to exploitation, safety and changes in the law. Teela Sanders, Barbara G. Brents and Chris Wakefield's book Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives (Routledge, 2020) makes clear that a variety of situational as well as individual factors affect the willingness and ability to purchase sexual services. The view that emerges shatters the stereotypes and generalistions on which much policy is based and demonstrates the complexities surrounding who pays for sex and the contours of sexual consumption in consumer culture. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In More Than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems They Solve for Patients, Health Care Organizations, and the State (Cornell UP, 2020), LaTonya J. Trotter chronicles the everyday work of a group of nurse practitioners (NPs) working on the front lines of the American health care crisis as they cared for four hundred African American older adults living with poor health and limited means. Trotter describes how these NPs practiced an inclusive form of care work that addressed medical, social, and organizational problems that often accompany poverty. In solving this expanded terrain of problems from inside the clinic, these NPs were not only solving a broader set of concerns for their patients; they became a professional solution for managing "difficult people" for both their employer and the state. Through More Than Medicine, we discover that the problems found in the NP's exam room are as much a product of our nation's disinvestment in social problems as of physician scarcity or rising costs. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the wake of the George Floyd killing, many Americans are engaging in a renewed debate about the role violence and especially police violence, plays in American society. In A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What it Means for Justice (Harvard UP, 2020), David Alan Sklansky, the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, argues that in order to think sensibly about criminal justice, we must consider how we think about violence and the criminal law’s role in shaping our perceptions. Sklansky argues that the criminal law’s definitions of violence have proven “slippery” and have been used in highly inconsistent ways. We talk about offenders as being characterologically violent, but contrastingly talk about the police, gun owners, or free speech activists in nonviolent terms. For example, police officers use “force” to subdue “vicious” criminals. Or they “stop and frisk” suspects instead of violently violating a person’s bodily integrity. While the police have increasingly militarized and have become more insular and reactionary, Sklansky argues that police institutions themselves have also played a role in creating many of the situations in which the police find themselves. Additionally, Sklansky significantly details how our conversations of violence regarding rape and domestic violence, the treatment of juvenile offenders, and free speech and gun rights, suffer from the same inconsistencies, especially as they tend to exaggerate and perpetuate race, gender, and class differences. Sklansky argues that the law has not always drawn consistent boundaries between violent and non-violent offenses. Burglary, while labeled a violent felony, requires no act of interpersonal violence. Assault or battery, on the other hand, are often misdemeanors, though they require physical violence. In addition to thinking inconsistently about violence, most Americans accept and even celebrate forms of societal violence. For example, American prisons, while not officially condoning violence, allow and sometimes encourage violence against prisoners as forms of discipline and retribution. As Sklansky argues, violence in these institutions is often treated as a form of entertainment, a “morbid parody of combat sports.” Sklansky prompts us to confront our overly simplistic definitions and assumptions about violence in the American law. He encourages us to take advantage of an increased awareness of violence and to work toward more just and consistent definitions. Samuel P. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Idaho College of Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
I spoke with Prof. Tim Jackson about his latest book: Post Growth, Life after Capitalism, published by Polity Books in 2021. The book starts with a reflection on the event of the past few months. The success in 2019 of the school strikes for climate, the attention that Greta Thunberg received even in Davos, and the arrival of the pandemic that changed our priorities. Even the 2009 crisis challenged the degrowth movement when we experienced the consequences of the recession. I have asked how do we keep the focus on sustainability? This book and his work in general are about the need for a change in our economic paradigms. But we are still tied to old ideas and institutions. Keynes that many progressive politicians and economists frequently refer to, cannot be really claimed to be offering revolutionary ideas for our times. Still, the book mentions an essay by Keynes from 1930 where he appears clearly interested in what should come after the immediate actions (growth) needed to overcome the great depression. We discussed how the shift in economic paradigm can follow different patterns in the rich nations and in the developing ones. Finally, referring to the final chapter, 'Dolphins in Venice', we talked about what could happen at the end of the pandemic to our cultural and consumption preferences. Capitalism is broken. The relentless pursuit of more has delivered climate catastrophe, social inequality and financial instability—and left us ill prepared for life in a global pandemic. Weaving together philosophical reflection, economic insight and social vision, Tim Jackson’s passionate and provocative book dares us to imagine a world beyond capitalism—a place where relationship and meaning take precedence over profits and power. Post Growth is both a manifesto for system change and an invitation to rekindle a deeper conversation about the nature of the human condition. Dr Tim Jackson holds degrees in mathematics (MA, Cambridge), philosophy (MA, Uni Western Ontario) and physics (PhD, St Andrews). He is Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity and Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey in the UK. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How should we understand creative work? In Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries (Columbia UP, 2021), Michael Siciliano, an assistant professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, explores this question through a comparison of a recording studio and a digital content creation company. The book considers the meaning and practice of ‘creative’ labour, considering its ambivalences, the passions and commitments, as well as the compromises and alienations associated with this area of economy and society. It represents a crucial intervention to the literature on cultural production, as well as offering an important understanding of the impact of digital modes of distribution and production on creative industries. A rich and fascinating comparative ethnography, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Dilara Yarbrough about her article "Nothing About Us Without Us: Reading Protests against Oppressive Knowledge Production as Guidelines for Solidarity Research," published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (2019). Dilara Yarbrough is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice Studies at San Francisco State University. Dilara’s research focuses on how different types of governmental responses to poverty perpetuate or interrupt racial, gender and economic inequalities. Her book manuscript Abolitionist Care describes how poverty relief services provided by and for sex workers and transgender women of colour incorporate radical harm reduction and grassroots organizing to disrupt carceral logics. In this podcast, Dilara discusses anti-oppressive approaches to the production and dissemination of knowledge, including Participatory Action and Solidarity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Gentrification Down the Shore (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Molly Vollman Makris and Mary Gatta engage in a rich ethnographic investigation of Asbury Park to better understand the connection between jobs and seasonal gentrification and the experiences of longtime residents in this beach-community city. They demonstrate how the racial inequality in the founding of Asbury Park is reverberating a century later. This book tells an important and nuanced tale of gentrification using an intersectional lens to examine the history of race relations, the too often overlooked history of the postindustrial city, the role of the LGBTQ population, barriers to employment and access to amenities, and the role of developers as the city rapidly changes. Makris and Gatta draw on in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnographic observation, as well as data analysis to tell the reader a story of life on the West Side of Asbury Park as the East Side prospers and to point to a potential path forward. Molly Vollman Makris is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Urban Studies at Guttman Community College, City University of New York. Mary Gatta is as an Associate Professor of Sociology at Guttman Community College, City University of New York. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Jon Levy about his new book You’re Invited: The Art and Science of Cultivating Influence (Harper Business, 2021). Jon Levy is a behavioral scientist who over a decade ago founded The Influencer Dinner, a secret dining experience for industry leaders. He’s the author of The 2 AM Principle: Discover the Science of Adventure and has also served as a consultant on influence, connectivity and decision making for companies looking to transform how they do business. This episode starts with discussing Jon’s idea of launching dinners where famous people would come together to cook a meal, talk, and clean up afterwards. It grew from there to covering why connectivity is so important, and what can make an event compelling: generosity, novelty, (good) curation, and the ability to create a sense of awe. Without pushing oneself, in other words, the event can’t by definition be remarkable. Another insight is what Jon calls the IKEA Effect; just as putting your own furniture together makes you commit more to it, so likewise does an event benefit by having people come together in an activity or activities where they feel engaged and hence have a greater sense of belonging. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
"… I am an axe; And my son a handle, soon; To be shaping again, model; And tool, craft of culture; How we go on." - Gary Snyder, Axe Handles (1983) "… wisdom comes to those who understand the student is more important than the teacher in the lineage of knowledge." - Wade Davis, New Books Network (2021) Of the three major influences on Wade Davis’ life and work one of the most important is the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder, and in this interview the professor shares how foundational that connection remains. This is just one highlight of many he shares about his thinking and writing as Wade indulges my interest in his ‘craft of culture’ on his path to becoming a renowned storyteller. This professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, former Explorer-in-Residence for the National Geographic Society, and award-winning author, Davis shares the interesting back stories of his best-selling first book, The Serpent and The Rainbow, about his research into Haitian ‘zombie poison’, how his hypothesis was publically challenged, and how the Hollywood movie version was just the kind of cultural distortion he was trying to overcome with his book. In the course of talking about this first book which helped launch his writing career he shares thoughts about academic writing more generally and in particular how his PhD thesis, Passage of Darkness, is really a sterile version of the richer and more textured narrative of the first book even though the latter is preferred by academics. For that matter, Wade has something to say about academic objectivity before we move on to talk about his influential One River, his CBC lectures-inspired The Wayfinders, and his award-winning Into The Silence. He also speaks at length about the influence of his Harvard mentors – the British anthropologist David May Ray Lewis, and the botanist and plant explorer Richard Evan Schultes, and how he and the late botanical explorer Tim Plowman made up the ‘coca project’ and the significance of ‘the divine leaf of immortality’. Keith Krueger teaching business and academic communication in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at: keith.krueger@uts.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
From submarines to the suburbs--the remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburgh's eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the world's leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth. In Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers. Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburgh's suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburgh's elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city. Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the "renewal" of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Kevin Vallier is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University. His most recent book is titled Trust in a Polarized Age. You can follow him on Twitter @kvallier. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In post-Suharto Indonesian politics the exchange of patronage for political support is commonplace. Clientelism saturates the political system through everyday practices of vote buying, influence peddling, manipulating government programs, and skimming money from government projects. In this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, Professor Michele Ford spoke with Professors Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot about their upcoming book, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2019). Democracy for Sale is an on-the-ground account of Indonesian democracy, analysing its election campaigns and behind-the-scenes machinations. With comparative leverage from political practices in India and Argentina, Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot provide compelling evidence of the importance of informal networks and personal relationships that shape access to power and privilege in the messy political environment of contemporary Indonesia. Edward Aspinall is a Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University. He researches politics in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, with interests in democratisation, ethnicity, and clientelism, among other topics. Ward Berenschot is a Professor of Comparative Political Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and a senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), studying contemporary politics in Indonesia and India. His work focuses on the role of money and informality in election campaigns, while a second field of research concerns the character of civil society and citizenship in democratising countries. He has also been involved in efforts to promote legal aid in Indonesia, particularly in relation to land conflicts sparked by palm oil expansion. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We commonly ascribe beliefs and similar attitudes to groups. For instance, we say that a foreign government believes that members of the press are spies, or that a corporation denies that its product is harmful to the environment. Sometimes, it seems that in such cases, we are simply ascribing to the group the shared beliefs of its members. But there are other cases in which it appears we are referencing an independent subject of the belief or attitude – the government or the corporation, over and above its members. Puzzles abound. In The Epistemology of Groups (Oxford 2021), Jennifer Lackey develops a unified account of group belief, justified group belief, group knowledge, and group assertion. Intriguingly, this account serves ultimately to allow us to make sense of group lies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Talking about social class and the American class structure is a challenge. It can be easy to talk about the class system too rigidly, implying that “the rich stay rich while the poor stay poor.” Yet in our individualistic culture, much rhetoric suggests that anything is possible, which can dismiss the privileges or constraints that come with social class. Dr. Jessi Streib, assistant professor of sociology at Duke University, is a social class researcher and scholar whose work focuses on interesting junctures and disjunctures where class reveals its influence on individual lives. In Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall (Oxford UP, 2020), Streib focuses on a cohort of over 100 men and women who began life in the upper middle class, interviewing them over a ten-year period as they transition from their teens to their late twenties. By looking at the interplay of resources and identity characteristics that influence each person’s class trajectory to maintain upper middle-class status or become downwardly mobile, Streib identifies the multifaceted elements that influence these outcomes. Each chapter highlights stories that exemplify and show the range of outcomes in various trajectories through a series of archetypes. Social class if often discussed through quantitative studies that can maintain an abstractness to the concept of class mobility, so there is a real power in telling the stories of individuals as an approach to demonstrating the multi-faceted factors that affect social class. The book explores stories of those who become professionals, stay-at-home moms and family men, aspiring athletes and artists, rebels, and explorers. Streib is able to show the interplay of complicated choices individuals make as they enter adulthood, focused on individual values and goals but with associated class implications. Privilege Lost brings to life the stories of the downwardly mobile, showing that class standing is only one way to measure one’s life satisfaction. This exploration of the coming of age of white upper middle class youth reveals much about class and privilege in American family life. Michelle Newhart is a sociologists and instructional designer at Mt. San Antonio College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology? What makes us feel that we need to learn to code--or else? In The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope (MIT Press, 2021), Daniel Greene argues that the problem of poverty became a problem of technology in order to manage the contradictions of a changing economy. Greene shows how the digital divide emerged as a policy problem and why simple technological solutions to complex social issues continue to appeal to politicians and professionals who should (and often do) know better. Patrick Sheehan is a PhD student in Sociology at UT Austin studying work and careers in the digital economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Cinderella stories captured the imagination of girls in the 1950s, when dreams of meeting the right man could seem like a happy ending, a solution to life's problems. But over the next fifty years women's lives were transformed, not by the magic wand of a fairy godmother, nor by marrying princes, but by education, work, birth control--and feminism. However, while widening opportunities for women were seen as progress, feminists were regularly caricatured as man-haters, cast in the role of ugly sisters, witches or wicked fairies in the fairy-tale. Carol Dyhouse's new book Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the reshaping of women's lives, loves and dreams since 1950, the year in which Walt Disney's film Cinderella gave expression to popular ideas of romance, and at a time when marriage was a major determinant of female life chances and teenage girls dreamed of Mr Right and happy endings. It ends with the runaway success of Disney's Frozen, in 2013--a film with relevance to very different times. Along the way, it illuminates how women's expectations and emotional landscapes have shifted, asking bold questions about how women's lives have been transformed since 1950. How have women's changing life experiences been mirrored in new expectations about marriage, intimacy, and family life? How have new forms of independence through education and work, and greater control over childbearing, altered women's life ambitions? And were feminists right to believe that sexual equality would improve relationships between men and women? Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The cultural landscape plays a momentous role in the transmission of Christianity. Consequently, the global expansion of the church has led to the increasing diversification of world Christianity. As a result, scholars are turning more and more to native cultures as the point of focus. Understanding Korean Christianity: Grassroot Perspectives on Causes, Culture, and Responses (Pickwick, 2019) examines how this new discourse evolved as well as presenting a missional methodology based on the study of the native landscapes of Korea. Kale Yu argues that the process of formulating and communicating Christianity was less consistent than is usually supposed. By immersing the reader in the thought and lived experience of various Korean contexts, Professor Yu recreates the diversity of cultural landscapes experienced by Korean Christians of different periods in history. The result is a new interpretation of cross-cultural missional interactions. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. Student from South Korea in the Department of History & Ecumenics, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Dr Katie Cruz contributed a chapter titled "The Work of Sex Work: Prostitution, Unfreedom and Criminality at Work" to the book Criminality at Work. In this podcast, Dr Cruz talks about her research around stripping and labour rights. She discusses the case of Nowack vs Chandler Bars when a woman working as a stripper in a London strip club was successful in pursuing her case against the club. She discusses her other work including her research among sex workers in Jamaica. Kate's blog posts are available here. Cruz's other works in include: --Cruz, K., & Brown, W. (2016). "Feminism, law, and neoliberalism: An interview and discussion with Wendy Brown." Feminist Legal Studies, 24(1), 69-89. --Cruz, K. (2018). "Beyond Liberalism: Marxist feminism, migrant sex work, and labour unfreedom." Feminist Legal Studies, 26(1), 65-92. --Hardy, K., & Cruz, K. (2019). "Affective organizing: Collectivizing informal sex workers in an intimate union." American behavioural scientist, 63(2), 244-261. --Cruz, K., Davidson, J. O. C., & Taylor, J. S. (2019). "Tourism and sexual violence and exploitation in Jamaica: contesting the ‘trafficking and modern slavery frame." Journal of the British Academy, 7(s1), 191-216. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Throughout In Concert: Performing Musical Persona (University of Michigan Press, 2021), Dr. Philip Auslander addresses not only the visual means by which musicians engage their audiences through costume and physical gesture, but also spectacular aspects of performance such as light shows. Although musicians do not usually enact fictional characters on stage, they nevertheless present themselves to audiences in ways specific to the performance situation. Auslander’s term to denote the musician’s presence before the audience is musical persona. While the presence of a musical persona may be most obvious within rock and pop music, the book’s analysis extends to classical music, jazz, blues, country, electronic music, laptop performance, and music made with experimental digital interfaces. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) is the story of art and work under contemporary capitalism. Whilst labour used to be regarded as an unattractive subject for art, the proximity of work to everyday life has subsequently narrowed the gap between work and art. The artist is no longer considered apart from the economic but is heralded as an example of how to work in neoliberal management textbooks. With the narrowing of work and art visible in galleries and art discourse today, Working Aesthetics takes a step back to ask why labour has become a valid subject for contemporary art and explores what this means for aesthetic culture today. Danielle Child speaks with Pierre d'Alancaisez about the rise of the art fabricator embodied by the stories of Lippincott, Inc. and Mike Smith Studio, dematerialised labour of Rimini Protokoll, and the digital afterlives of etoy and the brave new world of NFTs. The opening street scene by Eyre Crowe is here. Dannielle Child is a senior lecturer at Manchester School of Art. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Kim Scott about her new book Just Work: Get Sh*t Done, Fast & Fair (St. Martin's Press, 2021). Kim Scott and her fellow guest on this episode, Trier Bryant, co-founded the company Just Work to help organizations and individuals create more equitable workplaces. Scott was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led various teams at Google. Bryant has been a leader at Goldman Sachs, Twitter, Astra, and proudly served in the United States Air Force as a Captain, leading engineering teams. Every situation where somebody gets harmed at work—socially, emotionally, physically—involves the person harmed, an upstander (observer), the bully, and ultimately the leader who should be nurturing a better workplace where justice presides. How to handle those situations, and the difference between bias vs. prejudice is central to this episode. Along the way, the discussion touches on having a Code of Conduct at work; whether and how HR can be helpful; and a clear gender split given the reality that 70% of office bullies are men, whereas 60% of those bullied are women. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Nikki Lane's The Black Queer Work of Ratchet: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the (Anti)Politics of Respectability (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) enters as a corrective to the tendency to trivialize and (mis)appropriate African American language practices. The word ratchet has entered into a wider (whiter) American discourse the same way that many words in African American English have--through hip-hop and social media. Generally, ratchet refers to behaviors and cultural expressions of Black people that sit outside of normative, middle-class respectable codes of conduct. Ratchet can function both as a tool for critiquing bad Black behavior, and as a tool for resisting the notion that there are such things as "good" and "bad" behavior in the first place. This book takes seriously the way ratchet operates in the everyday lives of middle-class and upwardly mobile Black Queer women in Washington, DC who, because of their sexuality, are situated outside of the norms of (Black) respectability. The book introduces the concept of "ratchet/boojie cultural politics" which draws from a rich body of Black intellectual traditions which interrogate the debates concerning what is and is not "acceptable" Black (middle-class) behavior. Placing issues of non-normative sexuality at the center of the conversation about notions of propriety within normative modes of Black middle-class behavior, this book discusses what it means for Black Queer women's bodies to be present within ratchet/boojie cultural projects, asking what Black Queer women's increasing visibility does for the everyday experiences of Black queer people more broadly.
This work makes reference to a few songs that really give a depth of understanding the concept of boujee and ratchet. I suggest listeners who are not familiar go and check out Migos and Kanye West - I Don't Like ft. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Bernadette Barton, Ph.D. exposes the double standard we attach to women’s sexuality in The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society (NYU Press, 2021) Pictures of half-naked girls and women can easily be found on screens, billboards, and advertisement across the United States of America. There are pole-dancing courses that can be purchased by women who desire to stay fit. Men share dick pics to nonconsensual passengers on planes and trains. The last American President has also bragged about grabbing women “by their pussy.” This pornification of society is what Barton calls “raunch culture.” In this book, she explores what raunch culture is, why it matters, and how it is ruining America. She exposes how what is shown on the internet has a driving force in what is displayed on the programs, advertisement, and social media we watch. These images then make their way to content that is displayed on our cellphones, available for us to purchase in the fashion industry, and fantasies/desires we have when engaging in sexual intercourse. From twerking and breast implants, to fake nails and push-up bras, Barton explores just how much we encounter raunch culture on a daily basis – porn has become normalized. Drawing on interviews, television shows, movies, and social media, Barton argues that raunch culture matters not because it is sexy, but because it is sexist. She shows how young women are encouraged to be sexy like porn stars, and to be grateful for getting cat-called or receiving unsolicited dick pics. In male politicians vote to restrict women’s access to birth control and abortion. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. He is currently studying the social interactions that people engage in at two annual festivals that take place during the summer months along the banks of the Mississippi River. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How are immigrants’ lives shaped by cultural and political dynamics in their homeland, hostland, and “elsewhere” countries whose geopolitical dynamics affect their experiences (such as South Asian Muslims who are affected by post-9/11 and more recent backlash against Middle Eastern nations)? In today’s podcast, we talk with Tahseen Shams, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto-St.George and author of Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World. Tahseen talks about how her own background as a Bangladeshi immigrant to Mississippi inspired her to become an ethnographer, and how her positionality affected her research with other South Asian Immigrants. She describes how she used content analysis of Facebook to overcome her own effect on interviewees and some of the difficulties she had in managing relationships with her participants. Also, in a fascinating discussion of how her female research participants navigated contrasting identity categories of “Good Muslim” and “Moderate Muslim”, she reflects on what she learned from the tensions between what they said in interviews and what she observed them doing. Finally, Tahseen talks about finding inspiration in reading novels and her new research project on inter-ethnic relationships. Tahseen Shams is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto - St. George, and the Bissell-Heyd Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the United States of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Fear In Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Tells Us about America (NYU Press, 2021), Caleb Iyer Elfenbein, Associate Professor at Grinnell College, examines Islamophobia in the United States, positing that rather than simply being an outcome of the 9/11 attacks, anti-Muslim activity grows out of a fear of difference that has always characterized US public life. Elfenbein examines the effects of this fear on American Muslims, as well as describing how it works to shape and distort American society. Drawing on over 1,800 news reports documenting anti-Muslim activity, Elfenbein pinpoints trends, draws connections to the broader histories of immigration, identity, belonging, and citizenship in the US, and examines how Muslim communities have responded. In our conversation we discuss the Mapping Islamophobia digital humanities project, the role of storytelling in synthesizing a large amounts of data, anti-Muslim political rhetoric and activity, the effects of “public hate,” Muslim participation in public life, the role of legislation, hate crimes, Muslim public outreach and engagement, and Muslim politicians. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Megan Ryburn’s Uncertain Citizenship: Everyday Practices of Bolivian Migrants in Chile (University of California Press, 2018) is a multi-sited ethnography of citizenship practices of Bolivian migrants in Chile. The book asks readers to think beyond a binary category of citizen/noncitizen when looking at migrant practices and spaces. Instead, Uncertain Citizenship emphasizes the transnational, overlapping, and fluctuating forms of citizenship that migrants engage with and inhabit as they move through their lives and across borders. While Ryburn understands the importance of legal and bureaucratic status as a determinant of the experience of migration, her book fundamentally considers “papeleo” as a practice and an experience in which there are many opportunities for regularization as well as marginalization. Uncertain Citizenship is an essential read for scholars of the Andes and the Southern Cone, as well as scholars of migration generally. Her reflections on ethnographic practice and engaging style make this book a good fit for undergraduate classrooms as well with chapters on solidarity, dance troupes, and the Chilean Dream. Dr. Ryburn is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the London School of Economics Latin America and Caribbean Centre. Uncertain Citizens: Bolivian Migrants in Chile received an honorable mention for the Best Book of Social Sciences in 2019 from the LASA Southern Cone Studies Section She is the Book Review Editor of the Journal of Latin American Studies. Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The first in-depth study of the All World Gayatri Pariwar, a modern Indian religious movement. The All World Gayatri Pariwar is a modern religious movement that enjoys wide popularity in North India, particularly among the many STEM workers who joined after becoming disillusioned with their lucrative but unfulfilling private-sector careers. Founded in the mid-twentieth century, the Gayatri Pariwar works to popularize practices inspired by ancient religious texts and breaks with convention by framing these practices as the foundation of a universal spirituality. The movement appeals to science in its advocacy of these practices, claiming that they have medical benefits that constitute proof that rational people around the world should find persuasive. Should these practices become sufficiently widespread, the belief is that humanity will enter a new satyug, or “golden age.” In The Science of Satyug: Class, Charisma, and Vedic Revivalism in the All World Gayatri Pariwar (SUNY Press, 2021), Daniel Heifetz focuses on how religion and science are objects of intense emotion that help to constitute identities. Weaving engaging ethnographic anecdotes together with readings of Gayatri Pariwar literature, Heifetz interprets this material in light of classic and contemporary theory. The result is a significant contribution to current conversations about the globalized middle classes and the entanglement of religion and science that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding these aspects of life in modern India. Daniel Heifetz teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sadomasochism and the BDSM Community in the United States: Kinky People Unite (Routledge, 2021) chronicles the development of sadomasochistic sexuality and its communities in the United States from the post-war period to the present day. Having evolved from scattered networks of sadomasochists to a coherent body bound by shared principles of "safe, sane, consensual," activists worked to transform popular perceptions of their community, end its routine harassment by law enforcement, and win inclusion in US American society. Often paralleling the work of LGBTQ+ activists, people who engaged in BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadism and Masochism) transformed both their own sexual practices and how outsiders perceived them. The development of this community highlights the interactions of people of different sexual orientations within a sexual community, the influence of various campaigns for sexual freedom, and the BDSM community's influence on popular perceptions of sexuality and sexual freedom. The text’s historical perspective gives depth and texture to a specific dimension of the history of sexuality in the United States. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the history of sexuality. Its clear and direct approach offers an important and useful chronology of a movement that has long been neglected by historians. Dr. Stephen K. Stein is the Associate Chair of the Department of History at the University of Memphis. His recent publications include From Torpedoes to Aviation: Washington Irving Chambers and Technological Innovation in the New Navy, 1877-1913 (2007); The Sea in World History: Trade, Travel, and Exploration (2017); Twenty-Five Years of Living in Leather: The National Leather Association, 1986-2011 (2012); “The Greely Relief Expedition and the New Navy,” International Journal of Naval History 5 (December 2006), which won the Rear Admiral Ernest M. Eller Prize in Naval History; and "Lessons Learned Building the Online History Program at the University of Memphis," History Teacher 47 (May 2014). Dr. Isabel Machado is an independent researcher and serves as reviews editor for the Oral History Journal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Doron Taussig invites us to question the American Dream. Did you earn what you have? Did everyone else? The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; in other words, the United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. When Americans think and talk about our lives, we grapple with this idea, asking how a person got to where he or she is and whether he or she earned it. In What We Mean by the American Dream: Stories We Tell about Meritocracy (Cornell UP, 2021), Taussig tries to find out how we answer those questions. Weaving together interviews with Americans from many walks of life—as well as stories told in the US media about prominent figures from politics, sports, and business—What We Mean by the American Dream investigates how we think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. Taussig looks into the fabric of American life to explore how various people, including dairy farmers, police officers, dancers, teachers, computer technicians, students, store clerks, the unemployed, homemakers, and even drug dealers got to where they are today and whether they earned it or not. Taussig's frank assessment of the state of the US workforce and its dreams allows him to truly and meaningfully ask the question that underpins so many of our political debates and personal frustrations: Did you earn it? By doing so, he sheds new light on what we mean by—and how we can deliver on—the American Dream of today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode, I interview Kas Saghafi, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis, about his book The World After the End of the World, published through SUNY Press in 2020. In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of “the end the world” in Derrida’s late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the death of the other. He examines this and several other tightly knit motifs in Derrida’s work: mourning, survival, the phantasm, the event, and most significantly, the term salut, which in French means at once greeting and salvation. An underlying concern of The World after the End of the World is whether a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) can be dissociated from discourse on religion. Saghafi compares Derrida’s thought along these lines with similar concerns of Jean-Luc Nancy’s. Combining analysis of these themes with reflections on personal loss, this book maintains that, for Derrida, salutation, greeting, and welcoming is resistant to the economy of salvation. This resistance calls for what Derrida refers to as a “spectro-poetics” devoted to and assigned to the other’s singularity. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Social networks existed and shaped our lives long before Silicon Valley startups made them virtual. For over two decades economist Matthew O. Jackson, a professor at Stanford University, has studied how the shape of networks and our positions within them can affect us. In this interview, he explains how network structures can create poverty traps, exacerbate financial crises, and contribute to political polarization. He also explains how a new awareness of the role of networks has been used to improve financial regulation, promote public health knowledge, and guide vaccination strategy. Jackson also discusses how he first began to study networks, previously neglected by economists, and how economists can both learn from and contribute to the exciting cross-disciplinary dialogue among researchers from sociology, math, physics, and other fields. Professor Jackson's website provides free access to the chapter on contagion, of particular interest in this time of pandemic. For those who want to learn even more than the book can cover, he offers a free online course on the topic. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us; the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs our spine at the mere thought of him or her. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is virtually silent on the no less mysterious moments when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, or when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours before. In The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations (Oxford UP, 2019), Eva Illouz documents the multifarious ways in which relationships end. She argues that if modern love was once marked by the freedom to enter sexual and emotional bonds according to one's will and choice, contemporary love has now become characterized by practices of non-choice, the freedom to withdraw from relationships. Illouz dubs this process by which relationships fade, evaporate, dissolve, and break down "unloving." While sociology has classically focused on the formation of social bonds, The End of Love makes a powerful case for studying why and how social bonds collapse and dissolve. Particularly striking is the role that capitalism plays in practices of non-choice and "unloving." The unmaking of social bonds, she argues, is connected to contemporary capitalism that is characterized by practices of non-commitment and non-choice, practices that enable the quick withdrawal from a transaction and the quick realignment of prices and the breaking of loyalties. Unloving and non-choice have in turn a profound impact on society and economics as they explain why people may be having fewer children, increasingly living alone, and having less sex. The End of Love presents a profound and original analysis of the effects of capitalism and consumer culture on personal relationships and of what the dissolution of personal relationships means for capitalism. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The rapid gentrification of Black and brown neighborhoods in urban areas by predominantly upper-class white and other white-adjacent peoples is largely facilitated by urban redevelopment and revitalization projects. These projects often usher in aesthetics that seek to attract those understood as desirable populations. But what happens when the aesthetics of poor Black and brown neighborhoods themselves become the vehicle for gentrification and urban renewal? As Johana Londoño writes, “the aesthetic depiction and manipulation of Latinx urban life and culture as a way to counteract the fear that Latinxs and their culture were transgressing normative expectations of urbanness” (ix). In her new book, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities (Duke University Press, 2020), Dr. Londoño traces how Latinx people are targeted as problems in urban areas that need to be addressed. Simultaneously, architects, urban planners, policymakers, ethnographers, business owners, and settlement workers – all of whom Londoño refers to as “brokers” – were carefully pulling into their projects the visual aesthetics of barrios which would at once produce a Latinized space while simultaneously “not interfere in the economic and cultural interests of normative urbanity” (xvii). There was danger in representing barrios because it threatened urban normativity. For Londoño, “Because barrios in US cities are largely the result of unequal forces, reproducing barrio culture and spatial layouts, besides being parodic, would make plain the failures of liberalism to treat all individuals equally” (9-10). Representing barrios in full would reveal the unequal relations of power, state and federal disinvestment in Black and brown neighborhoods, and the economic and material realities of these neighborhoods that go into the formation of barrios. Abstraction but not disruption, however, seems to be have been the goal. By making Latinxs legible in a normative sense, their aesthetics then became implicated in the capitalist spatial order. “I argue that Latinx visibility has been made key to the cyclical nature of U.S. capitalist urbanism: its decay and the reconstitution of its normativity,” writes Londoño (5). The aesthetics found in barrios became abstracted enough to appeal to urban capitalism and thus became implemented onto the gentrifying urban landscape. By writing the history of barrios and the marginalization of Latinxs in urban spaces, and by focusing on the brokers who manipulate Latinx urban culture to make it visible in mainstream spaces, Johana Londoño underscores how the built environment as a racial project continues to build on racial hierarchies to maintain structures. She covers instances of manipulation of barrio aesthetics in New York, Miami, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Santa Ana and concludes in her hometown of Union City, New Jersey. Londoño’s skill of highlighting the ways barrio aesthetics play out on the gentrifying landscape of the modern renting market seamlessly brings into focus all at once the racialized and spatial histories of a neighborhood, the decisions by brokers on how to target Latinx consumers, and implications of barrio aesthetics in an increasingly segregated urban landscape. Abstract Barrios is a book that should be read across ethnic studies, urban studies, and in the fields of art and architecture. Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Panoramic and provocative in its scope, John Geoffrey Scott and Christian Grov's The Routledge Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society (Routledge, 2021) is the definitive guide to contemporary issues associated with male sex work and a must read for those who study masculinities, male sexuality, sexual health, and sexual cultures. This groundbreaking volume will have a powerful impact on our understanding of this challenging, elusive subject. While the internet has brought the previously hidden worlds of male sex work more starkly into public view, academic research has often remained locked into descriptions of male sex workers and their clients as perverse. Drawing from a variety of regions, the chapters provide insights into the historical, popular cultural, social, and economic aspects of sex work, as well as demographic patterns, health outcomes, and policy issues. This approach shifts thought on male sex work from a hidden "social problem" to a publicly acknowledged "social phenomenon." The book challenges myths and reconceptualizes male sex work as a discrete field. Importantly, it provides a vehicle for the voices of male sex workers and new and established scholars. This richly detailed, humane, and innovative collection retrieves male sex work from silence and invisibility on the one hand and its association with scandal and stigma on the other. The findings within have profound implications for how governments approach public health and regulation of the sex industry and for how society can make sense of the complexities of human sexualities. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Apps have transformed dating from a mysterious adventure into a daily chore. Young, single, college-educated women are sick and tired of competing for a shrinking supply of guys. And marriage-material men, long expected to take the lead when it comes to asking women out, are suddenly balking at making the first move, fearing they'll come across as creepy or inappropriate. Society is changing, which means it's time for dating to evolve. Millennial and Gen Z women are more than capable of seeking out what—and who—they want. They're standouts in the classroom and champions on the playing fields. They're leaders in the workplace and trailblazers in city halls, state houses, and Congress. So why would we tell a generation of badass women that they're not allowed to be bold when it comes to finding love? Why should they have to sit back and wait (and wait and wait) for men to find them? In Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (Benbella, 2021), Jon Birger, author of Date-onomics, offers women bold new strategies for finding the one. Backed by research showing that women can win at romance by making the first move with the men of their choice, Birger explains why:
It's better to choose than to be chosen
The "play hard to get" method is not only outdated but grounded in bad science
The first move does not have to be a big move
It's time to log off of dating apps and date men you actually know
The workplace can be a terrific place to meet a long-term romantic partner
. . . and more!
Make Your Move is an honest, solution-based guide to finding love that lasts. If you're tired of playing by old rules, look no further: Make your move and win Jon Birger is an award-winning writer, a contributor to Fortune, and the author of Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. A former senior writer at both Fortune and Money, Jon's work has also appeared in Barron's, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, New York Magazine, Time, and Washington Post. He was included on AlwaysOn Network's list of "Power Players in Technology Business Media." A familiar face and voice on television and radio, Jon has been a guest on ABC's Good Morning America, BBC World Service, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Fox News-discussing a wide range of topics from the dating market to the stock market to oil market. Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Economist, data journalist, and best-selling author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz uses data from the internet to gain new insights into the human psyche. In his new book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (HarperCollins, 2017), Seth has used Google searches to measure racism, self-induced abortion, depression, child abuse, hateful mobs, the science of humor, sexual preference, anxiety, son preference, and sexual insecurity, among many other topics. In this interview he explains how web searches are a kind of digital truth serum that reveals our hidden desires, insecurities and biases. He also explores other ways economists have used the explosion of new data created by the digitization of the economy to shed new light on old questions. Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he created and leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Successful word-coinages--those that stay in currency for a good long time--tend to conceal their beginnings. We take them at face value and rarely when and where they were first minted. Engaging, illuminating, and authoritative, Ralph Keyes's The Hidden History of Coined Words (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the etymological underworld of terms and expressions and uncovers plenty of hidden gems. He also finds some fascinating patterns, such as that successful neologisms are as likely to be created by chance as by design. A remarkable number of new words were coined whimsically, originally intended to troll or taunt. Knickers, for example, resulted from a hoax; big bang from an insult. Casual wisecracking produced software, crowdsource, and blog. More than a few resulted from happy accidents, such as typos, mistranslations, and mishearing (bigly and buttonhole), or from being taken entirely out of context (robotics). Neologizers (a Thomas Jefferson coinage) include not just scholars and writers but cartoonists, columnists, children's book authors. Wimp originated with a book series, as did goop, and nerd from a book by Dr. Seuss. Coinages are often contested, controversy swirling around such terms as gonzo, mojo, and booty call. Keyes considers all contenders, while also leading us through the fray between new word partisans, and those who resist them strenuously. He concludes with advice about how to make your own successful coinage. The Hidden History of Coined Words will appeal not just to word mavens but history buffs, trivia contesters, and anyone who loves the immersive power of language. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Christopher A. Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing (Princeton University Press, 2021) challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves. Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behavior and political opinion, he offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new apps and bots to help readers avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could hit “reset” and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research. Providing data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, Breaking the Social Media Prism shows how to combat online polarization without deleting our accounts. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Anita Hardon's Chemical Youth: Navigating Uncertainty in Search of the Good Life (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) explores how young people engage with chemical substances in their everyday lives. It builds upon and supplements a large body of literature on young people’s use of drugs and alcohol to highlight the subjectivities and socialities that chemical use enables across diverse socio-cultural settings, illustrating how young people seek to avoid harm, while harnessing the beneficial effects of chemical use. The book is based on multi-sited anthropological research in Southeast Asia, Europe and the US, and presents insights from collaborative and contrasting analysis. Hardon brings new perspectives to debates across drug policy studies, pharmaceutical cultures and regulation, science and technology studies, and youth and precarity in post-industrial societies. This book is available open access here. Geert Slabbekorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in the Indian city of Mumbai, Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai's Other World-Class Histories (Association for Asian Studies, 2020) is an unconventional little book – experimental in form – about how we come to know the worlds about which we write. The narrative follows the author’s fieldnotes diaries as they wend their way through a series of ethnographic puzzles that emerge in the wake of a high-profile mega-infrastructure project that became an internationally celebrated prototype and model. Waiting Town complicates this celebratory narrative by revealing the conflicting temporalities and procedural pretentions of ‘world class’ developmentalism. On one level, Waiting Town is a book about Mumbai – about housing schemes and scams, about ‘duplicate’ documents (and ‘duplicate duplicates’), and about the material wreckage wrought by the city’s ‘world-class’ ambitions. And at the same time, it has a larger story to tell about truth and falsehood, time and memory – and about the promises and pitfalls of knowledge production, interpretation and representation more generally. Lisa Björkman is Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at University of Louisville and Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Since President Nixon coined the phrase, the "War on Drugs" has presented an important change in how people view and discuss criminal justice practices and drug laws. The term evokes images of militarization, punishment, and violence, as well as combat and the potential for victory. It is no surprise then that questions such as whether the "War on Drugs" has "failed" or "can be won" have animated mass media and public debate for the past 40 years. Through analysis of 30 years of newspaper content, Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and Media in the War on Drugs Debate (Routledge, 2021) examines the social and cultural contours of this heated debate and explores how proponents and critics of the controversial social issues of drug policy and incarceration frame their arguments in mass media. Additionally, it looks at the contemporary public debate on the "War on Drugs" through an analysis of readers' comments drawn from the comments sections of online news articles. Through a discussion of the findings and their implications, the book illuminates the ways in which ideas about race, politics, society, and crime, and forms of evidence and statistics such as rates of arrest and incarceration or the financial costs of drug policies and incarceration are advanced, interpreted, and contested. Further, the book will bring to light how people form a sense of their racial selves in debates over policy issues tied to racial inequality such as the "War on Drugs" through narratives that connect racial categories to concepts such as innocence, criminality, free will, and fairness. Debating the Drug War offers readers a variety of concepts and theoretical perspectives that they can use to make sense of these vital issues in contemporary society. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Imagine a rodeo rider atop a bucking bronco, hat in hand, straining to remain astride. Is the rider in your mind's eye white? Is the person male? Popular imaginings and high level, televised, professional rodeo circuits have created a stereotyped image of who rodeo is by and for, but it is far too limited an image, and one that does not reflect reality. In Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Race, Gender, and Identity in the American Rodeo (University Press of Kansas, 2020), Dr. Elyssa Ford, an associate professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University, paints a very different image of rodeo than what Western myth would have one believe. Ford argues that rodeo has, from its creation, both a vehicle for rebellion and a place of refuge for groups of people told they didn't belong in the American West, let alone in Western rodeo. From Hawaiian ranching culture to Black and gay rodeo, men and women have used professional riding as a powerful expression of self in a nation that has often tried to deny their very personhood. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can Sociology be nudged away from its traditional parochialism to embrace empirical work that focuses on the global south? Marco Garrido (assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago) and Victoria Reyes (assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside) are the editors of a recent special issue of Contexts magazine, New Ethnographies of the Global South, that brings together scholars doing fieldwork outside of the US and Europe. Marco and Victoria tell us about how they came to do ethnographic research on the Philippines and describe how the special issue emerged as part of a broader shift towards studying the Global South. We also talk with them about why and how there are pressures against overseas scholarship from within graduate programs and academic journals, how Global South ethnographers must translate their work for US audiences, and how younger scholars can pursue their interests while also positioning themselves for success. Victoria Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. Reyes studies culture, borders, and empire. Her work is driven by the question of how to understand territoriality in the 21stcentury. Her work has been published in Social Forces, Ethnography, Theory and Society, City & Community, Poetics, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology and she is the author of Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire. Marco Garrido is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Garrido's work has focused on the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila as located in slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Qualitative Sociology, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and he is the author of The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sasha Roseneil, Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Studies at University College London joins today to talk about the new book The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm: Intimate Citizenship Regimes in a Changing Europe, out 2020 with UCL Press. The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm explores the ongoing strength and insidious grip of couple-normativity across changing landscapes of law, policy and everyday life in four contrasting national contexts: the UK, Bulgaria, Norway and Portugal. By investigating how the couple-norm is lived and experienced, how it has changed over time, and how it varies between places and social groups, this book provides a detailed analysis of changing intimate citizenship regimes in Europe, and makes a major intervention in understandings of the contemporary condition of personal life. The authors develop the feminist concept of ‘intimate citizenship’ and propose the new concept of ‘intimate citizenship regime’, offering a study of intimate citizenship regimes as normative systems that have been undergoing profound change in recent decades. Against the backdrop of processes of de-patriarchalization, liberalization, pluralization and homonormalization, the ongoing potency of the couple-norm becomes ever clearer. The authors provide an analysis of how the couple-form is institutionalized, supported and mandated by legal regulations, social policies and everyday practices, and how this serves to shape the intimate life choices and trajectories of those who seem to be living aslant to the conventional heterosexual cohabiting couple-form. Attending also to practices and moments that challenge couple-normativity, both consciously chosen and explicit, as well as circumstantial, subconscious and implicit, The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm makes an important contribution to literatures on citizenship, intimacy, family life, and social change in sociology, social policy, socio-legal studies, gender/sexuality/queer studies and psychosocial studies. This book was researched and written through an EU grant by a pan-European group of scholars. As a result, it is available for free; follow the link above. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today on the New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network, we’re here today with Christopher Close, Associate Professor of History at St. Joseph’s University in the incomparable city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to talk about his latest book, State Formation and Shared Sovereignty: The Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic, 1488- 1696, out this year, 2021, with Cambridge University Press. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dozens of alliances asserting shared sovereignty formed in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries. Many accounts of state formation struggle to explain these leagues, since they characterize state formation as a process of internal bureaucratization within individual states. This comparative study of alliances in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries focuses on a formative time in European history, from the late fifteenth century until the immediate aftermath of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, to demonstrate how the sharing of sovereignty through alliances influenced the evolution of the Empire, the Dutch Republic, and their various member states in fundamental ways. Alliances simultaneously supported and constrained central and territorial authorities, while their collaborative policy-making process empowered smaller states, helping to ensure their survival. By revealing how the interdependencies of alliance shaped states of all sizes in the Empire and the Low Countries, Christopher W. Close opens new perspectives on state formation with profound implications for understanding the development of states across Europe. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Duane Jethro’s Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a terrific book. In it, Jethro develops a novel analytical framework to understand the relationship between the senses (taste, smell, sight, hearing and touch) and heritage formation. Heritage formation and the senses are intimately linked as foundational processes, important for untangling how heritage is actually nation-building and nation-building is better understood through material culture. Jethro’s interdisciplinary study makes an important contribution to sensory studies, memory studies and the material turn in the humanities and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this very special episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science we feature Lee Ann Fujii’s Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach (Routledge, 2018), which is the fifth title in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. Lee Ann Fujji was a professor at the University of Toronto who published widely on political violence, and on interview methods. She died unexpectedly in March 2018. The significance of her scholarship, the acuity of her intellect, and the density of her humanism were already well recognized in her too short lifetime. Yet the full importance of Lee Ann’s work, of how she conducted herself as one who both thought and felt deeply has continued to be acknowledged and celebrated since her passing—not least of all, through the community of new and emerging researchers she nurtured and mentored. On this episode, two of her mentees, Jessica Soedirgo and Aarjen Glas, reflect on their experiences working with Lee Ann. They talk about the contents of Interviewing in Social Science Research, on how relational interviewing methods differ from others, and discuss how Lee Ann’s approach inspired them to rethink their own projects, and collaborate with each other. Listeners interested in learning more about Lee Ann Fujii’s life and work can read tributes here (scroll down to “An Ode to Her Revolt: Remembering Lee Ann Fujii); and also get details about an award and travel grant in her name. Lahoma Thomas has an article on being mentored by Lee Ann, which Jessica Soedirgo mentions in the interview. To download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The conventional approach to suicide is psychiatric: ask the average person why people kill themselves, and they will likely cite depression. But this approach fails to recognize suicide’s social causes. People kill themselves because of breakups and divorces, because of lost jobs and ruined finances, because of public humiliations and the threat of arrest. While some psychological approaches address external stressors, this comprehensive study is the first to systematically examine suicide as a social behavior with social catalysts. Drawing on Donald Black’s theories of conflict management and pure sociology, Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction (University of Virginia Press, 2020) presents a new theory of the social conditions that compel an aggrieved person to turn to self-destruction. Interpersonal conflict plays a central but under-appreciated role in the incidence of suicide. Examining a wide range of cross-cultural cases, Jason Manning argues that suicide arises from increased inequality and decreasing intimacy, and that conflicts are more likely to become suicidal when they occur in a context of social inferiority. As suicide rates continue to rise around the world, this timely new theory can help clinicians, scholars, and members of the general public to explain and predict patterns of self-destructive behavior. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the shape and feel of the consumer economy. While this centre of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers challenged the managers and executives who directed their labours. Shannan Clark. author of The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism (Oxford UP, 2020), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the origins of the creative class, their labour union struggles and successes, the role of the Works Projects Administration, and institutions like the Design Laboratory and Consumer Union which foretell the experiences of today’s culture workers. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico (U California Press, 2020), based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magaña considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, young people remake urban space and construct new identities in ways that directly challenge elite visions of their city and essentialist notions of what it means to be indigenous in the contemporary era. Cartographies of Youth Resistance is essential reading for students and scholars interested in youth politics and culture in Mexico, social movements, urban studies, and migration. Dr. Magaña is sociocultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Mexican American studies at the university of Arizona. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This episode features three interviews with organizers and scholars concerned with Asian migrant sex work: SWAN Vancouver (Alison Clancey and Kelly Go), Dr. Lily Wong, and Dr. Yuri Doolan. On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long targeted three Atlanta-area spas and massage parlors and killed eight people: Delania Ashley Yuan González, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue. Six of these victims were Asian women. Within the days following the shooting, many groups representing women, Asian Americans, sex workers, and migrants, have collectively mourned and sent strength and solidarity to the eight victims and their families. This podcast episode seeks to express solidarity with these groups by highlighting the work of scholars and organizers who have been studying the racially encoded figures and the broader histories of Asian migrant sex work. We hope to give space here to understand how the violence that occurred on March 16 was imbricated within a racial capitalist structure that views Asian and Asian American women as disposable objects, a view that has been historically continuous with the histories of Chinese exclusion (initiated by fears of Chinese sex workers and yellow peril), and with over one hundred and fifty years of US imperialism in Asia, from the colonial theft of Hawai’i and the Philippine-American War to Japanese Incarceration, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and the growth of over eight-hundred military bases across the world. As the organizers and scholars interviewed here stress, it is crucial now to join groups local and international that stand for the decriminalization of migration and sex work, and to reject calls for hate-crime laws or anti-sex trafficking laws, or any legislation that would bring more policing, all of which would only make migrants and sex workers more vulnerable and stigmatized. Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the history of caste in a city? Indian modernizers assumed that the various processes of modernity, including industrial capitalism, would attenuate caste and create the possibility of new social relationships, including class solidarity. Instead, capitalism relied on caste to recruit and discipline labor, and the colonial and postcolonial governments deployed it for housing, city planning, and provisions for social welfare. On its part, caste adapted to housing, urban planning, and even land tenures. Even the purported antitheses of capitalism — Marxism and Communism — could not annihilate caste. As a result, caste became robust even as it was shrouded beneath the veneer of modern urban life. Outcaste Bombay (University of Washington Press, 2021) examines the interplay of caste and class in twentieth century Bombay. It studies processes that are transnational — capitalism, Marxism, urban planning, literature — and the ways in which they became relevant to life in the city. It focuses on urban outcastes — Dalits primarily, and also the urban poor – to trace their interaction with city-making and urban politics, their sense of self and community, and the cultural life they fashioned in Bombay. This inter-disciplinary book draws on rare English and Marathi language sources — including novels, poems, and manifestoes — and contributes to debates in the fields of South Asian history, global Marxism, social anthropology, urban studies, labor studies, Dalit studies, and literature. Juned Shaikh is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests include Modern South Asia, urban studies, labor studies, Dalit Studies, and global Marxism. His second book project will be on the life and times of Gangadhar Adhikari, a scientist who embraced communism, and became a prominent leader of the Communist Party of India. When he is not working, or spending time with his family, he enjoys cooking, gardening, hiking, and following cricket scores from around the world. Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on South Asian economic writing. He is also coordinator of the Medical Humanities Working Group at NYU, and of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. He also co-hosts the podcast High Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The last several decades have seen tremendous political and cultural strides forward for the LGBTQ+ community with both the legislative and cultural recognition helping many secure a more safe and open lifestyle than possible just a short while ago. However, these advances have raised a number of criticisms and qualifications, and not just from stuffy conservatives either. Many on the radical left have argued that the advances of gay, trans and queer persons is part of a broader attempt by the powers of capital to present an increasingly brutal economic society with a friendlier face, one of diversity and inclusion. This critique has led to a counter-critique of class-reductionism, the treatment of every issue and person from a very basic class-perspective. Diving right into this debate is my guest today, Peter Drucker, here to discuss his book Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (Brill, 2015). Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series, Drucker's book is unapologetically Marxist in its orientation and presents a massive history of sexual orientations and identity throughout much of human history, with particular focus on gender formations under colonialism, industrialization, and the more recent cases of Fordist and Neoliberal capitalism. However, Drucker also sees things that Marxists could learn from contemporary queer theory and practice as they try to navigate a world that was not designed for them, and as they try to build a better one. Rich in information and attentive to historical detail, this book is a fascinating combination of history, queer theory and political science that will be helpful to everyone who hopes to someday see a world where we all belong. Peter Drucker received his PhD in political science at Columbia University. A lifelong activist on the radical left, he has published widely on socialist theory and history, and has also written extensively on LGBTQ+ issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, but it prefigured as well the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in American society. And, yet, despite a vague, sometimes begrudging recognition of its immense import, more often than not the movement has been misrepresented and misunderstood. For the general public, a singular moment, frozen in time at the Lincoln Memorial, sums up much of what Americans know about that remarkable decade of struggle. In The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights (Oxford UP, 2021), Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people who made it. Holt conveys a sense of these developments as a social movement, one that shaped its participants even as they shaped it. He emphasizes the conditions of possibility that enabled the heroic initiatives of the common folk over those of their more celebrated leaders. This groundbreaking book reinserts the critical concept of "movement" back into our image and understanding of the civil rights movement. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
From its more mainstream, business-focused and business-friendly “Lean In” variants, to more radical, critical and intersectional understandings of feminism, the past decade has seen a flourishing of discussion from those proposing and critiquing different schools of thought for the way we think about gender in society. Dr. Eugenia Cheng’s addition to this conversation is x+y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender (Basic Books, 2020). She applies insights gained from her mathematical background to propose a new way to talk about gender and to propose an alternative: the terms “ingressive” and “congressive” behavior. In this interview, Dr. Cheng and I talk about what we gain from bringing a mathematical understanding to questions of social relations and structures. We talk about how she rethinks “gender”, and the new terms she proposes in her book. We end with a short discussion of whether these insights are applicable to conversations about other demographic and social identifiers. Dr. Eugenia Cheng is a mathematician and concert pianist. She is Scientist In Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a PhD in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Alongside her research in Category Theory and undergraduate teaching her aim is to rid the world of “math-phobia”. She was an early pioneer of math on YouTube and her videos have been viewed over 15 million times to date. Her other books are How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics (Basic Books: 2016), which was featured on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics (Basic Books: 2017) which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize in 2017 and The Art of Logic in an Illogical World (Basic Books: 2018) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of x+y. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Feminist Geography Unbound: Discomfort, Bodies, and Prefigured Futures, edited by Banu Gökarıksel, Michael Hawkins, Christopher Neubert, and Sara Smith (West Virginia University Press, 2021) is a collection of papers by a diverse range of up-and-coming scholars in feminist geography. Addressing topics from Dalit activism to tiny houses to restrictions on transgender bathroom use, the collection challenges the "comfort feminism" promoted by white middle-class feminists and asks us to embrace productive discomfort in scholarship and activism to seek out a better future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How does a specific American religious identity acquire racial meaning? What happens when we move beyond phenotypes and include clothing, names, and behaviors to the characteristics that inform ethnoracial categorization? Forever Suspect, Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror (Rutgers University Press, 2018) provides a nuanced portrayal of the experiences of South Asian and Arab Muslims in post 9/11 America and the role of racialized state and private citizen surveillance in shaping Muslim lived experiences. Saher Selod, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Simmons University, shares with us her story of growing up in Kansas and Texas and how writing this book helped her reclaim her own racialized experiences as the children of Pakistani immigrants to the US. Saher first began this project as a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. As she returned to the dissertation to craft it into a book, she realized that beyond just race, racism and racialization, surveillance was a key recurring theme for the interview respondents. In today’s conversation, we explore the nuances of gender, race and surveillance, what it means to “Fly while Muslim”, and the harmful consequences of institutional surveillance laws like “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) that came about during the Obama Administration. We also touch on limitations of the book, including the exclusion of Black Muslims from this specific project. Saher’s openness with which she shares how her thinking has evolved over the years since this project first began leads us to discuss the ways in which non-Black Muslim immigrants and American born Muslims enact and maintain white supremacist structures. Forever Suspect provides an important and eye opening lens for us to consider how racialized surveillance, in all dimensions and forms, the War on Terror and U.S. Empire building continues to impact Muslim communities in the U.S. Nafeesa Andrabi is a 4th year Sociology PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, a Biosocial Fellow at Carolina Population Center and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In America's Pacific Northwest a group of conservative Protestants have been conducting a new experiment in cultural transformation. Dissatisfied with what they see as the clumsy political engagement and vapid literary and artistic culture of mainstream Evangelicals, these Christian Reconstructionists have deployed an altogether different set of strategies for the long game, fueled by their Calvinist theology and much-more-hopeful apocalypse. In Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford UP, 2021), Crawford Gribben presents a hybrid study of historical, theological, literary, and anthropological analysis of this variant of Evangelical counter-culture. Gribben paints a rich and detailed portrait of this loosely banded, sometimes coordinated migration to the "American redoubt." This migration has led, in part, to the establishment of a network of communities and institutions that include churches, a liberal arts college, a publishing house, and an ambitious media strategy that has already had an outsize impact. From their outpost in Idaho and prompted by their revised postmillennial eschatology, these Christian conservatives are preparing to survive the collapse American society and to reconstruct a godly society that will usher in the Kingdom of Christ. For this group of born-again Protestants, their apocalyptic strategy is precisely to be left behind. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Rebecca Bryant, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, and Mete Hatay, the Senior Research Consultant at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, co-authored Sovereignty Suspended: Building the So-Called State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). The monograph is based on more than two decades of ethnographic and archival research in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus – an entity that looks like a state and acts like a state but that much of the world says does not or should not exist. Sovereignty Suspended traces the process by which the north portion of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus began to emerge as a separate but unrecognized state-like space following the violent partition of the mid-1970s. The authors excavate the contradictions and paradoxes of life in a “de facto” state, arguing that it is only by rethinking the concept of de facto statehood as a realm of social and cultural practice that we will come to understand the longevity of such states and what it means to live in them. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. Action at a Distance (Meson Press, 2020) this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality: John Durham Peters looks at episodes of simultaneity and synchronization. Christina Vagt discusses the agency of computer models against the backdrop of aesthetic theories by Henri Bergson and Hans Blumenberg, and Florian Sprenger discusses early electrical transmissions through copper wire and the temporality of instantaneity. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice often with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Phil Zuckerman's book, Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (2nd ed.) (New York University Press, 2020), points out that religious conservatives around the world often claim that a society without a strong foundation of faith would necessarily be an immoral one, bereft of ethics, values, and meaning. Indeed, the Christian Right in the United States has argued that a society without God would be hell on earth. Zuckerman, however, challenges these claims. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with more than 150 citizens of Denmark and Sweden, among the least religious countries in the world, he shows that, far from being inhumane, crime-infested, and dysfunctional, highly secular societies are healthier, safer, greener, less violent, and more democratic and egalitarian than highly religious ones. Society without God provides a rich portrait of life in a secular society, exploring how a culture without faith copes with death, grapples with the meaning of life, and remains content through everyday ups and downs. Phil Zuckerman is an Associate Dean and Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. He is also a regular affiliated professor at Claremont Graduate University, and he has been a guest professor for two years at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. In 2011, Phil founded the first Secular Studies department in the nation, he regularly writes for Psychology Today, Huffington Post, and numerous scholarly journals, and his books have been translated and published in Danish, Farsi, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Italian. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (Intellect Books, 2020) is an exploration of China’s cultural economy over the last twenty years, particularly through the lens of its creative hub of Shanghai. The research presented here raises questions about the nature of contemporary ‘creative’ capitalism and the universal claims of Western modernity, offering new ways of thinking about cultural policy in China. Taking a long-term historical perspective, Justin O’Connor and Xin Gu analyze the ongoing development of China’s cultural industries, examining the institutions, regulations, interests, and markets that underpin the Chinese cultural economy and the strategic position of Shanghai within it. Further, the authors explore cultural policy reforms in post-colonial China and articulate Shanghai’s significance in paving China’s path to modernity and entry to global capitalism. In-depth and illuminating, Red Creative carefully situates China’s contemporary cultural economy in its larger global and historical context, revealing the limits of Western thought in understanding Chinese history, culture, and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Whether framed as complaints about cancel culture or as increased awareness of prejudice, stories about offensive language are common in our daily news cycle. In On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2020), linguist Karen Stollznow explores the history of language that offends, including talk about race and ethnicity, gender, religion, mental health, physical appearance, and age. Her book tells the origin story of how terms come to have the power to offend. It also investigates the euphemism treadmill, the phenomenon of offensive terms being replaced with new, neutral terms which eventually become offensive as well. Despite the large number of terms the book deals with, she argues that it isn’t impossible to keep track of what’s offensive and what isn’t. By explaining the background to our language and its implications for the lived experiences of human beings, Stollznow hopes the book will enable its readers to examine their own language and its power—for harm and for good. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Citizenship is acquired and constructed through various mechanisms, including language tests, that require individuals to demonstrate a sufficient national identity. For some recent migrants, acquiring citizenship and passing rigorous language testing still is not enough to feel like they belong. Becoming a Citizen: Linguistic Trials and Negotiations in the UK (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019) provides valuable context for how language and sociolinguistics impacts citizenship in both official and unofficial ways. Kamran Khan, a sociolinguist at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, explores the process of acquiring UK citizenship and investigates how the naturalisation process is experienced, with an explicit focus on language practices. This ethnographically-informed study focuses on W, a Yemeni immigrant in the UK, during the final phase of the citizenship process. In this time, he encounters linguistic trials and tests involving the Life in the UK citizenship test, community life, ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), adult education and the citizenship ceremony. The richness of linguistic data featured in this book allows for a nuanced portrayal of the complexities of becoming a citizen. This is especially so in the context of the UK's assimilationist form of citizenship which is reflected in the introduction of a citizenship test within a broader socio-political climate. Becoming a Citizen offers a detailed analysis of the linguistic process of naturalisation in the UK and is relevant to scholars working in sociolinguistics, language policy, migration studies and ethnographic research. Nafeesa Andrabi is a 4th year Sociology PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, a Biosocial Fellow at Carolina Population Center and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Shelter in A Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) by Dr. Jelani Favors fills the “missing pages” of history by highighting the enduring role that Black colleges have played in African American freedom movements in the long-twentieth century. Favors shows that Black colleges created freedom fighters whose organizing, dedication, and fearlessness made the Black Freedom Struggle’s most pivotal moments possible. Favors also argues that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were fortified interstitial spaces for consciousness-raising and solidarity-building among race women and race men. HBCU students, faculty, and administrators were vital players in fashioning blueprints for Black liberation and ensuring the inter-generational transmission of resistance wisdom. Taking the long view and moving through a tour of Black higher education, Favors theorizes that a hidden second curriculum and a Black college communitas thrived on each campus, making them both seedbeds of racial justice and shelter in a time of storm. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A close friend and muse of many of postrevolutionary Mexico's greatest artists, Luz Jiménez's likeness appears across Mexico City in the form of painting, photography, and sculpture. Jiménez's ubiquity has earned her the titles of "the most painted woman in all of Mexico" and "the archetype of Indigenous Mexican woman." And yet the details of her complex life as an Indigenous woman at mid century have long remained shrouded by artistic depictions of her face and body. Jiménez's experience of hypervisibility and simultaneous erasure in postrevolutionary Mexico is no anomaly; during the early to mid-twentieth century, Indigenous women were idealized and objectified as relics of Mexico's past as cultural elites sought to manufacture a distinctly mestizo future. The experiences of modern Indigenous women constitute the focus of Natasha Varner's new book, La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2020), a vivid recovery of the intersections of settler colonialism, gender, visual culture, and modernity. Varner employs methods from the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies and settler colonial studies in an innovative new study of postrevolutionary Mexican visual culture. Drawing upon a range of midcentury media - including newspapers, photography, film, postcards and tourism materials, and more - Varner weaves together narratives of visibility, erasure, survivance, dispossession, and identity that ultimately center upon on Indigenous women's experiences and livelihoods. Despite efforts to erase Indigenous women from Mexico's future, La Raza Cosmética impresses upon us a powerful reminder of Indigenous women's persistence in Mexico - at midcentury as well as in the present. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to David G. White, Jr. about his book Disrupting Corporate Culture: How Cognitive Science Alters Accepted Beliefs About Culture and Culture Change and Its Impact on Leaders and Change Agents (Routledge, 2021). David G. White, Jr. is a cognitive anthropologist working with organizations on culture, change, and leadership issues. He’s the co-founder of Ontos Global, a boutique consulting firm. David previously held leadership roles at Microsoft, Mercer, and IBM, and he is also a professional jazz musician with 7 CDs to his credit. This episode challenges myths that hinder true culture change at companies, such as Culture Starts at the Top and Culture Is What We Say We Care About. Instead, David argues that new neural pathways form in the brain based on tangible, physical practices that change. So leaders spouting off about “shared values” (talking the talk) won’t be nearly as productive as investigating a company’s dominant logic and how that may serve or hinter the company’s prospects. In other words, David argues that culture is shaped by tasks and the basic operating assumptions that underlie them. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Global Education Effect and Japan: Constructing New Borders and Identification Practices (Routledge, 2020) volume investigates the "global education effect"--the impact of global education initiatives on institutional and individual practices and perceptions--with a special focus on the dynamics of border-construction, recognition, subversion, and erasure regarding "Japan". The Japanese government's push for global education has taken shape mainly in the form of English-Medium Instruction programs and bringing in international students who actually serve as a foreign workforce to fill the declining labour force. Chapters in this volume draw from education, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and psychology to examine the ways in which demographic changes, economic concerns, race politics, and nationhood intersect with the efforts to "globalize" education and create specific "global education effects" in the Japanese archipelago. This book will provide a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in Japanese studies and global education. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This episode of Ethnographic Marginalia features Dr. Leslie MacColman, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Sociology at The Ohio State University who studies crime and policing in Latin America. Leslie explains how extensive experiences with civil society organizations inspired her move to academia while continuing to inform her research. She then describes research on police reform in Buenos Aires and how a project that centered police experiences grew to include government officials, activists, sex workers, and homeless teens. Leslie tells us how her identity as an American woman affected the way her participants related to her, and how her responsibilities as a mother affected the kind of fieldwork she could do. Finally, she reflects on how recent calls for police reform in the US have affected how her own research is understood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Scientists have scientific reason and use the scientific method. Humanists have... Emotion? Close reading? Not so, argues Eric Hayot in Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (Columbia UP, 2021). Contrary to popular belief, the humanities involve both reasoning and methods. Humanist reason, Hayot shows, is philosophically and historically grounded and applicable to almost every discipline. Part history of philosophy, part methods handbook, and part manifesto, Humanist Reason will change the way we advocate for the humanities in the twenty-first century. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Has 'migrant' become an unshakeable identity for some people? How does this happen and what role does the media play in classifying individuals as 'migrants' rather than people? How Media and Conflicts Make Migrants (Manchester UP, 2020) challenges the idea of the 'migrant', pointing instead to the array of systems and processes that force this identity on individuals, shaping their interactions with the state and with others. Kirsten Folkert, Gargi Bhattacharyya, and Janna Graham speak to Pierre d'Alancaisez about their research carried out in the United Kingdom and Italy and examine how media representations construct global conflicts in a climate of changing media habits, widespread mistrust, and fake news. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy: Carnival, Politics, and Musical Engagement in Haiti (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a study of carnival, politics, and the musical engagement of ordinary citizens and celebrity musicians in contemporary Haiti. Drawing on more than a decade and a half of ethnographic research, Rebecca Dirksen presents an in-depth consideration of politically and socially engaged music and what these expressions mean for the Haitian population in the face of challenging political and economic circumstances. The book centers the voices of Haitian musicians and regular citizens by extensively sharing interviews and detailed analyses of musical performance in the context of contemporary events well beyond the musical realm. Dr. Rebecca Dirksen is an ethnomusicologist working across the spectrum of musical genres in Haiti and its diaspora. Her research concerns cultural approaches to development, crisis, and disaster; sacred ecologies, diverse environmentalisms, and ecomusicology; and applied/engaged/activist scholarship. She is a professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington and a founding member of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT). Dr. Isabel Machado serves as reviews editor for the Oral History Journal and is guest editing a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Festival Studies on the “Materiality of Festivities.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Religious people have a range of new media in which they can share their beliefs and reflect on what it means to believe, to act, and to be members of their religious communities. In Talk about Faith: How Debate and Conversation Shape Belief (Cambridge UP, 2021), Stephen Pihlaja investigates how Christians and Muslims interact with each other through debates broadcast online, podcasts, and YouTube videos. He explores the way in which they present themselves and their faiths and how they situate their ideas in relationship to each other and to their perceived audiences Pihlaja argues that people position themselves and others differently depending on conversational contexts and topic, generalizing about themselves in relationship to a range of already-existing storylines, whether they're talking about biblical inerrancy, the nature of Islam, to homosexuality and interracial dating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In contemporary policy discourse, the notion of corruption is highly constricted, understood just as the pursuit of private gain while fulfilling a public duty. Its paradigmatic manifestations are bribery and extortion, placing the onus on individuals, typically bureaucrats. Sudhir Chella Rajan argues that this understanding ignores the true depths of corruption, which is properly seen as a foundation of social structures. Not just bribes but also caste, gender relations, and the reproduction of class are forms of corruption. In A Social Theory of Corruption: Notes from the Indian Subcontinent (Harvard UP, 2020), Rajan argues that syndromes of corruption can be identified by paying attention to social orders and the elites they support. From the breakup of the Harappan civilization in the second millennium BCE to the anticolonial movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites and their descendants made off with substantial material and symbolic gains for hundreds of years before their schemes unraveled. Rajan makes clear that this grander form of corruption is not limited to India or the annals of global history. Societal corruption is endemic, as tax cheats and complicit bankers squirrel away public money in offshore accounts, corporate titans buy political influence, and the rich ensure that their children live lavishly no matter how little they contribute. These elites use their privileged access to power to fix the rules of the game—legal structures and social norms—benefiting themselves, even while most ordinary people remain faithful to the rubrics of everyday life. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row—a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year—and they’re still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. They demonstrate why, for those who used to prosper in America, capitalism is no longer delivering. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020) paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today’s America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America. This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism’s excesses and make it work for everyone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability (2020, University of Minnesota Press) provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system. Liat Ben-Moshe (https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/) provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom. Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Brian Foster, self-identified Black boy from rural Mississippi, joins us today for a conversation about his book, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020). In this interview, he shares with us how his experiences growing up in, leaving and returning home to Mississippi shaped his storytelling. Foster first began this ethnographic project as a doctoral student in Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill. As he tells us, the project started as an exploration of educational inequality and race. It became something very different as he let himself be guided by the stories and experiences of the community he was researching. Brian tells us about a few of the folks he met while living in Clarksdale who shaped the direction and core ideas of this book; their stories highlighted perplexing and sometimes uncomfortable contradictions about what it meant to love and not like the Blues. We learn about Clarksdale, MI and the unique history of the Mississippi Delta, the development of the Blues Commission and Blues tourism as an effort to combat declining manufacturing and agricultural industries, the significance of the Blues to the Delta region, and the contradictions between investing in the Blues and investing in Black communities. We discuss storytelling, examining positionality in ethnographic research and how Foster sees Blues Epistemology as a lens to prioritize seeing Black Southerners as complex human rather than constructed caricatures. I Don’t Like the Blues tells us an often-overlooked history of a community who has come to be defined as just one thing – Black Southerners – by just one thing – the Blues. By taking us into the homes, cars, backyards and neighborhoods of Black Clarksdalians, Foster gives us the stories and the framework for thinking about how race, place and community development has shaped the lives of Black folks in contemporary Mississippi. Recently, his public writing “How We Got Here” on his Mississippian family and the tradition of hog slaughter, was developed into an award-winning short film. You can learn more about Brian’s ongoing work on his website. Nafeesa Andrabi a 4th year Sociology PhD student with specialization in Race/Ethnicity and Health/Illness. I am currently a Biosocial Fellow at Carolina Population Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The concept of the individual self - a being that is autonomous, rational and largely without vulnerability - shapes current legal frameworks, the power dynamics between individuals, and limits the opportunities of many people who are marginalised to flourish in their own conception of the good life. In his latest book, Professor Jonathan Herring argues for a radical reconceptualisation of the self. One based not on individual rights, but instead which focuses on promoting and protecting caring relationships between people. He argues that the law has the potential to play a powerful role in shaping a relational concept of self, and that this is what it should do. Instead of discriminating against vulnerability, the law should celebrate the universal vulnerabilities of all. Rather than disadvantaging carers, the law has the power to recognise our mutual interdependence and interconnectedness; this will bring about a more equitable society for all, one in which the value and dignity of all variations of what it is to be human can be recognised and celebrated. In Law and the Relational Self (Cambridge UP, 2019) Herring provides a comprehensive theoretical framework of the relational self which he applies in real-life practical situations: he examines domestic abuse, medical law, family law and criminal law. In each of these examples the Herring makes a convincing case for replacing the concept of the individual self with that of the relational self, and shows the power of law in doing so. This is an important book and should change the way that legal scholars, practitioners and all individuals think about themselves and how the law works. It offers potential for a new way of being, and a world where the things that really matter are protected in law. Jonathan Herring is a fellow in Law at Exeter College, and a professor of Law in the Law Faculty at the University of Oxford. At the time that this interview was recorded he had over 250 publications, including 107 books on topics spanning family law, medical law, criminal law and legal issues surrounding care and old age. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals (University of Virginia Press, 2020) dives into the discussion and debate surrounding the 2016 primary and how Donald Trump was ultimately nominated by the Republican Party to be their standard bearer and then elected president. But this is not the center of the book—though it is a very important data point. Christopher Stout, Associate Professor of Political Science at Oregon State University, came to this question about identity politics and how this understanding of rhetorical and political levers is at play with different groups of voters in the United States, through the work of Charles Hamilton and considerations of the idea of deracialized strategies in American politics. Hamilton, who has written a forward to The Case for Identity Politics, co-authored, with Kwame Toure, the 1967 text Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, bringing forward this deracialization thesis that provides the jumping off point for Stout’s research and analysis. Stout discusses this concept of the deracialization of political rhetoric and campaigns, especially by Democratic presidential candidates over the past thirty or forty years. The Case for Identity Politics explores the nuances of policy appeals that center on race and policy appeals that deracialize the policy itself. Stout, in examining these different paths over the past decades, also traces some of the changes within American political parties, most particularly within the parties themselves and whom the parties see and respond to as their base supporters. This is a rich, detailed, and methodologically diverse study of identity politics, and how identity, particularly racial identity, has worked within politics in the United States, operating differently at state/local levels and national levels. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Mine is one of the first words babies learn. By the time we grow up, the idea of ownership seems natural, whether buying a cup of coffee or a house. But who controls the space behind your airplane seat: you reclining or the squished laptop user behind? Why is plagiarism wrong, but it's okay to knock-off a recipe or a dress design? And after a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, but in New York you lose the space and the chair? Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives (Doubleday, 2021) explains these puzzles and many more. Surprisingly, there are just six simple stories that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the story that steers us to do what they want. But we can always pick a different story. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality. As Michael Heller and James Salzman show--in the spirited style of Freakonomics, Nudge, and Predictably Irrational--ownership is always up for grabs. With stories that are eye-opening, mind-bending, and sometimes infuriating, Mine! reveals the rules of ownership that secretly control our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Transnational Identities on Okinawa’s Military Bases: Invisible Armies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), Johanna Zulueta considers the role of civilian workers on U.S. bases in Okinawa, Japan and how transnational movements within East Asia during the Occupation period brought foreign workers, mostly from the Philippines, to work on these bases. Decades later, in a seeming “reproduction of base labour”, returnees of both Okinawan and Philippine heritage began occupying jobs on base as United States of Japan (USFJ) employees. The book investigates the role that ethnicity, nationality, and capital play in the lives of these base employees, and at the same time examines how Japanese and Okinawan identity/ies are formed and challenged. It offers a valuable resource for those interested in Japan and Okinawa, U.S. military basing, migration, and mixed ethnicities. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Tijuana is the largest of Mexico’s northern border cities, and although it has struggled during the United States’ dramatic escalation of border enforcement, it nonetheless remains deeply connected with California by one of the largest, busiest international ports of entry in the world. In Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Rihan Yeh probes the border’s role in shaping Mexican senses of self and collectivity. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Yeh examines a range of ethnographic evidence: public demonstrations, internet forums, popular music, dinner table discussions, police encounters, workplace banter, intensely personal interviews, and more. Through these everyday exchanges, she shows how the promise of passage and the threat of prohibition shape Tijuana’s communal sense of “we” and throw into relief long-standing divisions of class and citizenship in Mexico.
Out of the nitty-gritty of quotidian talk and interaction in Tijuana, Yeh captures the dynamics of desire and denial that permeate public spheres in our age of transnational crossings and fortified borders. Original and accessible, Passing is a timely work in light of current fierce debates over immigration, Latin American citizenship, and the US-Mexico border. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This is not a comprehensive study of every sexual quirk, kink and ritual across all cultures throughout time, as that would entail writing an encyclopaedia. Rather, this is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless. The act of sex has not changed since people first worked out what went where, but the ways in which society dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed have varied significantly through the ages. Humans are the only creatures that stigmatise particular sexual practices, and sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world. Attitudes will change and grow - hopefully for the better - but sex will never be free of stigma or shame unless we acknowledge where it has come from. Drawing upon extensive research from Dr Kate Lister's Whores of Yore website and written with her distinctive humour and wit, A Curious History of Sex (Unbound, 2020) covers topics ranging from twentieth- century testicle thefts to Victorian doctors massaging the pelvises of their female patients, from smutty bread innuendos dating back to AD 79, to the new and controversial sex doll brothels. It is peppered with surprising and informative historical slang and illustrated by eye-opening, toe- curling and hilarious images. In this fascinating book, Lister deftly debunks myths and stereotypes and gives unusual sexual practices an historical framework, as she provides valuable context for issues facing people today, including gender, sexual shame, beauty and language. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Duke University officially integrated its student body in the early 1960s, but the University itself did little to make students of color feel as though Duke was their academic home. During this decade, black students organized, agitated, protested, and finally took the bold step of occupying the University's main administrative building for one harrowing day, all in an effort to bring equality and rights to this historically white university campus. In his deeply researched book, Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice (Duke University Press, 2021) Theodore D. Segal tells the story of the students, administrators, and activists who forced Duke to acknowledge and address its segregation and disparity. Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
John M. Janzen's Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo (Wisconsin University Press, 2019) offers a granular and insightful view of the state of healthcare services in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo), and examines the extent to which said services are able to improve the health of the communities that inhabit this region. The collapse of the Congolese state during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the deterioration and virtual disappearance of state-sponsored healthcare institutions. This vacuum came to be filled by organisms such as the World Health Organization, other NGOs and health-based institutions organized under the new framework of the health zone. As a result, a precarious healthcare system emerged, one that combines the ingenuity and resources of the local population with those from external sources. Unfortunately, this system is only able to offer a limited and fragile solution to the health needs of the populations it seeks to serve. Janzen uses this examination to remind us that positive health outcomes are not merely a factor of adequate knowledge and resources, but also require that those in charge of creating and implementing health policies are seen as legitimate within their communities. To support this argument, he starts by describing the population history of the region in relation to policies of the colonial and postcolonial era, and the ways in which specific diseases affected the lives peoples in the region. He then explores the different kind of institutions that support the social reproduction of health and the ways in which people in this region explain what it means to be healthy. Finally, he looks at theories of legitimation, both in Western thought and in the Kongo culture, and argues that legitimacy is a key element in the creation of a robust and effective healthcare system. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this magnum opus, Paul Vallely guides the reader on a journey through the history and meaning of giving in religion and society. Vivid with anecdote and scholarly insight, this magisterial survey – from the ancient Greeks to today's high-tech geeks – provides an original take on the history of philanthropy. It shows how giving has, variously, been a matter of honor, altruism, religious injunction, political control, moral activism, enlightened self-interest, public good, personal fulfillment and plutocratic manipulation. Its narrative moves from the Greek man of honor and Roman patron, via the Jewish prophet and Christian scholastic – through Puritan proto-capitalist, Enlightenment activist and Victorian moralist – to the robber-baron philanthropist, the welfare socialist, the celebrity activist and today's wealthy mega-giver. In the process it discovers that philanthropy lost an essential element as it entered the modern era. The book then embarks on a journey to determine where today's philanthropists come closest to recovering that missing dimension. Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020) explores the successes and failures of philanthrocapitalism, examines its claims and contradictions, and asks tough questions of top philanthropists and leading thinkers – among them Richard Branson, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Jonathan Ruffer, David Sainsbury, John Studzinski, Bob Geldof, Naser Haghamed, Lenny Henry, Jonathan Sacks, Rowan Williams, Ngaire Woods, and the presidents of the Rockefeller and Soros foundations, Rajiv Shah and Patrick Gaspard. In extended conversations they explore the relationship between philanthropy and family, faith, society, art, politics, and the creation and distribution of wealth. Highly engaging and meticulously researched, Paul Vallely's authoritative account of philanthropy then and now critiques the excessive utilitarianism of much modern philanthrocapitalism and points to how philanthropy can rediscover its soul. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can the history of women’s work in film and TV help address inequality today? In Women’s Activism Behind the Screens: Trade Unions and Gender Inequality in the British Film and Television Industries (University of Bristol Press, 2020), Frances Galt, a Teaching Associate in history at Newcastle University, looks at the history of women’s struggles for equality within unions in the screen industry, to show the lessons of how gender equality has progressed and receded since the 1930s. The book draws on a rich blend of archival, oral history, and policy document research, presenting the context for key moments in the fight to support the status of women in the film and television industries. A fascinating history, with crucial lessons for contemporary activism, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the beginnings of the country, with the rhetoric only ratcheting up in recent times. Our current era of fake news, alternative facts, and media partisanship has led to a breeding ground for all types of myths and misinformation to gain traction and legitimacy. Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty (Oxford UP, 2021) is the first book to systematically address and confront many of the most widespread myths pertaining to poverty. Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock powerfully demonstrate that the realities of poverty are much different than the myths; indeed in many ways they are more disturbing. The idealized image of American society is one of abundant opportunities, with hard work being rewarded by economic prosperity. But what if this picture is wrong? What if poverty is an experience that touches the majority of Americans? What if hard work does not necessarily lead to economic well-being? What if the reasons for poverty are largely beyond the control of individuals? And if all of the evidence necessary to disprove these myths has been readily available for years, why do they remain so stubbornly pervasive? These are much more disturbing realities to consider because they call into question the very core of America's identity. Armed with the latest research, Poorly Understood not only challenges the myths of poverty and inequality, but it explains why these myths continue to exist, providing an innovative blueprint for how the nation can move forward to effectively alleviate American poverty. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community, and the Meaning of Generosity (Knopf, 2020) is an utterly unique, deeply personal meditation on what it means to tend to others and to ourselves--and how the two things work hand in hand. Priya Basil explores how food--and the act of offering food to others--are used to express love and support. Weaving together stories from her own life with knowledge gleaned from her Sikh heritage; her years spent in Kenya, India, Britain, and Germany; and ideas from Derrida, Plato, Arendt, and Peter Singer, Basil focuses an unexpected and illuminating light on what it means to be both a host and a guest. Lively, wide-ranging, and impassioned, Be My Guest is a singular work, at once a deeply felt plea for a kinder, more welcoming world and a reminder that, fundamentally, we all have more in common than we imagine. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Ming-Hui Huang about her book (coauthored with Roland T. Rust), The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) This episode covers the movement of the economy from brawn to brains to hearts. Put another way, the focus here is on the movement from the Physical Economy (farming, factories, etc.) to the Thinking Economy to now the dawning of the Feeling Economy. In the near-term future, artificial intelligence (AI) will handle the thinking tasks and humans on the job will focus on adding value through empathy and their interpersonal skills. The episode explores everything from workers re-skilling, cross-skilling and up-skilling to handle this change, to the impact of this change to being feeling-centric on our politics, educational practices, and the expectations of consumers. Of special note is that the new economic era may privilege female “soft” skills over the “hard” skills men are known by and often more comfortable with. Ming-Hui Huang holds a number of posts. She’s a Distinguished Professor at National Taiwan University; a fellow of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC); an International Research Fellow of the Centre for Corporate Reputation, University of Oxford, UK; and a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Service, University of Maryland, USA. She is also the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Service Research. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Blog Post: In Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse (Oxford University Press, 2019), Dr. Ethan Pollock discusses one of life’s basic questions—How do people get clean?—in a way that embeds those everyday practices into a sophisticated historical context. From legends about medieval Kievan rulers, to everyday Russians in the Soviet era, the banya has been a consistent part of everyday life. While its existence has been continuous, the meanings assigned to the banya have been at once diffuse, contradictory, and reflective of prevailing cultural and political trends and questions. Dr. Pollock’s book addresses these themes and more, in this fascinating historical survey. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It’s often said that the time in our lives can often pass without us noticing. Old age can come before we realize it, and it brings with it new elements to our own daily lives that we couldn’t have anticipated before. Observed from a distance and growing old can seem like a universal experience, but observed up close, it becomes clear that the different ways people age are as varied and unique as the people themselves, and these differences can come from within and without. Whether you get to live out your twilight years in a comfortable retirement home in the country, or an understaffed inner-city hospital, these experiences will be profoundly different, and likely had different paths that led to them. Viewed in this way, aging is seen not as some eternal experience that is the same for all people, but as a fundamental part of our politics and economic dynamics, for better and for worse. The COVID-crisis of the last year has brought to light how vulnerable our elderly are, how understaffed our care-facilities are, and how much needs to change to provide lives of safety, comfort and dignity to our elders, but in many ways all this crisis has done is exacerbated certain tensions and antagonisms that were already there, barely concealed by the relentless optimism of neoliberal technocrats. Changing these systems will mean rethinking the aging process, and connecting it with broader questions traditionally raised by the fields of critical theory and radical critiques of political economy. Diving right into this project are my guests today, Carroll Estes and Nicholas DiCarlo, here to discuss their recent publication Aging A-Z: Concepts Toward Emancipatory Gerontology (Routledge 2019). Styled as a sort of dictionary, the book has entries for a number of terms you would expect a book like this to have: Ableism, Home Care and Retirement all make appearances. Readers will be surprised, however, by the number of entries that also make appearances: Climate Change, Colonialism, Epistemology, Leninist Strategy and Praxis all make appearances as well. This book then is incredibly broad in scope, and attempts to force readers to realize the ways in which aging is affected that go beyond one’s immediate concern, bringing a new layer of understanding to the phrase: ‘The personal is political.’ Speaking as someone who has spent the entirety of the COVID-crisis working in elderly care, this book was a joyful revelation to flip through, and should be considered critical reading by anyone impacted by aging. Carroll Estes has a long and distinguished career in both academia and activism. She is professor emerita of Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. It was there that she founded the Institute for Health and Aging. She has written numerous books and articles on the politics of aging, including the co-authored The Long Term Care Crisis, which was a 1994 Most Important Book (Choice Magazine). She is also the recipient of numerous academic honors, and is the former president of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the American Society on Aging (ASA) and the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE). Nicholas DiCarlo writes about aging and social policy at the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco. They have a Masters of Social Work, and a private psychotherapy practice in Oakland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Alan Klima’s Ethnography #9 (Duke University Press, 2019) was co-written by a ghost. And that’s just the start of what’s going on in this eerie, singular book. It’s a discussion of finance in post-crash Thailand, a study of non-material histories, and an examination of the limits of anthropological writing. It’s also at once a complex and textured challenge to ethnographic realism and a compelling story about the life and death (and etc) of a young girl. The book was a co-winner of 2020’s Gregory Bateson Prize and is available open access here. In today’s conversation, I do my best to ask Professor Klima about the status of ghosts in anthropology, tensions between narrative and theory, and how anthropologists can get weird with their writing. Alan Klima is Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis, his previous works include the book The Funeral Casino (Princeton University Press 2002) and the film Ghosts and Numbers (2010). Lachlan Summers is an eccentric billionaire and PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, where he researches Mexico City’s repeating earthquakes. He is a Contributing Editor at Cultural Anthropology, a member of the Emergent Futures CoLab, and can be found on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Bestselling author Timothy Keller and legal scholar John Inazu bring together a thrilling range of artists, thinkers, and leaders to provide a guide to faithful living in a pluralistic, fractured world. How can Christians today interact with those around them in a way that shows respect to those whose beliefs are radically different but that also remains faithful to the gospel? Timothy Keller and John Inazu bring together illuminating stories--their own and from others--to answer this vital question. Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference (Thomas Nelson, 2020) gathers an array of perspectives from people thinking deeply and working daily to live with humility, patience, and tolerance in our time. Providing varied and enlightening approaches to reaching faithfully across deep and often painful differences, Uncommon Ground shows us how to live with confidence, joy, and hope in a complex and fragmented age. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The meaning of being an immigrant has changed significantly in the 21st century. The internet, social media and networks, cost of travels, homeland products of food that one can find all over the world, working far from home – all bring new opportunities to the idea of living in one place, but still feel deep belonging with the homeland. Growing numbers of Israelis are living today in Europe. The book, Zion: The Israeli Diaspora in Europe (Pardes, 2019; in Hebrew), gives us a wide picture of their lives, challenges but also shows us a glimpse for a broader perspective around being an immigrant and having an hybrid identity. Some of these Israelis still work remotely in companies based in Israel, in Hebrew, visiting Israel once a month since it is cheap and takes only a few hours of travel. They speak Hebrew with their kids, meet with other Israelis who live in their European city, and use Israeli media. Many of their parents or grandparents left Europe after the Holocaust or a bit before, to create a homeland for the Jewish people in Zion. Now, their children and grandchildren are moving back to Europe and make there, their new homes. In his book, journalist David Stavrou brings us their stories, stories that invite other immigrants and scholars to rethink about the meaning of living in two homes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Two stores sit side-by-side. One with signage overflowing with text: a full list of business services (income tax returns, notary public, a variety of insurance) on the storefront, twenty-two words in all. It provides business services (a lot of them). The other showing a single word—james—in small font in the corner of a drab, brown-colored overhanging sign. It’s a restaurant (obviously). Such a juxtaposition has become increasingly common in gentrifying neighborhoods, revealing more than just commercial offerings. In their new book, What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification, and Place-Making in Brooklyn (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr examine the importance of signs and “linguistic landscapes” in shaping urban spaces as well as how we experience them. It argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation of place in Brooklyn, New York. Using a sample of more than 2,000 storefronts and over a decade of ethnographic observation and interviews, Trinch and Snajdr chart two types of local Brooklyn retail signage: Old School, which uses many words, large lettering, and repetition to convey inclusiveness, and New School, with hallmarks of brevity, wordplay, and more exclusive meanings. Through in-depth ethnographic analyses they reveal how gentrification and corporate redevelopment in Brooklyn are connected to public communication, literacy practices, the transformation of motherhood and gender roles, notions of historical preservation, urban planning, and systems of racial privilege. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can ethnographers use multimedia presentations of their work to reach new audiences, build different relationships with their participants, and promote new practices of witnessing and representation? On today’s episode we talk with Dr. Deborah Thomas, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She tells us about her collaborative and multimodal project, Tivoli Stories (tivolistories.com), based on the 2010 police and military incursion into a West Kingston community in search of a notorious drug trafficker and community don that left at least 75 dead. The project includes a documentary film titled Four Days in May, a museum exhibit, and the 2019 book Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Entanglement, Witnessing, Repair (Duke UP, 2019). Deborah explains how a background in dance led her to become an accidental anthropologist with an interest in both sovereignty and experimental ethnographic practices. She then discusses the Tivoli Stories project, describing how collaborative attempts to gather testimonies of the incursion led to first a documentary and then her book. She takes us behind the curtains for some of the simultaneously aesthetic and political choices of the film and book, including the use of portraits to humanize participants as distinct from the common images of suffering that may be termed ghetto porn. Her reflections offer a concrete and insightful look at an alternative means of ethnographic practice attuned to the lives, experiences, and politics of the communities we study. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Modern markets and exchange, compared with other social and political spheres, are seen through technical abstractions. This intellectual compartmentalization has political consequences: if capitalism operates through arcane, objective, and rational mechanics, the very real interests and very real consequences of exchange are disguised and simplified. In their empirically dense and theoretically bold edited volume, Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, Douglas Haynes, and Sebastian Schwecke gather historians and anthropologists to reflect on the dynamic, adaptive, and ambiguous realities of markets and exchange in India. Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction (Cambridge University Press, 2020) provides a rich array of vivid case studies – from colonial property and advertising milieus to today’s bazaar and criminal economies – to examine the friction and interdependence between commerce, society, and state. Beyond providing a vantage point for rethinking global capitalism from one of the world’s major economies, the volume conceptualizes the moral, spatial, legal, and symbolic dynamics of markets in a way that is broadly relevant through the Global South. Two of the volume’s editors, Ajay Gandhi, assistant professor at Leiden University, and Sebastian Schwecke, head of the Delhi office of the Max Weber Foundation, discuss the book’s theoretical ambitions and empirical range. Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on South Asian economic writing. He is also coordinator of the Medical Humanities Working Group at NYU, and of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. He also co-hosts the podcast High Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Digital dualism, or a sharp division between online and offline activity as "virtual" or "real" has long been a feature of liturgical studies and discussions around worship gatherings for theorists and practitioners alike. Teresa Berger's new book @Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds (Routledge, 2017) provides a manifesto for more nuanced thinking about digital mediation, materiality, ecclesial gathering, and sacramental presence in our digitally suffused world. While this book was published several years before the COVID-19 pandemic, the careful thinking Berger presents here can certainly guide church leaders and participants in present and future conversations as worshiping communities find themselves facing prolonged seasons of online gatherings and digital devotion. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today we are joined by Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to talk about her new book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.
In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Kaitland Byrd’s new book Real Southern Barbecue: Constructing Authenticity in Southern Food Culture (Lexington Press, 2019) examines an archive of oral histories collected by the Southern Foodways Alliance featuring the voices of barbecue pit masters and restaurant owners from the South. Byrd argues that barbecue as a cultural product has a unique relationship to the idea of authenticity. There are some clearly defined elements that seem to make it easy for diners to decide if their barbecue is authentic from the particular cuts of meat and sauces to the sights and smells of the restaurant. However, like all cuisines, barbecue has to respond to the world around it in ways that might challenge traditional definitions of authenticity. Byrd considers “authenticity” to be an unspoken agreement between producers and consumers, something that can be “constructed” and “fabricated” and “consumed.” Byrd applies the idea of “impression management” from sociology to describe how barbecue producers communicate authenticity to consumers even as they have to innovate and deviate from some of their traditional methods in response to changing circumstances. As Byrd explains, some barbecue purveyors have adapted to changes in consumer tastes and interests in health by offering leaner cuts of meat and emphasizing their traditional vegetable side dishes. They have also adapted to changes in agriculture and meat industries and responses to concerns about the environment, promoting barbecue as an original farm to table, tail to snout cuisine, embracing this vegetable-centric, lean-meat, farm-to-table movement as part of their impression management. One of the most significant challenges to authenticity that restauranteurs must manage are fire and building codes related to smoke, sometimes banning open pit smokers or requiring smokers to be separate buildings. As barbecue restaurants adopt electric smokers or impart flavor from liquid smoke, they must continue to communicate authenticity to consumers through other means. Byrd’s investigation highlights the creative and innovative methods of Southern pit masters and entrepreneurs. Kaitland Byrd is Lecturer in sociology and visiting scholar at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Eliza Weeks is a recent graduate of the Master of Food Studies program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. She hopes to do work related to amplifying diverse and often marginalized voices within the food system so that the opportunity to represent and share food and food culture is not limited to the privileged few. When Eliza is not on the job hunt she enjoys adventuring through new recipes, sharing food and stories with others, and cohosting her podcast Dear Human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara examines the dominant modes of power that seek to suppress LGBTQ lives and identities as well as the ways in which these communities and individuals push back. Lara details how Catholicism and Christianity attempt to delegitimize LGBTQ lives through an insistence on gender binaries and heteronormativity through power it yields in political and domestic life. LGBTQ people and groups enact Streetwalking , which Lara theorizes as the actions of LGBTQ people, such as walking in the street or hanging out in public, as a means to disrupt the Christian colonial gender and sexual order. Streetwalking includes different practices of resistance such as confratación, flipping the script, and cuentos, which people deploy to transform silence into power. Lara walks us through the strategies and tactics LGBTQ people employ to both assert their power and insist on their right to exist. Ana-Maurine Lara is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Is intersectionality a critical social theory? What must intersectionality do to be both critical and a social theory? Must social justice be a guiding normative principle? And what does or should social justice mean in intersectional theory? Patricia Hills Collins explores these questions, and many more, in Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Duke University Press, 2019). Engaging a wide range of thinkers, activists, and traditions, including Classical American Pragmatism, the Frankfurt School, and Ida B. Well-Barnett, Collins helps us to reconsider how we think of intersectionality’s history in order to shape its future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In today’s episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, Sneha Annavarapu talks with Dr. Caterina Fugazzola, Earl S Johnson Instructor in Sociology at the University of Chicago, about her research on the contemporary tongzhi (LGBT) movement in the People’s Republic of China. Dr. Fugazzola briefly discusses her current book project (under contract with Temple University Press) in which she explains how grassroots groups organizing around sexual identity have achieved significant social change—in terms of visibility, social acceptance, and participation—in virtual absence of public protest, and under conditions of tightening governmental control over civil society groups. But, more pertinently to our special series, our guest tells us about what drew her to the project, and the kinds of dilemmas, issues, and opportunities that marked her fieldwork in the region. For instance, she walks us through what it is like to do ethnographic fieldwork on a cruise ship! We also chat about what it means to do ethnographic observations online and why teaching digital ethnographic methods is a welcome opportunity to rethink our very dated presumptions around physical co-presence in fieldwork being desirable to gather more “authentic” data. In all, tune in for a very candid, witty, and insightful conversation around fieldwork and for a dose of Dr. Fugazzola’s vivacious and contagious energy for the affordances of digital ethnography. Learn more about Ethnographic Marginalia here. Dr. Caterina Fugazzola is is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Sociology. Her general interests include social movements, gender and sexuality studies, transnational sociology, and qualitative research methods. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Researchers often face significant and unique ethical and methodological challenges when conducting qualitative field work among people who have been identified as perpetrators of genocide. This can include overcoming biases that often accompany research on perpetrators; conceptualizing, identifying, and recruiting research subjects; risk mitigation and negotiating access in difficult contexts; self-care in conducting interviews relating to extreme violence; and minimizing harm for interviewees who may themselves be traumatized. K. F. Anderson and E. Jessee's Researching Perpetrators of Genocide (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) offers a collection of case studies by scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds turns a critical and reflective eye toward qualitative fieldwork on the topic. Framed by an introduction that sets out key issues in perpetrator research and a conclusion that proposes and outlines a code of best practice, the volume provides an essential starting point for future research while advancing genocide studies, transitional justice, and related fields. This original, important, and welcome contribution will be of value to historians, political scientists, criminologists, anthropologists, lawyers, and legal scholars. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We are joined today by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa in the writers’ heaven that is Iowa City, Iowa. She also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Gender, Women’s Studies, and Sexuality Studies at Iowa. She is here today to talk to us about her upcoming book: Me Too: The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media (Polity Press, 2021). Professor Durham is the author of the quite famous The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It (Overlook Press, 2008) and Technosex: Precarious Corporealities, Mediated Sexualities, and the Ethics of Embodied Technics (Palgrave 2016) – both of which address modern, mass media explorations of the sexuality and gender. In the wake of the MeToo movement, revelations of sexual assault and harassment continue to disrupt sexual politics across the globe. Reports of recurrent and widespread misconduct - in workplaces from doctors' offices to factory floors - are precipitating firings, legal actions, street protests, and policy punditry. Meenakshi Gigi Durham situates media culture as a place in which these broader social struggles are enacted and reproduced. The media figures whose depravity sparked the #MeToo movement are symbolic markers of the complexities of sexual desire and consent. Pop culture sparks controversies about rape culture; social media users have launched feminist resistance that turned to real-world activism; investigative journalists have broken stories of assault, offering a platform for survivors to speak truth to patriarchal power. Arguing that the media are a linchpin in these events, Durham provides a feminist account of the interrelated contexts of media production, representation, and reception. She situates media as the key site where the establishment of sexuality and social relations takes place and traces the media's powerful role in both reifying and challenging rape culture. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford UP, 2018) offers an intimate ethnographic account of a group of LGBT activists before, during, and after Myanmar's post-2011 political transition. Lynette J. Chua explores how these activists devoted themselves to, and fell in love with, the practice of human rights and how they were able to empower queer Burmese to accept themselves, gain social belonging, and reform discriminatory legislation and law enforcement. Informed by interviews with activists from all walks of life—city dwellers, villagers, political dissidents, children of military families, wage laborers, shopkeepers, beauticians, spirit mediums, lawyers, students—Chua details the vivid particulars of the LGBT activist experience founding a movement first among exiles and migrants and then in Myanmar's cities, towns, and countryside. A distinct political and emotional culture of activism took shape, fusing shared emotions and cultural bearings with legal and political ideas about human rights. For this network of activists, human rights moved hearts and minds and crafted a transformative web of friendship, fellowship, and affection among queer Burmese. Chua's investigation provides crucial insights into the intersection of emotions and interpersonal relationships with law, rights, and social movements. Lynette J. Chua is Associate Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. Her first book, Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights & Resistance in an Authoritarian State (2014), received the Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociology Association's Sociology of Law Section. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can ethnographic research shine light on the reproduction of social inequality in upscale Los Angeles restaurants? In today’s episode we talk with Dr. Eli Wilson, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico, about his fieldwork in three LA restaurants. In the new book Front of the House, Back of the House, Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers (NYU Press, 2020), he takes readers inside the social hierarchies of upscale restaurants, where mostly white and college-educated servers and bartenders may make three times as much as the mostly Latino immigrant cooks and dishwashers who work hidden away in the back of the restaurant. Eli explains how his fieldwork emerged from his firsthand experience with the privileges of working in the front of the house. He describes the divisions between the two groups, and how he was able to build relationships with back of the house workers. He also talks about the discomfort that came from his own advantages as a tip-earner, and how he explained and managed his dual role as worker and ethnographer. Two unequal worlds of work exist within the upscale restaurant scene of Los Angeles. White, college-educated servers operate in the front of the house—also known as the public areas of the restaurant—while Latino immigrants toil in the back of the house and out of customer view. In Front of the House, Back of the House, Eli Revelle Yano Wilson shows us what keeps these workers apart, exploring race, class, and gender inequalities in the food service industry. Drawing on research at three different high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, Wilson highlights why these inequalities persist in the twenty-first century, pointing to discriminatory hiring and supervisory practices that ultimately grant educated whites access to the most desirable positions. Additionally, he shows us how workers navigate these inequalities under the same roof, making sense of their jobs, their identities, and each other in a world that reinforces their separateness. Front of the House, Back of the House takes us behind the scenes of the food service industry, providing a window into the unequal lives of white and Latino restaurant workers. Eli Revelle Yano Wilson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. His research examines how social inequalities are both reproduced and challenged in urban labor markets. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Meghan Condon and Amber Wichowsky have written an incredibly timely and fascinating study of our understanding of income inequality in the United States, and how this understanding contributes to the policies that are pursued, or, to their point, may not be pursued by elected officials to solve some of these entrenched economic problems. The Economic Other centers on understanding how we, individually, see ourselves in cross-class comparisons and how this comparison—either looking “upwards” towards those who are wealthier than we are, or “downwards” towards those who are less economically affluent than we are—shapes our understanding of economic inequality, shapes our sense of political efficacy, and shapes our demands (or lack of demands) for policies to rectify this economic gulf. Condon and Wichowsky used a complex mixed method approach to the research, including conducting experiments and surveys for their research, asking respondents to consider themselves in these various economic comparisons, while also providing respondents with the opportunity to describe their own sense of their understanding of those who are seen as either wealthy or poor. The analysis looks at the way that we understand our positions in society, especially economically, as relational, and therefore it is necessary to understand how this relational assessment contributes to how individuals comprehend the growing income divide in the United States. The research surfaced information that shows how social comparison thinking—our comparisons with others up and down the economic ladder—is animated by race and gender as well, connecting class politics with identity politics, noting that economic inequality or class inequality can’t be solved without attention to the racialized and gendered dimensions that are associated with income inequality. Condon and Wichowsky also explain that political rhetoric has played a role in how we understand our economic position and context, as have popular culture renderings, particularly in context of reality television programming about rich Americans. The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020) is an important contribution to our understanding of how Americans understand ourselves, especially in regard to our own, personal economic status, and how this shapes our demands on politicians and policies to solve, or not solve, economic anxiety and precarity in the United States. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Edited by Naomi M. Leite, Quetzil E. Castañeda, and Kathleen M. Adams, The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond (Lexington Books, 2019) focuses on the experience-near, interpretive-humanistic approach to tourism studies widely associated with anthropologist Edward Bruner. The contributors draw on their fieldwork to illustrate and build upon key concepts in tourism ethnography, from experience, encounter, and emergent culture to authenticity, narrative, contested sites, the borderzone, embodiment, identity, and mobility. The Ethnography of Tourism won the 2020 Edward Bruner Book Prize from the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group (American Anthropological Association). Dr. Naomi Leite is Associate Professor of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. Dr. Quetzil Castañeda is Senior Lecturer at Indiana University Bloomington. Dr. Kathleen Adams is Professor of Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Most of the time, we believe our daily lives to be governed by structures determined from above (e.g., laws that dictate our behavior, companies that pay employees wages, climate patterns that determine what we eat or where we live). In contrast, social organization is often a feature of local organization. While those forces may seem beyond individual grasp, we often come together in small communities to change circumstances that would otherwise flatten us. In The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Gary Alan Fine emphasizes and describes the meso-level collectives, the organizations that bridge our individual interests and the larger structures that shape our lives. Fine describes the meso-level social collectives as “hinges” or groups that come together to pursue a shared social goal, bridging the individual and the broader society. Fine argues that understanding hinges in society is crucial to explaining how societies function – creating links between the micro- and macro-orders of society. Fine draws on historical cases and fieldwork to illustrate how these hinges work and how to describe them. In The Hinge, Fine provides reader with new theoretical tools for understanding an essential part of the social worlds. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent study, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant”, was published in Gender Issues Journal. His interests include the sociology of art and culture, sociology of death and dying, and sociology of sex and gender. He is currently working on a research project about obituary writing as an art world. More can be found about Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. by going to his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo at wmpenn dot edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This unique episode features a dual/duel interview with two authors whose recent books focus on the overlapping contexts and theories of Game Studies and Asian American Studies. The first is Tara Fickle and her book The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (NYU Press, 2019), which investigates the ways Asian Americans have had to fit roles, play games, and follow rules in order to be seen as valuable in the US. The second author is Christopher B. Patterson, who discusses his book Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Empire (NYU Press, 2020), which asks similar questions to theorize ways of seeing games as queer erotics, as expressions of empire, and as withholding “The Asiatic.” During this duel/dual interview, each author asks the other questions about their books, with the goal of having a broader conversation about the various concepts that both books play with. Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The progress that has been made by the gay rights movement can sometimes obscure the work that is still left to be done. In his new book, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives (2019, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), Walt Odets addresses the hardships gay men continue to face and the dangers of overlooking them. In our interview, we discuss the continued relevance of the AIDS epidemic as well as the difference between 'gay' and 'homosexual.' This interview will be relevant to gay men and those who care for them, as well as those interested in changing social norms around sexual orientation. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology (U Cincinnati Press, 2020) is an extraordinary new volume that examines the origin, development, and significance of Black Sociology through the accomplishments of early African American sociologists at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Atlanta University, Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, and Howard University. Black Sociology is a concept that weaponizes the discipline for that which is “right and good" and prioritizes scholar-activist inspired research directed at impacting real world conditions of African Americans. Guided by this approach, this book debunks the idea that the sociology practiced by early African Americans does not exemplify scholarly excellence. Instead, Earl Wright II demonstrates that Tuskegee Institute, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, established the first applied program of rural sociology. Fisk University, first under the guidance of George Edmund Haynes then Charles S. Johnson, developed one of the earliest and most impactful programs of applied urban sociology. Wright extends our understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois's Atlanta Sociological Laboratory with an articulation of the contributions of women to the first American school of sociology. Jim Crow Sociology forces contemporary scholars to grapple with who are and who are not included in the disciplinary canon. Specifically, this book forces us to ask why early African American sociologists and HBCUs are not canonized. What makes this book most consequential is that it provides evidence supporting the proposition that sociology began in earnest in the United States as a Black and southern enterprise. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to help end an American tradition of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio, urged abusive parents to seek help. Support groups for parents, including Parents Anonymous, proliferated across the country to deal with the seemingly burgeoning crisis. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of abused children were reported to child welfare agencies, due in part to an expansion of mandatory reporting laws and the creation of reporting hotlines across the nation. In Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way (University of North Carolina Press Books, 2020), Mical Raz examines this history of child abuse policy and charts how it changed since the late 1960s, specifically taking into account the frequency with which agencies removed African American children from their homes and placed them in foster care. Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept the country in the 1980s, Raz argues that these panics and policies--as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender--played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse. These perceptions were often directly at odds with the available data and disproportionately targeted poor African American families above others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Located amid tropical rainforest in the heart of Papua New Guinea, the Frieda River area is home to one of the biggest undeveloped gold and copper deposits in the Pacific. For decades, mining companies have prospected in this area in anticipation of a large-scale mine which may (or may not) open in the future. In Emilia E. Skrzypek, Revealing the Invisible Mine: Social Complexities of an Undeveloped Mining Project (Berghahn, 2020). Emilia 'Emilka' Skrzypek tells the story of Paiyamo people on whose land a potential mine may be located. Paiyamo people hope that the mine will lead to the development of their remote rural area, and in this book Skrzypek show the unique cultural logic they use to make the potential mine a reality, or -- to use Paiyamo terms -- to 'reveal' a mine whose existence has already affected their lives, but which has not yet emerged and become visible. In this episode of the podcast host Alex Golub speaks to Emilka about the potential Frieda mine, Paiyamo people, and the way they grapple with the existence of an anticipated mine. What does it mean to view knowledge in terms of its effect rather than its accuracy? How are relationships created and transformed as people realize older understandings and secrets had a meaning which is only now being understood in the present context? How might we use this analytic lens to think about the work of ethnography and fieldwork itself? These are just some of the questions which Alex and Emilka discuss in this interview Emilia Skrzypek is a senior research fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Her most recent article, "Extractive entanglements and regimes of accountability at an undeveloped mining project" appears in the December 2020 number of Resources Policy. Alex Golub is an associate professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in Honolulu. His most recent publication is a biographical interview with Martha Macintyre, an anthropologist of mining, in the edited volume Unequal Lives: Gender, Race, and Class in The Western Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Modern romance is broken. It's time to flip the script. Apps have transformed dating from a mysterious adventure into a daily chore. Young, single, college-educated women are sick and tired of competing for a shrinking supply of guys. And marriage-material men, long expected to take the lead when it comes to asking women out, are suddenly balking at making the first move, fearing they'll come across as creepy or inappropriate. Society is changing, which means it's time for dating to evolve. Millennial and Gen Z women are more than capable of seeking out what—and who—they want. They're standouts in the classroom and champions on the playing fields. They're leaders in the workplace and trailblazers in city halls, state houses, and Congress. So why would we tell a generation of badass women that they're not allowed to be bold when it comes to finding love? Why should they have to sit back and wait (and wait and wait) for men to find them? In Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (BenBella Books, 2021) Jon Birger, author of Date-onomics, offers women bold new strategies for finding the one. Backed by research showing that women can win at romance by making the first move with the men of their choice, Birger explains why: It's better to choose than to be chosenThe "play hard to get" method is not only outdated but grounded in bad science The first move does not have to be a big move It's time to log off of dating apps and date men you actually know The workplace can be a terrific place to meet a long-term romantic partner . . . and more! Make Your Move is an honest, solution-based guide to finding love that lasts. If you're tired of playing by old rules, look no further: Make your move and win. Jon Birger is an award-winning magazine writer and author of two dating books -- Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (2021) and Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game (2015). A former senior writer at Fortune, Jon has been named to AlwaysOn Network's list of "Power Players in Technology Business Media." He's also a familiar face and voice on television and radio, having made appearances on ABC's Good Morning America, BBC World Service, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Fox News -- discussing topics ranging from the dating market to the stock market. A graduate of Brown University, Jon lives with his family in Larchmont, N.Y. To contact Jon about media interviews, speaking opportunities, or consulting work, please visit his author website, www.jonbirger.com. Clint Sabom is an award winning writer who hosts a podcast on mental health and psychology called The Sanity Sessions: Exploring Mental Illness And Maladaptations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Being a great power almost seems to invite discussion of decline: whether you are declining, what can be done to prevent or arrest it, and what the consequences of decline might ultimately be. The United States has not managed to escape from any of this analysis, but understanding how imperial and hegemonic decline has played out historically often does not inform these discussions. Is the United States an empire, or it better described as a hegemon? What’s the meaningful difference, especially in the current content of the United States’ global position? Richard Lachmann’s First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (Verso, 2020) explores these questions. Lachmann examines prior explanations of great power decline and finds them wanting for a variety of different reasons. Lachmann instead focuses on a series of factors that first of all enable hegemony, but also the factors that ultimately cause its collapse. Lachmann examines the cause of the Netherlands and the British Empire before examining how these factor are currently at play in the United States. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What meaning does a daily soccer game in a public Los Angeles park have for a group of Latino men and the ethnographer who studied them? In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. David Trouille, Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University, about the ten years of fieldwork behind his new book Fútbol in the Park from the University of Chicago press. In a thoughtful self-reflexive conversation, David tells us how a neighborhood campaign against the players initially drew him to the community of Latino soccer players that are the subject of his book. He describes how he built relationships with the men over time on and off the field, and how the social space of the games created social ties that were essential to their ability to find work. While surrounding well-to-do mostly white communities accepted the men as workers in their homes, they simultaneously resisted their visible presence in the park. David tells us how this stigmatization, combined with national discourses constructing Latino men as “bad hombres” created dilemmas in how to write about his research. He explains how he made difficult decisions to only partially anonymize the men but not write about their immigration status, and ultimately describe the men as complex and real human beings, including writing about their drinking and occasional fighting. For more information about Ethnographic Marginalia, please click here. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The drums beat, an old man in a grand robe mutters incantation and three brides on horseback led by their grooms on foot proceed to the Naxi Wedding Courtyard, accompanied, watched and photographed the whole way by tourists, who have bought tickets for the privilege. The traditional wedding ceremonies are performed for the ethnic tourism industry in Lijiang, a World Heritage town in southwest China. Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China (Amsterdam UP, 2018) examines how heritage interacts with social-cultural changes and how individuals perform and negotiate their identities through daily practices that include tourism, on the one hand, and the performance of ethnicity on the other. The wedding performances in Lijiang not only serve as a heritage 'product' but show how the heritage and tourism industry helps to shape people's values, dreams and expectations. This book also explores the rise of 'romantic consumerism' in contemporary China. Chinese dissatisfaction with the urban mundane leads to romanticized interests in practices and people deemed to be natural, ethnic, spiritual and aesthetic, and a search for tradition and authenticity. But what, exactly, are tradition and authenticity, and what happens to them when they are turned into performance? Yujie Zhu is a Lecturer at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University. He is the co-editor of Politics of Scale and Sustainable Tourism Management at World Heritage Sites. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where a complex history has created a situation where authors can represent any sentence element in three distinct scripts. In Scripting Japan: Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese (Routledge, 2020), Wesley Robertson provides the first investigation into the ways Japanese authors and their readers engage with this potential for script variation as a social language practice, looking at how purely script-based language choices reflect social ideologies, become linked to language users, and influence the total meaning created by language acts. Throughout the text, analysis of data from multiple studies examines how Japanese language users' experiences with the script variation all around them influence how they engage with, produce, and understand both orthographic variation and major social divides, ultimately evidencing that even the avoidance of variation can become a socially significant act in Japan. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The call to prayer breaks the hustle and bustle of an urban sonic landscape in unique ways. For Muslims living in Hamtramck, Michigan broadcasting the adhān was one way of space-making, which demarcated the city as Muslim space. In Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit (NYU Press, 2020), Alisa Perkins, Associate Professor at Western Michigan University, explores the debate around the local call to prayer as well as other scenarios where Muslims navigate public and politic space. Hamtramck has one of the largest concentrations of Muslim residents of any American city. Perkins walks us through neighborhoods, homes, mosques, and schools in her rich ethnography to show how different communities plot gendered and religious boundaries. In our conversation we discuss the history of Hamtramck, Bangladeshi immigration patterns, Yemeni transnational activities, high school classrooms, public prayer, gender distancing, LGBTQ rights, the relationship between secularism and pluralism, public space, interfaith coalitions, and the effects of legislation. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini about their book Humanocracy: Creating Organizations As Amazing As the People Inside Them (HBR, 2020). This episode attacks the way bureaucracies are “innovation-phobic” and “soul crushing.” How can motivation, productivity and innovation be radically enhanced? By dismantling traditional power structures within large companies, giving employees the opportunity to become “micropreneurs.” Tying compensation to contribution and enabling true empowerment are the ways to go. Gary Hamel is on the faculty of the London Business School and has been hailed by the Wall Street Journal as the world’s most influential business thinker. Michele Zanini is, along with Hamel, the cofounder of the Management Lab. An alumnus of McKinsey & Company, Zanini has a degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir (Duke UP, 2020), Saiba Varma explores the psychological, ontological, and political entanglements between medicine and violence in Indian-controlled Kashmir—the world's most densely militarized place. Into a long history of occupations, insurgencies, suppressions, natural disasters, and a crisis of public health infrastructure come interventions in human distress, especially those of doctors and humanitarians, who struggle against an epidemic: more than sixty percent of the civilian population suffers from depression, anxiety, PTSD, or acute stress. Drawing on encounters between medical providers and patients in an array of settings, Varma reveals how colonization is embodied and how overlapping state practices of care and violence create disorienting worlds for doctors and patients alike. Varma shows how occupation creates worlds of disrupted meaning in which clinical life is connected to political disorder, subverting biomedical neutrality, ethics, and processes of care in profound ways. By highlighting the imbrications between humanitarianism and militarism and between care and violence, Varma theorizes care not as a redemptive practice, but as a fraught sphere of action that is never quite what it seems. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, hundreds of cities in the U.S. and across the globe organized Women’s Marches in response to Trump’s misogynistic comments and as a general rebuke of his election. In this collection edited by Dr. Rachelle (Riki) Salzman, established and emerging scholars contribute essays that examine the folkloric aspects of the Women’s Marches. Hear our conversation as we discuss the symbolic elements of these protests. First, Dr. Saltzman tells me about her start in folklore with her fascinating adventures in documenting the oral histories of Chesapeake watermen on the Eastern Shore in Maryland as a college student and then later curating thousands of World War II letters written by American soldiers who corresponded with a secretary at a Jewish YMCA. We begin our discussion of Pussyhats, Politics, and Public Protest (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) by talking about the deliberate timing of its release. While the publication focuses on the Women’s Marches that took place at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, the release of the book takes place as his administration wraps up and a new one begins. Dr. Saltzman characterizes the 2017 Women’s Marches as “carnivalesque” where public events have a number of features of the carnival – the turning of the world upside down, poking fun, and critiquing those in power under the license of festivity with the possibility of transformative change. The protests signs were also a significant part of the marches, engaging in humor and puns to critique the status quo but also as a means to understand the community. Similarly, the pussy hats also carry symbolic meaning of community making and we share our stories of receiving our own pussy hats from friends. From there we discuss a queer art studio that created conversation about the protests through its jewelry and the multiple generations that attended the protests. Dr. Salzman is a folklorist at the High Desert Museum and the Oregon Folklife Network where she was also the former Executive Director. She also teaches at the Oregon State University as a lecturer in the Folklore and Public Culture program. Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For six years, anthropologist and artist Maya Stovall enacted a series of dance performances outside of liquor stores in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood on Detroit’s east side. Stovall conceptualized these performances as prompts for people that may pass by and as a means to open up space for conversation with Detroit residents. These filmed performances and the interviews that followed make up Liquor Store Theatre (Duke University Press, 2020). In the book, Stovall probes the historic, economic, and political forces that constructed and shape the city of Detroit. Liquor Store Theatre attends closely to the methods of performance and interviews as they unfold in the author’s pursuit of this project. Stovall’s interlocuters share their perspectives on the changes in the city, the challenges the city faces, as well as their hopes for a future in which they can enjoy the benefits of the city. A native Detroiter herself, Stovall’s artistic ventures turn the lens back on the city itself and center the voices of Detroiters, whose awareness of the city’s challenges mixes with their pursuit of opportunity. Liquor Store Theatre videos have been screened at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and at the Cranbrook Art Museum. Stovall brings together ethnography, contemporary art and performance, and geography to offer an innovative method for troubling the relationship between the observed and the observer of city life. Maya Stovall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Stovall’s exhibition for 1526 appears at the Reyes Finn gallery. Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Reforms in Myanmar (formerly Burma) have eased restrictions on citizens' political activities. Yet for most Burmese, Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung shows in Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar (U Wisconsin Press, 2019), eking out a living from day to day leaves little time for civic engagement. Citizens have coped with extreme hardship through great resourcefulness. But by making bad situations more tolerable in the short term, these coping strategies may hinder the emergence of the democratic values needed to sustain the country's transition to a more open political environment. Thawnghmung conducted in-depth interviews and surveys of 372 individuals from all walks of life and across geographical locations in Myanmar between 2008 and 2015. To frame her analysis, she provides context from countries with comparable political and economic situations. Her findings will be welcomed by political scientists and policy analysts, as well by journalists and humanitarian activists looking for substantive, reliable information about everyday life in a country that remains largely in the shadows. Anyone interested in political economy, development, or culture in Myanmar or more generally will find Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar an insightful and intellectually provocative read. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As well as presenting practical challenges, addressing the question ‘what is it like in North Korea?’ raises ethical concerns around who is entitled to interpret life in a place so often discussed in luridly exoticizing terms. The awareness of authorial position and sensitivity to shared humanity which runs through Andray Abrahamian’s Being in North Korea (Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2019) is thus one of its real strengths. Weaving together a trove of insights into local society, politics and economics gleaned from years of visits to the country, including many trips as an organiser of local business workshops, Abrahamian offers a convincing and authoritative account of both lesser-known everyday North Korean affairs and clear-eyed interpretations of more familiar macro-level topics. Frank in its acknowledgement of the limits to what an outsider can know about a society that has made opacity the key to its very survival, this is a book which goes as far as anything by a Western outsider is likely to in showing readers what life is like there. Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the space of a few weeks this spring, organizations around the world learned that many traditional, in-person jobs could, in fact, be performed remotely. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, however, some individuals were already utilizing new options for personal mobility and online work to strike out on their own. In the new book, Digital Nomads: In Search of Freedom, Community, and Meaningful Work in the New Economy (Oxford UP, 2020), Rachael A. Woldoff and Robert C. Litchfield examine the growing demographic of individuals disaffected by the daily grind of office work who have left the U.S. and Europe to work remotely from low-cost global hubs around the world. These “digital nomads” seek out communities of like-minded unconventional people—what they call a tribe—in places like Indonesia, Thailand, Colombia, Mexico, or Portugal. Taking advantage of advancements in mobility, technology, and telecommunication, digital nomads are venturing around the world in search of a new way of living and working. Through dozens of interviews and several stints living in a digital nomad hub in Bali, Indonesia, Woldoff and Litchfield show why digital nomads leave their conventional lives behind, arguing that the creative class and Millennial workers, though successful, often feel that “world class cities” and desirable jobs are anything but paradise. Digital Nomads follows these new workers through their transitions into freelancing, entrepreneurship, and remote work, and explains how digital nomads create fluid, intimate communities abroad. Complete with a preface that addresses how COVID-19 is inevitably changing the landscape of work, Digital Nomads offers insight into the new ways people are balancing freedom, work, community, and creative fulfillment in the digital age. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What does it mean to connect as a people through mass media? This book approaches that question by exploring how Moroccans engage communicative failure as they seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused not just on social relations that used to be and have been lost but also on what ought to be and had yet to be realized. Such laments have transpired in a range of communication channels, from objects such as devotional prayer beads and remote controls; to interactional forms such as storytelling, dress styles, and orthography; to media platforms like television news, religious stations, or WhatsApp group chats. Channeling Moroccanness: Language and the Media of Sociality (Fordham UP, 2020) examines these laments as ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing formations of Moroccan relationality. Rather than furthering the discourse about Morocco’s conflict between liberal secularists and religious conservatives, this ethnography shows the subtle range of ideologies and practices evoked in Fassi homes to calibrate Moroccan sociality and political consciousness. Dr. Becky Schulthies is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is trained as a linguistic anthropologist, with areas of interest including Arabic language ideologies, graphic sensibilities, social media discourse, and, more recently, human- plant semiotic ideologies. She has previously coedited, with Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyn Early, the third edition of Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Fatima Tariq co-hosted the episode. She is a masters' student in Near Eastern Studies at NYU. Fatima is interested in translation studies, Arabic pedagogy, and decolonial thought. She is an ambivalent linguistic anthropologist and an aspiring Arabic-English literary translator. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than popular narratives might suggest. Rural Origins, City Lives: Class and Place in Contemporary China (U Washington Press, 2016) probes long-held assumptions about migrant workers in China. Drawing on fieldwork in Nanjing, Roberta Zavoretti argues that many rural-born urban-dwellers are—contrary to state policy and media portrayals—diverse in their employment, lifestyle, and aspirations. Working and living in the cities, such workers change China’s urban landscape, becoming part of an increasingly diversified and stratified society. Zavoretti finds that—more than thirty years after the Open Door Reform—class formation, not residence status, is key to understanding inequality in contemporary China. Suvi Rautio is a part-time Course Lecturer at the Social & Cultural Anthropology discipline at University of Helsinki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Does religion cause violent conflict, asks Chad M. Bauman, and if so, does it cause conflict any more than other social identities? Through an extended history of Christian-Hindu relations, and with particular attention to the 2007-08 riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, Anti-Christian Violence in India examines religious violence and how it pertains to broader aspects of humanity. Is "religious" conflict sui generis, or is it merely one species of inter-group conflict? Why and how might violence become an attractive option for religious actors? What explains the increase in religious violence over the last twenty to thirty years? Integrating theories of anti-Christian violence focused on politics, economics, and proselytization, Anti-Christian Violence in India (Cornell UP, 2020) in India additionally weaves in recent theory about globalization, and in particular the forms of resistance against Western secular modernity that globalization periodically helps provoke. With such theories in mind, Bauman explores the nature of anti-Christian violence in India, contending that resistance to secular modernities is, in fact, an important but often overlooked reason behind Hindu attacks on Christians. Intensifying the widespread Hindu tendency to think of religion in ethnic rather than universal terms, the ideology of Hindutva explicitly rejects both the secular privatization of religion and the separability of religions from the communities that incubate them. And so, with provocative and original analysis, Bauman questions whether anti-Christian violence in contemporary India is really about religion, in the narrowest sense, or rather a manifestation of broader concerns, among some Hindus, about the Western socio-political order with which they associate global Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Other End of the Needle (Rutgers University Press, 2020), David C. Lane, Ph.D. investigates the intricacies of the tattoo industry. Particularly, Lane found that tattooing is more complex than simply the tattoos that people wear. Using qualitative data and an accessible writing style, Lane explains the complexity of tattoo work as a type of social activity. His central argument is that tattooing is a social world, where people must be socialized, manage a system of stratification, create spaces conducive for labor, develop sets of beliefs and values, struggle to retain control over their tools, and contend with changes that in turn affect their labor. Earlier research has examined tattoos and their meanings. Yet, Lane notes, prior research has focused almost exclusively on the tattoos—the outcome of an intricate social process—and have ignored the significance of tattoo workers themselves. "Tattooists," as Lane dubs them, make decisions, but they work within a social world that constrains and shapes the outcome of their labor—the tattoo. The goal of this book is to help readers understand the world of tattoo work as an intricate and nuanced form of work. Lane ultimately asks new questions about the social processes occurring prior to the tattoo’s existence. David C. Lane is currently recruiting participants for his next study on identity management and past trauma experienced by people who have tattoos. The goal of this study is to understand how tattoos are used by people to develop their own identity. If you are interested in participating please go to http://tattoostudyisu.com. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent study, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant”, was published in Gender Issues Journal. His interests include the sociology of art and culture, sociology of death and dying, and sociology of sex and gender. He is currently working on a research project about obituary writing as an art world. More can be found about Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. by going to his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo at wmpenn dot edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Since the turn of the millennium, American Evangelical Protestantism has seen a swell of interest in Calvinist theology. Variously described as the New Calvinism or Neo-Reformed Christianity, the latter half of the first decade saw a resurgence of Reformed theology, especially among younger Evangelicals. Brad Vermurlen presents an insightful sociological study of this resurgence of reformed Christianity, interpreted through the lens of strategic action field theory in his new book Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle Over American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2020). Using a field theoretic model to analyze data collected through ethnographic observation, interviews with Christian leaders, and digital and print content analysis, Vermurlen explains how New Calvinist Christian leaders positioned themselves within the broader field of American Evangelicalism and solidified their movement within a variety of precipitating causes and game-like maneuvers. In the end, Reformed Resurgence offers a lucid account of how a conservative religious movement can survive, and even thrive, in a hyper-modern, secularizing society. To find out more about Brad Vermurlen, visit http://bradvermurlen.com/ Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Twenty-eight years after Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history” and pronounced Western-style liberalism as the culmination of a Hegelian narrative of progress, pundits and academics of all stripes find themselves struggling to explain the failed prediction that China’s increased activity in international markets would inevitably lead to increasing political and social liberalization in that country. With his ground-breaking book, Network Origins of the Global Economy: East vs. West in a Complex Systems Perspective, out from Cambridge University Press in 2020, Hilton L. Root takes a road less-traveled in contemporary economics and brings the analytical tools of systems theory to bear on this perplexing question, believing that a study of network structure might be able to shed more light than the traditional tools of economic analysis. This clearly argued and eminently readable book accounts for much of the current state of affairs by tracing the contrasting historical evolution of Europe as a Small World Network constituted by the dense connectivity of dynastic marriages between the continent’s royal houses, and China as a Hub and Spoke Network with communications flowing outward through the branches of its vast and robustly structured bureaucracy from a primary central node. Other networked social factors under consideration are the development of Europe’s blend of Germanic custom and Roman law, and China’s tradition of the ideal Confucian gentleman and its deep commitment to merit rather than birthright as the condition for ascending the ranks of administrative power structures. Emerging from this thoughtful and well-researched study is a compelling explanatory narrative of Europe’s ongoing capacity to adapt to rapid change and China’s pattern of long stretches of stability, sudden collapse, and subsequent resurrection of largely unchanged network structure. This adventurous scholarly work simultaneously opens new theoretical doors for economists and provides systems scholars with access to new dimensions of application. Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Creativity in Tokyo: Revitalizing a Mature City (Palgrave, 2020), Heide Imai and Matjaz Ursic focues on overlooked contextual factors that constitute the urban creative climate or innovative urban milieu in contemporary cities. Filled with reflections based on interviews with a diverse range of creative actors in various local neighborhoods in Tokyo, it offers a rare glimpse into the complex set of elements that provide long-term, physical, and sociocultural support to urban creativity. The authors highlight the interplay between physical and soft (social) factors in the process of place-making and explore how a city’s creativity is influenced by financial support and accessible infrastructure, as well as the sets of informal networks, services, and tacit, locally embedded knowledge that provide the basic layers of stimuli needed for creativity to fully develop. The authors show how the future development of creativity and the overall development of a city depend not only on the (top-down) planning strategies of formal authorities, but also on the appropriate (bottom-up) inclusion of heterogeneous elements that are provided and embedded within the small, hidden context of city spaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Melissa Michelson and Brian Harrison, co-authors of the book Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights (Oxford University Press, 2017), which focused on how people came to change their minds about same-sex marriage and LGBT rights, examine their thesis from the previous research to determine if it is applicable to transgender rights as well. What they find is that they need to look at a different kind of framework to engage individuals who are opposed to transgender rights in order to shift that thinking and provide an opening to changing hearts and minds (which is also part of the thrust of Brian Harrison’s 2020 book, A Change is Gonna Come: How to Have Effective Political Conversations in a Divided America, Oxford University Press, 2020). Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights (Oxford UP, 2020) focuses on transgender and gender non-conforming rights and how American society has responded and is responding to this subsequent wave of advocacy for the rights of those within this community. Harrison and Michelson’s research indicates that people understand marriage and gender identity in very different ways, and this discrepancy is what led them to reconsider the kind of theoretical framework necessary to move towards rights advocacy for those in the gender non-conforming and transgender community. The book employed a number of different research methods to distinguish what might move people towards being more open to transgender rights. Transforming Prejudice develops the theory of gender identity reassurance as the optimal means to open up the space to changing minds, helping individuals become less afraid and more accepting of the gender non-conforming/transgender community. This is a fascinating and important analysis that also helps guide activism while contributing to political science and social movement scholarship. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect? Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics (Sternberg Press, 2020) delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on notions such as “research” and “knowledge production.” Tom Holert, author of Knowledge Beside Itself, speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the history of art's fraught relationship with knowledge and its opposition to scientific notions of epistemology, as well as about art's complicity in the "epistemic mammoth" of the knowledge economy. Holert discusses the work of Natascha Sadr Haghighian and 'The Trainee' by Pilvi Takala which is available to view on Vimeo. Tom Holert is a writer and curator. In 2015 he cofounded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin, a platform for research and production departing from the example set by Farocki. With Anselm Franke he curated the 2018 exhibition “Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present, c. 1930” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. “Education Shock,” a research and exhibition project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt on the spatial politics of education in the global 1960s and 1970s will take place in 2021. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How has the Syrian regime been able to bear the brunt of the challenges raised against it? And, what can we learn about the seductions of authoritarian politics more generally from the study of Syria? These questions animate Lisa Wedeen’s Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Her answers to them journey far beyond narrow causal inferences about the war in Syria, into an empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated account of the part that ideology as form plays in the making of subjects. Drawing on a decade of multi-sited ethnography, Wedeen traverses the day-to-day violence of war to attend to how Syrians are interpolated into arrangements for political domination through logics of disavowal. Weaving her interlocutors’ cultural products and interpretations of conditions in Syria together with work by Althusser, Arendt and Wittgenstein, she offers a complex and unsettling account of how people are brought into deeply ambivalent relationships with neoliberal autocracy, at once desiring political change and craving social order. Listeners to this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science might also be interested in two other episodes on exemplary interpretivist political scientific studies featured in this series: Sarah Marie Wiebe on Everyday Exposure, and James C. Scott on Against the Grain. To download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Barbara Dennis of Indiana University on her new ethnography, Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise, published in 2020 by Peter Lang Press. Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise features the IU-Unityville Outreach Project and tells the story of a 4-year-long participatory, critical ethnography in a local United States school district. The book speaks into the contemporary conversations around immigration, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and the experiences of Dreamers. The project involved a multilingual team of graduate students, educators, community members, and students who together aimed to transform school practices in order to bring about more success with transnational students who were enrolling in the district at an increasing rate. Over the span of several years, what began with a simple request for help, morphed into a rich ethnographic understanding of the complex tensions produced by monocultural and assimilationist ideals when juxtaposed with strangers. A unique and innovative feature about the book lies in that it seamlessly weaves together substantive discussions, methodological practices, and ethical challenges revolving around a transformative, social justice project. Walking with Strangers has made significant and much-needed contributions to the field of critical and social justice oriented educational research. In particular, it zooms into the complex and localized dynamics among immigrant families and students, predominantly white communities, public schools structured by white culture, and teachers unprepared for educating transnational children. The book not only sheds light on the innovative approaches through which educational researchers and educators could bring positive changes to the school life of marginalized and disadvantaged students, but also candidly reflects on the places where such efforts failed when confronting white privilege and gender oppression. Barbara Dennis is a peace and social justice activist, and critical educational ethnographer. She is a professor of qualitative inquiry in the Inquiry Methodology program at Indiana University’s, School of Education. She regularly publishes on feminist ethnography, critical participatory ethics, and methodological theory. Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. Widespread use of the drug, which for a short period became “easier to buy than vegetables,” coincided with radical changes in the local economy caused by the marketization of the mining industry. More than two decades later, both the heroin epidemic and the mining boom are often discussed as recent history. Middle-aged long-term heroin users, however, complain that they feel stuck in an earlier moment of the country’s rapid reforms, navigating a world that no longer resembles either the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers. Overcoming addiction in Gejiu has become inseparable from broader attempts to reimagine laboring lives in a rapidly shifting social world. Drawing on more than eighteen months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how individuals’ varying experiences of recovery highlight shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present. Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China (University of California Press, 2020) is an important intervention contributing to cultural and medical anthropology and to the field of China studies. Suvi Rautio is a part-time Course Lecturer at the Social & Cultural Anthropology discipline at University of Helsinki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that you can make it if you try. The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time. World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (FSG, 2020) points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at VanLeerIdeas@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Few human enterprises are as complex, dynamic, and unpredictable as war. Armed conflict substitutes the relatively ordered reality of peace with the undeniably chaotic reality of combat. Militaries, by design, seek to make sense of and prepare for that chaos. And as long as there have been organized militaries, there have been military officers, theorists, and observers, like Ardant du Pique or B.H. Liddell Hart, who sought to predict the fundamental nature of the next war. But as Lieutenant General David Barno and Dr. Nora Bensahel observe in Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime (Oxford University Press, 2020), anticipating the complexities, subtitles, and character of the next war is no simple task. Warfare has a nasty habit of confounding pre-war assumptions and rendering impotent cherished pre-war doctrines, technologies, and leaders. To successfully contend with warfare’s radical shifts and rampant unknowns, Barno and Bensahel argue, modern militaries need to be adaptable. They must build an adaptive capacity within their doctrine, cultivate an adaptive approach to technological implementation, and—perhaps most importantly—inculcate an adaptive mindset in their tactical, theater, and institutional leadership. Such adaptive capability, Barno and Bensahel contend, will only grow in importance as the resurgence in great power conflict, the effects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the expansion of warfare into space and cyberspace radically reshape the threat environment of the 21st Century. Whether or not the modern United States military is adaptable enough to face and overcome these threats remains an open question—one that Barno and Bensahel seek to answer. Drawing upon a wealth of examples from the conflicts of the 20th century, Adaptation Under Fire powerfully illustrates what successful and unsuccessful adaptation looks like in relation to military doctrine, technology, and leadership. History, of course, is not predictive. Bensahel and Barno, however, deftly wield its analytic potential, revealing the factors that contribute to a potent adaptive capability, as well as the ways in which those factors manifest or fail to manifest within the United States military today. Lucidly argued and perspicacious in its diagnosis and prescriptions, Adaptation Under Fire makes a compelling argument for adaptability as a core competency in the modern United States military. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to David Smith and Brad Johnson about their new book Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace (HBR Press, 2020). This episode addresses some of the many ways in which women face challenges in the workplace, from pay equity issues, to sexual harassment, to being interrupted by men 3x more than men get interrupted by men or women alike. The importance of trust to offset gaslighting that undermines women’s confidence was yet another topic covered during this episode. David G. Smith is Associate Professor of sociology in the College of Leadership and Ethics at the U.S. Naval War College. Brad Johnson is Professor of psychology in the Department of Leadership, Ethics and Law at the U.S. Naval Academy, and a Faculty Associate in the Graduate School of Education at Johns Hopkins University. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Immigrant Japan? Sounds like a contradiction, but as Gracia Liu-Farrer shows in Immigrant Japan Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society (Cornell University Press, 2020), millions of immigrants make their lives in Japan, dealing with the tensions between belonging and not belonging in this ethno-nationalist country. Why do people want to come to Japan? Where do immigrants with various resources and demographic profiles fit in the economic landscape? How do immigrants narrate belonging in an environment where they are "other" at a time when mobility is increasingly easy and belonging increasingly complex? Gracia Liu-Farrer illuminates the lives of these immigrants by bringing in sociological, geographical, and psychological theories—guiding the reader through life trajectories of migrants of diverse backgrounds while also going so far as to suggest that Japan is already an immigrant country. In this interview we talked about what has contributed to the formation of "ethno-nationalism" in the history of modern Japan and how the growing population of immigrants and the complex reality of their lives offer us a more comprehensive understanding of "belonging" and "displacement" in contemporary Japanese society. After discussing the problems that prevent us from clearly seeing Japan as an immigrant country I asked Gracia two questions about the present and the future of this country:
"Does the COVID19 pandemic introduce any new problems that fall outside the purview of this book, or does the book provide any new insights into current situation?"
"What could people do to create a robust sense of belonging that is inclusive of everyone in Japan?"
Her answers were as insightful and salient as her analysis of the relationship between migration and belonging in Japan. Gracia Liu-Farrer is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Director of Institute of Asian Migrations, Waseda University, Japan. She is the author of Labor Migration from China to Japan and coeditor of the Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex love, for example, and the proper role of women, have undergone paradigm shifts over the last several decades. In this book, Robert Baker argues that these inversions are the product of moral revolutions that follow a pattern similar to that of the scientific revolutions analyzed by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book, The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution (MIT Press, 2019). After laying out the theoretical terrain, Baker develops his argument with examples of moral reversals from the recent and distant past. He describes the revolution, led by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that transformed the postmortem dissection of human bodies from punitive desecration to civic virtue; the criminalization of abortion in the nineteenth century and its decriminalization in the twentieth century; and the invention of a new bioethics paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s, supporting a patient-led rebellion against medical paternalism. Finally, Baker reflects on moral relativism, arguing that the acceptance of "absolute" moral truths denies us the diversity of moral perspectives that permit us to alter our morality in response to changing environments. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth are disproportionately represented in the U.S. youth homelessness population. In Coming Out to the Streets, Brandon Andrew Robinson examines their lives. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets looks into the LGBTQ youth's lives before they experience homelessness—within their families, schools, and other institutions—and later when they navigate the streets, deal with police, and access shelters and other services. Through this documentation, Brandon Andrew Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape the ways that the LGBTQ youth negotiate their gender and sexuality before and while they are experiencing homelessness. To address LGBTQ youth homelessness, Robinson contends that solutions must move beyond blaming families for rejecting their child. In highlighting the voices of the LGBTQ youth, Robinson calls for queer and trans liberation through systemic change. This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Brandon Andrew Robinson is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside and coauthor of Race and Sexuality. Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured on City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis (Cornell University Press, 2020), Dr. Jodi Rios examines relationships between blackness, space, and racism, in the northern suburbs of St. Louis. She argues that the “double bind of living as Black in North St. Louis County means that Black residents both suffer from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability that occurs when they simply occupy space” (1). Rios theorizes “Blackness-as-risk” as foundational to the historical and contemporary construction of metropolitan space. She documents the ways in which Black residents in the north St. Louis suburbs are subject to excessive ordinances and constant policing. Yet, these residents also resist such constraints. After the murder of Michael Brown in August 2014, Black Lives Matter protests erupted throughout St. Louis as well as across the country. Through the lens of such protests, Rios theorizes “Blackness-as-freedom” as “the unique capacity of blackness to embody freedom in the face of death and to imagine other worlds, other futures” (5). Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a transdisciplinary work that draws from history, ethnography, geography, as well as architecture and design, to show how anti-blackness is produced and contested when Black people occupy space. Jodi Rios is a scholar, designer, and educator whose work is located at the intersection of physical, social, and political space. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Americans once lived alongside animals. They raised them, worked them, ate them, and lived off their products. This was true not just in rural areas but also in cities, which were crowded with livestock and beasts of burden. But as urban areas grew in the nineteenth century, these relationships changed. Slaughterhouses, dairies, and hog ranches receded into suburbs and hinterlands. Milk and meat increasingly came from stores, while the family cow and pig gave way to the household pet. This great shift, Andrew Robichaud reveals, transformed people’s relationships with animals and nature and radically altered ideas about what it means to be human. Animal City: The Domestication of Urban America (Harvard UP, 2019) illustrates, these transformations in human and animal lives were not inevitable results of population growth but rather followed decades of social and political struggles. City officials sought to control urban animal populations and developed sweeping regulatory powers that ushered in new forms of urban life. Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals worked to enhance certain animals’ moral standing in law and culture, in turn inspiring new child welfare laws and spurring other wide-ranging reforms. The animal city is still with us today. The urban landscapes we inhabit are products of the transformations of the nineteenth century. From urban development to environmental inequality, our cities still bear the scars of the domestication of urban America. Akash Ondaatje is a Research Associate at Know History. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820 (https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/27991). Contact: 17amo2@queensu.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Baseball has been Japan's most popular sport for over a century. In The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers: Professional Baseball in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2018), anthropologist William Kelly analyzes Japanese baseball ethnographically by focusing on a single professional team, the Hanshin Tigers. For over fifty years, the Tigers have been the one of the country’s most watched and talked-about professional baseball teams, second only to their powerful rivals, the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. Despite a largely losing record, perennial frustration, and infighting among players, the Tigers remain overwhelming sentimental favorites in many parts of the country. This book analyzes the Hanshin Tiger phenomenon, and offers an account of why it has long been so compelling and instructive. Professor Kelly argues that the Tigers represent what he calls a sportsworld —a collective product of the actions of players, coaching staff, management, media, and millions of passionate fans. The team has come to symbolize a powerful counter-narrative to idealized notions of Japanese workplace relations. The Tigers are savored as a melodramatic representation of real corporate life, rife with rivalries and office politics familiar to every Japanese worker. And playing in a historic stadium on the edge of Osaka, they carry the hopes and frustrations of Japan’s second city against the all-powerful capital. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I interview Tanya Lurhmann about her new book, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton University Press, 2020). Lurhmann is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches psychology and anthropology. And her work is fascinating. She’s interested in what seems like an impossible question: how it is that people from vastly different religious and spiritual traditions experience their gods and their spirits as real? She goes about answering this question in a very straightforward way. Well, asks Lurhmann, what do their believers do and what do they learn to do such that they might turn to you and say, “Oh yes, God is real. I just had coffee with God this morning.” Lurhmann’s book is keenly argued and lucidly written, which is to say Lurhmann is not just a brilliant scholar but also an engaging writer and speaker, which makes her book and Lurhmann herself all the more of a pleasure to encounter. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today we speak with Javier Auyero, Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, about his 25 years of experience studying marginalized communities in Buenos Aires ethnographically. Javier tells us how he first came to sociology, and the intellectual curiosities and political interests that drove him to many of his projects. He also describes the very different ways he’s gone about ethnographic research: from the more classic model of solo ethnographer going into the field every day, to his collaboration with local “native” ethnographers, to working with paid research assistants. We then learn how Javier teaches ethnography by applying the same set of questions to a number of exemplary works, before ending by discussing what novels can add to ethnographic research—both to improve writing and convey emotion and experience. For more information about Ethnographic Marginalia, please click here. Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and Interim Director at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. His main areas of research, writing, and teaching are urban marginality, political ethnography, and collective violence. Auyero is author or co-author of numerous award-winning books, including Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita(2000), Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition (2003), Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina(2007), Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina (2012), Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (2009, with Débora Swistun), In Harm’s Way: The Dynamics of Urban Violence (2015, with María Fernanda Berti), and The Ambivalent State: Police-Criminal Collusion at the Urban Margins (2019, with Katherine Sobering). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Since 1990 public political criticism has evolved into a prominent feature of Vietnam's political landscape. Over the last three decades, such criticism has become widespread around four main clusters of issues: factory workers demanding better wages and living standards; villagers demonstrating and petitioning against corruption and land confiscations; citizens opposing China's encroachment into Vietnam and criticizing China-Vietnam relations; and dissidents objecting to the party-state regime and pressing for democratisation. In this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, Professor Michele Ford hosted Emeritus Professor Benedict Kerkvliet to discuss his book, Speaking Out in Vietnam: Public Political Criticism in a Communist Party–Ruled Nation (Cornell University Press, 2019). In his analysis of Communist Party–ruled Vietnam, Benedict Kerkvliet assesses the rise and diversity of these public displays of disagreement, showing that it has morphed from family whispers to large-scale use of electronic media, and argues that although we may think that the party-state represses public criticism, in fact Vietnamese authorities often tolerate and respond positively to such public and open protests. Benedict Kerkvliet is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University. Fascinated with how ordinary people deal with big pressures on their lives, Ben has emphasized research on agrarian politics in Southeast Asia. Closely related is his study of interactions between ordinary people and authorities or other elites. He is currently researching local reactions to major recent national policies in the Philippines and Vietnam. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The gyms of urban ‘new India’ are intriguing spaces. While they cater largely to well-off clients, these shiny, modern institutions are also vehicles of upward mobility for the trainers and specialists who work there. As they learn English, ‘upgrade’ their dressing style and try to develop a deeper understanding of the lives of their upmarket customers., they break with an older kind of masculinity represented by the pehlwans in their akharas. Equally, the gym aspires to be a safe space for women—a break from the toxic masculinity they must deal with outside its walls. Yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Class barriers are less permeable than they appear. The use of bodily capital to breach them is more fraught with danger than one might anticipate. And the profession is riddled with pitfalls and contradictions. Michiel Baas has spent a decade studying gyms, trainers and bodybuilders, and finds in them a new way to investigate India. He walks us through the homes and workspaces of these men—yes, they are almost all men—to bodybuilding competitions and also into their most intimate worlds of ambitions, desires and struggles. In Muscular India: Masculinity, Mobility & the New Middle Class (Context, 2020), Baas unveils a fascinating world, hidden in plain sight. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Theodora Wildcroft's Post-lineage Yoga: From Guru to #metoo (Equinox Publishing, 2020) presents a ground-breaking model for scholars to understand the contemporary teaching and practice of yoga, one where peer networks are more relevant than either brand loyalty or lineage affiliation. Previous research has considered the history and science of yoga, but rarely the ways in which it has been shared. This book aims to change that. From the very advent of group classes, yoga teachers have dictated the movement, and experience, of their students. But threaded through yoga’s history is a more democratic, individualised way of sharing practice with others. With the recent #MeTooinYoga movement, and the growing popularity of accessible yoga, teachers are increasingly turning to this hidden history for answers. In a diverse profession strongly resistant to official regulation, it is vital for scholars and policy makers alike to understand the risks and rewards of this development. In 2004 there were estimated to be 2.5 million yoga practitioners in Britain alone, and numbers are still rising today. As more and more people enjoy the practice, this book asks: in communities based more on peer-networks than hierarchal leadership structures, how are the highest ethical standards negotiated? How does practice relate to life off the mat? What does best practice look like, in ‘post-lineage’ yoga? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The name Cancún brings to mind tourism, resorts, beaches, sun, and fun. In her book, Stuck With Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatan (University of California Press, 2020), Matilde Córdoba Azcárate reveals the processes of labor, extraction, and reorganization that make places such as Cancún a tourism site. Dr. Azcárate examines four tourist sites across the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, including resorts in Cancún and Temozón, a nature preserve in Celestún, and guayabera shirt production in Tekit. She documents the ways in which tourism rearranges space in a given local in order to produce the experiences that tourists seek. Attention to labor shows how workers get stuck with tourism as a source of economic support in that it provides a wage on which to live. Yet, at the same time such work takes its toll on the body and limits the ability to imagine alternative futures. Tourism has come to act as a form of development that appears to have no way out, thus leaving us stuck with it as a means of travel as well as a means of subsistence. Azcárate moves beyond understanding tourism as an experience or a site of consumption, to demonstrate that tourism instills its own ordering processes around space and labor that operate to commodify nature, experiences, styles, and people in order to produce leisure for the few. This book would be of interest to those in Anthropology, Communication studies, Tourism studies, Labor Studies, and Latin American Studies. Matilde Córdoba Azcárate is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
John Wei’s book Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) studies queer cultures and social practices in China and Sinophone Asia. Young queer people in Asia struggle under the dual pressures of compulsory familism and compulsory development, that is, to marry and continue the family line and to participate successfully in the neoliberal development of Asia. Compulsory development often necessitates migration for education and work. Wei explores how queer people grapple with kinship, home, and developing queer communities under these conditions. Using his training in film and media studies, he analyzes films by queer Chinese-language filmmakers and discusses the creation of gay communities in cafes, queer film clubs, online social media platforms, and mobile social media. Thoroughly grounded in theory, Wei contributes new metaphors of stretched kinship and gated communities to understand movements of queer cultures and social practices. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth-century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu and on Twitter @LDickmeyer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
One of the lures that drew Americans to the suburbs in the years after World War II was the promise of a secure life. By the mid-1970s, however, it seemed that this security was under threat from a variety of sources. In Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), Kyle Riismandel examines the anxiety felt by American suburbanites during those decades, and what their responses reveal about the politics and society of that era. As Riismandel explains, many of these fears were mirrored and amplified by the popular culture of the era, with movies and television shows shaping perceptions of the problems suburbanites faced. Keyed by events such as the meltdown of the Three Mile Island reactor, the discoveries of pollution at Love Canal, and the kidnapping of Adam Walsh, suburbanites mobilized to prevent bar similar threats from endangering their neighborhoods. As Riismandel illustrates, their opposition was typically very localized, and often embodied both the distrust of government and the concern for cultural decay reflected in the New Right politics so prevalent during the era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the aftermath of World War II, a succession of mass supernatural events swept through a war-torn Germany. As millions were afflicted by a host of seemingly incurable maladies (including blindness and paralysis), waves of apocalyptic rumors crashed over the land. A messianic faith healer rose to extraordinary fame, prayer groups performed exorcisms, and enormous crowds traveled to witness apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Most strikingly, scores of people accused their neighbors of witchcraft and found themselves in turn hauled into court on charges of defamation, assault, and even murder. What linked these events, in the wake of an annihilationist war and the Holocaust, was a widespread preoccupation with evil. While many histories emphasize Germany's rapid transition from genocidal dictatorship to liberal democracy, A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post–WWII Germany (Metropolitan, 2020), places in full view the toxic mistrust, profound bitterness, and spiritual malaise that unfolded alongside the economic miracle. Drawing from a set of previously unpublished archival materials, acclaimed historian Monica Black argues that the surge of supernatural obsessions stemmed from the unspoken guilt and shame of a nation remarkably silent about what was euphemistically called "the most recent past." This shadow history irrevocably changes our view of postwar Germany, revealing the country's fraught emotional life, deep moral disquiet, and the cost of trying to bury a horrific legacy. Monica Black is a historian of modern Europe. Her research focuses on the cultural and social history of Germany, with an emphasis on the era of the World Wars and the decades immediately after 1945. Since 2010 she has been Associate Professor of History at the U of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her first book, published with Cambridge UP in 2010, was Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany. She is the Editor since 2019 of the journal Central European History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), Alyson K. Spurgas, Ph.D. examines the “new science of female sexuality” from a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that measures the disconnect between subjective and genital female arousal, contemporary psychiatric diagnoses for low female desire, new models for understanding women’s sexual response, and cutting-edge treatments for low desire in women—including from the realms of mindfulness and alternative healing. Spurgas makes the case that, together, all of these technologies create a “feminized responsive desire framework” for understanding women’s sexuality, and that this, in fact, produces women’s sexuality as a complex problem to be solved. The biggest problem, Spurgas argues, is that gendered and sexualized trauma—including as it is produced within techno-scientific medicine itself—is too often ignored in contemporary renderings. Through incisive textual analysis and in-depth qualitative research based on interviews with women with low desire, Spurgas argues for a more radical and communal form of care for feminized—and traumatized—populations, in opposition to biopolitical mandates to individualize and neo-liberalize forms of self-care. Ultimately, this is a book not just about a specific diagnosis or dysfunction but about the material-discursive regimes that produce and regulate femininity. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent study, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant”, was published in Gender Issues Journal. His interests include the sociology of art and culture, sociology of death and dying, and sociology of sex and gender. More can be found about Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. by going to his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo at wmpenn dot edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Adam Fabry's book The Political Economy of Hungary: From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2019) explores the political economy of Hungary from the mid-1970s to the present. Widely considered a 'poster boy' of neoliberal transformation in post-communist Eastern Europe until the mid-2000s, Hungary has in recent years developed into a model 'illiberal' regime. Constitutional checks-and-balances are non-functioning; the independent media, trade unions, and civil society groups are constantly attacked by the authorities; there is widespread intolerance against minorities and refugees; and the governing FIDESZ party, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, controls all public institutions and increasingly large parts of the country's economy. To make sense of the politico-economical roller coaster that Hungary has experienced in the last four decades, Fabry employs a Marxian political economy approach, emphasising competitive accumulation, class struggle (both between capital and labour, as well as different 'fractions of capital'), and uneven and combined development. The author analyses the neoliberal transformation of the Hungarian political economy and argues that the drift to authoritarianism under the Orb n regime cannot be explained as a case of Hungarian exceptionalism, but rather represents an outcome of the inherent contradictions of the variety of neoliberalism that emerged in Hungary after 1989. Adam Fabry is a lecturer of Political Economy at the National University of Chilecito (UNdeC), Argentina. He received his PhD from Brunel University under the supervision of Gareth Dale. Adam’s research interests include: international political economy, uneven and combined development, neoliberalism, and the history and politics of the far-right, with a regional focus on Central Eastern Europe and Latin America. His work has been published in international journals, such as Capital & Class, Competition & Change, Historical Materialism. The Political Economy of Hungary: From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2019) is his first monograph. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Joseph E. David, Professor of Law at Sapir Academic College in Israel, has written an intellectual history of the concept of belonging. David reviews the ancient Greek, Christian Biblical, Talmudic and Islamic conceptions of belonging and how such ideas have affected understandings of familial relations, marriage, and the political role of the family at different points in Western political history. His case studies range from the earliest Christian and, Jewish and Islamic discussions of legally appropriate family relations to the modern concerns with the public versus private status of the family in the liberal state. David also presents us with the options the modern liberal state has provided policy-makers who are concerned with autonomy and equality in the family. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the several decades since scholars in the humanities have taken up computational tools, they have borrowed many techniques from other fields, including visualization methods to create charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, and other graphic displays of information. But are these visualizations actually adequate for the interpretive approach that distinguishes much of the work in the humanities? Information visualization, as practiced today, lacks the interpretive frameworks required for humanities-oriented methodologies. In Visualization and Interpretation, Johanna Drucker continues her interrogation of visual epistemology in the digital humanities, reorienting the creation of digital tools within humanities contexts. Johanna Drucker is Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Luca Scholz is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester (UK). His research focuses on European and spatial history. He tweets at @DrLucaScholz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Edited by Dr. Timothy Larsen, The Oxford Handbook of Christmas (Oxford University Press, 2020) provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of all aspects of Christmas across the globe, from the specifically religious to the purely cultural. The volume provides authoritative treatments of a range of topics, from the origins of Christmas to the present; decorating trees to eating plum pudding; from the Bible to contemporary worship; from carols to cinema; from the Nativity Story to Santa Claus; from Bethlehem to Japan; from Catholics to Baptists; from secularism to consumerism. Christmas is not just a modern holiday, but has been an important feast for most Christians since the fourth century and a dominant event in many cultures and countries for over a millennium. The Oxford Handbook of Christmas provides an invaluable reference point for anyone interested in this global phenomenon. Dr. Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This is part of our Special Series on Third World Nationalism. In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, in addition to the rise of China and Russia, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the world, the reconfiguration of global power, and its inextricability from mainstream politics in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Today my guest is Isar Godreau, author of Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico (University of Illinois Press, 2015). The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race--created to overcome U.S. colonial power--simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism.
Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black. Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
This edited volume is the first book-length study of Buddhist tourism in contemporary Asia in the English language. Featuring chapters from diverse contributors from religious studies, anthropology, and art history, Buddhist Tourism in Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) explores themes of Buddhist imaginaries, place-making, secularization, and commodification in three parts. The first part, Buddhist Imaginaries and Place-Making features four interesting chapters on how Buddhism is marketed and promoted to domestic and international tourists, as well as how these imaginaries “sediments” over time. The chapters in Part II, Secularizing the Sacred, reveal interestingly that Buddhist tourism tends to create alliances with secular forces as strategies to promote their traditions and sacred sites. Part III of the volume shifts to discussions of commodification in Buddhism and its consequences. Here, contributors show that commodification is not necessarily at odds with Buddhism nor is it a new phenomenon. Covering a wide range of Buddhist sites across Asia and their multi-layered participants in Buddhist tourism, this book uses the unique lens of tourism to offer fresh perspectives on Buddhist spaces, identities, and practices. Courtney Bruntz is Assistant Professor, Philosophy & Religious Studies, at Doane University Brooke Schedneck is Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, at Rhodes College Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In a colonial-era housing estate in Nairobi, urban life unfolds in the shadow of a billboard promising a bright hypermodern global future. How do ordinary residents inhabit this temporal condition? What are the everyday practices of city-making that bring life to urban plans and their material ruins? In Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of Time & Urban Belonging (James Curry, 2019) anthropologist Constance Smith argues that “as people make places, they also make themselves, and in the process, they offer new possibilities for urban histories and perspectives.” In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, she joins host Jacob Doherty to discuss urban history-making, the materiality of decay, the politics of security, and the ties that bind urban and rural lives together in contemporary East Africa. Constance Smith is a UKRI Future Leader Fellow at the University of Manchester. Her work has been published in Social Anthropology, Focaal, Social Dynamics, and Urban Planning. Her current project, Tower Block Failures, explores the widening inequalities of urban life through the stories of urban catastrophes in the UK and Kenya. Jacob Doherty is a lecturer in the anthropology of development at the University of Edinburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey (University of California Press, 2020) is an exploration of “the ways in which . . .veterans’ gendered and classed experiences of warfare and disability are hardened into politics . . .how self, community, and the world-making practices of disabled veterans get tangled up with ultranationalist politics in contemporary Turkey.” Drawing on extensive interviews and participant observations, anthropologist Salih Can Açıksöz traces the experiences of veterans of Turkey’s ongoing counter-guerilla warfare in the country’s predominantly Kurdish eastern region. In Turkey, military service is mandatory, part of a “heteropatriarchal contract” between men and the state. Injury in wartime confers on veterans the status of gazi, meaning both “wounded soldier” and “holy warrior.” Yet military “operations” in southeast Turkey are not officially recognized as war, and disabling injuries in Turkey’s “deeply ableist society” deny veterans the implicit rewards of their gendered contract with the state. Therefore, since the 1990s, disabled veterans have organized to demand the state honor its debts. In his book, Professor Açıksöz shows the different forms these organizations take, as well as the ways in which veterans' groups became drawn into far-right political movements during the early 2000s. Reuben Silverman is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is it like to do research in a marginalized community in the shadows of Ecuador’s largest oil refinery? On today’s episode we talk with Maricarmen Hernandez, assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. Maricarmen tells us about her fieldwork with a heavily contaminated community in the Ecuadorian coastal city of Esmeraldas. She tells us how she gained access to the community and reflects on the relationships she developed while in the field. Many of these relationships were with women who were on the frontlines of political struggles over health effects from contamination and the formalization of land titles. Maricarmen reflects on why women took leading roles in these struggles, and how her own gender influenced her research. She also talks about how she uses photography as part of her fieldwork, and finally explains what happened when security concerns forced her to leave her field site. Learn more about Ethnographic Marginalia here. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York (University of Washington Press, 2020), anthropologist Sienna Craig examines the inter-generational shifts that increasingly transform the Mustang region of northern Nepal, particularly in the face of increased migration. Historically a community engaged in traditional trading and agricultural practices, Mustang and its communities have been radically altered since the 1990s by new modes of life, transnationalism, and (dis)connection. Drawing on 25 years of ethnographic engagement with Mustang and its far-flung diasporic outpost in New York City, the book charts the multiple forces that led to these changes and attends to their ambivalent impacts across time and space. Each section is comprised of one literary short story and one ethnographic chapter, all of which explore the cultural impacts wrought by accelerated migrations and returns. From shifting norms around childbirth to the challenges of living across linguistic divides, from the mobilities that threaten traditional social worlds to the ties that bind communities together, The Ends of Kinship asks how connections among people and to geographic places get forged and reformed through cycles of movement. What emerges is a beautifully rendered account of a community in flux, caught in the interstices between the remote, high-altitude landscapes of windswept Mustang and the bustling, multi-cultural cityscapes of New York City. More information about the book, including a variety of teaching resources, can be found at here. Sienna Craig is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She has authored several books and many journal articles in addition to multiple works of creative writing. Benjamin Linder earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology (2019) from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is currently serving as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University, the Netherlands Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State-Building Between China and Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2019) explains the variations in state building across the borderland area between China, Myanmar, and Thailand. It presents a comparative historical account of the state and nation-building processes in the ethnically diverse and geographically rugged borderland area where China meets Southeast Asia. It argues the failure of the Myanmar state to consolidate its control over its borderland area is partly due to the political and military meddling by its two more powerful neighbors during the Cold War. Furthermore, both China and Thailand, being more economically advanced than Myanmar, have exerted heavy economic influence on the borderland area at the cost of Myanmar’s economic sovereignty. The book provides a historical account of the borderland that traces the pattern of relations between valley states and upland people before the mid-twentieth century. Then it discusses the implications of the Chinese nationalist KMT troops in Burma and Thailand and Burmese and Thai communist insurgencies since the mid-1960s on attempts by the three states to consolidate their respective borderland areas. The book also portrays the dynamics of the borderland economy and the dominance of both China and Thailand on Myanmar’s borderland territory in the post-Cold War period. It further discusses the comparative nation-building processes among the three states and the implications for the ethnic minority groups in the borderland area and their national identity contestations. Finally, the book provides an updated account of the current ethnic conflicts along Myanmar’s restive borderland and its ongoing peace negotiation process. Enze Han is an Associate professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at University of Hong Kong. Victoria Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Meteorites, mega-volcanoes, and plate tectonics--the old forces of nature--have transformed Earth for millions of years. They are now joined by a new geological force--humans. Our actions have driven Earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. For the first time in our home planet's 4.5-billion-year history a single species is increasingly dictating Earth's future. To some the Anthropocene symbolizes a future of superlative control of our environment. To others it is the height of hubris, the illusion of our mastery over nature. Whatever your view, just below the surface of this odd-sounding scientific word, the Anthropocene, is a heady mix of science, philosophy, and politics linked to our deepest fears and utopian visions. In The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (Yale UP, 2018), scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin reveal a new view of human history and a new outlook for the future of humanity in the unstable world we have created. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Wild horses still roam the mountains of Galicia, Spain. But each year, in a ritual dating to the 1500s called rapa das bestas, villagers herd these “beasts” together and shave their manes and tails. Shaving the Beasts is a firsthand account of how the horses experience this traumatic rite, producing a profound revelation about the durability of sociality in the face of violent domination. John Hartigan Jr. constructs an engrossing, day-by-day narrative chronicling the complex, nuanced social lives of wild horses and the impact of their traumatic ritual shearing every summer. His story generates intimate, individual portraits of these creatures while analyzing the social practices—like grazing and grooming—that are the building blocks of equine society. Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) culminates in a searing portrayal of the inspiring resilience these creatures display as they endure and recover from rapa das bestas. Turning away from “thick” description to “thin,” Hartigan moves toward a more observational form of study, focusing on behaviors over interpretations. This vivid approach provides new and important contributions to the study of animal behavior. Ultimately, he comes away with profound, penetrating insights into multispecies interactions and a strong alternative to humancentric ethnographic practices. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Yuen Yuen Ang, a Professor of political science and China expert at the University of Michigan. We spoke already in summer 2019 to discuss her previous book: How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. In that book she anticipated the theme of this book: corruption. She explains that 'contrary to conventional wisdom, rich nations became rich by first eliminating corruption, the real history is that corruption was never eliminated, it changes in form and structure as an economy becomes richer.' We started our conversation with a definition of corruption and her typologies: petty theft, grand theft, speed money, access money. The argument in China's Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption (Cambridge University Press, 2020) has been widely taken out of context, as ‘corruption is good for growth’. I asked Yuen to clarify. She believes that not all types of corruption carry the same harm and have the same impact on growth. She explained this with the analogy of types of drugs. Corruption is a complex phenomenon. She argues that we fail to understand it when we adopt one-dimensional measures. Some countries appear free of corruption but instead they are just characterized by more sophisticated forms of corruption. Yuen gave us a short outlook on the state of research in the field of corruption and her contribution.
The book, 150 pages organized in seven chapters, is rich of tables and pictures. Yuen created a database with hundreds of party leaders and bureaucrats, and their fate. We learn about tigers and flies, in the terminology of Xi’s campaign against corruption. In your previous book, she described the strange case of China’s meritocracy. Despite absence of democracy and freedom of press, since Deng, in most cases, the Chinese Communist Party has been selecting a good ruling elite. Overall, the promotion of local cadres and their careers from village level to Zhongnanhai has been based on their ability to meet objective, measurable targets. To some extent, corruption is the opposite of the ideal of meritocracy. I have asked what is the interplay between the two in China. In the section Chinese Bureaucracy 101, Yuen argues that we commonly use public administration theories that are based on ahistorical and wester-centred principles. This is not helpful to understand China she concludes. The book ends with conclusions in the form of five questions. In fact, the very end is a final, timely, note on the risk of a new cold war between the USA and China. Yuen argues that stereotypes and misunderstandings are dangerously fueling commercial and political confrontation. Her study on corruption, and the parallel between China’s and the American Gilded age, is an example of how perhaps China is not that exceptional, exotic and hence dangerous to us. This is a great new book that contributes to the study of corruption in two ways: with a methodological innovation and with a comparative historical analysis. It is a must have for the libraries of economists, sociologists, political scientists and much more. It is also accessible to non specialists and a pleasure to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and economic dispossession caused by the collapse of socialism continue to force Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reconfigure their religious lives and societal values. David Henig draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past--and how doing so shapes the present. In particular, Henig questions how contemporary religious imagination, experience, and practice infuse and interact with social forms like family and neighborhood and with the legacies of past ruptures and critical events. His observations and analysis go to the heart of how societal and historical entanglements shape, fracture, and reconfigure religious convictions and conduct. Provocative and laden with eyewitness detail, Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (U Illinois Press, 2020) offers a rare sustained look at what it means to be Muslim and live a Muslim life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women (Indiana University Press, 2020), Michal Raucher explores the ways ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in Israel make decisions about their reproductive lives. Although they must contend with interference from doctors, rabbis, and the Israeli government, ultra-Orthodox women find space for―and insist on―autonomy from them when they make decisions regarding the use of contraceptives, prenatal testing, fetal ultrasounds, and other reproductive practices. Drawing on their experiences of pregnancy, knowledge of cultural norms of reproduction, and theological beliefs, Raucher shows that ultra-Orthodox women assert that they are in the best position to make decisions about reproduction. Conceiving Agency puts forward a new view of ultra-Orthodox women acting in ways that challenge male authority and the structural hierarchies of their conservative religious tradition. Raucher asserts that ultra-Orthodox women's reproductive agency is a demonstration of women's commitment to ultra-Orthodox life and culture as well as an indication of how they define religious ethics. Michal Raucher is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. Her research lies at the intersection of Israel studies, the anthropology of women in Judaism, and religious authority. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sharon Marcus’s new book, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton UP, 2020), sets out to help us understand celebrity culture and how it has shifted and evolved since its contemporary inception in the early 1800s. Marcus highlights the celebrity concept throughout western history, indicating some of the same dynamics at work in classical Greece that we see in our current popular culture landscape. This culture has three components that are generally all present in some form: the celebrities themselves, who may achieve that role through some form of performance or other attention-generating experience or event, a media of some kind (radio, newspaper, magazines, social media) that focuses attention on individual celebrities, and the fans or citizens who engage with the celebrities. Marcus delineates this “three-legged stool” of celebrity culture and notes that while aspects of it have changed over the years—especially the form of media—the structure and foundation continues to operate as an interactive ecosystem. Marcus opens up her tracing of this culture with Sarah Bernhardt, who embodied a kind of prototype of what we see and consider modern celebrity culture. With Bernhardt as an iconic example as well as a Virgil-like guide, Marcus explores contemporary celebrity, and also the critique of celebrity, asking the question of how we should understand these phenomena in the age of Trump, both in the United States and elsewhere. The Drama of Celebrity also dives into the racial and gender dynamics that have long been at work in the value placed on those who achieve fame and celebrity status. Without shifting the thesis to focus only on the role of gender and celebrity, Marcus teases out the dichotomous approach to male celebrity and female celebrity, and the different standards that are applied to both the individual celebrity themselves and their fans. As we move through different media and different performative formats that promote or garner an individual fame and celebrity, Marcus also compels the reader to consider the opposing ideas of American individualism and the production of mass culture, and how these antithetical dimensions are united within celebrity culture. This is a fascinating examination of the idea and the mechanics of celebrity and will be of interest to a broad array of readers. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How vulnerable can you be as a researcher? Why, in a commercially successful city like Wangqing, are Chinese Koreans more successful in their businesses than entrepreneurs from Korea who often have prestigious educational degrees? These are some of the questions Sharon Yoon addresses in her powerful new book, The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography on Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing’s Koreatown (Oxford University Press, 2020). Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Korean Chinese mum and pop store, underground Korean Chinese church, South Korean megachurch, chaebol (conglomerate) company, and 800 migrant surveys, Yoon shows how hybridity of Korean Chinese people lead to their economic success, but at the emotional cost of belonging in middle-class and longing for gohyang (home). However, Yoon contests the romanticized idea of diasporic homeland by demonstrating how Korean Chinese feel alienated from their homeland (South Korea), while neoliberal restructuring lead to isolation within the ethnic enclaves like Wangqing as people draw ethnic boundaries. She examines how “ethnic boundary-making process" constitute "conflicting notions of class and morality justif[ying] who deserve[s] to belong” in Wangqing between Korean entrepreneurs, expatriates working in chaebol companies, and Korean Chinese (2). Yoon further analyzes how spatial divisions also disempower individuals from breaking the script of distrust and othering. Racialization intersects with gender, as ethnic Others (Korean Chinese)' labor is reduced to feminized and devalued work in chaebol companies. However, their cultural, feminized skills become crucial in the entrepreneurial successes they attain later in their career, which destabilize value embedded in gendered demarcation of labor in the first place. In this well-researched and nuanced monograph, Yoon makes major contributions to East Asian studies, migration studies, and critical race studies through her insights into how globalization is changing the meaning of ethnicity and boundary-making in the context of East Asia. Sharon J. Yoon is assistant professor of Korean studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests include global and transnational sociology, qualitative methods, and race, ethnicity, and migration. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Participation is everywhere today. It has been formalized, measured, standardized, scaled up, network-enabled, and sent around the world. Platforms, algorithms, and software offer to make participation easier, but new technologies have had the opposite effect. We find ourselves suspicious of how participation extracts our data or monetizes our emotions, and the more procedural participation becomes, the more it seems to recede from our grasp. In The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Christopher M. Kelty traces four stories of participation across the twentieth century, showing how they are part of a much longer-term problem in relation to the individual and collective experience of representative democracy. Kelty argues that in the last century or so, the power of participation has dwindled; over time, it has been formatted in ways that cramp and dwarf it, even as the drive to participate has spread to nearly every kind of human endeavor, all around the world. The Participant is a historical ethnography of the concept of participation, investigating how the concept has evolved into the form it takes today. It is a book that asks, "Why do we participate?" And sometimes, "Why do we refuse?" C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
There is a strong interest today in turning inward to explore the mind and body. Mindfulness meditation exemplifies this trend, and has become increasingly well-known and widely practiced. In Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Michal Pagis, who lectures in sociology at Bar-Ilan university, explores in depth one school of mindfulness, or vipassana, founded by the Indian teacher S.N. Goenka and now established in countries around the world. Pagis draws on her own meditation experience and on in-depth interviews with vipassana meditators in both Israel and the United States. She explores the communities that form when people go on silent meditation retreats, the impact of focusing on bodily sensations over the course of an intensive retreat, and the ways that retreat practice affect practitioners and those close to them. Jack Petranker is the Director of the Center for Creative Inquiry and the Mangalam Research Center in Berkeley, CA. He presents programs in Full Presence Mindfulness, an approach grounded in the teachings of Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Situated at a crossroads of trade in the late nineteenth century, and later the economic capital of German East Africa, the thriving caravan and port town of Bagamoyo, Tanzania is one of many diverse communities on the East African coast which has been characterized as 'Swahili'. In Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo (Cambridge UP, 2019), Steven Fabian combines extensive archival sources from African and European archives alongside fieldwork in Bagamoyo to move beyond the category of 'Swahili' as it has been traditionally understood. Revealing how townspeople - Africans, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans alike - created a local vocabulary which referenced aspects of everyday town life and bound them together as members of a shared community, this first extensive examination of Bagamoyo's history from the pre-colonial era to independence uses a new lens of historical analysis to emphasize the importance of place in creating local, urban identities and suggests a broader understanding of these concepts historically along the Swahili Coast in the Indian Ocean World. Dr. Steven Fabian is a former associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Fredonia. He was President of the Tanzania Studies Association from 2015 to 2017 and currently serves as co-chair of Radical History Review. Dr. Fabian is currently a teacher of African and world history at Horace Mann School in New York City. His book Making Identity on the Swahili Coast is a 2020 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize finalist, awarded by the African Studies Association. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the status of Muslim Americans in American democracy? Dr. Nazita Lajevardi’s superb new study concludes they are ‘outsiders at home.’ In Outsiders at Homes: The Politics of American Islamophobia published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, Dr. Lajevardi uses a combination of quantitative methods – including survey experiments, field experiments, and textual analysis of media transcripts – to find that the citizenship and inclusion of American Muslims is inhibited because Muslim Americans are viewed negatively by the public, portrayed negatively by the media, and treated negatively by political elites. The book portrays Muslim American citizenship as grudgingly bestowed and remarkably insecure – and highlights the extent to which American Muslims are aware of their exclusion and precarity and how that awareness affects their political behavior. Dr. Nazita Lajevardi is an attorney and assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University. Her research has been featured in The Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, and the Huffington Post. The book combines sophisticated quantitative methods with forceful prose accessible to all. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Her Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and her “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Transformational festivals, from Burning Man to Lightning in a Bottle, Bhakti Fest, and Wanderlust, are massive events that attract thousands of participants to sites around the world. In White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals (University of California Press, 2020), Amanda J. Lucia shows how these festivals operate as religious institutions for "spiritual, but not religious" (SBNR) communities. Whereas previous research into SBNR practices and New Age religion has not addressed the predominantly white makeup of these communities, White Utopias examines the complicated, often contradictory relationships with race at these events, presenting an engrossing ethnography of SBNR practices. Lucia contends that participants create temporary utopias through their shared commitments to spiritual growth and human connection. But they also participate in religious exoticism by adopting Indigenous and Indic spiritualities, a practice that ultimately renders them exclusive, white utopias. Focusing on yoga's role in disseminating SBNR values, Lucia offers new ways of comprehending transformational festivals as significant cultural phenomena. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Paul Donovan's Profit and Prejudice: The Luddites of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Routledge, 2020) is a great example of what Robert Shiller has championed as narrative economics--pointing out the power and real-world economic import of stories, of narratives. In this case, Donovan highlights the cost of prejudice and how it will become even more expensive as we enter the fourth industrial revolution, a period in which human capital will be critically important to the success of any endeavor. Prejudice is bad for business and the economy, he concludes. Donovan argues for "Fighting Back"--the title of a chapter--to confront the economic cost of prejudice, but it will be an uphill battle. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
While many doctors claim that Lyme disease--a tick-borne bacterial infection--is easily diagnosed and treated, other doctors and the patients they care for argue that it can persist beyond standard antibiotic treatment in the form of chronic Lyme disease. In Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine (Duke UP, 2020), Abigail A. Dumes offers an ethnographic exploration of the Lyme disease controversy that sheds light on the relationship between contested illness and evidence-based medicine in the United States. Drawing on fieldwork among Lyme patients, doctors, and scientists, Dumes formulates the notion of divided bodies: she argues that contested illnesses are disorders characterized by the division of bodies of thought in which the patient's experience is often in conflict with how it is perceived. Dumes also shows how evidence-based medicine has paradoxically amplified differences in practice and opinion by providing a platform of legitimacy on which interested parties--patients, doctors, scientists, politicians--can make claims to medical truth. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Far too often, the most evocative and interesting experiences that come out of ethnographic fieldwork are pushed to the margins. In the first episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, series hosts Sneha Annavarapu and Alex Diamond explain their reasons for starting a podcast and website (ethnomarginalia.com), before sharing some of the fieldwork experiences that have inspired them. Drawing on her research on the regulation of Indian driving habits, Sneha explains why potholes are a fruitful way to understand the state, how the pandemic has pushed her to turn an ethnographic lens to social media and popular culture artifacts, and the dilemmas around including sexual harassment from her interlocutors as part of the written presentation of her research. Alex talks about his experiences researching the community experience of Colombia’s peace process, including why the pandemic has pushed him to a deeper engagement with rural lifestyles, how a trip to the local butcher provided food for thought, and the difficulties of staying neutral while doing fieldwork with both candidates in a mayoral campaign. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Consumers may love their products and services but, among politicians and activists, the big-technology companies are fast developing a reputation as the Robber Barons of the 21st century. Google recently joined Apple, Amazon and Microsoft as a so-called “tera-cap” – companies valued at more than a trillion dollars. Add Facebook and the five tech giants alone account for a quarter of the S&P500. How have they managed this in such a short timeframe? Their critics claim that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and Tim Cook are just digital versions of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller – monopolists who control entry nto their markets. Not so simple, claims Nicolas Petit in Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario (Oxford University Press, 2020). Concerns about privacy or the dissemination of “fake news” are valid but “looking at these predicaments through monopoly lenses is like using Facebook to get your news. It seems to do the job. But it might well be fake”. “The picture of big tech firms as monopolists is intuitively attractive but analytically wrong,” he writes. “A better picture is one of big tech firms as moligopolists, that is firms that coexist as monopolists and oligopolists”. Nicolas Petit is the Joint Chair in Competition Law at the European University Institute and the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies in Florence. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sarah Hines (Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Oklahoma) and James Cane-Carrasco (Associate Professor, Departments of History and International & Area Studies, University of Oklahoma) speak with Lessie Jo Frazier (Professor, Departments of Gender Studies and American Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington) about her new book, Desired States: Sex, Gender, and Political Culture in Chile (Rutgers UP, 2020). In a powerful refutation to scholars who relegate gendered social order and sexuality to the private sphere, Lessie Jo Frazier contends that desire played a central role in the political culture of the modern Chilean state. In four chapters and an epilogue that span 1913 to 2019, Prof. Frazier documents how public debates over sexuality—including those over working women’s behavior, the vulnerability of male prisoners of war, and socialist masculinities—have long shaped the body politic. Frazier unites ethnographic fieldwork, cultural criticism, and extensive archival research to highlight how states and political movements conjure or condemn people’s desires for institutional purposes. Join us for a conversation about the serendipity that brought her to research in Chile, and the diverse influences that shaped this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (FSG Originals, 2020), the celebrated writers and Logic cofounders Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff take an unprecedented dive into the tech industry, conducting unfiltered, in-depth, anonymous interviews with tech workers at all levels, including a data scientist, a start-up founder, a cook who serves their lunch, and a PR wizard. In the process, Weigel and Tarnoff open the conversation about the tech industry at large, a conversation that has previously been dominated by the voices of CEOs. Deeply illuminating, revealing, and at times lurid, Voices from the Valley is a vital and comprehensive view of an industry that governs our lives. Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“My aim is to explain how and why a certain notion of the self has come to dominate the culture of the West, why this self finds its most obvious manifestation in the transformation of sexual mores, and what the wider implications of this transformation are and may well be in the future.” So writes Carl Trueman in the introduction to his 2020 book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway Books, 2020) This is a book that progressives should read in order to better understand how social conservatives perceive the massive societal changes, particularly in the realm of sexual politics and identity, of the last 60 years or so. It is a book that social conservatives, particularly Christian ones, should read so as to understand the sexual revolution and, in particular, the normalization of transgenderism. Trueman argues that transgenderism cannot be properly understood without a grasp of a centuries-long transformation in how people in Western societies came to understand the nature of human selfhood. Trueman charts the rise of expressive individualism and how that worldview affects nearly every niche of our lives. He writes, “The sexual revolution does not simply represent a growth in the routine transgression of traditional sexual codes or even a modest expansion of the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior; rather, it involves the abolition of such codes in their entirety. More than that, it has come in certain areas, such as that of homosexuality, to require the positive repudiation of traditional sexual mores to the point where belief in, or maintenance of, such traditional views has come to be seen as ridiculous and even a sign of serious mental or moral deficiency.” Trueman elucidates in depth the ideas of three philosophers of the modern condition: Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre. He traces as well the impact on our own times of a range of thinkers and movements including Rousseau, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Freud, surrealism, Hugh Hefner, Anthony Kennedy, Peter Singer, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, and LGBTQ+ activists. Whatever your political or religious views, this book will endow you with an understanding of the origins of current and future debates about free speech and religious liberty and to judge the merits of the arguments of both sides with humanity. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Even as beauty pageants have been critiqued as misogynistic and dated cultural vestiges of the past in the US and elsewhere, the pageant industry is growing in popularity across the Global South, and Nigeria is one of the countries at the forefront of this trend. In a country with over 1,000 reported pageants, these events are more than superficial forms of entertainment. Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation (Stanford UP, 2020) takes us inside the world of Nigerian beauty contests to see how they are transformed into contested vehicles for promoting complex ideas about gender and power, ethnicity and belonging, and a rapidly changing articulation of Nigerian nationhood. Drawing on four case studies of beauty pageants, this book examines how Nigeria's changing position in the global political economy and existing cultural tensions inform varied forms of embodied nationalism, where contestants are expected to integrate recognizable elements of Nigerian cultural identity while also conveying a narrative of a newly-emerging, globally-relevant Nigeria. Oluwakemi M. Balogun critically examines Nigerian pageants in the context of major transitions within the nation-state, using these events as a lens through which to understand Nigerian national identity and international relations. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine (Verso, 2020) is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become? Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In their new collection, Monstrous Women in Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody put together a critical volume on the ways women are made monstrous in popular culture. This edited volume examines the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. The five sections of this book look at the cultural context surrounding varied monstrous voices: embodiment, maternity, childhood, power, and performance. This volume probes into the patriarchal contexts wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject, such that women frequently become monsters. The collection includes contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa, Pauline J. Reynolds, Stefanie Snider, J. Richard Stevens, Justin Wigard, Daniel F. Yezbick, and Jing Zhang. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. She has written extensively on popular culture in the classroom, youth’s out of school literacy practices, music-based pedagogy, and punk, including her book "Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics" (Peter Lang, 2018). She's a diehard Cubs fan and will miss The Winchester Brothers when they are gone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Harmony Bench's Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (Minnesota UP, 2020) traces the changing ways dance is distributed and created on the internet from the heady early internet of the 1990s to the ubiquitous social media platforms of today. Bench discusses how flash mobs reclaimed public space in the aftermath of 9/11, how "hyperdance" promised that every viewer would also be a co-choreographer, and how viral dance crazes unite people across borders in ways that are potentially liberatory but also can erase the specificities of specific dance cultures. This is a book that will be of interest to dancers and dance scholars especially during a year when almost all dance was presented online, but it will also be of use to scholars and readers interested in the changing role of the internet in our daily lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Conspiracy theories prove to be popular and widely-spread. As a rule, we do not tend to take them seriously, but it would be wrong to suggest that audiences are not intrigued by them. What can conspiracy theories communicate about those who engage with them and about those who are this way or the other implicated? With Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Keith A. Livers explores the conspiracy theory on the theoretical and practical levels. The book offers a solid background that helps historicize the conspiracy preoccupations in Russia. By connecting the conspiracy manifestations in Russian culture across the centuries, Livers successfully demonstrates how deeply engrained the conspiracy culture is in Russia. The book analyzes in detail a diverse cultural material that includes, among others, Pelevin’s and Bekmambetov’s works: by combining chronologically diverse material, Livers looks into and dissects the mechanism of the persistent sustainability of conspiracy culture in Russia. An inseparable part of the conspiracy theory is history, which appears to be part of political dimensions: this aspect is extensively commented on by Livers. Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination complicates the issue of conspiracy culture and brings it to the level of discussion that offers insights into the current position of the Russian Federation on the local and global levels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The moral horrors of genocide and mass atrocity lead us to wonder how such things are even possible. A common and understandable reaction is to see events of this kind as arising from the collapse and eventual disappearance of norms. That is, because we find genocide and mass atrocity so difficult to comprehend, we grasp for an explanation that ascribes to such episodes the absence of compressibility. In Unconscionable Crimes: How Norms Explain and Constrain Mass Atrocity (MIT 2020), Paul Morrow argues against this tendency. On his view, instances of mass atrocity often reflect the presence, rather than the absence, of norms. Paul Morrow argues that recognizing the moral, legal, and social norms governing mass atrocity can help prevent its occurrence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Bringing to the fore a wealth of original research, A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality (University of California Press, 2021) examines how the informal reclamation of abandoned property has been shaping Detroit for decades. Dr. Claire Herbert, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon lived in the city for almost five years to get a ground-view sense of how this process molds urban areas. She participated in community meetings and tax foreclosure protests, interviewed various groups, followed scrappers through abandoned buildings, and visited squatted houses and gardens. Herbert found that new residents with more privilege often have their back-to-the-earth practices formalized by local policies, whereas longtime, more disempowered residents, usually representing communities of color, have their practices labeled as illegal and illegitimate. She teases out how these divergent treatments reproduce long-standing inequalities in race, class, and property ownership. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode, I speak with Matt Rafalow, about his book, Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This book provides an ethnographic study of students and teachers at three Los Angeles schools utilizing instructional technology. We discuss the role of play in learning, how disciplinary dispositions are influenced by race and class, and how the prevalence ed tech can reinforce existing social heirarchies. His recommended books included the following:
Teachers and Machines: Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 by Larry Cuban (Teachers' College Press, 1986)
Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs by Paul Willis and Stanley Aronowitz (Columbia University Press, 1981)
Keepin' It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White: Why School Success Has No Color by Prudence L. Carter (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
New York City's Lower East Side has witnessed a severe decline in its Jewish population in recent decades, yet every morning in the big room of the city's oldest yeshiva, students still gather to study the Talmud beneath the great arched windows facing out onto East Broadway. In Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (Princeton University Press, 2020), Jonathan Boyarin presents a uniquely personal account of the year he spent as both student and observer at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem, and a poignant chronicle of a side of Jewish life that outsiders rarely see. Boyarin explores the yeshiva's relationship with the neighborhood, the city, and Jewish and American culture more broadly, and brings vividly to life its routines, rituals, and rhythms. He describes the compelling and often colorful personalities he encounters each day, and introduces readers to the Rosh Yeshiva, or Rebbi, the moral and intellectual head of the yeshiva. Boyarin reflects on the tantalizing meanings of "study for its own sake" in the intellectually vibrant world of traditional rabbinic learning, and records his fellow students' responses to his negotiation of the daily complexities of yeshiva life while he also conducts anthropological fieldwork. A richly mature work by a writer of uncommon insight, wit, and honesty, Yeshiva Days is the story of a place on the Lower East Side with its own distinctive heritage and character, a meditation on the enduring power of Jewish tradition and learning, and a record of a different way of engaging with time and otherness. Jonathan Boyarin is the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Cornell University. His books include Jewish Families, Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side, and The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the mid-1980s, Goa witnessed mass demonstrations, violent protests and political mobilising, following which Konkani was declared the official language of the Goan territory. However, Konkani was recognised only in the Devanagari script, one of two scripts used for the language in Goa, the other being the Roman script. Set against this historical background, Citizenship in a Caste Polity: Religion, Language and Belonging in Goa (Orient BlackSwan, 2020) studies the contestations around the demand that the Roman script also be officially recognised and given equal status. Based on meetings and interviews with individuals involved in this mobilisation, the author explores the interconnected themes of language, citizenship and identity, showing how, by deliberately excluding the Roman script, the largely lower-caste and lower-class Catholic users of this script were denoted as less-than-authentic members of civil society. As citizens of a former Portuguese territory, the Goan Catholics’ experience of Indian citizenship does not fall entirely within the framework of British Indian history. This allows for a construction of the post-colonial Indian experience from outside of the British Indian framework, and its focus on Catholics enables a more nuanced study of Indian secularism, while also studying a group that has remained largely underrepresented in research. The weaves together multiple disciplinary, conceptual, historical and empirical threads to give us an insight into how citizenship and political subjectivities are constructed, negotiated and experienced in Goa, especially when it comes to fixing and contesting identities around the Konkani Language, its dialects and scripts. Lucidly written and brilliantly argued, this book is a unique critical historical and ethnographic account of the politics of Konkani language, and will be valuable to scholars of History, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Citizenship Studies and Cultural Studies, and beyond that also to the policy makers working on state and citizenship policies. Ali Mohsin is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva. His research focuses on the politics of poverty, inequality and social protection in Pakistan. He can be reached at ali.mohsin@graduateinstitute.ch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering (University of California Press, 2020), sociologist Jennifer Randles shares the stories of more than 60 marginalized men as they sought to become more engaged parents through a government-supported “responsible” fatherhood program. Dads’ experiences serve as a unique window into long-standing controversies about the importance of fathering, its connection to inequality, and the state’s role in shaping men’s parenting. With a compassionate and hopeful voice, Randles proposes a more equitable political agenda for fatherhood, one that carefully considers the social and economic factors shaping men’s abilities to be involved in their children’s lives and the ideologies that rationalize the necessity of that involvement. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In a bustling city-center of Seoul, women in yellow vests protesting over the “final” resettlement between the Japanese and Korean governments every Wednesday is an iconic sight, testifying to the strength and resilience of the “comfort women” movement. In her award-winning book Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress (University of Michigan Press, 2018), Elizabeth Son examines a long neglected aspect of the “comfort women” advocacy movement: embodied practices of the former “comfort women” and activists as they protest against the historical amnesia of sexual slavery. Through a transpacific framework, Son shows how the “comfort women” movement holds Asian American and Asian activists together as they collectively address America’s imperialist past and seek redress against militarized sexual violence. Son’s monograph takes the reader to the materiality, physicality, and aurality of the Wednesday demonstrations as the collective presence of former “comfort women” and activists refuse the label “post” of post-colonial, and counter the forced historical amnesia of “comfort women” history. Son further examines the testimonies of “comfort women” during the Women’s Tribunal, which was organized transnationally to highlight the failure of Tokyo Tribunal and other international organizations in recognizing sexual slavery as a crime. Transpacific redressive theater further critiques cultural amnesia, and transpacific memorials connect “comfort women” from formerly colonized nations as well as Japan to rise in solidarity against the universal atrocity of the war. In examining embodied aspects of transpacific redress of the “comfort women” movement, Son’s work asks important questions surrounding the limits/possibilities of transpacific alliances, historical erasure of sexual slavery and the violent legacy of militarized imperialism. Elizabeth Son is Associate Professor and the Director of the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama (IPTD) Program at Northwestern University. She was an inaugural Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society fellow, and was a scholar-in-residence at KAN-WIN: Empowering Women in the Asian American Community. She continues to partner with KAN-WIN as a crisis hotline volunteer and co-founding member of their “comfort women” justice advocacy team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“India is not yet a nation. It is still in an improvisational mode like a jazz band that needs to perform repeatedly together in order to uplift every voice in the chorus,” Suraj Yengde writes in his explosive text, Caste Matters (India Viking, 2019). Yengde, a first-generation Dalit scholar educated across continents, challenges deep-seated beliefs about caste and unpacks its many layers. He describes his gut-wrenching experiences of growing up in a Dalit basti, the multiple humiliations suffered by Dalits on a daily basis, and their incredible resilience enabled by love and humour. As he brings to light the immovable glass ceiling that exists for Dalits even in politics, bureaucracy and judiciary, Yengde provides an unflinchingly honest account of divisions within the Dalit community itself-from their internal caste divisions to the conduct of elite Dalits and their tokenized forms of modern-day untouchability-all operating under the inescapable influences of Brahminical doctrines. This path-breaking book reveals how caste crushes human creativity and is disturbingly similar to other forms of oppression, such as race, class and gender. At once a reflection on inequality and a call to arms, Caste Matters argues that until Dalits lay claim to power and Brahmins join hands against Brahminism to effect real transformation, caste will continue to matter. In this interview he covers a wide range of topics from feminism to radical love and humor to casteism on a transnational level. Suraj Yengde is currently a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and an inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Initiative for Institutional Anti-racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Batman and The Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020), Chris Richardson presents a cultural analysis of the ways gender, identity, and sexuality are negotiated in the rivalry of Batman and The Joker. Richardson's queer reading of the text provides new understandings of Batman and The Joker and the transformations of the Gotham Universe throughout its 80-year existence. In particular, Richardson investigates how artists, writers, and fans engage with, challenge, and interpret gendered and sexual representations of this influential and popular rivalry. Fans of Batman and The Joker will find this work engaging and applicable across a range of scholarly fields and popular interests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality (Oxford University Press, 2020), Andrea Jain examines the interconnectedness between global spirituality and neoliberal capitalism through an examination of the global yoga and self-care industries. Building off her work in Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014), Jain examines how spiritual industries and corporations impart neoliberal spirituality, which she contends is a central component of neoliberal capitalism. In broader terms, Jain’s examination of neoliberal spirituality, and yoga more specifically, provides a rich avenue to analyze and understand the role of religion in contemporary society. Andrea Jain is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis and the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In her latest book, Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village (University of Hawaii Press), due out in May 2021, Associate Professor Holly High argues that socialism remains an important consideration in understanding “the politics of culture and the culture of politics” in Laos. She contends that understanding socialism in Laos requires moving past the ideological condemnations and emotion-laden judgements that marked the Cold War era, as well as paying attention to everyday experience. In this episode, Associate Professor Holly High talks to Dr Natali Pearson about her decades-long anthropological fieldwork in rural parts of Laos, recounting little-known stories of life in a remote village in Sekong Province. She explores the role of the State in shaping local aspirations, world views and beliefs, as well as discusses notions of gender and how socialist values of equality, unity and independence have influenced the lives of women in one of Laos' model villages. Warning: This episode contains discussions of gender-based violence which may be distressing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. Associate Professor Holly High is Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. She has been researching Lao PDR since the year 2000. Her work has been characterised by long-term fieldwork in rural and remote Laos, where she studies everyday experience in relation to larger issues in Laos and the world. Her research has looked at poverty reduction projects and agricultural, cultural, and health policies. In 2020, Associate Professor Holly High was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship for her work on reproductive health policy rollout in Laos. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi (Duke UP, 2020) Dwaipayan Banerjee explores the efforts of Delhi's urban poor to create a livable life with cancer as patients and families negotiate an overextended health system unequipped to respond to the disease. Owing to long wait times, most urban poor cancer patients do not receive a diagnosis until it is too late to treat the disease effectively. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the city's largest cancer care NGO and at India's premier public health hospital, Banerjee describes how, for these patients, a cancer diagnosis is often the latest and most serious in a long series of infrastructural failures. In the wake of these failures, Banerjee tracks how the disease then distributes itself across networks of social relations, testing these networks for strength and vulnerability. Banerjee demonstrates how living with and alongside cancer is to be newly awakened to the fragility of social ties, some already made brittle by past histories, and others that are retested for their capacity to support. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ellen Lamont's new book The Mating Game: How Gender Still Shapes How We Date (University of California Press, 2020) offers an in-depth analysis of how gender shapes dating practices. Despite enormous changes in patterns of dating and courtship in twenty-first-century America, contemporary understandings of romance and intimacy remain firmly rooted in age-old assumptions of gender difference. These tenacious beliefs now vie with cultural messages of gender equality that stress independence, self-development, and egalitarian practices in public and private life. Through interviews with heterosexual and LGBTQ individuals, Ellen Lamont’s The Mating Game explores how people with diverse sexualities and gender identities date, form romantic relationships, and make decisions about future commitments as they negotiate uncertain terrain fraught with competing messages about gender, sexuality, and intimacy. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The politics of identity have played center stage in many political debates in the last few years, and is often seen somewhat pejoratively as an epiphenomenal manifestation of the dynamics of capitalism. Some scholars, however, see this as a reductive mistake, not just for any attempt to organize against capitalism, but also as part of a mistaken understanding of what ‘identity’ is. This is one of the animating ideas of Ani Maitra in his new book Identity, Mediation and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern University Press, 2020). Utilizing the insights of philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical theory, the book looks at radio transmissions and films dispersed through the Algerian revolution and its aftermath; it examines experimental prose and imagery around Asian-American identity produced by neoliberal academic institutions; and it looks at the orientations on display at an LGBTQ+ film festival in an India struggling to join the world market while still maintaining its own distinct identity. The book is a theoretically-informed world tour that scours the globe in search of the various contexts that mediate us, and the contradictory identities that emerge. Ani Maitra is an associate professor of film and media studies at Colgate University. He received his PhD at Brown University, and is the author of a number of book chapters and articles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How did public demand shape education in the 20th century? In The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford UP, 2020), Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge, charts the history of schools, colleges, and universities. The book charts the tension between demands for democracy and the defence of meritocracy within both elite and public discourses, showing how this tension plays out in Britain’s complex and fragmented education system. Offering an alternative vision to the popular memory and perception of education, a note of caution about the power of education to cure social inequalities, and a celebration of public demand for high quality education for all, the book is essential reading across the humanities, social sciences, and for anyone interested in understanding education in contemporary society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In India, the practice of jugaad—finding workarounds or hacks to solve problems—emerged out of subaltern strategies of negotiating poverty, discrimination, and violence but is now celebrated in management literature as a disruptive innovation. In Jugaad Time: The Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (Duke UP, 2019) Amit S. Rai explores how jugaad operates within contemporary Indian digital media cultures through the use of the mobile phone. Rai shows that despite being co-opted by capitalism to extract free creative labor from the workforce, jugaad is simultaneously a practice of everyday resistance, as workers and communities employ hacks to oppose corporate, caste, and gender power. Locating the tensions surrounding jugaad—as both premodern and postdigital, innovative and oppressive—Rai maps how jugaad can be used to undermine neoliberal capitalist media ecologies and nationalist politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities--but not both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls. To escape all this, Paulina O. Espejo's On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place (Oxford UP, 2020) presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties. This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions--not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, Can Music Make You Sick?: Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition (University of Westminster Press, 2020) proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions. Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (UNC Press, 2020), Emily Contois argues that the figure of The Dude was invented (or perhaps only capitalized on) by marketing and advertising firms to combat “gender contamination” and sell what may be perceived as “feminine” foods to men. Contois suggests that this figure coalesced in response to the 2008 recession and the “gender crisis” that it created. Not only were job losses higher for men during this “mancession,” but struggling companies sought to improve sales by marketing products to men that had previously been targeted exclusively at women including diet sodas and low-calorie yogurts, as well as cookbooks, food television, and weight loss programs. In short, The Dude – represented by Jeff Bridges’s famous character in The Big Lebowski – is a male figure who “resit[s] the demands of manhood like competitiveness and breadwinning” by “simply opt[ing] out of the struggle.” Contois devotes an entire chapter to the figure of Guy Fieri, who embodies the carefully crafted ambivalence of the Dude. Contois explains that while the Dude somehow seems to be breaking gender stereotypes by offering a pathway for defying social expectations and un-gendering products, the Dude only serves to reinforce binary gender and hegemonic masculinities. Contois concludes that most of the marketing campaigns featuring the Dude have essentially failed or changed course. Notably, Coke Zero and Weight Watchers for Men have had design and marketing makeovers to Coca-Cola Zero Sugar and WW. Still others have repurposed the Dude into a gender inclusive message that uncritically accepts not caring about consequences of the food system. Contois’s final word of the book is directed to media strategists and designers, asking them to think more carefully about the role that they play in forming and reforming expectations and performances of gender in the real world. “Advertisers can do better,” Contois asks, “so why aren’t they?” Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Cuban resourcefulness is on full display in Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life (Duke 2020), as sociologist Sujatha Fernandes presents an array of strategies not just for survival but for the invention of expressive practices and community-building spaces. Enduring years of Special Period economics and a transition away from Fidel Castro’s leadership as well as shifting political contexts in Latin America, the United States and Europe, Cubans continue to struggle but also find ways to flourish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Over the nearly two decades that they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, Ahmed Kanna, Amélie Le Renard, and Neha Vora have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for this book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a "field" that is marked by such representations. The three focus on deconstructing the exceptionalist representations that circulate about the Arabian Peninsula. They analyze what exceptionalism does, how it is used by various people, and how it helps shape power relations in the societies they study. They propose ways that this analysis of exceptionalism provides tools for rethinking the concepts that have become commonplace, structuring narratives and analytical frameworks within fieldwork in and on the Arabian Peninsula. They ask: What would not only Middle East studies, but studies of postcolonial societies and global capitalism in other parts of the world look like if the Arabian Peninsula was central rather than peripheral or exceptional to ongoing sociohistorical processes and representational practices? The authors explore how the exceptionalizing discourses that permeate Arabian Peninsula studies spring from colonialist discourses still operative in anthropology and sociology more generally, and suggest that de-exceptionalizing the region within their disciplines can offer opportunities for decolonized knowledge production. This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Ahmed Kanna is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of the Pacific. He is author of Dubai: The City as Corporation, and has published articles in peer-reviewed journals including Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies and Journal of Urban Affairs. Amélie Le Renard is Sociologist and Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and author of A Society of Young Women. Neha Vora is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Lafayette College, and is author of Impossible Citizens and Teach for Arabia. Follow her on Twitter @nativeinformant. Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured on City & Society, entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography, and Anthropology News. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Representations of Poverty and Place: Using Geographical Text Analysis to Understand Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) explores a novel methodological approach which combines analytical techniques from linguistics and geography to bring fresh insights to the study of poverty. Using Geographical Text Analysis, the authors - Laura Paterson and Ian N. Gregory - map the discursive construction of poverty in the UK and compares the results to what administrative data reveal. The analysis draws together qualitative and quantitative techniques from corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, Geographical Information Science, and the spatial humanities. By identifying the place-names that occur within close proximity to search terms associated with to poverty it shows how different newspapers use place to foreground different aspects of poverty (including employment, housing, money, and benefits), and how the London-centric nature of newspaper reporting dominates the discursive construction of UK poverty. This book demonstrates how interdisciplinary research methods can illuminate complex social issues and will appeal to researchers in a number of disciplines from sociology, geography and the spatial humanities, economics, linguistics, health, and public policy, in addition to policymakers and practitioners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics (Duke UP, 2020), Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Monster is an adult pit bull, muscular and grey, who is impounded in a large animal shelter in Los Angeles. Like many other dogs at the shelter, Monster is associated with marginalized humans and assumed to embody certain behaviors because of his breed. And like approximately one million shelter animals each year, Monster will be killed. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals (Stanford UP, 2020) takes us inside one of the country's highest-intake animal shelters. Katja M. Guenther witnesses the dramatic variance in the narratives assigned different animals, including Monster, which dictate their chances for survival. She argues that these inequalities are powerfully linked to human ideas about race, class, gender, ability, and species. Guenther deftly explores internal hierarchies, breed discrimination, and importantly, instances of resistance and agency. Katja M. Guenther is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Making Their Place (Stanford, 2010). Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In his latest book, Professor Lindsay Farmer offers a historical and conceptual analysis of theories of criminalization. The book shows how criminalization is inextricably linked to the making of the modern criminal law. This distinct body of rules and processes is neither fixed nor inevitable in what, who, and how it criminalizes. Instead, it is constructed by the changing functions of criminal law as an instrument of government in the modern state. In this way, the criminal law, and processes of criminalization shape the modern civil order. Making of the Modern Criminal Law: Criminalization and Civil Order first traces the development of the modern criminal law as an institution, and shows how this secures civil order. Specifically, it identifies particular aspects of criminal law – those being jurisdiction, codification and responsibility – to give an understanding how social order is constructed by the criminal law. The book then provides detailed analysis of three particular areas of criminal law, focusing on patterns of criminalization in relation to property, the person and sexual conduct. The book is essential reading for scholars of criminal law and theory, criminalization, and all those who wish to understand the far-reaching impact of the criminal law on social order. Farmer raises questions relevant for lawyers, legislators and theorists and asks the reader to question their assumptions about the modern criminal law, the process of criminalization and social order. Lindsay Farmer is a professor of law at the University of Glasgow. He has previously held teaching posts at the University of Strathclyde, and at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has spent time as a visiting professor at the Center for Law and Society in the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Toronto, Columbia University, New York and the University of Sydney. He is the author of a number of books, and has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2019-2022) to work on a project entitled "Rethinking the Relation between Criminal Law and Markets". In 2019 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality, criminal law and civil disobedience. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong’s protests and its politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode, we meet Dr. Jill Massino, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina who is fascinated researching everyday life under dictatorships. We discuss her first book Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania (Berghahn, 2020). This book which is based on more than one hundred oral histories and extensive work with archival material, shows convincingly that people and societies are complex and elude clear-cut generalizations. The author looks through the prism of everyday life, following the cycle of growing up, marriage, parenthood, and also discussing the materiality that structures one’s life – the accessibility of consumer goods and the efforts going into procuring them when they are scarce. “For me the important thing about everyday life history is that […] it provides a fuller portrait of the politics, of the economic system, of the society you are focusing on and it allows to see how people were both effected by and responded to state policies,” Massino explains. People did suffer under the Eastern European socialist regimes, the author says, and not only in prison and labour camps, but also juggling careers and family responsibilities, witnessing the gulf between the state’s delusional propaganda and reality, queuing for hours in the cold or trying to find infant formula through connections. On the other hand, Massino shows that this was also a time of meaningful experiences – some people escaped poverty and explored their talents, pursued fulfilling careers, and spent their family vacations on the Black Sea. The focus of the book is on women’s experiences; the author looks at their inclusion in the labour force – simultaneously encouraged and failed by the state, their reproductive struggles, as well as the shifts but also the patriarchal residues in gender roles at the work place and in the family. Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The pelvic exam is considered a fundamental procedure for medical students to learn; it is also often the one of the first times where medical students are required to touch a real human being in a professional manner. In Feeling Medicine: How the Pelvic Exam Shapes Medical Training (NYU Press, 2020), Kelly Underman gives us a look inside these gynecological teaching programs, showing how they embody the tension between scientific thought and human emotion in medical education. Drawing on interviews with medical students, faculty, and the people who use their own bodies to teach this exam, Underman offers the first in-depth examination of this essential, but seldom discussed, aspect of medical education. Through studying, teaching, and learning about the pelvic exam, she contrasts the technical and emotional dimensions of learning to be a physician. Ultimately, Feeling Medicine explores what it means to be a good doctor in the twenty-first century, particularly in an era of corporatized healthcare. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“The key element shaping inequality is no longer the employment relationship but rather whether one is able to buy assets that appreciate at a faster rate than both inflation and wages”. So argue Lisa Adkins, Martijn Konings and Melinda Cooper in The Asset Economy (Polity Press, 2020), extending the argument in Thomas Piketty’s 2014 best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Inheritance, they claim, is no longer a 19th-century-style transmission of property titles after death but a “strategically timed transfer of funds that need to be leveraged and put to work in the speculative logic of the asset economy”. In the Anglo-Saxon economies at least, households are no longer just a unit of subsistence or consumption but a dynamic Minskyan balance-sheet manager. Lisa Adkins is Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences and Martijn Konings is Professor of Political Economy and Social Theory at the University of Sydney. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu nationalism has further polarized traditional views: Dalits, Muslims, and Christians protest threats to their beef-eating heritage while Hindu fundamentalists rally against those who eat the sacred cow. Yet close observation of what people do and do not eat, the styles and contexts within which they do so, and the disparities between rhetoric and everyday action overturns this simplistic binary opposition. Understanding how a food can be implicated in riots, vigilante attacks, and even murders demands that we look beyond immediate politics to wider contexts. In Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India (University of Washington Press, 2020), James Staples charts how cattle owners, brokers, butchers, cooks, and occasional beef eaters navigate the contemporary political and cultural climate. Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian offers a fine-grained exploration of the current situation, locating it within the wider anthropology of food and eating in the region and revealing critical aspects of what it is to be Indian in the early twenty-first century. James Staples is reader in social anthropology at Brunel University London and author of Leprosy and a Life in South India: Journeys with a Tamil Brahmin and Peculiar People, Amazing Lives: Leprosy, Social Exclusion and Community Making in South India. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this chronologically and thematically ambitious study of racial passing literature, Julia Charles highlights how mixed-race subjects invent cultural spaces for themselves—a place she terms that middle world. Charles, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Auburn University, focuses on the construction and performance of racial identity in works by writers from the antebellum period through Reconstruction, connecting these passing or crossing narratives to more contemporary examples of racial performativity - including Rachel Dolezal and her Black-passing controversy, the FX show Atlanta, and the musical Show Boat. Provocative and theoretically innovative, Charles’s That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing (UNC Press, 2020) offers a nuanced approach to African American passing literature and examines how mixed-race performers articulated their sense of selfhood and communal belonging in both past and present. James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at Northumbria University, UK. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Based on detailed ethnographic research, this book explores the varied experiences of women who have converted to Buddhism in contemporary Britain and analyses the implications of their experiences for understanding the translation and transference of Buddhist practices temporally and geographically. Caroline Starkey's Women in British Buddhism: Commitment, Connection, Community (Routledge, 2019) examines how women initially engage with Buddhist groups, their perspectives on religious discipline, and their relationships to ideas of gender equality and feminism. Whilst the recent study of Buddhism outside Asia has tended to emphasize the transnational and the global, this book de-centres this, highlighting the significance of locality and immediate community in contemporary women's faith practices. Showcasing the narratives and life stories of 25 ordained women across seven different Buddhist groups connected to Britain, the research in this book challenges uncritical assumptions made about 'Western' women who engage with Buddhist practices, and provides a new framing of contemporary ordination through a detailed and holistic examination of a group of Buddhist practitioners that have received little focused attention. The first multi-tradition study of ordained Buddhist women in Britain, this book will be of interest to academics working in the fields of Buddhist studies, religious studies, gender studies, Asian studies and the sociology of religion. Olivia Porter is a PhD candidate at Kings College London. Her research focuses on Tai Theravada Buddhism in Myanmar and its borders. She can be contacted at: olivia.c.porter@kcl.ac.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Steven M. Ortiz’ new book The Sport Marriage: Women Who Make It Work (University of Illinois Press, 2020) offers an in-depth analysis of and perceive insight into what is means to be an athlete’s wife in a male-dominated institution of professional sports. Ortiz draws from three decades of research that focuses on the experience of women who are married to male professional athletes. He found that these women were faced with enormous challenges as they attempted to establish and maintain their family and marriage. He found that the traditional sport marriage is career dominated and that the men prioritized their careers over everything else. Women who were married to pro-athletes were encouraged to own their subordination by following unwritten rules and strategically managing their self. These women were expected to contribute their emotional and physical labor to their husbands’ careers while adjusting to public life and trying to maintain the privacy of their family life. They were expected to manage power and cope with pervasive groups, over-involved mothers, a culture of infidelity, and husbands who prioritize team loyalty over all. Steven M. Ortiz is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Oregon State University. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps, weather, and porn indifferently. Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (U Chicago Press, 2020), begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main periods—the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with constant reference to the present. Cmiel’s original text examines the growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture, the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters brings Cmiel’s study into the present moment, providing the backstory to current controversies about the slipperiness of facts in a digital age. A hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, Promiscuous Knowledge enlightens our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our time. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States (University of California Press, 2019) offers an ethnography of adoption processes in the United States through the inner workings of a private adoption agency in Chicago, IL. Through participant observation with social workers and at other sites, Dr. Kathryn A. Mariner emphasizes adoption and its processes of family formation as uncertain or subject to possible failures along the way. Mariner focuses particularly on transracial adoption, here constituted as the adoption of Black babies by White couples. Often seen as a means of providing these children with a better life and transcending racial boundaries, Mariner shows that conditions of racial inequality and the devaluation of Black families make these kinds of adoptions possible. The process of adoption can fail to deliver a baby to an eager adoptive family through various uncertainties that can involve the expectant mother and father or the suitability of the adoptive couple for receiving a child. Social workers must manage these contingencies through various means of communication, interaction, and speculation about expectant mothers and couples seeking adoption. Mariner theorizes this process through the idea of intimate speculation, “a set of practices mobilized by adoption professionals (social workers, clinicians, educators, attorneys), prospective adoptive parents, and expectant mothers that involve differential investment in an imagined future child” (7). Orienting our gaze away from the adoptive family as the logical outcome of adoption, the book argues for understanding adoption as a future oriented process with various possible outcomes. Kathryn A. Mariner is the Wilmot Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is an art school? In Art Schools and Place: Geographies of Emerging Artists and Art Scenes (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Dr Silvie Jacobi, a researcher and head of education at London School of Mosaic, thinks through the status of art schools and arts education in the contemporary world. The book draws on ethnographic research in Manchester and Leipzig, comparting and contrasting two nations, two educational systems, and two cities, to show the different approaches to training and supporting contemporary culture. The book also compares artforms, considering both traditional practices, alongside the emergence of digital and media arts. Bridging geography, sociology, and the history of art, the book is essential reading for scholars of cultural and creative industries, as well as anyone interested in the continuing value and importance of the arts in education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A startling look at the unexpected places where violent hate groups recruit young people. Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2020) shows how tomorrow's far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from college campuses and mixed martial arts gyms to clothing stores, online gaming chat rooms, and YouTube cooking channels. Instead of focusing on the how and why of far-right radicalization, Cynthia Miller-Idriss seeks answers in the physical and virtual spaces where hate is cultivated. Where does the far right do its recruiting? When do young people encounter extremist messaging in their everyday lives? Miller-Idriss shows how far-right groups are swelling their ranks and developing their cultural, intellectual, and financial capacities in a variety of mainstream settings. She demonstrates how young people on the margins of our communities are targeted in these settings, and how the path to radicalization is a nuanced process of moving in and out of far-right scenes throughout adolescence and adulthood. Hate in the Homeland is essential for understanding the tactics and underlying ideas of modern far-right extremism. This eye-opening book takes readers into the mainstream places and spaces where today's far right is engaging and ensnaring young people, and reveals innovative strategies we can use to combat extremist radicalization. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do we promote peace in the streets? In his new book Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence--and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets (Basic Books, 2019), Thomas Abt explains. Abt teaches, studies, and writes about the use of evidence-informed approaches to reduce urban violence. Abt is a Senior Fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice in Washington, D.C. Prior to the Council, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Hard Kennedy and Law Schools. Before that, he held leadership positions in the New York Governor’s Office and the U.S. Department of Justice. Abt’s work has been featured in major media outlets, including the Atlantic, the Economist, Foreign Affairs, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and National Public Radio. This episode covers an array of topics, from the estimated $10 million cost to society per homicide; to strategies involving people, places, and things (related to behavior-based strategies) that can most effectively combat urban violence. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What are the identity conflicts that define contemporary society? In Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics (Cambridge UP, 2020) Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, professors of politics at the University of Manchester, explore the long term, structural changes in British society that underpinned the 2016 referendum on EU membership, the 2017 and 2019 general elections, as well as contemporary political debates and future questions such as voting on Scottish independence. At the heart of the book is the identification of new identity groups- both liberal and conservative- that have been shaped by changes in education and diversity, as well as by politicians’ and political parties’ behaviours. Offering historical analysis of immigration and public opinion, as well as a rich and detailed engagement with contemporary social attitudes, the book is essential reading both in the UK and in other nations seeing the rise of similar forms of social change and attitudinal conflicts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 1990, the Japanese government introduced the Nikkei-jin (Japanese descendant) visa and since then it has attracted more than 190,000 Nikkei Brazilian nationals to Japan. In Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora (Stanford UP, 2019), Dr. Ikeuchi points out that “Unlike Japanese migrants in early twentieth-century Brazil, Brazilian migrants in twenty-first-century Japan lack solid governmental support from their home country, sufficient socioeconomic capital, and birthright citizenship.” Trapped in a suspended time and space of the precariousness of unskilled labor, Dr. Ikeuchi argues that many Brazilian migrants turned to Pentecostalism, a religion that allowed these people who have been “putting aside living” and feeling “neither here nor there” in Japan to find temporal and cultural belonging. Suma Ikeuchi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In his new book Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions (Baylor University Press, 2020), Philip Jenkins maps the demographic revolution that has taken hold of many countries around the globe in recent decades and explores the implications for the future development of the world’s religions. Demographic change has driven the secularization of contemporary Western Europe, where the revolution began. Jenkins shows how the European trajectory of rapid declines in fertility is now affecting much of the globe. The implications are clear: the religious character of many non-European areas is highly likely to move in the direction of sweeping secularization. And this is now reshaping the United States itself. This demographic revolution is reshaping Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism. In order to accommodate the new social trends, these religions must adapt to situations where large families are no longer the norm. Each religious tradition will develop distinctive emphases concerning morality, gender, and sexuality, as well as the roles of clergy and laity in the faith’s institutional structures. Radical change follows great upheaval and the tidal shift is well underway, Jenkins argues. In his new book, he describes this ongoing phenomenon and envisions our collective religious future. Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and Emeritus Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities with Penn State. He received his PhD in history from Cambridge and has published 29 books, which have been translated into sixteen languages. The Economist magazine has called him “one of America’s best scholars of religion.” Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Against the backdrop of four decades of continuous conflict in Afghanistan, the Pashtun male protagonists of this book carry out their daily effort to internally negotiate, adjust (if at all), and respond to the very strict cultural norms and rules of masculinity that their androcentric social environment enjoins on them. Yet, in a widespread context of war, displacement, relocation, and social violence, cultural expectations and stringent tenets on how to comport oneself as a "real man" have a profound impact on the psychological equilibrium and emotional dynamics of these individuals. Crafting Masculine Selves: Culture, War, and Psychodynamics in Afghanistan (Oxford UP, 2019) is a close investigation into these private and at times contradictory aspects of subjectivity. Stemming from five years of research in a southeastern province of Afghanistan, it presents a long-term, psychodynamic engagement with a select group of male Pashtun individuals, which results in a multilayered dive not only into their inner lives, but also into the cultural and social environment in which they live and develop. Behind the screen of what often seems like outward conformity, Andrea Chiovenda is able to point to areas of strong inner conflict, ambivalence, and rebellion, which in turn will serve as the seeds for cultural and social change. These dynamics play out in a setting in which what was considered legitimate and justifiable violence on the battlefield has now spilled over into everyday life, even among non-combatants. Jeffrey Bristol holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Boston University, a J.D. from the University of Michigan and an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago. He is a lawyer, independent scholar and naval officer based in Tampa, Fl. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Medical marijuana laws have spread across the U.S. to all but a handful of states. Yet, eighty years of social stigma and federal prohibition creates dilemmas for patients who participate in state programs. Michelle Newhart and William Dolphin's The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience (Routledge, 2018) takes the first comprehensive look at how patients negotiate incomplete medicalization and what their experiences reveal about our relationship with this controversial plant as it is incorporated into biomedicine. Is cannabis used similarly to other medicines? Drawing on interviews with midlife patients in Colorado, a state at the forefront of medical cannabis implementation, this book explores the practical decisions individuals confront about medical use, including whether cannabis will work for them; the risks of registering in a state program; and how to handle questions of supply, dosage, and routines of use. Individual stories capture how patients redefine and reclaim cannabis use as legitimate―individually and collectively―and grapple with an inherently political identity. These experiences help illustrate how stigma, prejudice, and social change operate. By positioning cannabis use within sociological models of medical behavior, Newhart and Dolphin provide a wide-reaching, theoretically informed analysis of the issue that expands established concepts and provides new insight on medical cannabis and how state programs work. Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Written from Neil Shister’s perspective as a journalist, student of American culture, and six-time participant in Burning Man, Radical Ritual: How Burning Man Changed the World (Counterpoint, 2019) presents the event as vitally, historically important. Shister contends that Burning Man is a significant player in the avant-garde, forging new social paradigms as liberal democracy unravels. Burning Man’s contribution to this new order is postmodern, a fusion of sixties humanism with state-of-the-art Silicon Valley wizardry. Shister is not alone in his opinion. In 2018, the Smithsonian dedicated its entire Renwick Gallery, located next door to the White House, to an exhibition of Burning Man art and culture. The festival intertwines conservative and progressive ideas. On one hand it is a celebration of self-reliance, personal accountability, and individual freedom; on the other hand it is based on strong values of inclusion, consensual decision making, and centered, collaborative endeavor. In a wonderful mix of narrative storytelling and reportage, Radical Ritual discusses how Burning Man has impacted the art world, disaster relief, urban renewal, the utilization of renewable energy, and even the corporate governance of Google. The story concludes with the sudden death in April 2018 of Larry Harvey, now renowned as the philosophical epicenter of the movement. Neil Shister has been a correspondent with Time Magazine, television critic for The Miami Herald, and editor of Atlanta Magazine. He’s taught at Hampshire College, Boston University, and George Washington University. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Studies on marriage migration often portray marriage migrants as victims of globalization and patriarchy. Although there are intersecting oppressions among female migrant workers, the tendency to conflate marriage migration with sex trafficking among humanitarian organizations and scholars lead to erasure of divergent experiences. In her book, Elusive Belonging: Marriage Immigrants and "Multiculturalism" in Rural South Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018), Minjeong Kim challenges this narrative by showing how the feeling of belonging eludes a simple binary between authenticity of love [read as inclusion] and exclusion. Through in-depth interviews with thirty-five Filipinas, twenty-five Korean husbands, and eight Korean community members, Kim explores emotional citizenship created between couples, in-law families, as well as the transnational network of Filipina migrants. As scholarship on citizenship and migration highlights the importance of emotions in creating communities and identities for migrants in their host countries, Kim shows how Filipina’s social identities, along with their locations, intersect with multiplicity of emotions to shape their belonging within diverse national, familial, and co-ethnic spaces. Through her rich ethnography of international marriage couples in rural South Korea, Kim reminds us of the danger of victim narrative that can flatten marriage migrants’ experiences, and offers us a new way of thinking about citizenship that is shaped by migrants themselves through a multiplicity of emotions. Minjeong Kim is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Sociology at San Diego State University. Her research areas include gender, family and international migration, as well as Asian American studies and the media. Da In Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include reproductive justice movement, care labor and migration, affect theory, citizenship, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 1947, decolonization promised a better life for India's peasants, workers, students, Dalits, and religious minorities. By the 1970s, however, this promise had not yet been realized. Various groups fought for the social justice but in response, Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution, and with it, civil liberties. The hope of decolonization that had turned to disillusion in the postcolonial period quickly descended into a nightmare. In Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India (Cambridge UP, 2020), Kristin Plys recounts the little known story of the movement against the Emergency as seen through New Delhi's Indian Coffee House based on newly uncovered evidence and oral histories with the men who led the movement against the Emergency. Kristin Plys is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson's Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Duke UP, 2020) is an engaging and interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary black popular culture and how to think about this broad and diverse landscape, especially in relation to power, capitalism, gender identity, and presidential politics. Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson have pulled together a fascinating array of scholars of popular culture, cultural critics, as well as those who have produced popular artifacts. A number of the cultural voices in Are You Entertained? are presented in interviews at the end of each section of the book, with artists thinking through questions about black popular culture from an expansive perspective as a maker of art and as someone who creates within the context of politics, economics, and culture. Are You Entertained? is a dynamic, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary analysis of contemporary shifts, trends, and debates within the context of seeing and understanding black popular culture. The book is divided into four thematic sections that pull together chapters that speak across academic disciplines and cultural artifacts to focus on the topics of “Performing Blackness,” “Politicizing Blackness,” “Owning Blackness,” and “Loving Blackness.” This approach weaves together the conversations in each chapter in an organic fashion, pulling together conceptual ideas as well as providing the reader with deep dives into films, music, television, visual art, theater, advertising, fashion, web series, and more. Embedded within the book are not only scholarly analyses of different kinds and sites of popular culture, but also images of fine art that are critiqued in context and extend the discussion of what the “pop” in popular culture means when discussing different forms of art and culture. Drake and Henderson have assembled authors and analysis that take the reader on an enlightening journey not only through popular culture artifacts, but also complex conversations about commodification, capitalism, and consumerism, and the tension between art and profit. The idea for this edited volume was to trace how and where black culture (high, low, popular) has moved from the margins to the mainstream, and what this means in terms of artistic ownership. Within this stream of analysis, there is the enduring dynamic that often surrounds black art and production, which centers around the unequal treatment and consumption, in all dimensions, of black art. This book not only takes up the question of black popular culture in the 21st century, but also provides the reader with actual engagement with art and critique, an experiential and academic undertaking for both the reader and the authors/editors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What are the possibilities and what are the inequalities of the digital world? In The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave, 2020), Francesca Sobande, a lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University explores the experiences of Black women as producers and as consumers of digital media. The book offers a rich combination of archival and interview material, along with a theoretical framework crossing boundaries of digital, media, and communication studies, along with feminist and critical race theory. It also thinks through the role of platforms such as Twitter and YouTube, demonstrating how Black women are using digital spaces as alternatives forms of media, whilst still facing discrimination and abuse. At a time when inequalities across media industries are under scrutiny, alongside organisational and institutional responses to Black Lives Matter, the book is essential reading for anyone keen to understand the struggles of Black women in the digital world, alongside the possibilities for resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Paul Howe's book Teen Spirit: How Adolescence Transformed the Adult World (Cornell UP, 2020) offers a novel and provocative perspective on how we came to be living in an age of political immaturity and social turmoil. Award-winning author, Paul Howe, argues it's because a teenage mentality has slowly gripped the adult world. Howe contends that many features of how we live today--some regrettable, others beneficial--can be traced to the emergence of a more defined adolescent stage of life in the early twentieth century, when young people started spending their formative, developmental years with peers, particularly in formal school settings. He shows how adolescent qualities have slowly seeped upwards, where they have gradually reshaped the norms and habits of adulthood. The effects over the long haul, Howe contends, have been profound, in both the private realm and in the public arena of political, economic, and social interaction. Our teenage traits remain part of us as we move into adulthood. We now need instruction manuals for adulting Teen Spirit challenges our assumptions about the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood. Yet despite a cultural system that seems to be built on the ethos of Generation Me, it's not all bad. In fact, there is an equally impressive rise in creativity, diversity, and tolerance within society: all traits stemming from core components of the adolescent character. Howe's bold and suggestive approach to analyzing the teen in all of us helps make sense of the impulsivity driving society and to think anew about civic re-engagement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World (Stanford University Press, 2020) by Tahseen Shams (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto) reconceptualizes the homeland-hostland dyad. Drawing from the experiences of diasporic South Asian Muslim community in America, namely Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indians, Shams introduces an innovative conceptual notion of “elsewhere” which informs her new multicentered approach to the study of globalized immigrant identities. Using ethnographic study, social media analysis, and autoethnographic reflections, she provocatively highlights how for her varied participants, their identities as South Asian Muslim Americans were not only informed by their perception of sending and receiving countries, but also was defined by societies beyond these nation states, especially those that defined their sense of an ummatic connection, such as to countries in the Middle East. In such instances, affinities to elsewhere informed South Asian American Muslim’s political and social mobilizations, such as during American presidential elections or in their other social justice involvement. At the same time, other elsewhere events, such as an ISIS attack in a European country, further altered their experiences as Muslims in America. The conceptual paradigm of “elsewhere” in this study productively shifts homeland-hostland dynamics beyond a simple binary and further challenges us to rethink how homeland politics, global Muslim events, and hostland reception dynamics complicate diasporic identity formation in a globalized and transnational context. This book will be of interest to those who work on international migration, diaspora studies, South Asian Islam, and Islam in America. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Rene Almeling’s new book GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health (University of California Press, 2020) provides an in-depth look at why we do not talk about men’s reproductive health and this knowledge gap shapes reproductive politics today. Over the past several centuries, the medical profession has made enormous efforts to understand and treat women’s reproductive bodies. It is only recently, however, that researchers have begun to ask basic questions about how men’s health matters for reproductive outcomes, from miscarriage to childhood illness. Andrology failed to establish itself as a medical specialty in the nineteenth-century and there continues to be a lack of attention to the importance of men’s age, health, and exposure. Dr. Almeling examines the production, circulation, and reception of biomedical knowledge about men’s reproductive health. Throughout this book she conducts an in-depth analysis of male reproductive health by using historical documents, media messages, and qualitative interviews. The findings outlined in this book demonstrate how this non-knowledge shapes reproductive politics today. Rene Almeling, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Sociology, and, by courtesy, American Studies, Public Health, and Medicine at Yale University. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“How can dance be sustained by its practitioners in the unstable political and geographical landscape of war?” Satkunaratnam asks this through her text, Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practicing Bharatanatyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka (Wesleyan UP, 2020), a groundbreaking ethnographic examination of dance practice in Colombo, Sri Lanka, during the civil war (1983–2009). It is the first book of scholarship on bharata natyam (a classical dance originating in India) in Sri Lanka, and the first on the role of this dance in the country's war. Focusing on women dancers, Ahalya Satkunaratnam shows how they navigated conditions of conflict and a neoliberal, global economy, resisted nationalism and militarism, and advocated for peace. Her interdisciplinary methodology combines historical analysis, methods of dance studies, and dance ethnography. In this discussion, Satkunaratnam describes her ethnographic work, placing importance on the body, which carries the memory of war and transnational shifts. Satkunaratnam emphasizes trust and freeness in her process of telling stories that disrupt boundaries. Ahalya Satkunaratnam is professor of arts and humanities at Quest University Canada located in the unceded territories of the Tseil-Watuth, Musqueum, and Squamish peoples. A dancer and choreographer, she has performed across the United States, Canada, India, and Sri Lanka. Preethi Ramaprasad is a performer and doctoral student in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research is based on the politics of bharatanatyam, mythologies, and transnationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Black Americans are by far the most unified racial group in American electoral politics, with 80 to 90 percent identifying as Democrats—a surprising figure given that nearly a third now also identify as ideologically conservative, up from less than 10 percent in the 1970s. Why has ideological change failed to push more black Americans into the Republican Party? Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2020) answers this question with a pathbreaking new theory that foregrounds the specificity of the black American experience and illuminates social pressure as the key element of black Americans’ unwavering support for the Democratic Party. Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird argue that the roots of black political unity were established through the adversities of slavery and segregation, when black Americans forged uniquely strong social bonds for survival and resistance. White and Laird explain how these tight communities have continued to produce and enforce political norms—including Democratic Party identification in the post–Civil Rights era. The social experience of race for black Americans is thus fundamental to their political choices. Black voters are uniquely influenced by the social expectations of other black Americans to prioritize the group’s ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. When navigating the choice of supporting a political party, this social expectation translates into affiliation with the Democratic Party. Through fresh analysis of survey data and original experiments, White and Laird explore where and how black political norms are enforced, what this means for the future of black politics, and how this framework can be used to understand the electoral behavior of other communities. An innovative explanation for why black Americans continue in political lockstep, Steadfast Democrats sheds light on the motivations consolidating an influential portion of the American electoral population. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely make a case for why interpretivism is the most philosophically cogent approach currently on offer in the social sciences, and for anti-naturalism as the best option among interpretivist alternatives. Part survey of existing approaches to social scientific inquiry and their philosophical roots, part argument for anti-naturalism, Interpretive Social Science is a concise, lucid and keenly argued account of the interpretivist agenda that at times chimes with other work featured to date on New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, and at others sounds an altogether different note about what interpretivists do, or ought to do, and why. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in the symposium on Interpretive Social Science published in Critical Review (31:3-4), with contributions by Cornel Ban, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Lisa Wedeen. To download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why are we so concerned with belonging? In what ways does our belonging constitute our identity? Is belonging a universal concept or a culturally dependent value? How does belonging situate and motivate us? In these days of identity politics, these issues are more significant and more complex than ever. Joseph E. David grapples with these questions through a genealogical analysis of ideas and concepts of belonging. In his book Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines crucial historical moments in which perceptions of belonging were formed, transformed, or dismantled. The cases presented here focus on the pivotal role played by belonging in kinship, law, and political order, stretching across cultural and religious contexts from eleventh-century Mediterranean religious legal debates to twentieth-century statist liberalism in Western societies. With thorough inquiry into diverse discourses of belonging, David pushes past the politics of belonging to acknowledge just how wide-ranging and fluid notions of belonging can be. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still. As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion. This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Fernando Domínguez Rubio is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California-San Diego. Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
India’s urban slums exhibit dramatic variation in their access to basic public goods and services—paved roads, piped water, trash removal, sewers, and streetlights. Why are some vulnerable communities able to secure development from the state while others fail? Author Adam Michael Auerbach, Assistant Professor at the School of International Service at American University, Washington D.C, explores the this question in his book, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Good Provision in India’s Urban Slums (Cambridge UP, 2019) Drawing on over two years of fieldwork in the north Indian cities of Bhopal and Jaipur, the book’s theory centres on the political organization of slums and the informal slum leaders who spearhead resident efforts to petition the state for public services—in particular, those slum leaders who are party workers. The book shows that the striking variation in the density and partisan distribution of party workers across settlements has powerful consequences for the ability of residents to politically mobilize to improve local conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I spoke with Dr Margaret Heffernan about her latest book, Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together (Simon and Schuster, 2020). Margaret produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she became a businesswomen. She is the author of six books and a successful TED Talk speaker. She is also a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath. In her 2012 TED Talk, ‘Dare to disagree’, she told the story Alice Stewart. This is the story of how clear, certain medical data, are not always enough to change rapidly our professional rules and personal habits. In her 2019 TED Talk she argued that the more we rely on technology to make us efficient, the fewer skills we have to confront the unexpected. That’s why we need less technology and ‘more messy human skills - imagination, humility, bravery - to solve problems in business, government and life in an unpredictable age’. In her new book, she explores the people and organizations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty: ‘We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won’t allow that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out’. Uncertainty is clearly an important construct in both macroeconomics and behavioural economics. This book starts with an anecdote on the early life of a great American economist, Irving Fisher. His swimming accident and the discovery of his tuberculosis contributed to the development his research interest in stability and monetary economics. Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to resist the false promises of technology and efficiency and instead to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milano-Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Co-operative economy and collective ownership. Currently he is associate editor of The Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (REPE) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It would be hard to overstate the importance of culture. It teaches us, heals us, rips us apart and puts us back together in new and surprising ways. Given its fundamental importance to the human experience, it would make sense that looking at the sort of people who produce it for us, thinking about who they are, what their experiences are, and what that may say about the cultural products they then make. There is no product without a producer, and cultural products are no different, so understanding cultural products means thinking more critically about who produces them. This is the goal of the recently published Culture is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries (Manchester University Press, 2020). Written by Orian Brook, Mark Taylor and, my guest today, Dave O’Brien, the book combines quantitative data analysis with personal interviews to weave together the complicated picture of who the people behind some of our most cherished experiences are. Dave O’Brien is Chancellor’s Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries, based in the School of History of Art at Edinburgh University. He is also the author of Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries (Routledge). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The implied answer to the titular question of All Bullshit and Lies? (Oxford University Press 2020) is no, it’s not. In this book, subtitled Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness, Chris Heffer argues that to analyze untruthfulness, we need a framework which goes beyond these two kinds of speech acts, bullshitting and lying. With his TRUST framework (Trust-related Untruthfulness in Situated Text), Heffer analyzes untruthfulness which includes irresponsible attitudes towards truth, like dogma and distortion, as well as manipulations of the putatively true, like withholding information or misleading. He considers not only epistemic responsibility but moral culpability, taking up real-world cases such as presidential tweets and sloganeering. The book draws on work in philosophy of language, linguistics, and epistemology, along with discourse analysis, psychology, and sociology to provide a flexible framework which can help cut through increasing epistemic partisanship, believing for the sake of affiliation rather than reason. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this wide-ranging history of the African diaspora and slavery in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Matthew S. Hopper examines the interconnected themes of enslavement, globalization, and empire and challenges previously held conventions regarding Middle Eastern slavery and British imperialism. Whereas conventional historiography regards the Indian Ocean slave trade as fundamentally different from its Atlantic counterpart, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (Yale UP, 2015) argues that both systems were influenced by global economic forces. The author goes on to dispute the triumphalist antislavery narrative that attributes the end of the slave trade between East Africa and the Persian Gulf to the efforts of the British Royal Navy, arguing instead that Great Britain allowed the inhuman practice to continue because it was vital to the Gulf economy and therefore vital to British interests in the region. Hopper’s book links the personal stories of enslaved Africans to the impersonal global commodity chains their labor enabled, demonstrating how the growing demand for workers created by a global demand for Persian Gulf products compelled the enslavement of these people and their transportation to eastern Arabia. His provocative and deeply researched history fills a salient gap in the literature on the African diaspora. Dr. Matthew S. Hopper is a Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His book, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), was a finalist for the 2016 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. In recent years, he has been conducting archival work in Mauritius, Cape Town and the Seychelles for a new book project on the history of liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean world. Robyn Morse is a History Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia. Her research focus includes archival memory, slavery, and socio-economic history in the Middle East and Indian Ocean World. She can be reached by email at rmm9hf@virginia.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What are the similar ways in which animals and people try to intimidate others? In his new book, Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents (Oxford UP, 2020), David Barash explains. Barash is a research scientist and writer who spent 43 years as a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. He’s authored over 240 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and authored or co-authored 41 books. Among his awards is being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Topics covered in this episode include:
The degree to which bluffing is intrinsic to animals’ survival strategy, with better success at bluffing generally speaking than is true of human beings.
What advice did Roy Cohn give Donald Trump and how exaggerating one’s prowess is an essential part of that advice.
The degree to which many Americans feel besieged, and in looking for a solution might see Democrats as the “mommy party” and Republicans as the “daddy party.”
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with humility and humor, as he brings us along with him on his travels to times and places that produced genius. Beginning with Athens in the Golden age, and ending with Palo Alto in the Silicon age, Weiner steps lightly through a most serious and fascinating topic, aided and supplemented with the latest social science research on creativity and its cultivation. The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places (Simon and Schuster, 2016) is an intellectual odyssey that examines the connection between our surroundings and our most innovative ideas, and has fun doing it. What inspires genius? Why do certain urban settings – and certain historical challenges – foster innovation? Would geniuses like Socrates, Michelangelo, Einstein and Disney have flourished, had they found themselves in other locations and other historical circumstances? Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
John W. Traphagan’s Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan (Cambria Press, 2020) presents a series of deeply contextualized ethnographies of small-business entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial ecosystem of contemporary rural Japan. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japan has been experiencing an unprecedented decline in population that is expected to accelerate over the coming decades. Rural areas, in particular, have been at the cutting edge of this demographic transition as young people often out-migrate to urban areas to pursue education and career opportunities and to explore spaces and lifeways viewed as cosmopolitan and international. At the same time, some urbanites have decided to either return to the rural climes of their upbringing or move there for the first time to start small businesses. And rural communities have attempted to attract large projects, such as the International Linear Collider, that it is hoped will draw in new people, prevent younger people from out-migrating, and bolster local economies. A combination of individual and institutional entrepreneurial activities is changing the social and geographical landscape of rural Japan and reinventing that space as one that blends perceptions and experiences of the urban and rural, cosmopolitan and rustic. While there has been considerable research on rural Japan and numerous studies that focus on entrepreneurs, only limited attention has been paid to the intersection of entrepreneurial activities in rural Japan and the ways in which entrepreneurs more generally are contributing to the re-formation of rural space and place. This ethnographic study develops the concept of cosmopolitan rurality as a social and geographical space that cannot be characterized as either urban or rural nor as specifically cosmopolitan or rustic. In the "rural" Japan of the early twenty-first, as in many other parts of the industrial world, we see the emergence of a new type of social context forming a hybrid space of neo-rurality that brings together people and ideas reflecting local, national, and global frames of experience. One of the key drivers behind this hybrid space is expressed in entrepreneurial activities by locals to generate an entrepreneurial ecosystem that it is hoped can attract new people and ideas while retaining ideational and geographical elements associated with traditional values and spaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Past Can't Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and memory, suggesting that, instead of understanding human rights in a normative fashion, human rights should be treated as an ideology. Conceptualizing human rights as an ideology gives us useful theoretical and methodological tools to recognize the real impact human rights has on the ground. David traces the rise of the global phenomenon that is the human rights memorialization agenda, termed 'Moral Remembrance', and explores what happens once this agenda becomes implemented. Based on evidence from the Western Balkans and Israel/Palestine, she argues that the human rights memorialization agenda does not lead to a better appreciation of human rights but, contrary to what would be expected, it merely serves to strengthen national sentiments, divisions and animosities along ethnic lines, and leads to the new forms of societal inequalities that are closely connected to different forms of corruptions. Lea David is Assistant Professor in the School of Sociology at University College Dublin. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Rogers M. Smith, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a new book on the connection between our understanding of peoplehood and community, and the contemporary growth of populism around the world. This book and the meditation on these issues of populism and nationalism come out of the presentations Smith gave as the 2018 Castle Lecture Series on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. Thus, That Is Not Who We Are!: Populism and Peoplehood (Yale UP, 2020) comes out of Smith’s long engagement with this concept of peoplehood and how that idea—which also helps us to understand the modern structure and engagement of community— encounters populism, which also connects people to community and to the nation-state as a defined entity. Smith notes that he has been quite concerned with the rise of authoritarianism, particularly as it has been connected to populism in a number of different countries. The tension between those groups that are culturally traditionalists and those groups that are more cosmopolitan in perspective is at the heart of what That Is Not Who We Are! explores and seeks to understand, particularly in this period of economic globalization and technological innovation. Smith approaches these research questions from a comparative perspective, bringing together an analysis of a host of different nation states and regions to examine populism’s appeal and how these concepts have been connected to questions of national identity and this umbrella understanding of peoplehood. In order to understand peoplehood, we must think in terms of narratives, and Smith explains that it is these narratives that help us see ourselves as particular communities and as members of a state or nation. These narratives are also used by political leaders to define what it is that we all share as a “people”—and these narratives may also define who is not a member of, or is excluded from the nation, the state, the people. Smith notes that, as humans, we understand the world in which we live through this narrative lens, they give meaning to our experiences. We are fundamentally social creatures who fulfill our needs, as humans, in societies and communities. Populist leaders make extensive use of these narratives of peoplehood and this is one of the animating issues in That is Not Who We Are!: Populism and Peoplehood. Because of the need for narratives to help us understand ourselves as humans, it becomes problematic to shift away from this aspect of populism that can also lead to authoritarianism. But Smith urges the reader to turn towards these narratives of peoplehood, in part because they are important in understanding the demos within democracies. But also because stories or narratives are not sufficient in politics. Citizens expect that politics produces some kind of results, some kinds of policies. And while stories can be engaging, citizens also generally want to see the policies enacted. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is it that makes hatred so addicting? In her new book Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2020), Berit Bogaard explains. Berit is a Professor of Philosophy and a Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami. Her areas of research include the topics of perception, emotions, and language. She’s published five books, four with Oxford University Press over the past decade, plus The Superhuman Mind, published by Penguin in 2015. Topics covered in this episode include:
The two-fold nature of hatred, which has both a personal dimension and a group dimension to it. Hatred runs hotter and longer than anger, having more intensity and an attitudinal element.
How a 6th trait, honesty-humility, is a contender to supplement to the usual Big 5 personality model because it brings into the equation the role of narcissism, and its likely relationship to contempt.
How it is that some relatively privileged white men could be so prone to hatred toward women and minorities, with that hatred growing in times of greater economic inequality.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions (University of Chicago Press), Fabian In Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions (University of Chicago Press), Fabian Holt shows how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades. Adopting a critical approach, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a theory of performance institutions. The two central institutions of popular music—the club and the festival—are analyzed within the broader history of music and cultural life in modernity, shedding new light on organized cultural life in capitalism, urban media cultures, and the role of festive events in society. Everyone Loves Live Music argues that while live music provides exciting experiences for many people, it also promotes a new ideology of music in neoliberal capitalism. Dr. Fabian Holt is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University. He is also the author of the book Genre in Popular Music, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Adopting a critical approach, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a theory of performance institutions. The two central institutions of popular music—the club and the festival—are analyzed within the broader history of music and cultural life in modernity, shedding new light on organized cultural life in capitalism, urban media cultures, and the role of festive events in society. Everyone Loves Live Music argues that while live music provides exciting experiences for many people, it also promotes a new ideology of music in neoliberal capitalism. Dr. Fabian Holt is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University. He is also the author of the book Genre in Popular Music, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be quite deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric. From ancestor cults to anime, spirits, ghosts, and other invisible dimensions of reality appear to be pervasive. In Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), international scholars from various backgrounds consider together this “invisible empire” and highlight the “agency of the intangible.” The contributors of this edited volume approach spirits and animism in contemporary Japan from diverse perspectives. Satō Hiroo opens the book with a chapter on the transformation in Japanese visions of the afterlife, the status of the dead, and regional traditions of memorialization. Andrea De Antoni looks further into the ontology of spirits via an investigation into recent cases of spirit possession (tsuki, hyōi) that is treated at the Kenmi Shrine in Shikoku. Jason Josephson-Storm traces both the European and Japanese genealogies of theorizing “primitive” civilizations and their beliefs in spirits, magic, and an animated nature. In Fabio Rambelli’s chapter, a unique type of epistemological system for understanding the existence of spirits is introduced: Minataka Kumagusu’s “Minakata mandala,” which involves Buddhist philosophy, Western science, and an awareness of the Japanese folk tradition all at the same time. In Ellen Van Goethem’s chapter, she explores how and why there were widespread assumptions about how the city of Kyoto was animated by invisible agencies such as guardian spirits and the flow of qi (Jp. Ki). Carina Roth continues the discussion on enchanted landscapes by drawing our attention to “power spots” (pawā supotto) and “healing” forests as recent developments in contemporary Japanese religiosity. Focusing on the role of media in the public perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs) and their animistic positions, Ioannis Gaitanidis shows how the media paradoxically both helps to normalize animism as part of “traditional” Japanese culture while chastising animistic NRM’s egregious behaviors. Concerning spirits in modern Japanese fiction, another type of powerful media in contemporary Japanese society, Rebecca Suter identifies in her chapter a “fantastic hesitation” that authors take on, which opens doors to the “undecidability of reality” that seems to be a main gateway to the spirit world. Centering on the media arts scene in Japan, Mauro Arrighi in his chapter highlights how animism serves as one of the main creative sources for contemporary artists. Then, Jolyon Thomas turns our focus to anime and their depictions of humanity’s connection with nature. In doing so, he invites us to reflect on the term “animism” and how the spirits of anime are really rooted in late capitalist modernity with its attendant pleasures and woes. In the closing chapter, Andrea Castiglioni points out a growing tendency in recent Japanese films to focus on violent spirit entities (araburugami), rather than benign figures. He argues that this perhaps is related to the emergence of a new kind of national identity for Japan as a country that is uniquely able to control the unpredictability of nature and malignant invisible agencies. In this podcast episode, I spoke with the editor of this edited volume, Dr. Fabio Rambelli. Fabio Rambelli is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedding processions, and even the traditional funerary wails. In Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press) Ziad Fahmy offers the first historical examination of the changing soundscapes of urban Egypt, highlighting the mundane sounds of street life, while "listening" to the voices of ordinary people as they struggle with state authorities for ownership of the streets. Interweaving infrastructural, cultural, and social history, Fahmy analyzes the sounds of modernity, using sounded sources as an analytical tool for examining the past. Street Sounds also reveals a political dimension of noise by demonstrating how the growing middle classes used sound to distinguish themselves from the Egyptian masses. This book contextualizes sound, layering historical analysis with a sensory dimension, bringing us closer to the Egyptian streets as lived and embodied by everyday people. This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Ziad Fahmy is a Professor of Modern Middle East History at Cornell University’s Department of Near Eastern studies. Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social and political destinies are shaped by the will of the people without realizing that ‘the people’ are always produced, both as individuals and as aggregates, by the media: we are all embedded in mediated publics, ‘intra-structured’ by the apparatuses of communication that govern our interactions. In his new book Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019), Yves Citton maps out the new regime of experience, media and power that he designates by the term “mediarchy.” To understand mediarchy, we need to look both at the effects that the media have on us and also at the new forms of being and experience that they induce in us. We can never entirely escape from the effects of the mediarchies that operate through us but by becoming more aware of their conditioning, we can develop the new forms of political analysis and practice which are essential if we are to rise to the unprecedented challenges of our time. This comprehensive and far-reaching book will be essential reading for students and scholars in media and communications, politics and sociology, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the multiple and complex ways that the media – from newspapers and TV to social media and the internet – shape our social, political and personal lives today. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Karl Gerth’s new book, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) details how the state created brands, promoted and advertised particular products, set up department stores, and facilitated the promotion of certain luxury consumer products (notably wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines)—all in the Mao era. Though not typically considered to be a period of Chinese history driven by consumerism, Gerth’s beautifully researched book shows how, in the early People’s Republic, the Communist Party expanded consumerism and built ‘state capitalism’, and the ferocity of consumer impulses and behaviors that followed. Challenging, provocative, and precisely written, Unending Capitalism is sure to appeal to anyone interested in modern Chinese history and histories of capitalism, as well as any readers looking for a book that uses some really fascinating sources to complicate the dominant narrative of China’s ‘socialist’ history. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She works on Manchu language books and book history and loves anything with a good kesike in it. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Following the high-profile deaths of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, both cities erupted in protest over the unjustified homicides of unarmed black males at the hands of police officers. These local tragedies—and the protests surrounding them—assumed national significance, igniting fierce debate about the fairness and efficacy of the American criminal justice system. Yet, outside the gaze of mainstream attention, how do local residents and protestors in Ferguson and Baltimore understand their own experiences with race, place, and policing? In Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter, and How They Changed America (NYU Press), Jennifer Cobbina draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Brown and Gray. She examines how protestors in both cities understood their experiences with the police, how those experiences influenced their perceptions of policing, what galvanized Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and how policing tactics during demonstrations influenced subsequent mobilization decisions among protesters. Ultimately, she humanizes people’s deep and abiding anger, underscoring how a movement emerged to denounce both racial biases by police and the broader economic and social system that has stacked the deck against young black civilians. Hands Up, Don’t Shoot is a remarkably current, on-the-ground assessment of the powerful, protestor-driven movement around race, justice, and policing in America. Jennifer E. Cobbina is Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
While Tibetan Buddhism continues to face restrictions and challenges imposed by the state in contemporary China, it has in fact entered mainstream Chinese society with a growing middle-class and even celebrity following at the same time. In Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese: Mediation and Superscription of the Tibetan Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Society (Lexington Books, 2020), Dr. Joshua Esler sheds light on this recent development in Sino-Tibetan Buddhism that is gaining increasing momentum in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Drawing from more than eighty interviews with diverse interlocutors such as Tibetan Buddhist teachers, Han practitioners, and lay Tibetans, Dr. Esler shows how Tibetan Buddhism has been “superscribed” with new religious meanings and “re-mandalized” to include regions outside of geographical Tibet. Joshua Esler is a lecturer and researcher in Asian Studies at Sheridan College, Perth, Australia. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Stephanie Newell, Professor of English at Yale University, came to this project, which explores the concept of “dirt” and how this idea is used and applied to people and spaces, in a rather indirect way, having read the memoirs and journals of merchant traders – particularly the white British traders who were writing about their visits to many of the African colonies. In observing the ways in which these traders discussed the people they encountered in West Africa, Newell notes that the traders cast these encounters as, unsurprisingly, binary. Obviously, the traders also brought their racial, class, and imperial perspectives to these memoirs of their travels. Newell shifts the narrative focus and the voices heard, centering the Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos (Duke UP, 2019) in Nigeria, specifically, Lagos, since a broad part of the analysis is spotlighting how urban environments are particularly cast and imagined in context of dirt. There is also a comparative dimension in the research, since the initial project also included fieldwork and analysis in Nairobi, Kenya, and the overarching analysis of colonial and postcolonial urban history and culture in West Africa. Newell, along with a team of researchers across a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, explore this idea of “dirt” across the long 20th century. Histories of Dirt explores these concepts in three distinct research areas, using different methodological approaches to not only understand the concepts, but also to recenter the voices and considerations of Lagosians themselves. The book traces the views and understandings of this idea and how it has contributed to “social and political life” in Lagos, but the basis for this understanding comes from different sources and different ways to capture public opinion over the course of more than 100 years. The initial basis for the analysis comes from the perspectives of the Lagosians in contrast to the writings and policies of the British colonists. These perspectives are derived from a variety of considerations, including how public health films were understood by the Lagosian populations in the early part of the 20th century. The colonial archives were also used – to excavate the perspectives of Lagosians as well. Newall explains that the research that focuses on the middle period of the 20th century came from a variety of newspapers that were owned and run by Nigerians and thus provided data and information from Lagosian perspectives, though there are also dynamics around class that come through this media-based data and information. The final section of research comes from focus group interviews with current residents of Lagos. By using a multi-method approach, Newall is able to keep the focus on the words and voices of the Lagosians themselves, teasing out the information from their perspectives, as opposed to having those voices mediated by colonizers or western commercial encounters. While the subtitle of this book might suggest that the study is narrow, the analysis and interpretation of this concept of dirt and how the idea and the terminology surrounding it are understood through different lenses and contexts makes this work important on a much broader scale. And because of the variety of data sources and analytical perspectives, this research is truly interdisciplinary in scope. Histories of Dirt is a fascinating exploration and analysis and will be of interest to a wide array of scholars, researchers, and readers. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How does any organization invite the true, full participation of its members? In his new book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2020), Timothy Clark explains. Clark is the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, and ranks as a global authority on senior executive development, strategy acceleration and organizational change. He’s the author of five book, and over 150 articles. Clark earned a doctorate degree in Social Science from Oxford University. Topics covered in this episode include:
Why showing respect and granting permission are the keys to unlocking potential.
What lies beneath stunning statics like, only 36% of business professional believe their companies foster an inclusive culture, and only one-third of workers believe their opinions count; whereas, 50% of workers report being treated rudely at work at least once a week.
How a leader’s “tell-to-ask” ratio relates to whether that person suffers from the narcissism that limits the effectiveness of so many leaders
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Muslims in a Post-9/11 America (University of Michigan Press, 2018) examines how public fears about Muslims in the United States compare with the reality of American Muslims’ attitudes on a range of relevant issues. While most research on Muslim Americans focuses on Arab Muslims, a quarter of the Muslim American population, Rachel Gillum includes perspectives of Muslims from various ethnic and national communities—from African Americans to those of Pakistani, Iranian, or Eastern European descent. Using interviews and one of the largest nationwide surveys of Muslim Americans to date, Gillum examines more than three generations of Muslim American immigrants to assess how segments of the Muslim American community are integrating into the U.S. social fabric, and how they respond to post-9/11 policy changes. Gillum’s findings challenge perceptions of Muslims as a homogeneous, isolated, un-American, and potentially violent segment of the U.S. population. Despite these realities, negative political rhetoric around Muslim Americans persists. The findings suggest that the policies designed to keep America safe from terrorist attacks may have eroded one of law enforcement’s greatest assets in the fight against violent extremism—a relationship of trust and goodwill between the Muslim American community and the U.S. government. Gillum argues for policies and law enforcement tactics that will bring nuanced understandings of this diverse category of Americans and build trust, rather than alienate Muslim communities. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Shanghai’s status as a bustling, international place both now and in the past hardly needs much introduction, although the centrality of horse racing to the earlier incarnation of the city’s cosmopolitanism is less known. Taking activities at the erstwhile Shanghai Race Club as a lens through which to examine life in the city, Jay Carter’s Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai (W W Norton) offers a rich and revealing portrait of multiple colourful lives lived in ‘Old Shanghai’, and their demises. Carter’s narrative moves elegantly between trackside life and events and characters in the wider city, depicting the colourful lives of Shanghai’s colonial settlers, Chinese residents and the dynamics of racism and exclusion as well as hybridisation which existed between them. The Champions Day races, it turns out are also not the only landmark event to transport us into worlds of these people, and by focusing our attention on a single day –12 November 1941 – Carter also gleans a wealth of detail from a posthumous birthday celebration for the founding father of Chinese nationalism, and a funeral procession for china’s wealthiest woman. Occurring on the same day as the marquee races, all these events in the author’s deft hands are windows into a world soon to disappear in a maelstrom of global events. James Carter, professor of history at Saint Joseph’s University, is the author of two previous books on Chinese history and is a Fellow of the National Committee on US-China Relations. Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What happens when a woman seeking an abortion is turned away? Diana Greene Foster, PhD, decided to find out. With a team of scientists—psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nursing scholars, and public health researchers—she set out to discover the effect of receiving versus being denied an abortion on women’s lives. Over the course of a ten-year investigation that began in 2007, she and her team followed a thousand women from more than twenty states, some of whom received their abortions, some of whom were turned away. Now, for the first time, the results of this landmark study—the largest of its kind to examine women’s experiences with abortion and unwanted pregnancy in the United States—have been gathered together in one place. Here Foster presents the emotional, physical, and socioeconomic outcomes for women who received their abortion and those who were denied. She analyzes the impact on their mental and physical health, their careers, their romantic lives, their professional aspirations, and even their existing and future children—and finds that women who received an abortion were almost always better off than women who were denied one. Interwoven with these findings are ten riveting first-person narratives by women who share their candid stories. As the debate about abortion rights intensifies, The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion (Scribner, 2020) offers an in-depth examination of the real-world consequences for women of being denied abortions and provides evidence to refute the claim that abortion harms women. With brilliant synthesis and startling statistics—that thousands of American women are unable to access abortions; that 99% of women who receive an abortion do not regret it five years later—The Turnaway Study is a necessary and revelatory look at the impact of abortion access on people’s lives. Dr. Foster and her team have developed a lecture series for students of reproductive health based on the Turnaway Study. One can find short lectures by the investigators, suggested readings, and discussion questions at https://turnawaystudy.com/the-course/. Diana Greene Foster is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences and director of research at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH). An internationally recognized expert on women’s experiences with contraception and abortion, she is the principal investigator of the Turnaway Study. She has a bachelor’s of science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a doctorate from Princeton University. She lives with her husband and two children in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Kathryne M. Young, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has written a combination of a sociological study and self-help book about and for American law school students. In How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School (Stanford UP, 2018), Dr. Young surveyed over 1,100 then-current law students, 250 alumni, and conducted detailed interviews with law students about their experiences in law school and concerns about pedagogy, other students, law professors, and hopes and fears about school and their future careers. Young’s work reveals the diversity of types of people and personalities who attend law school and how remarkably similar their experiences are, ranging from the most selective schools to the least. She reveals the varieties of perspectives and coping mechanisms used by students to grapple with the challenges of legal education. Dr. Young also includes much of her own impressions from when she was a law student at Stanford. Her perspectives and the responses of her subjects allow the book to also serve as a kind of self-help book for law students and anyone contemplating law school. In this interview, she discusses her sources, the current state of legal education and law students, and her hopes for reforms in legal education. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality (Oxford UP, 2020) brings together more than a decade’s worth of research during one of the most consequential moments in Cambodian history. After years of staggering economic growth and a political breakthrough in 2013, disappointment set in as the fruits of this growth failed to reach many Cambodians and the party of the country’s long-time prime minister, Hun Sen, returned to its authoritarian crackdown. But the scope of this book is much wider than the array of settings where Lawreniuk and Parsons investigate the experiences, narratives, and consequences of inequality. Instead, their research speaks to larger global articulations, such as the limits of inequality, as a concept, to account for contexts outside of the Global North, the rise of right-wing and anti-immigration political movements, and the pernicious mobility of poverty. Sabina Lawreniuk is Nottingham Research Fellow at the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. You can find her on Twitter @SabinaLawreniuk. Laurie Parsons is Lecturer in Human Geography and British Academy Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. You can find him on Twitter @lauriefdparsons. Dino Kadich is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. You can find him on Twitter @dinokadich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sufism in America is now a developed sub-field of study that exists at the intersection of Islamic Studies, American religions, and popular spirituality. Varieties of American Sufism: Islam, Sufi Orders, and Authority in a Time of Transition (State University of New York Press 2020) an edited volume by Elliott Bazzano (Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College) and Marcia Hermansen (Professor of Theology and Director of Islamic World Studies at Loyola University Chicago), captures these complex varieties of Sufism in America. The edited volume is organized around different case studies of Sufi communities in America, which are based on ethnographic studies completed by the contributors to the volume. Some of the Sufi communities discussed include the Inayati Order, the Golden Sufi Center, Mevlevi Order of America, Alami Tariqa, Ansari Qadiri Rifa‘i Tariqa, and the Tijani Order. Throughout the different chapters various themes emerge, some of which include questions of charismatic authority in an era of transition, as well as gender and racial dynamics amongst individual American Sufi communities. Through these dynamic discussions, the collective chapters de-center easy categories of Sufi communities in America, be they understood or framed as “hippie” or non-Islamic to Islamic ones by scholars and/or practitioners of Sufism. The volumes’ focus on lived and embodied realities of various Sufi communities and the amplification of voices of American Sufis themselves (such as through oral histories) is a fresh and insightful contribution to the growing field of Sufism in America. The book will be of interest to those who write and think about contemporary Sufism, American Islam, American religions and popular spirituality. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again--that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche--deeper than prejudice itself--leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human. An award-winning author and philosopher, Smith takes an unflinching look at the mechanisms of the mind that encourage us to see someone as less than human. There is something peculiar and horrifying in human psychology that makes us vulnerable to thinking of whole groups of people as subhuman creatures. When governments or other groups stand to gain by exploiting this innate propensity, and know just how to manipulate words and images to trigger it, there is no limit to the violence and hatred that can result. Drawing on numerous historical and contemporary cases and recent psychological research, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford University Press) is the first accessible guide to the phenomenon of dehumanization. Smith walks readers through the psychology of dehumanization, revealing its underlying role in both notorious and lesser-known episodes of violence from history and current events. In particular, he considers the uncomfortable kinship between racism and dehumanization, where beliefs involving race are so often precursors to dehumanization and the horrors that flow from it. On Inhumanity is bracing and vital reading in a world lurching towards authoritarian political regimes, resurgent white nationalism, refugee crises that breed nativist hostility, and fast-spreading racist rhetoric. The book will open your eyes to the pervasive dangers of dehumanization and the prejudices that can too easily take root within us, and resist them before they spread into the wider world. David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
A quinceañera is a traditional fifteenth birthday celebration for young women (though in contemporary times, it can also be for young men) in many Latinx communities. While the celebration has roots in religiosity, it has also become a space for imagining and performing class, identity, and Americanity. With fieldwork conducted in California, Texas, Indiana, and Mexico City, Dr. Rachel Gonzàlez provides a richly nuanced study in her recent book Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities (University of Texas Press, 2019) that examines the quinceañera as a site of possibility where young woman and their families can take ownership of their identity through consumerist actions and challenge narratives of Latinx class status that emphasize poverty and unstable migratory status by presenting an image of middle-class Latinx families In this podcast, we talk about how Dr. Gonzàlez’s move from studying neurology to studying folklore and why it was so important to study quinceañera with the lens of representation rather than ritual. We also discuss the ways in which aspirations of class mobility and Americanity are articulated through style and consumerist choices. The digital sphere also serves as an important creative space where information about quinceaneras – from clothing, advice, themes, and videos – are shared and allow young women and/or her family to imagine the possibilities for constructing a celebration that reflect their own ideals. Lastly, we discuss the ways in which Lia Garcia, a trans activist based in Mexico, uses the quinceañera in performance art to challenge perceptions of the body. Dr. Rachel Gonzàlez is an Associate Professor of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the thoroughly researched, lucidly narrated new book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press), Sai Balakrishnan (Assistant Professor of City and Urban Planning at UC Berkeley) examines the novel phenomenon of the conversion of agrarian landowners into urban shareholders in India’s newly emerging “corridor cities.” Working at the unique intersection of urban planning and agrarian politics in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, the book centers an unusual cast of characters based in agrarian space -- propertied sugar elites, marginal cultivators, landless workers – in explaining the production of India’s new urban corridors. Through a meticulous case-study of three privately developed real estate enclaves, the book empirically teases out the tensions between economic liberalization and political decentralization. In the first two corridor cities, the author shows how local, decentralized structures of democratic governance (exemplified in village councils or Gram Sabhas) could not be activated to challenge the unequal processes of economic transformation, but in third enclave, Gram Sabhas were able to be much more active. Through this comparative study, we learn of the critical factors which determine democratic horizons in rural land politics. With its keen attention to the historical production of spatial unevenness and its textured ethnography of a crucial yet understudied topic in Indian social science, this book will be essential reading for geographers, anthropologists, historians, and urbanists working across South Asia and beyond. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student at Harvard University with interests in agrarian capitalism in rural Rajasthan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
“Consider the works of the renowned Nobel-prize-winning African American writer, literary and social critic, and activist Toni Morrison (b. 1931),” writes Majid Daneshgar. “Hers—like Said’s—are popular in the West and cover most of the principal themes covered by Orientalism, including otherness, outsider-ship, exploitation and cultural colonialism and imperialism. Yet … one would be hard-pressed to find, for instance, even a free publisher’s copy of Morrison’s essay The Origin of Others, in translation or not, on the bookshelf of one of the Muslim academy’s experts on Islam or history, or politics, or sociology.” With this provocative introductory passage to set the stage for his book, Studying the Qur’an in the Muslim Academy (Oxford University Press), Majid Daneshgar invites his readers on a journey exploring how the Muslim academy—that is, academic institutions in the Muslim-majority world—teaches Islamic Studies, with an emphasis on the Qur’an. Through his personal experience and scholarly endeavors spanning Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, Daneshgar illuminates how Qur’anic and Islamic Studies in the Muslim academy are inevitably circumscribed and delimited by political and polemical agendas—with special attention paid to how Edward Said’s Orientalism is marshaled toward these effort—thus offering only selective readings of the Qur’anic text and wider Islamic source material. In addition, he also shows how such agendas even color intra-Muslim engagement across sectarian and national lines. Daneshgar offers alternative approaches—drawing from both theory and philology—and argues that bringing theories and methods from both the Western academy and the Muslim academy into more constructive dialogue with each other will advance—not hinder—intellectual and public engagement with Islam and the Qur’an. In our increasingly global and interconnected world, we can settle for no less. Majid Daneshgar, Ph.D. is a Research Associate at the Orientalisches Seminar, University of Freiburg, Germany. Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Although Latinos are now the largest non-majority group in the United States, existing research on white attitudes toward Latinos has focused almost exclusively on attitudes toward immigration. Ignored Racism: White Animus Toward Latinos (Cambridge University Press) changes that. It argues that such accounts fundamentally underestimate the political power of whites' animus toward Latinos and thus miss how conflict extends well beyond immigration to issues such as voting rights, criminal punishment, policing, and which candidates to support. Providing historical and cultural context and drawing on rich survey and experimental evidence, Mark Ramirez and David Peterson show that Latino racism-ethnicism (LRE) is a coherent belief system about Latinos that is conceptually and empirically distinct from other forms of out-group hostility, and from partisanship and ideology. Moreover, animus toward Latinos has become a powerful force in contemporary American politics, shaping white public opinion in elections and across a number of important issue areas - and resulting in policies that harm Latinos disproportionately. Mark D. Ramirez is Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. David A. M. Peterson is Professor and Whitaker-Lindgren Faculty Fellow in Political Science at Iowa State University. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York’s Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying—abandoned by her doctor because she could not pay his fee. The misery in the room and the walk to reach it inspired Wald to establish Henry Street Settlement, which would become one of the most influential social welfare organizations in American history. Through personal narratives, vivid images, and previously untold stories, Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier chronicles Henry Street’s sweeping history from 1893 to today in The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement (NYU Press). From the fights for public health and immigrants’ rights that fueled its founding, to advocating for relief during the Great Depression, all the way to tackling homelessness and AIDS in the 1980s, and into today—Henry Street has been a champion for social justice. Its powerful narrative illuminates larger stories about poverty, and who is “worthy” of help; immigration and migration, and who is welcomed; human rights, and whose voice is heard. For over 125 years, Henry Street Settlement has survived in a changing city and nation because of its ability to change with the times; because of the ingenuity of its guiding principle—that by bridging divides of class, culture, and race we could create a more equitable world; and because of the persistence of poverty, racism, and income disparity that it has pledged to confront. This makes the story of Henry Street as relevant today as it was more than a century ago. The House on Henry Street is not just about the challenges of overcoming hardship, but about the best possibilities of urban life and the hope and ambition it takes to achieve them. Links for companion materials such as the web exhibition, curriculum materials, and a walking tour can be found on this site: http://www.thehouseonhenrystreet.org Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier is a national-award-winning curator and writer, and principal of REW & Co. She has directed research projects, developed physical and digital exhibitions, and written on the history of New York City—as well the urban centers of Newark and Philadelphia—with a focus on social justice. The author of an award-winning history of Brooklyn, Snyder-Grenier is a Fellow of the New York Academy of History. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In 2007, Ecuador joined the Latin American “Pink Tide” by electing a left-wing president, Rafael Correa, who voiced opposition to US imperialism and advocated higher levels of redistribution and social investment. However, shortly after coming to power, Correa came into conflict with members of his own coalition over the future of resource extraction in the country. Should Ecuador try to leverage its mineral wealth and oil fields to promote social welfare and human development, or should the country abandon the extractive model altogether because of its human and environmental costs? Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke UP, 2020) examines the deeper questions for democratic theory at stake in conflicts over resource extraction. Who are “the people” that have the authority to make decisions about whether the benefits of mining projects exceed the costs, the mining communities or the nation as a whole? How much authority should democratic governments delegate to experts to make decisions with enormous economic and environmental consequences for large groups of people? Using ethnographic and archival methods, Thea Riofrancos delves into the contentious politics of resource extraction, and in the process provides a new perspective on the “resource curse” literature in political science and economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As suburbanization, racial conflict, and the consequences of urban renewal threatened New York City with “urban crisis,” the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay (1966–1973) experimented with a broad array of projects in open spaces to affirm the value of city life. Mariana Mogilevich provides a fascinating history of a watershed moment when designers, government administrators, and residents sought to remake the city in the image of a diverse, free, and democratic society. New pedestrian malls, residential plazas, playgrounds in vacant lots, and parks on postindustrial waterfronts promised everyday spaces for play, social interaction, and participation in the life of the city. Whereas designers had long created urban spaces for a broad amorphous public, Mogilevich demonstrates how political pressures and the influence of the psychological sciences led them to a new conception of public space that included diverse publics and encouraged individual flourishing. Drawing on extensive archival research, site work, interviews, and the analysis of film and photographs, The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay's New York (University of Minnesota Press) considers familiar figures, such as William H. Whyte and Jane Jacobs, in a new light and foregrounds the important work of landscape architects Paul Friedberg and Lawrence Halprin and the architects of New York City’s Urban Design Group. The Invention of Public Space brings together psychology, politics, and design to uncover a critical moment of transformation in our understanding of city life and reveals the emergence of a concept of public space that remains today a powerful, if unrealized, aspiration. Mariana Mogilevich is a historian of architecture and urbanism and editor-in-chief of the Urban Omnibus, the online publication of the Architectural League of New York. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is a professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How are algorithms changing journalism? In Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press), Angèle Christin, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, explores the impact of metrics and analytics on the newsrooms of New York and Paris. Using an ethnography of two organisations, the book demonstrates the complexity, ambivalence, and difference in the use of metrics to make editorial and journalistic judgements. Covering a vast range of issues, from the history of journalism, through methods of managing organisations, to careers and pay, the book gives important insights into the current, and future, practices of our news organisations. As a result, the book is essential reading for social science and humanities scholars, as well as for anyone interested in how we get the news we have today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
An early wave of research helped make visible the complex dynamics of sexuality and gender norms in Latino life, but a new generation of scholars is bringing renewed energy and curiosity to this field of inquiry. In this episode we sit down with Frederick Luis Aldama, Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State University and co-editor of Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities (University of Arizona Press), to discuss some of the cutting-edge research in this new edited volume. This rich collection of work from eighteen contributors approaches the topic of masculinities from a diversity of perspectives and methodologies. With special emphasis on the plurality of Latinx masculinities, the essays reveal the divergent manifestations of masculinity across a broad spectrum including politics, social movements, literature, media, popular culture, personal experience, and other analytical angles. The pernicious effect of stereotypes and toxic Latinx masculinity is laid bare throughout the text in chapters that challenge the derogatory performances and reification of machismo in mainstream U.S. culture and society. At the same time, other essays look to how Latinx masculinities are being reclaimed and remade. Rejecting the inherited legacy of colonial thinking and heteronormative labels, authors outline the creation of new masculinities, new ways of being and coexisting. In this way, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities shows that masculinities are not simply violent and traumatic, but also healing and affirming. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism (SUNY Press, 2020), edited by Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, combines powerful first-person accounts with incisive scholarly analysis to understand the phenomenon of ultra-Orthodox Jews who leave their insular communities and venture into the wider world. In recent years, many formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews have documented leaving their communities in published stories, films, and memoirs. This movement is often identified as “off the derech” (OTD), or off the path, with the idea that the “path” is paved by Jewish law, rituals, and practices found within their birth communities. This volume tells the powerful stories of people abandoning their religious communities and embarking on uncertain journeys toward new lives and identities within mainstream society. Off the Derech is divided into two parts: stories and analysis. The first includes original selections from contemporary American and global authors writing about their OTD experiences. The second features chapters by scholars representing such diverse fields as literature, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, religion, and gender studies. The interdisciplinary lenses provide a range of methodologies by which readers can better understand this significant phenomenon within contemporary Jewish society. Today I talked to: Ezra Cappell, Professor of Jewish Studies and English and Director of the Perlmutter Fellows Program at the College of Charleston; Jessica Lang, a Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Baruch College, CUNY; Jericho Vincent, a writer and lecturer; Frieda Vizel, a specialized tour guide in Jewish Brooklyn. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Capitalism seems to many to be in a sort of constant crisis, leaving many struggling to make ends meet. This desperation was intensified in 2008, and for many never went away in spite of claims of a general economic ‘recovery.’ More recently, the tensions and shortcomings of our current socioeconomic system have been exacerbated by the COVID-crisis, with poorly compensated frontline workers struggling to stay safe in workplaces that have failed to take adequate care of their health and safety. The feeling that we’ve stuck riding along the precipice of disaster for years now is an animating idea for my guest today, Albena Azmanova, here to discuss her recent book Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Utopia or Crisis (Columbia University Press). The book argues that the animating element of contemporary life under capitalism is precarity, and the driving force behind this precarity is the insatiable drive for profits which leaves workers desperately trying to keep up with capital. Synthesizing history, philosophy, economics and policy analysis, the book takes a sharp look at the elements that make up our current situation, and what our possibilities are for change. Albena Azmanova is an associate professor of political and social theory at Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies. She is also the author of The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgement. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode, I speak with Federico R. Waitoller about his book, Excluded by Choice: Urban Students with Disabilities in the Education Marketplace (Teachers College Press). This book highlights the challenges faced by students of color who have special needs and their parents who evaluate their educational options. We discuss the services to which students with disabilities are entitled, how they are manifested in neighborhood and charter schools, and how they may be in tension with practices sometimes found in schools marketing themselves based on high test scores and college enrollment numbers. You can follow him on Twitter at @Waitollerf. His recommended books included the following:
Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side by Eve L. Ewing (University of Chicago Press, 2018)
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World by Djano Paris and H. Samy Alim (Teachers College Press, 2017)
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools by Jonathan Kozol (Broadway Books, 2012)
Federico R. Waitoller is an associate professor in the department of special education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at tsmattea@pm.me or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
College students hook up and have sex. That is what many students expect to happen during their time at university—it is part of growing up and navigating the relationship scene on most American campuses today. But what do you do when you’re a student at an evangelical university? Students at these schools must negotiate a barrage of religiously imbued undercurrents that impact how they think about relationships, in addition to how they experience and evaluate them. As they work to form successful unions, students at evangelical colleges balance sacred ideologies of purity, holiness, and godliness, while also dealing with more mainstream notions of popularity, the online world, and the appeal of sexual intimacy. In From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses (Rutgers University Press), Dana M. Malone shines a light on friendship, dating, and, sexuality, in both the ideals and the practical experiences of heterosexual students at U. S. evangelical colleges. She examines the struggles they have in balancing their gendered and religious presentations of self, the expectations of their campus community, and their desire to find meaningful romantic relationships. Dana Malone is an independent scholar and consultant in the Philadelphia area. Dr. Christina Gessler in an independent scholar, with a background in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural American women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What would actually make America great? More people. If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (Portfolio) is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing. Vox founder Matthew Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Drawing on examples and solutions from around the world, Yglesias shows not only that we can do this, but why we must. Making the case for massive population growth with analytic rigor and imagination, One Billion Americans issues a radical but undeniable challenge: Why not do it all, and stay on top forever? Matthew Yglesias is a founder of Vox, a host of the podcast The Weeds, and the author of the book The Rent is Too Damn High (Simon & Schuster, 2012). He lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Isabella Cosse’s Mafalda: A Social And Political History of a Global Comic (Duke University Press) is the definitive account of the most famous comic from Latin America, the Argentine strip Mafalda (1964-1973). Mafalda, a four-year-old girl living in a Buenos Aires apartment with her middle-class family, became an international symbol of dissent through her humorous, yet pointed critiques of authoritarianism. Cosse’s work of cultural history carefully situates the comic in the context of social modernization and political polarization in Argentina. Cosse reveals that the various characters reflect the heterogeneity of the Argentine middle classes during the years prior to the military dictatorship, when censorship was on the rise and standards of living grew more precarious for social sectors accustomed to modern comforts. Gender roles and generational change were also central themes in the comic, which used humor to explore the ways that middle-class families grappled with shifting configurations of power within the family and society more broadly. Cosse analyzes the processes by which Mafalda has acquired new meanings in a changing Argentina before, during, and after the military dictatorship. But this book is also transnational in scope, for Cosse follows Mafalda to the other countries where the comic found great success and resonated politically: Spain, Italy, and Mexico. Cosse’s award-winning work was first published in Spanish in 2014, and the English translation with Duke is part of the press’s series Latin America in Translation/En Traducción/Em Tradução. Isabella Cosse is an independent researcher for the National Science and Technology Research Council and the University of Buenos Aires. Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about youth, higher education, transnationalism, and social class in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational program for Mexican migrant children. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In an accessible and timely work of scholarship, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman's Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (W. W. Norton) tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the early textile mills that powered the Industrial Revolution to the factory towns of New England to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam. Behemoth offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now. Joshua B. Freeman is a Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. His previous books include American Empire and Working-Class New York, among others. He lives in New York City. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Routledge Handbook of Festivals (Routledge, 2018) offers a comprehensive evaluation of the most current research, debates, and controversies surrounding festivals. It covers a wide range of theories, concepts and contexts, such as sustainability, festival marketing and management, the strategic use of festivals, and their futures. The handbook features a variety of disciplinary, cultural, and national perspectives from an international team of authors. The handbook was edited by Dr. Judith Mair, Associate Professor and Discipline Leader of the Tourism Discipline Group in the University of Queensland Business School. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, and pandemic influenza are brutal reminders of the dangers of infectious disease. Comparing the development of disease control in Britain and the United States, from the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia to the H1N1 panics of more recent times, Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States (University of Massachusetts Press) provides a blueprint for managing pandemics in the twenty-first century. To understand why these two nations have handled contemporary disease threats in such different ways, Charles Allan McCoy examines when and how disease control measures were adopted in each country from the nineteenth century onward, which medical theory of disease was dominant at the time, and where disease control was located within the state apparatus. Particular starting conditions put Britain and the United States on distinct trajectories of institutionalization that led to their respective systems of disease control. As McCoy shows, even the seemingly objective matter of contagion is deeply enmeshed in social and political realities, and by developing unique systems of biopower to control the spread of disease, Britain and the United States have established different approaches of exerting political control over citizens’ lives and bodies. Charles Allan McCoy is assistant professor of sociology at the State University of New York Plattsburgh. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Jovana Babović’s Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia (University of Pittsburgh Press) examines the ways in which middle-class Belgraders negotiated metropolitan modernity in the interwar era. Defying the historiographical conventions of its field, the book unearths leisure activities that captured the attention of Belgrade urbanites in the 1920s and 1930s. The capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade was gradually integrated into transnational entertainment networks, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad. Belgrade’s middle-class residents consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state. Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisure indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. As they endowed foreign entertainment with higher cultural value, they edged out domestic performers and their lower-class patrons from urban life. Metropolitan Belgrade tells the story of how the Europeanization of the city’s middle class led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry. Jovana Babović is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Geneseo and a historian of urban life and popular culture in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Vladislav Lilić is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at vladislav.lilic@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Alicia M. Walker’s new book Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation, Infidelity (Palgrave MacMillan) provides an insider glimpse of the experiences and perceptions that men have regarding their participation in infidelity. Walker offers a personal view of the inner workings of her participants’ most intimate relationships, as well as the way the men in her study negotiate marriages that fall short of their expectations. She collected her sample from an online dating service called Ashley Madison and her findings from this study contradicted the normalized gendered social scripts. The motivations for the men in this study to seek outside partnerships were not rooted in the desire for sexual pleasure or variety. Rather, the men in her study described their relationships as an outlet to receive emotional support that they did not receive from their primary partnership. Their romantic partners provided them with attention and validation that was not provided by their primary partnership. Many of the men shared that their primary partners made them feel emasculated. Their outside partners provided support and praise, and aid in the processing of complex emotions. This in-depth analysis provides a unique insight into the experiences that men have with sexuality and masculinity, and will interesting to those who seek to understand male infidelity from a sociological perspective that has not been widely explored before. One of the reviewers for this book declared that Dr. Walker has created a new “Sociology of Infidelity”. Alicia M. Walker, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Missouri State University. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, "The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant", was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Marco Puleri’s Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics (Peter Lang, 2020) examines a complex process of identity formation in the context of exposure to a diversity of linguistic and cultural influences. Puleri zeroes in on contemporary Ukraine to explore the specificities of cultural overlapping and the power it exercises on the individual’s construction of self. As the title prompts, the emphasis is made on hybrid identities, which Puleri views from the perspective of epistemological multivalences. The discussion of the formation and function of hybrid identities is rooted not only in cultural and linguistic diversities, but also in complex historical and political processes. In Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian, Puleri attempts to unravel entangled clusters that signal identity hybridity: the book offers an ample collection of instances that manifest the overlapping and collaboration of multiple narratives that construct various identities. The book discusses in detail the writers who write (or wrote) in Russian, but live in Ukraine. Puleri asks a legitimate question, to which it is hard to find an answer: how does one categorize such literature? Is it Russian? Even though it is not written in Russia and it is not written by writers who consider themselves Russians. Is it Ukrainian? It is not written in Ukrainian, but it is written by writers who identify themselves as Ukrainians. The question itself is further complicated by the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which makes the question sensitive and at times uncomfortable. In Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian, Puleri considers a variety of aspects, attempting to delicately approach the question of hybrid identity, which in the present combination—Ukrainian and Russian components—may evoke further anxieties and complications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (University of Mississippi Press, 2020), John F. Marszalek III shares conversations with same-sex couples living in small-town and rural Mississippi. In the first book of its kind to focus on Mississippi, couples tell their stories of how they met and fell in love, their decisions on whether or not to marry, and their experiences as sexual minorities with their neighbors, families, and churches. Their stories illuminate a complicated relationship between many same-sex couples and their communities, influenced by southern culture, religion, and family norms. As Marszalek guides readers into the homes of diverse same-sex couples, he weaves in his own story of meeting his husband and living as a married gay man in Mississippi. Both the couples and he explain why they remain in one of the most conservative states in the country rather than moving to a place with a large, vibrant gay community. In addition to sharing his own experiences, Marszalek reviews the literature on the topic, including writings from southern and rural queer studies, history, sociology, and psychology, to explain how the couples’ relationships and experiences compare to those of same-sex couples in other areas and times. Consequently, Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet is written for both the scholar of southern and queer studies and for anyone interested in learning about the experiences of same-sex couples. John F. Marszalek III is clinical faculty of the online clinical mental health counseling program at Southern New Hampshire University. He is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi, published by University Press of Mississippi. He lives in Mississippi with his husband and their two dogs. Chris Babits is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Utah State University. In addition to teaching, he’s feverishly writing his book, To Cure a Sinful Nation: A History of Conversion Therapy in the United States (University of Chicago Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Saint Lucia’s rural landscape is more forested today than at any time in at least seventy-five years (probably much longer). This change is profoundly significant given widespread efforts to achieve sustainable development on small-island states like Saint Lucia. Yet, this seemingly good-news story runs contrary to most conventional narratives about the worsening state of the environment in the Caribbean and elsewhere. How did this remarkable change come about? What role did government, the private sector and other actors play in this? What are the links between this environmental change and wider changes in the Saint Lucian economy, politics and society? Is there more to this story than meets the eye? These questions are explored in this interdisciplinary study of changing human-environment relations since the Second World War. Brad Walter's book The Greening of Saint Lucia: Economic Development and Environmental Change in the West Indies (UWI Press, 2019) is based on the results of a long-term, field-based research project that began in 2006. It entails the application of a novel research methodology for doing human-environment research (ACE: abductive causal eventism) that the author co-developed with a colleague from Rutgers University. This causal-historical methodology allows for the rigorous integration of findings derived from natural and social science sources, including ecological and air photo assessments, interviews, secondary data sources, and archival investigations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing's “old city” in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar—one of the capital city's poorest neighborhoods and only a stone's throw from Tian’anmen Square—lived in dilapidated conditions without sanitation. Few had stable employment. Today, most of Dashalar's original inhabitants have been relocated, displaced by gentrification. In Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center (Duke University Press) Harriet Evans captures the last gasps of subaltern life in Dashalar. Drawing on oral histories that reveal memories and experiences of several neighborhood families, she reflects on the relationships between individual, family, neighborhood, and the state; poverty and precarity; gender politics and ethical living; and resistance to and accommodation of party-state authority. Evans contends that residents' assertion of belonging to their neighborhood signifies not a nostalgic clinging to the past, but a rejection of their marginalization and a desire for recognition. Foregrounding the experiences of the last of Dashalar's older denizens as key to understanding Beijing's recent history, Evans complicates official narratives of China's economic success while raising crucial questions about the place of the subaltern in history. Harriet Evans is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster and Visiting Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Suvi Rautio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her research delve into themes including Chinese state-society relations, space and memory in efforts to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China and reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. She can be reached at suvi.rautio@helsinki.fi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural history and the endangered Soqotri language. Within the span of a decade, this Indian Ocean archipelago went from being among the most marginalized regions of Yemen to promoted for its outstanding global value. Islands of Heritage Conservation and Transformation in Yemen (Stanford University Press) shares Soqotrans' stories to offer the first exploration of environmental conservation, heritage production, and development in an Arab state. Examining the multiple notions of heritage in play for twenty-first-century Soqotra, Nathalie Peutz narrates how everyday Soqotrans came to assemble, defend, and mobilize their cultural and linguistic heritage. These efforts, which diverged from outsiders' focus on the island's natural heritage, ultimately added to Soqotrans' calls for political and cultural change during the Yemeni Revolution. Islands of Heritage shows that far from being merely a conservative endeavor, the protection of heritage can have profoundly transformative, even revolutionary effects. Grassroots claims to heritage can be a potent form of political engagement with the most imminent concerns of the present: human rights, globalization, democracy, and sustainability. Nathalie Peutz is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University Abu Dhabi. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How is communicating virtually Is like eating Pringles forever? Find out as I talk to Nick Morgan about his new book Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). Morgan is one of America’s top communication theorists and coaches. He’s written for Fortune 50 CEOs as well as for political and educational leaders, and coached people for events ranging from TED talks to giving testimony to Congress. Topics covered in this episode include:
What’s the likeliest way to lose the trust of others during a conference call, and how can you best hope to restore it?
Why are most online webinars a disaster and what kind of format improves them best?
If powerpoint presentations are no longer the way to go in selling to prospects in online calls, what’s the alternative?
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
As Baby Boomers reach the tipping point of aging into later life, the record numbers of seniors int the 65 and over crowd generates greater interest and in aging and its representation. Gray Matters: Finding Meaning in the Stories of Later Life (Rutgers University Press) draws upon diverse cultural representation from movies, films, books, and art, and juxtaposes these narratives of aging with surveys from over 200 seniors aged 65 and over from around the United States to explore questions of meaning in older life. Topics include transitions in family relationships, work and retirement, intimacy and sexuality, memory and memory loss, health and finances, and choices about the end of life. Through the interplay of cultural representations and real-life experiences of older life emerges an acknowledgment of the diversity and complexity of experiences in older life. It is a thought piece that examines the personal experiences of older life in the context of how those experiences are often represented in various cultures, and in the ways that older life is structured through our social institutions. A theme throughout Gray Matters is the foregrounding of the voices of seniors to tell their own stories. Even in selecting research and literature, this book maintains a focus on the experiences of those who are 65 and older rather than allowing other perspectives to overshadow them. By presenting experiences as well as depictions of aging and research on aging, this book brings forth rich conversation to many of the assumptions and stereotypes about aging that often go unquestioned. The result is an intimate experience that very consciously complicates ideas of aging, expanding the stories of over-65 experiences beyond a binary of “successful” aging or not, and questioning the cultural and socioeconomic assumptions that underlie such oversimplifications. Gray Matters allows a richer story to emerge, creating space in which common fears associated with aging are explored from those who are experiencing them, which produces some surprises and some reasons for hope without being reductionist. If you are interested in a contemplation of authentic and diverse experiences of aging and older life you will enjoy this book. Ellyn Lem is a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Waukesha. Michelle Newhart, PhD, is a sociologist and author whose work focuses on medical sociology, aging and the life course, and research methods. She teaches at University of La Verne and Mt. San Antonio College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We are in the middle of a cultural revolution, where the spectrum of gender and sexual identities is seemingly unlimited. So when author and journalist Lisa Selin Davis's six-year-old daughter first called herself a "tomboy," Davis was hesitant. Her child favored sweatpants and T-shirts over anything pink or princess-themed, just like the sporty, skinned-kneed girls Davis had played with as a kid. But "tomboy" seemed like an outdated word-why use a word with "boy" in it for such girls at all? So was it outdated? In an era where some are throwing elaborate gender reveal parties and others are embracing they/them pronouns, Davis set out to answer that question, and to find out where tomboys fit into our changing understandings of gender. In Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different (Hachette Go), Davis explores the evolution of tomboyism from a Victorian ideal to a twenty-first century fashion statement, honoring the girls and women-and those who identify otherwise-who stomp all over archaic gender norms. She highlights the forces that have shifted what we think of as masculine and feminine, delving into everything from clothing to psychology, history to neuroscience, and the connection between tomboyism, gender identity, and sexuality. Above all else, Davis' comprehensive deep-dive inspires us to better appreciate those who defy traditional gender boundaries, and the incredible people they become. Whether you're a grown-up tomboy or raising a gender-rebel of your own, Tomboy is the perfect companion for navigating our cultural shift. It is a celebration of both diversity and those who dare to be different, ultimately revealing how gender nonconformity is a gift. Lisa Selin Davis is an essayist, novelist, and journalist who has written for major publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Time, Yahoo!, and Salon, among many others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and kids. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Who owns the street? This is the question that animates The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914-1945 (Cambridge University Press) by Molly Loberg. Interwar Berliners faced this question with great hope yet devastating consequences. In Germany, the First World War and 1918 Revolution transformed the city streets into the most important media for politics and commerce. There, partisans and entrepreneurs fought for the attention of crowds with posters, illuminated advertisements, parades, traffic jams, and violence. The Nazi Party relied on how people already experienced the city to stage aggressive political theater, including the April Boycott and Kristallnacht. Observers in Germany and abroad looked to Berlin's streets to predict the future. They saw dazzling window displays that radiated optimism. They also witnessed crime waves, antisemitic rioting, and failed policing that pointed toward societal collapse. Recognizing the power of urban space, officials pursued increasingly radical policies to 'revitalize' the city, culminating in Albert Speer's plan to eradicate the heart of Berlin and build Germania. The book was awarded the prestigious Hans Rosenberg Book Prize of 2018 and has recently been released in paperback. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi (Sam Houston State University) follows the Cold War-era journeys of South Asian international students from U.S. Information Service reading rooms in India and Pakistan, to the halls of the University of Houston, to the suburban subdivisions of Alief and Sugar Land. This student migration between 1960 and 1980 shows how public diplomacy programs overseas catalyzed the arrival of highly educated, middle-class Asians in the U.S. before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Drawing on archival documents, GIS data, and oral interviews, Quraishi investigates how Indian and Pakistani immigrants forged an “interethnic” identity in Houston and located themselves—both socially and geographically—in the midst of a booming yet segregated Sunbelt city. She conceptualizes their mobility as “brown flight,” a process that simultaneously strengthened ethnic bonds even as it reinforced racial and class barriers. By exploring the links between international and local scales, Redefining the Immigrant South will interest scholars from many fields, including Asian American history; histories of the U.S. South, immigration, and U.S. foreign relations; and sub/urban studies. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Through a feminist perspective, Carnival Is Woman: Feminism and Performance in Caribbean Mas (University Press of Mississippi, 2019) examines the presence of women in contemporary Carnival by demonstrating not only their strength in numbers, but also the ways in which they participate in the festivities. Exploring different themes, the authors in this volume explain the power of women in the evolution of Carnival mas’ in Trinidad and the Caribbean diaspora. Dr. Dwaine Plaza is a Professor of Sociology in the School of Public Policy. From 2016-2018 he served in the College of Liberal Arts as an Associate Dean with a portfolio of student success and engagement. He has been at Oregon State University for twenty-three years and teaches a wide slate of classes both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He has written extensively on the topics of Caribbean migration within the international diaspora, gender, racism, social justice and inequality. Dr. Frances Henry, Professor Emerita, is considered to be one of Canada's leading experts in the study of racism and anti-racism and has published many books on this subject. However, she began her professional career as a Caribbeanist and did her Ph.D. research in Caribbean studies. She has maintained this interest and in addition to the current work, co-authored a book on Caribbean migration with Dwaine Plaza. Now retired from York University in Canada, she is still an active fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and the Inter-American Network of Academies of Science and maintains an active research career. Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Department of History of the University of Memphis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What are the policy implications due to a fundamental distrust and dislike of “outsiders”? Today I talked to political scientist John R. Hibbing about his new book The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post-Trump Era (Oxford UP, 2020) Hibbing teaches political science at the University of Nebraska and has been both a NATO fellow in Science and a Guggenheim Fellow. Media appearances have included Star Talk, The Hidden Brain, and The Daily Show. Topics covered in this episode include: • What are the biggest misconceptions, among the media and others, about Trump’s staunchest supporters? • In what ways are Trump’s fans different from the Republican party’s traditional base? • In a battle over the soul of whether America might be a democracy or an oligarchy in the future, where do securitarians land and what are the implications for the country? Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge UP, 2020) addresses one of the big questions in economics and economic history: why did the modern economy emerge in northwestern Europe at some point in the 17th or 18th century but not in the Middle East? After all, for centuries following the spread of Islam, the Middle East was far ahead of Europe – on both technological and economic terms. Jared Rubin argues that the religion itself is not to blame; the importance of religious legitimacy in Middle Eastern politics was the primary factor. In much of the Muslim world, religious authorities were given an important seat at the political bargaining table, which they used to block important advancements such as the printing press and usury. In Europe, however, the Church played a weaker role in legitimizing rule, especially where Protestantism spread (indeed, the Reformation was successful due to the spread of printing, which was blocked in the Middle East). It was precisely in those Protestant nations, especially England and the Dutch Republic, where the modern economy was born. In this interview, Jared shares with us his opinions on a wide range of topics – from the work of Jared Diamond and the theories of Max Weber, to his serendipitous journey in academia that led him to write his first book. Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic turn" in historiography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we understand computerization as a social process? Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is a timely and welcome edited volume in which a set of interdisciplinary contributors explore how people make automated processes work, and how these systems reciprocally transform everyday life. From farming to finance—not to mention schools to prisons—the volume amounts to an urgent plea to remove the veil of corporate and government secrecy shrouding technologies that subtly restructure our social and material worlds without any semblance of democratic oversight. I spoke with the book’s editors, Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, about how to do the anthropology of algorithms, and what they learned from bringing these accounts together. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and numbers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Democracy is a popular topic among scholars of politics in Southeast Asia. Liberalism is not. Or at least it hadn’t been up until the last few years, which have seen a spate of books with liberalism in the title: on Islam in Indonesia, capitalism in Singapore, post-colonialism in the Philippines, and now, Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar (Oxford University Press, 2018). In this new study, Roman David and Ian Holliday draw on extensive survey and interview data to argue that people in Myanmar show inconsistent commitments to the tenets of liberalism in its adjacent aspects: by being, for instance, highly tolerant of some minority groups but highly intolerant of others, notably Rohingya; and, by showing support for democracy but also for the military’s continued role in national politics. They characterize this condition as “limited liberalism”, which they distinguish from semi-liberalism and other hybrid types. Roman David and Ian Holliday join us on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about limited liberalism in Myanmar and beyond, about trust in government and the Coronavirus pandemic, prospects for transitional justice, and about doing survey and interview research on politics in Myanmar in the 2010s. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: • Astrid Noren-Nilsson, Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination and Democracy • Helen Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Millions of tourists visit Washington D.C. every year, vying to see its landscape, museums, and buildings and learn about seminal moments in US history. Attracting white evangelicals to the nation’s capital, Christian heritage tours contribute to the thriving tourist industry in D.C. In Saving History: How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation’s Capital and Redeem a Christian America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Lauren R. Kerby examines how white evangelicals perceive themselves and their role in American life through an analysis of the narratives told by Christian heritage tours. A rich ethnographic study that transports the reader to Washington D.C., Saving History offers a unique analysis of Christian heritage, white evangelical identity, and the role of evangelicals in American society. Lauren R. Kerby is lecturer on religious studies and education specialist of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, boosters of digital educational technologies emphasized that these platforms are vital tools for cultivating global citizenship, connecting students across borders, and creating a participatory learning environment. In Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education (MIT Press), Katie Day Good amply illustrates that there is little new about these promises of tech-enhanced education. She demonstrates that already at the turn of the twentieth century, education reformers and technology entrepreneurs promoted emerging media as the necessary tools for preparing America’s children for a century of movement, interconnection, and rapid change. Good examines the promulgation of both hi-tech gadgets, such as lantern slides and stereoscopes, and low-tech innovations that reformers believed would open the wide world to children’s senses and liberate them from provincial ignorance. Good’s analytical focus is on how these purportedly cosmopolitan technological applications served to strengthen American power on the world stage and masked, reinforced, and excused domestic racial and ethnic disparities instead of confronting them. Bring the World to the Child is a thought-provoking and necessary read for anyone concerned about how the present necessity of online instruction exacerbates inequalities in education and technological access. Katie Day Good is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (Temple UP, 2020) challenges representations of contemporary Beirut as an exceptional space for LGBTQ people by highlighting everyday life in a city where violence is the norm. Ghassan Moussawi, a Beirut native, seeks to uncover the underlying processes of what he calls “fractal orientalism,” a relational understanding of modernity and cosmopolitanism that illustrates how transnational discourses of national and sexual exceptionalism operate on multiple scales in the Arab world. Moussawi’s intrepid ethnography features the voices of women, gay men and, genderqueers in Beirut to examine how queer individuals negotiate life in this uncertain region. He examines “ al-wad’,” or “the situation,” to understand the practices that form these strategies and to raise questions about queer-friendly spaces in and beyond Beirut. Disruptive Situations also shows how LGBTQ Beirutis resist reconciliation narratives and position their identities and visibility at different times as ways of simultaneously managing their multiple positionalities and al-wad’. Moussawi argues that the daily survival strategies in Beirut are queer—and not only enacted by LGBTQ people—since Beirutis are living amidst an already queer situation of ongoing precarity. Alongside the main contours of the book, our conversation covered discussions of “queer flexible methodology,” navigating disruption throughout fieldwork, and assumptions accompanying “insider/native ethnography.” This book will be of interest to those interested in gender and sexuality studies, sociology, anthropology, and urban studies. This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Ghassan Moussawi is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The sexual landscape has changed dramatically in the past few decades, with the meaning of gender and sexuality now being parsed within the realms of gender fluidity, nonheteronormative sexuality, BDSM, and polyamory. The sea change in sexual attitudes has also made room for the mainstreaming of internet pornography and the use of virtual reality for sexual pleasure – and the tech gurus have not even scratched the surface when it comes to mining the possibilities of alternative realities. In The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Confer Books, 2020), Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco survey modern sex culture and suggests ways psychoanalysis can update its theories and practice to meet the novel needs of today’s generations; at the same time, paying special attention to technology, which is augmenting and expanding sexual and gender possibilities. The authors consider how sexuality and bonding in this brave new world are best suited to meet our psychoanalytic needs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We’re all familiar with the statistic that 81% of white evangelical voters supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. But what if a deeper trawl through the complex relationship between religion and political activity in modern America suggests that statistic doesn’t really mean anything? In this exciting new book, John Compton, who serves as chair of the Department of Political Science at Chapman University, CA, suggests that we need entirely to revise the way in which we’ve thought about the relationship between religion and politics in American history. The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving their Neighbors (Oxford University Press, 2020) suggests that religion might have played a much smaller role in the divisions that mark American culture than many commentators have supposed. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (MIT Press), by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, demonstrates that this technology – which is mostly associated with covert surveillance and remote warfare – has also served as a vital tool for activists, social movements, and defenders of human rights to effect pro-social campaigns. Through stories of exemplar initiatives and analyses of thousands of civil uses of drones, Choi-Fitzpatrick argues that scholars and others interested in the implications of emergent technologies for democracy need to look beyond the networks of social media and consider as well the material devises that populate our world. Despite the risks and the nefarious (and obnoxious) applications of drones, these machines also have the capacity to “democratize surveillance,” putting a preeminent tool of statecraft in the hands of civil society. By tracing such uses, The Good Drone is an inspiring call for creativity, experimentation, and optimism regarding the humanitarian possibilities of emerging material technologies. Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego and concurrent Rights Lab Associate Professor of Social Movements and Human Rights at the University of Nottingham's School of Sociology and Social Policy. Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study? This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials. This book reveals not only how social inequality fundamentally shapes these drug trials, but it also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. These highly controlled studies bear little resemblance to real-world conditions, and everyone involved is incentivized to game the system, ultimately making new drugs appear safer than they really are. Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals (New York University Press) provides an unprecedented view of the intersection of racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, signaling the dangers of this research enterprise to both social justice and public health. Jill A. Fisher is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How has social media changed inequality in the cultural industries? In The Politics of Expertise in Cultural Labour: Arts, Work and Inequalities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Karen Patel, AHRC Leadership Fellow based at Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University, considers the idea of expertise in cultural labour, examining how it is understood and displayed by cultural workers. The book draws on an extensive and deep engagement with key theories of work, expertise, and culture, as well as offering detailed empirical case studies of the everyday working lives of creative practitioners. Moreover, by analyzing the impact and importance of social media, the book offers an important insight into how inequality functions even where technology seems to offer an end to cultural hierarchy. The book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Psychedelic drugs are making a comeback. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists actively studied the potential of drugs like LSD and psilocybin for treating mental health problems. After a decades-long hiatus, researchers are once again testing how effective these drugs are in relieving symptoms for a wide variety of psychiatric conditions, from depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder to posttraumatic stress disorder and substance addiction. In Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Danielle Giffort examines how this new generation of researchers and their allies are working to rehabilitate psychedelic drugs and to usher in a new era of psychedelic medicine. As this team of researchers and mental health professionals revive the field of psychedelic science, they are haunted by the past and by one person in particular: psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with people working on scientific psychedelia, Giffort shows how today’s researchers tell stories about Leary as an “impure” scientist and perform his antithesis to address a series of lingering dilemmas that threaten to rupture their budding legitimacy. Acid Revival presents new information about the so-called psychedelic renaissance and highlights the cultural work involved with the reassembly of dormant areas of medical science. This colorful and accessible history of the rise, fall, and reemergence of psychedelic medicine is infused with intriguing narratives and personalities—a story for popular science aficionados as well as for scholars of the history of science and medicine. Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What happens when a new group of migrants enters not just the social and economic life of a city, but also its religious institutions? Deborah E. Kanter, the John S. Ludington Endowed Professor of History at Albion College, takes us through the dramatic demographic transformation of Chicago through the eyes of Catholic parishes and Mexican churchgoers in her new book Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Catholic churches simultaneously served as a refugio for newly arrived Mexican immigrants to connect with their culture and mexicanidad, while also being sites of Americanization for their U.S.-born children. As the Mexican community in Chicago outgrew its original ethnic enclaves, it expanded into new neighborhoods and mixed into traditionally Slavic parishes. Ultimately, Latino laypeople made these new parishes their own in a process of ethnic succession that continues to define local churches today. Contrary to the mainstream trend in Chicano studies that has deemphasized the role of religion in Mexican American culture, Kanter foregrounds the Church as the center of everyday life for many Mexicans in Chicago throughout the twentieth century. Full of rich detail and personal stories collected from oral interviews, the book illustrates the centrality of local parishes in the creation of Latino Chicago. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ulrike Freitag’s A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge University Press), offers a rich urban and biographical history of Jeddah. Known as the 'Gate to Mecca' or 'Bride of the Red Sea', Jeddah has been a gateway for pilgrims travelling to Mecca and Medina and a station for international trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean for centuries. Seen from the perspective of its diverse population, this first biography of Jeddah traces the city's urban history and cosmopolitanism from the late Ottoman period to its present-day claim to multiculturalism, within the conservative environment of the Arabian Peninsula. Contextualising Jeddah with developments in the wider Muslim world, Ulrike Freitag investigates how different groups of migrants interacted in a changing urban space and how their economic activities influenced the political framework of the city. Richly illustrated, this study reveals how the transformation of Jeddah's urban space, population and politics has been indicative of changes in the wider Arab and Red Sea region, re-evaluating its place in the Middle East at a time when both its cosmopolitan practices and old city are changing dramatically against a backdrop of modernisation and Saudi nation-building. Ulrike Freitag is a historian of the Modern Middle East with a special interest in urban history and the Arabian Peninsula in its global context. She directs Zentrum Moderner Orient and teaches at the Freie Universität. She is author of Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut (Brill, 2003). Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The American attitude towards outsiders has always been ambivalent. The United States, it is commonly said, is a nation of immigrants; today, it’s the most demographically diverse great power. But on the other side of that spectrum have been anxiety about and hatred for the foreign. And there’s no shortage of this: from the English-only movements of the 1980s and 90s to the continued power of America First. Thomas Borstelmann, E.N. and Katherine Thompson Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has tried to sort out that ambivalence in his thoughtful and thought-provoking new book Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners (Columbia University Press, 2020). The book entertains its readers with examples pulled from the unlikeliest of places (Chef Boyardee and Captain America make appearances). But it also provokes us to think about the US’ relationship with the foreign in a much more complicated way. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How are algorithms shaping our experience of the internet? In Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press), Tanya Kant, a lecturer in Media And Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex interrogates the rise of algorithmic personalization, in the context of an internet dominated by platform providers and corporate interests. Using detailed empirical case studies, along with a rich and deep theoretical framework, the book shows the negative impact of algorithmic personalization, the nuances and ambivalences in user behaviours, and their modes of resistance. As we increasingly live our lives online, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how algorithms regulate our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What do medieval knights, suicide bombers and "victimhood culture" have in common? Betraying Dignity: The Toxic Seduction of Social Media, Shaming, and Radicalization (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) argues that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, individuals, political parties and nations around the world are abandoning the dignity-based culture we established in the aftermath of two world wars, less than a century ago. Disappointed or intimidated, many turn their backs on the humanitarian, universalistic culture that presumes our inherent human dignity and celebrates it as the basis of every individual's equal human rights. Instead, people and nations are returning to a much older, honor-based cultural structure. Because its ancient logic and mentality take new forms (such as social network shaming and certain aspects of "victimhood culture") -- we fail to recognize them, and overlook the pitfalls of the old honor-based structure. Narrating the history of honor-based societies, this book distinguishes their underlying principle from the post-WWII notion of dignity that underlies human rights. It makes the case that in order to revive and strengthen dignity-based culture, the concept of human dignity must be defined narrowly and succinctly, and enhanced with the principle of respect. Continuing its historical and cultural narrative, the book discusses contemporary phenomena such as al-Qaeda terrorists, shaming via social network, FoMO, and some features of the emerging "victimhood culture". The book pays homage to Erich Fromm's classic Escape from Freedom. Orit Kamir is founder and academic head of the Center for Human Dignity in Israel, and has taught law and culture studies at universities in Israel, the United States, and Europe. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of Tōhoku made it through. Smaller earthquakes and tsunamis have killed far more people in nearby China and India. What accounts for the exceptionally high survival rate? And why is it that some towns and cities in the Tōhoku region have built back more quickly than others? Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters (University of Chicago Press) illuminates two critical factors that had a direct influence on why survival rates varied so much across the Tōhoku region following the 3/11 disasters and why the rebuilding process has also not moved in lockstep across the region. Individuals and communities with stronger networks and better governance, Daniel P. Aldrich shows, had higher survival rates and accelerated recoveries. Less-connected communities with fewer such ties faced harder recovery processes and lower survival rates. Beyond the individual and neighborhood levels of survival and recovery, the rebuilding process has varied greatly, as some towns and cities have sought to work independently on rebuilding plans, ignoring recommendations from the national government and moving quickly to institute their own visions, while others have followed the guidelines offered by Tokyo-based bureaucrats for economic development and rebuilding. The datasets Daniel mentions in the podcast are available here. Daniel P. Aldrich is director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program and professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University. You can find him on twitter @DanielPAldrich Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Greg Beckett, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western University, about his richly grounded book There is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince (2019, University of California Press – and it is coming out in a paperback edition this November). This book is an examination of “crisis” in Haiti, and pushes back against the widespread racist idea that Haiti is inherently lawless by showing the ongoing production of disorder, the scripting of crisis, and the concatenation of disaster. Theoretically, the book adds nuance to ‘crisis’ as an analytic frame, showing how crisis endures, rather than being something that occurs in between two otherwise stable periods of social life. Importantly, the book foregrounds how crisis feels, and Beckett positions his interlocutors as theorists of Haitian crisis. Today’s conversation covers recognizing your interlocutors as theorists, rather than data; how to understand the seemingly oxymoronic “forever crisis”; the politics of genre; and dealing with ethnographic trauma. (Bonus content: the post-quarantine resurgence of Mexico City’s traffic and some cute birds). Dr. Beckett completed a MA in anthropology at Western University, and an MA and PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, and prior to joining the faculty at Western, he taught at Bowdoin College in Maine. He is on Twitter @GregBeckett9. Lachlan Summers is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. He is based in Mexico City and he researches the city’s repeating earthquakes. He is a contributing editor at Cultural Anthropology, a member of the Emergent Futures CoLab (https://www.urgentemergent.org/), and can be found on Twitter @backup_sandwich. He and his friends were permanently fired from teaching at UC Santa Cruz for participating in the wildcat strike of 2019-2020, but he hopes we can all get our jobs back soon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In his book The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip-Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi (Duke University Press, 2020), Gabriel Dattatreyan departs from the existing literature on masculinity in India, which focuses on largely middle-class, upper-caste embodiments of the same. His focus is on non-elite, urban, lower caste/class embodiments of masculinity, in the context of globally familiar soundscpaes, images and aesthetics. There is an interesting way in which the author provides a nuanced understanding of the “other”, which takes into account the heterogeneity of those who are usually lumped together in the category of that “other”. The book provides not just caste, and regional contexts for these “working class” men but also lays out the generational shifts in the “aspirations” and future imagination of these young men. This futurization of urban participation then is highlighted in conversation with the official, policy and bureaucratized imaginations of the urban and urban Delhi in particular. In doing so, the “other” emerges as not just the passive recipient of the imaginations imposed on them by people in power but as being capable of refashioning and materially reimagining urban spaces as well. The internet and social media in particular emerge as critical sites of global engagement for the young men, who are Dattatreyan’s interlocutors and collaborators. Social media is not simply a site for getting familiar with and consuming that which is global but also the site for producing this familiarity in creative ways. It is through the labor of these young men taking immense pain to aesthetically re-produce the globally familiar that these circulations take on meaning. These re-creations and embodied re-productions also become sites of traversing newer and older forms of inequalities as well as creating political disruptions through the use hip-hop aesthetics. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
During the long eighteenth century the moral and socio-political dimensions of family life and gender were hotly debated by intellectuals across Europe. John Millar, a Scottish law professor and philosopher, was a pioneer in making gendered and familial practice a critical parameter of cultural difference. His work was widely disseminated at home and abroad, translated into French and German and closely read by philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Johann Gottfried Herder. Taking Millar’s writings as his basis, Nicholas B. Miller explores the role of the family in Scottish Enlightenment political thought and traces its wider resonances across the Enlightenment world. John Millar’s organisation of cultural, gendered and social difference into a progressive narrative of authority relations provided the first extended world history of the family. In John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: Family Life and World History (Voltaire Foundation, 2017), Nicholas B. Miller examines contemporary responses and Enlightenment-era debates on polygamy, matriarchy, the Amazon legend, changes in national character and the possible futures of the family in commercial society. He traces how Enlightenment thinkers developed new standards of evidence and crafted new understandings of historical time in order to tackle the global diversity of family life and gender practice. By reconstituting these theories and discussions, Miller uncovers hitherto unexplored aspects of the Scottish contribution to European debates on the role of the family in history, society and politics. Nicholas B. Miller is Assistant Professor of History at Flagler College. Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The reissue and revision of Martin James’ State of Bass: The Origins of Jungle/Drum & Bass (Velocity Press, 2020) examines the origins and progression of British Junglism in the 1990s. Rave culture’s clashes with UK government and police drove the scene into a dark space, but jungle/drum & bass emerged to capture a new audience of youth, creating what James labels as the first truly Black British music scene. James draws on interviews with key participants in the early junglism scene, examining social, cultural, and musical roots of the scene that became a global phenomenon. Originally published in 1997, State of Bass: The Origins of Jungle/Drum & Bass extends the original text to include the award of the Mercury Prize to Reprazent and brings new perspectives to the story of the UK’s most crucial subterranean scene. Martin James is an internationally published music critic who has contributed to some of the UK’s leading music magazines. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do we move police forces from a warrior culture to connecting better with communities they serve? Today I talked to David A. Harris about his new book A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations (Anthem Press, 2020). Harris is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school and is the leading U.S. authority on racial profiling. Also the author of Profiles in Injustice (2002). he hosts the podcast Criminal Injustice. Topics covered in this episode include:
Harris’s vantage point on what the Minnesota legislature got right and only half-right in recently approving a police accountability measure in the wake of the George Floyd killing.
Why navigating fear and anger is so hard for both black suspects and the police alike.
What role a lack of familiarity – and trust – plays for officers and suspects in trying to avoid escalating their encounters.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we understand the legacy of colonialism within contemporary society? In Bordering Britain Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2020), Nadine El-Enany, a senior lecturer in law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law, historicises immigration law and ideas of citizenship in Britain, connecting the project of building a nation after the end of empire to whiteness, colonial violence, and racism. The book analyses legislation and case law, along with the social and historical context of immigration in Britain, to demonstrate the continued, systemic, violence at the heart of the British state. The book is essential reading across law, history, and the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Trena Paulus of Eastern Tennessee State University and Dr. Alyssa Wise of New York University on their new book, Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk (Routledge, 2019). The book offers a comprehensive discussion of conducting research on online talk, which includes but is not limited to synchronous and asynchronous interactions on social media, discussion forums, and other forms of digital communication platforms. It walks readers through the different stages and procedures of conducting online research, addresses the major challenges that researchers often encounter in doing this type of work, and presents a new research framework for conceiving online research. The book has a strong emphasis on supporting researchers to unpack their implicit assumptions and make informed decisions. It also pays close attention to the unique ethical challenges in doing research online. In an era of physical distancing, many social and educational research activities have been moved from face-to-face to online settings. The book will provide researchers with timely, much-needed, and rich food for thought as they make this unexpected transition. Novice and experienced researchers from multiple disciplines, such as education, communication, media studies, health sciences, political sciences and business, will all benefit from the methodological insights that Paulus and Wise shared in this book. Trena M. Paulus is Professor of Qualitative Research Methods in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, USA. Alyssa Friend Wise is Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Director of the Learning Analytics Research Network at New York University, USA. Pengfei Zhao is a qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sports scholars Danyel Reiche and Tamir Sorek’s edited volume, Sport, Politics, and Society in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2019), makes a significant contribution to what remains a largely understudied, yet critically important segment of Middle Eastern political and social life. It does so by discussing in eleven chapters multiple aspects and consequences of the region’s incestuous relationship between sports and politics. These range from corruption, the role of the private sector, an emphasis on elite sports and projection of the state at the expense of grassroots sports to battles for identity expressed among others in memories to how sports chants in Israel reflect society’s political and social moods as well as it fault lines, the struggle of women to overcome deeply entrenched social modes and how social media helps them with branding. The edited volume is not only an at times ethnographic dive into Middle Eastern sports’ multiple facets but also in many ways a mapping of how much remains to be explored. This is a volume that should attract the attention of anyone who is interested in the Middle East, sports and/or gender issues as well as readers whose focus is a specific country like Turkey, Israel, Palestine or Jordan or a group of nations like the Gulf states. Whatever one’s preference is, Reiche and Sorek have produced a volume rich in texture, insight and breadth that is likely to prompt the reader to think differently about the political and societal importance of Middle Eastern sports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city’s Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today’s political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
When children become entangled with the law, their lives can be disrupted irrevocably. When those children are underrepresented minorities, the potential for disruption is even greater. The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy (Oxford University Press) examines issues that arise when minority children's lives are directly or indirectly influenced by law and public policy. Uniquely comprehensive in scope, this trailblazing volume offers cutting-edge chapters on the intersections of race/ethnicity within the context of child maltreatment, child dependency court, custody and adoption, familial incarceration, school discipline and the "school-to-prison pipeline," juvenile justice, police/youth interactions, and jurors' perceptions of child and adolescent victims and defendants. The book also includes chapters focused on troubling situations that are less commonly researched, but growing in importance, including the role of race and racism in child sex trafficking and US immigration law and policy. Thus, individual chapters explore myriad ways in which law and policy shape the lives of marginalized children and adolescents - racial and ethnic minorities - who historically and presently are at heightened risk for experiencing disadvantageous consequences of law and policy. In so doing, The Legacy of Racism for Children can help social scientists to understand and work to prevent the perpetuation of racial discrimination in American laws and public policies. Margaret C. Stevenson is Associate Professor at the University of Evansville. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and an edited volume related to jury decision-making. Bette L. Bottoms is Professor of Psychology and Dean Emerita of the Honors College at The University of Illinois at Chicago. She is Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a past president of APA's Society for Child and Family Policy and Practice and Section on Child Maltreatment. Kelly C. Burke is a doctoral candidate in the Social Psychology Program at The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research on the influence of prejudice and case evidence (e.g., body-worn camera footage) on juror decision making has been published in peer-reviewed journals and books and funded by the American Psychology-Law Society's Diversity Research Award and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Grant-in-Aid Award. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism (NYU Press, 2020), Pat Zavella shows how reproductive justice organizations' collaborative work across racial lines provides a compelling model for other groups to successfully influence change. In the context of the war on women's reproductive rights and its disproportionate effect on women of color, and increased legal violence toward immigrants, The Movement for Reproductive Justice demonstrates that a truly intersectional movement built on grassroots organizing, culture shift work, and policy advocating can offer visions of strength, resiliency, and dignity for all. Dr. Pat Zavella is Professor Emerita in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also the author of I’m Neither Here nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty and coauthor of Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Department of History of the University of Memphis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Re-enchanting Modernity: Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China (Duke University Press, 2020), Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life after decades of enforced secularization in the coastal area of Wenzhou, China. Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Yang shows how the local practices of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism are based in community-oriented grassroots organizations that create spaces for relative local autonomy and self-governance. Central to Wenzhou's religious civil society is what Yang calls a "ritual economy," in which an ethos of generosity is expressed through donations to temples, clerics, ritual events, and charities in exchange for spiritual gain. With these investments in transcendent realms, Yang adopts Georges Bataille's notion of "ritual expenditures" to challenge the idea that rural Wenzhou's economic development can be described in terms of Max Weber's notion of a "Protestant Ethic". Instead, Yang suggests that Wenzhou's ritual economy forges an alternate path to capitalist modernity. Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment (University of California Press, 2020), Aliya Hamid Rao gets up close and personal with college-educated, unemployed men, women, and spouses to explain how comparable men and women have starkly different experiences of unemployment. Traditionally gendered understandings of work—that it’s a requirement for men and optional for women—loom large in this process, even for marriages that had been not organized in gender-traditional ways. These beliefs serve to make men’s unemployment an urgent problem, while women’s unemployment—cocooned within a narrative of staying at home—is almost a non-issue. Crunch Time reveals the minutiae of how gendered norms and behaviors are actively maintained by spouses at a time when they could be dismantled, and how gender is central to the ways couples react to and make sense of unemployment. In this interview, Dr. Rao and I discuss gendered time and space, as well as how time and type of engagement with housework during times of unemployment. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in family, work, and gender norms. Dr. Rao is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. She completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University in 2018. Her research interests include using qualitative methodologies to study work and organizations, economic sociology, family, gender, and emotions. You can find her on Twitter at @AliyaHRao. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the United States, each election cycle reminds us that younger voters vote at much lower rates than their older counterparts. This discrepancy is often chalked up to apathy or lack of interest in politics among younger voters. In their new book, John B. Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus analyze this conventional explanation along with the political science literature about voting behavior among different age cohorts. What they find is a more complex picture of contemporary young voters, and this complex picture is the focus of their new book, Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Action (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Holbein and Hillygus find that younger citizens (18-29 year old) are quite interested in politics and engaged in various dimensions of politics, but that voting, because of the complex process for registering and voting in the United States, makes it more difficult for younger voters to develop this habit and pursue it. Holbein and Hillygus’ analysis of the data refutes the oft-repeated commentary that younger voters are apathetic. In fact, Making Young Voters demonstrates that today, young voters are more concerned with politics than young voters of the past. But despite this greater interest, youth voting remains low. Making Young Voters argues that the true obstacles to youth voting are lack of experience, and less fully formed noncognitive skills, coupled with the high hurdles of the voting process itself, including the requirements to register to vote, and the differing requirements for actual voting, as well as the many elections that Americans face every year. Thus, some of disconnect between interest and follow through is on the voters themselves, but a sizeable issue, according to wealth and diversity of data that Holbein and Hillygus explore, is the complexity of the voting process in the United States. Holbein and Hillygus explain that younger voters are not accustomed to the act of voting and therefore struggle to follow through on their intention to vote. This can be seen in voter registration. Younger voters either forget to register or they are hesitant to register because they have never done it before, and therefore it is not a habit for them the way it is for older voters. Additionally, Holbein and Hillygus note that previous scholarship on youth voting focused on cognitive skills. Instead, Making Young Voters emphasizes the link between voting and noncognitive skills. Holbein and Hillygus assert that younger voters’ noncognitive skills are less developed. This also contributes to lower turnout among younger voters. Finally, Making Young Voters considers what could be done to increase youth voter turnout. The latter part of the book includes ideas to rethink civics classes and education to highlight how to register and how to vote so as to familiarize younger voters to the process itself. Holbein and Hillygus also suggest creating more pathways to registration such as same-day registration which allows voters to register at their polling place on the day of an election. Making Young Voters brings together approaches from political science, education, and psychology to explain what is standing in the way of more young people actually casting ballots in American elections. And what can be changed to make this process less daunting. Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What if the moral guardians of West African societies are postmenopausal women? This is the argument that Laura S. Grillo makes in her 2018 book, An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa (Duke University Press, 2018). Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire that spans three decades, Grillo elaborates a revolutionary argument that has significant implications not only for Côte d’Ivoire, but for the broader West African region. Postmenopausal women—the “Mothers”, as Grillo calls them—are the ultimate moral arbiters in society. They publicly perform their spiritual rebuke by stripping naked, wielding branches or pestles, and slapping their genitals and bare breasts to curse and expel the forces of evil. It is a ritual that has been observed from Sierra Leone to Cameroon, but An Intimate Rebuke is the first work to analyze these powerful displays as part of a connected moral framework. Grillo’s findings suggest both concrete ways to address the trauma of civil conflict and a framework to re-think the fundaments of African studies. Laura S. Grillo is Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University. Dr. Elisa Prosperetti teaches African and global history at SciencesPo Paris. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at: www.elisaprosperetti.net. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Elizabeth Shesko’s Conscript Nation: Coercion and Citizenship in the Bolivian Barracks (University of Pittsburgh Press) is an intimate and rich history of the militarization of Bolivia over the course of the twentieth century through the lives of the men conscripted to serve. Beginning with the Civil War of 1899 and elite fears of Aymara military might and autonomy and ending with the military coup of René Barrientos in 1964, Shesko shows how compulsory male conscription emerged out of desires to modernize the country and assimilate rural indigenous communities. Only nominally universal, conscription was in fact deeply unequal and disproportionately affected poor urban and rural men, most of whom were not eligible to vote because of property and literacy requirements before the Revolution of 1952. Over the course of the book, however, Shesko shows how some men turned their service and the networks they developed in the barracks into a means of demanding citizenship and the right to make claims on the patria. This new generation of conscripts would go on to transform the political and cultural life of the nation, especially in the wake of the disastrous Chaco War against Paraguay in the 1930s and in the development of political coalitions that took power in the National Revolution of 1952. Conscript Nation ends in 1964 as Cold War politics, US intervention, and transnational counterinsurgency networks were transforming military culture yet again, in Bolivia as well as Latin America. However, Shesko suggests that even in this period, service to the nation formed a template that subsequent generations, up to and including former President Evo Morales could mobilize to assert their right to belong and to lead in a country riven by racial and economic inequalities. This book will be of value for Bolivianists, military historians, as well as students of citizenship and race in Latin America, as it offers a window into the everyday lives and social worlds of Bolivian men who made up the armed forces. Elizabeth Shesko is an Assistant Professor of History at Oakland University in Michigan Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity (Ohio State University Press, 2020), Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball’s Latin/o American players—who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB—as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration, crime, masculinity, aggression, and violence. Rudolph examines the perception by media and fans of Latino baseball players and the consumption of these athletes as both social and political stand-ins for an entire culture, showing how these participants in the nationalist game of baseball exemplify tensions over race, nation, and language for some while simultaneously revealing baseball as a practice of latinidad, or pan-Latina/o/x identity, for others. By simultaneously exploring the ways in which Latino baseball players can appear both as threats to American values and the embodiment of the American Dream, and engaging with both archival research and new media representations of MLB players, Rudolph sheds new light on the current ambivalence of mainstream American media and fans towards Latin/o culture. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Those who exit a religion—particularly one they were born and raised in—often find themselves at sea in their efforts to transition to life beyond their community. In Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple UP, 2020), Schneur Zalman Newfield, who went through this process himself, interviews seventy-four Lubavitch and Satmar ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews who left their communities.He presents their motivations for leaving as well as how they make sense of their experiences and their processes of exiting, detailing their attitudes and opinions regarding their religious upbringing. Newfield also examines how these exiters forge new ways of being that their upbringing had not prepared them for, while also considering what these particular individuals lose and retain in the exit process. Degrees of Separation presents a comprehensive portrait of the prolonged state of being “in-between” that characterizes transition out of a totalizing worldview. What Newfield discovers is that exiters experience both a sense of independence and a persistent connection; they are not completely dislocated from their roots once they “arrive” at their new destination. Moreover, Degrees of Separation shows that this process of transitioning identity has implications beyond religion. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The collapse of the Soviet Union famously opened new venues for the theories of nationalism and the study of processes and actors involved in these new nation-building processes. In Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), Diana T. Kudaibergenova takes the new states and nations of Eurasia that emerged in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and seeks to better understand the phenomenon of post-Soviet states tapping into nationalism to build legitimacy. What explains this difference in approaching nation-building after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What can a study of two very different trajectories of development tell us about the nature of power, state and nationalizing regimes of the ‘new’ states of Eurasia? Toward Nationalizing Regimes finds surprising similarities in two such apparently different countries—one “western” and democratic, the other “eastern” and dictatorial. Dr. Kudaibergenova is a political sociologist who studies different intersections of power relations through concepts of state, nationalizing regimes and different ideologies. Trained as sociologist at Cambridge, she is currently a Research Associate on the leading UK Global Challenges Research Fund grant COMPASS that is based at the Centre of Development Studies (Department of Politics and International Studies) at the University of Cambridge. Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How have the everyday practices of parenting been shaped by patriarchy and coloniality? What are the transformative potentials of feminist parenting? In Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond, an anthology edited by Rama Salla Dieng and Andrea O’Reilly published in 2020 by Demeter Press, 28 writers from Africa, its diaspora, and around the world share reflect on these questions from their own parenting experiences and feminist activism. Collectively, the aim of the book is to explore the diversity of feminist parenting practices and the challenges this involves in wide range of social, economic, cultural, and religious contexts. Less concerned with critiquing the assumptions that underpin western feminist assumptions about parenting than with proliferating alternative accounts of the joys and struggles of feminist parenting, the book offers a powerful set of narratives and reflections on inter-generational care, structural violence, advocacy and activism, social reproduction, and the gendered politics of knowledge. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, editor Rama Salla Dieng joins host Jacob Doherty to discuss the genealogies of African feminisms that inform the anthology, the role of first-person narrative in producing and disseminating feminist theory, and how the book’s focus on parenting sets it apart from other work on gender in Africa. Three contributors to the anthology – Sadaf Kahn, Francoise Moudouthe, and Cheikh ‘Keyti’ Séne also join the episode to discuss their contributions. Rama Salla Dieng is a Lecturer in African Studies and International Development and Programme Director of the MSc Africa and International Development at the University of Edinburgh. Sadaf Kahn is a journalist and activist in Pakistan and cofounder Media Matters, of an organization that works on research and policy advocacy for media and digital rights. Francoise Moudouthe is a pan-African feminist with roots in Cameroon and the founder of the online feminist platform Eyala. Cheikh ‘Keyti’ Séne is a Senegalese musician and founder of the online youth news and hip hop forum Journal Rappé. Jacob Doherty is a lecturer in the Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Undocumented youth activists are at the forefront of the present-day immigrant rights movement. This is especially true surrounding the activism of the recent SCOTUS decision on DACA issued on June 18, 2020. Professor Kevin Escudero’s book, Organizing While Undocumented: Immigrant Youth’s Political Activism Under the Law (New York University Press, 2020), depicts just how undocumented immigrant youth have utilized their identities for political action between 2010-2019. By developing what he calls the “Identity Mobilization Model,” Escudero studies the intersectional collective identity formation of undocumented immigrant communities by focusing on how micro-level processes interact with macro-level legal structures. Escudero uses intimate narrative accounts of individual experiences, community gatherings, and organizer meetings to show how undocumented immigrant youth activists emphasized the heterogeneity of the movement while also forming coalitions with other movements. Escudero drew on ethnographic participant observation and fifty-one in-depth interviews with undocumented youth activists in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. The book covers three subgroups within the immigrant rights movement: undocumented Asian activists, undocumented queer activists, and formerly undocumented activists. Each chapter focuses on one of the three subgroups and details how the subgroup shared community knowledge, how they leveraged their intersectional movement identity, and what he observed as high-stakes allyship. Organizing While Undocumented shows how undocumented immigrants “have organized powerful countermobilizations to resist the stigma of illegality”. Further, Escudero carefully describes how undocumented youth form an oppositional consciousness informed by articulations of nuanced historical narratives and their participation in the immigrant rights movement. Overall, Organizing While Undocumented is in direct conversation with academic discussions of migrant illegality, social movement activism, and intersectionality. This book should be read by scholars interested in those fields as well as activists and allies of the immigrant rights movement. Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies. Their research focuses on the rise of federally-funded encampments (i.e., the concentration of populations) from the advent of the New Deal until post-WWII era. Their dissertation, “The Age of Encampment: Race, Surveillance, and the Power of Spatial Scripts, 1933-1950” reveals underlying continuities between the presence of threatening bodies and the increasing surveillance of these bodies in camps throughout the United States. Jonathan is currently a Ford Predoctoral Fellow as well as a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz and on their personal website www.historiancortez.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Hacking Diversity: The Politics of inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2020), Christina-Dunbar Hester, an associate professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, explores the world of open technology – communities centered on knowledge sharing. In particular, she investigates how these communities are considering the question of diversity and inclusion. Using ethnographic methods – interviews, participant observation, and deep readings of texts – Dunbar-Hester shows how the problem-solving ethos of open tech does not quite meet the challenge of structural social problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
After almost every presentation activist and writer Mia Birdsong gives to executives, think tanks, and policy makers, one of those leaders quietly confesses how much they long for the profound community she describes. They have family, friends, and colleagues, yet they still feel like they're standing alone. They're "winning" at the American Dream, but they're lonely, disconnected, and unsatisfied. It seems counterintuitive that living the "good life"--the well-paying job, the nuclear family, the upward mobility--can make us feel isolated and unhappy. But in a divided America, where only a quarter of us know our neighbors and everyone is either a winner or a loser, we've forgotten the key element that helped us make progress in the first place: community. In this provocative, groundbreaking work, Mia Birdsong shows that what separates us isn't only the ever-present injustices built around race, class, gender, values, and beliefs, but also our denial of our interdependence and need for belonging. In response to the fear and discomfort we feel, we've built walls, and instead of leaning on each other, we find ourselves leaning on concrete. Through research, interviews, and stories of lived experience, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community (Hachette, 2020) returns us to our inherent connectedness where we find strength, safety, and support in vulnerability and generosity, in asking for help, and in being accountable. Showing up--literally and figuratively--points us toward the promise of our collective vitality and leads us to the liberated well-being we all want. Mia Birdsong is an activist, facilitator, and storyteller. A Senior Fellow of the Economic Security Project, she was also an inaugural Ascend Fellow of The Aspen Institute and New American California Fellow. She was founding Co-Director of Family Story and Vice President of the Family Independence Initiative, Mia speaks widely at conferences and gatherings across the country. She lives with her loved ones on the occupied land of the Chochenyo Ohlone people (AKA Oakland, CA). Read more about her work at miabirdsong.com. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
L. L. Wynn’s book Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt: Navigating the Margins of Respectability (University of Texas Press, 2018) is an interrogation of urban life and gendered mobilities in Cairo, Egypt. She discusses categories of kinship, tourism, friendship, love, and sex through the lens of “respectability”; and in the process illustrates how “respectability” itself is an unstable category. Not only does it mean different things to different people, it is also something that people (men and women) don’t inherently possess and with which they must continuously grapple. Methodologically the book delineates the political stakes of writing about these categories in a space like Egypt, especially since the discourses of orientalism that frame these categories have had violent political implications. Wynn also critically positions herself within the text and constantly analyzes her own presence in the “field”. She visibly struggles with the category of “respectability” as it, inconsistently, applies to her. The book’s narrative style and care with which key characters and interlocutors are developed throughout, reiterate Wynn’s dedication to the political stakes of her text. From the antique store owners, workers and tour guides (called tourist hustlers) to belly dancers and university students the ethnography spans a variety of social groups and classes where themes of love, sex, and desire intertwine with the economy such that intimacy and circulation and exchange of money becomes closely tied. These affective and intimate economies become sites of speculating about “respectability” and judging people’s commitment to love. Money is exchanged and circulates just as words do in the form of gossip or the way people “talk” and the urbality of Cairo becomes unimaginable without thinking about love, sex, desire and violence, that co-exist in complex ways. L. L. Wynn is an associate professor and head of the Anthropology Department at Macquarie University. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
If we want girls to succeed, we need to teach them the audacity to transgress. Through the lives of students at three very different schools, Sally Nuamah, an award-winning scholar-activist, makes the case for “feminist schools” that orient girls toward a lifetime of achievement in How Girls Achieve (Harvard University Press). This bold and necessary book points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender. Educated women raise healthier families, build stronger communities, and generate economic opportunities for themselves and their children. Yet millions of disadvantaged girls never make it to school―and too many others drop out or fail. Upending decades of advice and billions of dollars in aid, Nuamah argues that this happens because so many challenges girls confront―from sexual abuse to unequal access to materials and opportunities―go unaddressed. But it isn’t enough just to go to school. What you learn there has to prepare you for the world where you’ll put that knowledge to work. A compelling and inspiring scholar who has founded a nonprofit to test her ideas, Nuamah reveals that developing resilience is not a gender-neutral undertaking. Preaching grit doesn’t help girls; it actively harms them. Drawing on her deep immersion in classrooms in the United States, Ghana, and South Africa, Nuamah calls for a new approach: creating feminist schools that will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms, and allow them to carve out their own paths to success. Sally A. Nuamah is a scholar, activist, and filmmaker. She has received numerous awards, including the Gates Millennium scholarship and the Black Women Organized for Political Action’s Under 40 Award in Education, and was selected a Change-Maker by the White House. “HerStory,” her award-winning documentary on girls and education in Ghana, has been screened across the world and is accessible through Discovery Education. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in women’s history, literature and anthropology. She studies the diaries and personal writings of 19th-century American women, and works as a historian and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the place of classical music in contemporary society? In Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Marianna Ritchey, an assistant professor of music history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explores the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and classical music, showing how many of the democratizing and innovative elements of the genre go hand-in-hand with corporate power. Using detailed social and musicological studies of key composers, movements, opera companies, and tech advertising, the book offers a critical but sympathetic analysis of the potential, but also the limits, of classical music. Accessibly written, blending critical theory with contemporary case studies the book will be essential reading across arts and social sciences, as well as for business and technology scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon (University of Michigan Press, 2019) illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman. Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué is an Assistant Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book was awarded the 2020 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in History at UCLA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today Jana Byars talks to Jean Halley, Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York about her new book Horse Crazy: Girls and the Lives of Horses (University of Georgia Press, 2019). Part memoir, part heavy-hitting theoretical exploration, this delightfully readable book explores the relationship between horses and humans, and how girls develop relationships with horses and subvert dominant narratives about gender roles and heteronormativity. Professor Halley works on the intersection of affective relationships, identity construction, and power, often as these intersections interact with horses. She is the author of The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows: Meat Markets (Palgrave 2012) and Boundaries of Touch: Parenting and Adult-Child Intimacy (Illinois, 2007) as well as the editor of Seeing Straight, Seeing White, and The Affective Turn. As well as her academic and hybrid academic/memoir work, Halley writes creative non-fiction. Killing Deer, a beautifully written and slightly devastating short, was published in Harper’s Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Terrorism and radicalization came to the forefront of news and politics in the US after the unforgettable attacks of September 11th, 2001. When George W. Bush famously asked "Why do they hate us?," the President echoed the confusion, anger and fear felt by millions of Americans, while also creating a politicized discourse that has come to characterize and obscure discussions of both phenomena in the media. Since then the American public has lived through a number of domestic attacks and threats, and watched international terrorist attacks from afar on television sets and computer screens. The anxiety and misinformation surrounding terrorism and radicalization are perhaps best detected in questions that have continued to recur in the last decade: "Are terrorists crazy?"; "Is there a profile of individuals likely to become terrorists?"; "Is it possible to prevent radicalization to terrorism?" Fortunately, in the two decades since 9/11, a significant body of research has emerged that can help provide definitive answers. In Radicalization to Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2020), Sophia Moskalenko and Clark McCauley propose twelve mechanisms that can move individuals, groups, and mass publics from political indifference to sympathy and support for terrorist violence. Radicalization to Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to Know synthesizes original and existing research to answer the questions raised after each new attack, including those committed by radicalized Americans. It offers a rigorously informed overview of the insight that will enable readers to see beyond the relentless news cycle to understand where terrorism comes from and how best to respond to it. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town (Routledge, 2020) is a classic in the social sciences. The rigour and richness of the ethnographic data of this book and its analysis is matched only by its literary style. This magnum opus of 732 pages, an outcome of fieldwork covering twenty-one years, complete with diagrams and photographs, reads like an epic novel, difficult to put down. Professor Jonathan Parry looks at a context in which the manual workforce is divided into distinct social classes, which have a clear sense of themselves as separate and interests that are sometimes opposed. The relationship between them may even be one of exploitation; and they are associated with different lifestyles and outlooks, kinship and marriage practices, and suicide patterns. A central concern is with the intersection between class, caste, gender and regional ethnicity, with how class trumps caste in most contexts and with how classes have become increasingly structured as the ‘structuration’ of castes has declined. The wider theoretical ambition is to specify the general conditions under which the so-called ‘working class’ has any realistic prospect of unity. Today I talked with the author, Jonathan Parry, emeritus professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (in collaboration with Ajay TG) and John Harriss, emeritus professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University. Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
When you ask people about academic collaborations, Piven and Cloward is almost always the first one they mention. In this episode of the Co-Authored podcast, we look at the four-decade collaboration between Professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. This collaboration is incredibly timely today, as protest and social movements are at the center of debates about racial justice and social equity. Piven and Cloward studied this together starting in the early 1960s and what they discovered about poverty, race, and social movements in the multiple books and articles reveals a lot about the way forward. During this episode, you’ll directly from Piven, who I interviewed at her home in Manhattan. She retired from the City University of New York Graduate Center several years ago, but continues to write. Richard Cloward passed in the early 2000s, but you’ll hear from him in a clip from the 1960s. You’ll also hear from Dara Strolovitch, Phil Rocco, and Mark Schmidt. There’s a little bit of Milton Friedman and Glenn Beck to keep things moving, as well. The episode was supported by the American Political Science Association, the New Books Network, and John Jay College, CUNY. It was edited and produced by Sam Anderson. I hope you enjoy listening. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Colleges fiercely defend America’s higher education system, arguing that it rewards bright kids who have worked hard. But it doesn’t actually work this way. As the recent bribery scandal demonstrates, social inequalities and colleges’ pursuit of wealth and prestige stack the deck in favor of the children of privilege. For education scholars and critics Anthony P. Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl, it’s clear that colleges are not the places of aspiration and equal opportunity they should (and claim to) be. The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America (The New Press) delves deeply into the rampant dysfunction of higher education today and critiques a system that pays lip service to social mobility and meritocracy, while offering little of either. Through policies that exacerbate inequality, including generously funding so-called merit-based aid rather than expanding opportunity for those who need it most, U.S. universities—the presumed pathway to a better financial future—are woefully (and in some cases criminally) complicit in reproducing racial and class privilege across generations. This timely and incisive book argues for unrigging the game by dramatically reducing the weight of the SAT/ACT; measuring colleges by their outcomes, not their inputs; designing affirmative action plans that honor the relationship between race and class; and making 14 the new 12—guaranteeing every American a public K–14 education. The Merit Myth shows the way to higher education becoming the beacon of opportunity it was intended to be. Anthony P. Carnevale, a chairman under President Clinton of the National Commission on Employment Policy, is the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. He lives in Washington, DC. Peter Schmidt, the author of Color and Money, is an award-winning writer and editor who has worked for Education Week and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He lives in Washington, DC. Jeff Strohl is the director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. He lives in Washington, DC. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Who are the Black middle-class in Britain? In Black Middle-Class Britannia: Identities, Repertoires, Cultural Consumption (Manchester University Press, 2019) Ali Meghji, a lecturer in social inequalities at the University of Cambridge, considers the identity of Britain’s Black middle-class by understanding culture and cultural consumption. Offering examples from across contemporary art and culture, the book provides both a theoretical framework and rich empirical data to demonstrate the importance of understanding race to the study of both class and culture. As a result, the book is essential reading across the arts and social sciences, as well as for cultural practitioners and policymakers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews editors Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein about their new book Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production (University of Alabama Press, 2020), which explores the rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries. Cookery explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike. Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole, Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion in agricultural production Donovan Conley is Berman Chair in Language and Thought and associate professor of communication studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Justin Eckstein is assistant professor and director of forensics in the communication department at Pacific Lutheran University. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Most Gulag scholarship focuses on political prisoners and, as a result, our knowledge of the camps as a lived experience remains relatively incomplete. Criminal Subculture in the Gulag: Prisoner Society in the Stalinist Labour Camps, 1924–53 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) draws on Gulag journals, song collections, tattoo drawings and dictionaries of slang, to explore the lives of the recidivist criminals and criminal gangs that originated in the Gulag under Stalin. Join us to listen as Mark Vincent maps the Gulag 'penal arc' of prisoners across initiation tests, means of communication, the importance of card playing, punishment rituals, tattooing rituals, and conflict between the vory v zakone and the other prisoners and camp staff. Mark Vincent is an independent scholar who obtained his PhD in 2015 from the University of East Anglia, UK. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
70 years ago, the philosopher Theodore Adorno and a team of scholars released a massive book titled The Authoritarian Personality (Verso, 2019), which attempted to map the psychological and emotional dynamics of those who might find themselves seduced by authoritarianism. The book synthesized both empirical psychology and sociology, relying on massive sets of data, with psychoanalytic models of personality so as to approach their subjects with a set of deep hermeneutic tools. The result is a book that is both both data-driven and speculative, and covers a vast swatch of theoretical territory. It was recently republished by Verso books, with a new introduction by Peter Gordon. Charles Clavey, a lecturer in social studies at Harvard University, whose research focuses on critical theory and the history of authoritarianism. His writing has appeared in a number of places including Modern Intellectual History, The LA Review of Books and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Pepper Glass’s new book Misplacing Ogden, Utah: Race, Class, Immigration, and the Construction of Urban Reputation (University of Utah Press, 2020) evaluates the widely held assumption that divisions between urban areas are reflections of varying amounts of crime, deprivation, and other social, cultural, and economic problems. Glass uses Ogden, Utah as a case study to argue that urban reputations are “moral frontiers” that uphold and create divides between the reputations of members of a community. As a working-class city, Ogden, Utah has long held a history of racial and immigrant diversity. Among many Utahns this community gained a reputation as a "sin city" in the middle of an entrenched religious culture. Glass blends ethnographic research with historical accounts, census reports, and other secondary sources to provide insight into Ogden’s reputation, past and present. This book captures the perception of residents of the entire city as opposed to only a sector of the community. Glass’s unique approach suggests that we can do a better job at confronting urban problems by rethinking the assumptions we have about place and promoting interventions that breakdown boundaries. Pepper Glass, Ph.D. is associate professor of sociology at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. He has published his research on racial inequality, social movements, and youth culture in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Mobilization, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is assistant professor of sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What kind of discrimination do Black women face in the legal profession? Tsedale Melaku explores this question and more in her new book: You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Using in-depth interviews with Black women about their lived experiences working in elite law firms, Melaku explores topics including double burden, system gendered racism, and color-blind ideology. She also pushes our thinking further about these issues through discovery of issues including the invisible labor clause and inclusion tax. Her respondents elaborate on their experiences of having their appearances and positions continually scrutinized, leading to hypervisibility and invisibility. Melaku also explores women’s experiences of isolation, exclusion, and ultimately attrition through daily experiences as well as through important relationships within professional networks. This book will be of interest to many readers inside and outside of Sociology. Scholars of race, gender, and work will find this to be an important reading for their own work and a critical addition to their classrooms. Anyone working in professional institutions could benefit from reading the experiences of these women and Melaku’s clear and thorough analysis of next steps and take-aways. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Today I talked to Charlotte Bruckermann about her new book Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China (Berghahn Books, 2019). Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstand devaluation and confront dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty takes root, this process challenges the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class in China and beyond. Suvi Rautio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her interests delve into themes, such as Chinese state-society relations, space and memory, to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China and reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. suvi.rautio@helsinki.fi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Over recent years, scholarship centering Afrolatinidad has pushed the bounds of the field towards greater forms of racial and ethnic understanding. Dr. Monika Gosin’s monograph, The Racial Politics of Division: Interethnic Struggles For Legitimacy in Multicultural Miami (Cornell University, 2019), adds to this burgeoning literary canon. By examining how controversial waves of Cuban immigration during the late 20th century intensified the friction between African Americans and the existing Cuban immigrant population in Miami, Gosin reveals how differing notions of “worthy citizenship” encouraged interethnic conflict. Dr. Gosin’s The Politics of Division “forces a relooking at the poles of black and white as they operate in the lives of people who are phenotypically black” (20). The author’s ability to hold and move between so many complex identities, histories, and frameworks is exemplary of the approach necessary to conduct relational research. Gosin’s communities of study include African American, white Cubans, Afro-Cubans, Haitians, and the ever-present looming structures of white supremacy both in the United States and Cuba. Traversing between intersecting and transnational racial ideologies, the book highlights three racializing frames (black/white, good/bad immigrant, and native/foreigner) through which communities facilitated their own relationship of belonging to the US nation-state. Gosin conducts extensive research in newspaper archives to understand how various racial and ethnic communities constructed media discourses about one another. She utilizes the archives of the Miami Times, an African American-owned and controlled paper, and El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language adaptation of the mainstream Miami Herald, to show the complexities of race, immigration, and citizenship. Throughout the book, Dr. Gosin maintains a strong commitment to the presence and histories of Afro-Cubans in both the African-American and white Cuban controlled newspapers. She supplements this work with in-depth personal interviews with Afro-Cubans living in Miami and Los Angeles, which further adds a dynamic to the history of racial complexity in southern Florida. As Gosin writes, “Examining how Afro-Cuban immigrants negotiate the intersections of blackness and Latinidad and rejections they sometimes face from other Latinos allows an important critique of the ways white supremacist notions have been embraced or perpetuated by nonblack Latinos” (191). This call for a better understanding of the ways white supremacy has infiltrated thought processes -- and scholarship -- in non-black Latinx peoples and Latinx Studies is critical to the book’s goal. The Racial Politics of Division is a book for those interested in race and race-making between non-white communities, how issues of racialization and immigration merge into sociopolitical consequences, and for students of (Afro)Latinx studies. Monika Gosin is Associate Professor in Sociology at William & Mary. Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies. Their research focuses on the rise of federally-funded encampments (i.e., the concentration of populations) from the advent of the New Deal until post-WWII era. Their dissertation, “The Age of Encampment: Race, Surveillance, and the Power of Spatial Scripts, 1933-1950” reveals underlying continuities between the presence of threatening bodies and the increasing surveillance of these bodies in camps throughout the United States. Jonathan is currently a Ford Predoctoral Fellow as well as a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz and on their personal website www.historiancortez.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Researchers frequently experience sexualized interactions, sexual objectification, and harassment as they conduct fieldwork. These experiences are often left out of ethnographers’ “tales from the field” and remain unaddressed within qualitative literature. In Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research (University of California Press, 2019), Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards argue that the androcentric, racist, and colonialist epistemological foundations of ethnographic methodology contribute to the silence surrounding sexual harassment and other forms of violence. Hanson and Richards challenge readers to recognize how these attitudes put researchers at risk, further the solitude experienced by researchers, lead others to question the validity of their work, and, in turn, negatively impact the construction of ethnographic knowledge. To improve methodological training, data collection, and knowledge produced by all researchers, Harassed advocates for an embodied approach to ethnography that reflexively engages with the ways in which researchers’ bodies shape the knowledge they produce. By challenging these assumptions, the authors offer an opportunity for researchers, advisors, and educators to consider the multiple ways in which good ethnographic research can be conducted. Beyond challenging current methodological training and mentorship, Harassed opens discussions about sexual harassment and violence in the social sciences in general. The authors brought up a couple of articles in the interview that they wanted to provide links to, in case listeners want to look these articles up: --Berry, Maya J., Claudia Cháves Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada. 2017. “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 32(4): 537-565. --Bonnes, Stephanie. 2017. “The Bureaucratic Harassment of U.S. Servicewomen.” Gender & Society 31(6): 804-829. Sneha Annavarapu is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the culture of the tech industry? In The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Emerald, 2019), Mariann Hardey, an Associate Professor in Marketing at Durham University, shows the ongoing inequalities faced by women in the IT industry. The book uses a range of case studies from across the world’s ‘tech cities’, drawing on interviews, focus groups, ethnography, and a feminist theoretical framework, to make clear the problem of the ‘women in tech’ label and the sexism in the tech industry. The book analyses the gendered spatial and career divisions of tech, making it an important addition to the literature, as well as essential reading for anyone interested in how this most essential modern industry works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, has been ranked as one of the most violent cities in the world. In Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Robert Samet undertakes ethnography with crime journalists on their reporting practices to offer a compelling argument about the relationship between populist politics and the news. Samet participates with and observes a group of crime reporters as they traverse the city, investigating crimes, recording interviews with victims, and writing up their stories. Reporters commonly collected and publicized denuncias, victims’ accusations or denouncements of wrongdoing that can also include calls for justice. Samet details the substance and variation of such denuncias to demonstrate how the ubiquity and prevalence of these pronouncements articulate a popular will. This book contributes to studies of media and journalism, Latin American politics and society, and political anthropology in order to expand our understanding of the role of journalism in amplifying the will of the people. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The success of populist politicians and the emergence of social justice movements around the world, and the recent demonstrations against police violence in the United States, demonstrate a widespread desire for fundamental political, economic, and social change, albeit not always in a leftwards direction. What can movements and parties that hope to bring about fundamental social change learn from the past? In Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019), George Lawson analyzes revolutionary episodes from the modern era (beginning with the Glorious Revolution of 1688) to discern how geopolitics, transnational circulation of ideas and people, organizational capabilities, and contingent choices come together to shape the emergence of revolutionary situations and the trajectories and outcomes of revolutions. He also explains why more moderate negotiated revolutions have been more common than far-reaching social revolutions since the 1980s. Finally, he suggests that the key for social movements to take advantage of systemic crises that could provide openings for revolutionary situations to emerge is the ability of opposition groups to form cohesive political organizations without succumbing to the authoritarianism and the “ends justify the means” logic that turned revolutionary forces into violent, authoritarian regimes in the past. George Lawson is Associate Professor, Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How are we going to address inequality and put the economy on a sounder footing? Today I talked to Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth about their new book Angrynomics (Agenda Publishing/Columbia University Press, 2020). Lonergan is an economist and macro fund manager in London whose writings often appear in The Financial Times. Blyth is a political economist at Brown University who received his PhD in political science from Columbia University. Topics covered in this episode include: --An exploration of how the emotions of anger, fear and disgust animate both the long-term economic stresses in society and those brought on by the Covid-19 crisis. --What the differences are between moral outrage versus tribal outrage. --Descriptions of three, potentially viable and game-changing solutions, including among them a “data dividend” and the creation of national wealth funds like those in Norway and beyond. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (Liveright, 2020) by Marcia Chatelain is a fascinating examination of the relationship between the fast-food industry, Black business owners, and the communities where they set up franchises after the Holy Week Uprisings of 1968. Using McDonalds as a “prism” to study the expansion of the fast-food industry and the effects of Black capitalism, Franchise tells a complex origins story about Black franchisees and their reception in Black communities across the nation in Atlanta, Chicago, Portland, Cleveland, and Los Angeles after the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement. Chatelain ultimately exposes the limits of Black entrepreneurship to supplant state responsibility to create socially and economically reparative conditions in Black communities, while demonstrating how a range of progressive Black politicians and activists came to support Black entrepreneurship as a solution to widespread federal and municipal disinvestment from Black communities. As Black franchise owners assisted the development of McDonalds into a wealthy and successful national brand, they also encountered glass-ceilings and discriminatory practices within McDonalds corporate and the larger business world despite their tremendous success compared to white counterparts. Chatelain traces these tensions and interconnections across political, business, and community stakeholders to explain how fast-food franchises ingratiated themselves into Black communities, while exasperating inequalities in Black America. Francise teaches readers to be skeptical of corporate or market-driven solutions whether articulated as Black capitalism or “empowerment,” especially during and after moments of Black uprising. Marcia Chatelain is a scholar, speaker, and strategist based in Washington, D.C. She teaches courses in African American life and culture at Georgetown University. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How are black lives lived in the contemporary city? In Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City, Dr Joy White, a sociologist and ethnographer based in London, explores the case study of Newham in East London to illustrate issues of privatisation, gentrification, policing, and racial discrimination. In doing so, the book highlights how specific cultures and musical scenes have flourished and developed, even as corporate power aims to regenerate away these vital elements of local life. The ethnography and analysis of power offers important lessons for towns and cities in the UK and beyond, connecting global trends and theoretical insights to specific local case studies. In our current context the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in urban life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Marriage after Migration: An Ethnography of Money, Romance, and Gender in Globalizing Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2019) tells the stories of five women in rural Mexico, each navigating the tricky terrain that is men’s international migration. With their husbands and sons working in the United States, will the women hold their families together? In the book, Nora Haenn draws on twenty-five years of experience in Calakmul, on Mexico’s southern border, to relate the pleasures and dangers driving labor migration. With their men abroad, women find new romance, unimagined wealth, and, for some, relief from constraining gender roles. But for these women migration’s dangers are just as real: a return to poverty, pressure to live up to impossible standards, emotional betrayal, divorce. When men return home with a drinking problem, wives can face life-threatening domestic violence. Marriage after Migration shows how globalization changes people but also how marginalized people, including indigenous people, drive globalization. By following the women’s journeys, readers go beneath the surface of globalization to see its roots in people’s most intimate relationships. Pamela Fuentes is an Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Pace University, NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay of Oakland University on their new book Women Rapping Revolution.(University of California Press, 2020). Detroit, Michigan, has long been recognized as a center of musical innovation and social change. Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay draw on seven years of fieldwork to illuminate the important role that women have played in mobilizing a grassroots response to political and social pressures at the heart of Detroit’s ongoing renewal and development project. Focusing on the Foundation, a women-centered hip-hop collective, Women Rapping Revolution argues that the hip-hop underground is a crucial site where Black women shape subjectivity and claim self-care as a principle of community organizing. Through interviews and sustained critical engagement with artists and activists, this study also articulates the substantial role of cultural production in social, racial, and economic justice efforts. Resources mentioned in the show: Farrugia and Hay,“The Politics and Place of a ‘Legendary’ Hip Hop Track in Detroit,” Journal of Music and Politics. Rebekah Farrugia is Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University. She is the author of Beyond the Dance Floor: Female DJs, Technology, and Electronic Dance Music Culture. Connect @b3kkaf on Twitter and @rebekah.farrugia.7 on Facebook. Kellie D. Hay is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University. She has authored many articles about music, politics, and cultural identity, and specializes in critical qualitative methodologies. Connect @obihay on Twitter, @kellie.hay.37 on Facebook and by email at hay@oakland.edu. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this interview and the book, Women Rapping Revolution. Connect with your host @rhetoriclee on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford University Press 2018), Barbara J. Risman uses her gender structure theory to tackle the question about whether today’s young people, Millennials, are pushing forward the gender revolution or backing away from it. In the first part of the book, Risman revises her theoretical argument to differentiate more clearly between culture and material aspects of each level of gender as a social structure. She then uses previous research to explain that today’s young people spend years in a new life stage where they are emerging as adults. The new research presented here offers a typology of how today’s young people wrestle with gender during the years of emerging adulthood. How do they experience gender at the individual level? What are the expectations they face because of their sex? What are their ideological beliefs and organizational constraints based on their gender category? Risman suggests there is great variety within this generation. She identifies four strategies used by young people: true believers in gender difference, innovators who want to push boundaries in feminist directions, straddlers who are simply confused, and rebels who sometimes identify as genderqueer and reject gender categories altogether. The final chapter offers a utopian vision that would ease the struggles of all these groups, a fourth wave of feminism that rejects the gender structure itself. Risman envisions a world where the sex ascribed at birth matters has few consequences beyond reproduction. In this interview, Dr. Risman and I discuss how gender is more than an identity, but a way of shaping and legitimating inequality. We also discuss her methods and data, the four categories of classifying participants’ gender beliefs and behaviours, and how to move forward with feminist change. This book makes a meaningful contribution to not only the literature on gender as a social structure but also the literature on emerging adulthood. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in gender, emerging adulthood, feminism, and inequality Dr. Barbara J. Risman (@bjrisman) is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Gender and Society and former president of Sociologists for Women in Society. Her research interests include gender inequality and families; feminist activism, and public sociology. More information is available on her website www.barbararisman.com/. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Good Reason to Run: Women and Political Candidacy (Temple University Press, 2020) is an excellent text that provides a wealth of information and analysis of the reasons why women (and men) choose to run for public office and what that path looks like in terms of training, support, obstacles, and advantages. This is a wonderfully accessible text, great for use in the classroom, for those who work in politics and campaigns, and for scholars of electoral politics, particularly those who study women and politics. Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, Dawn Langan Teele have assembled an impressive group of contributing authors, focusing mostly but not exclusively on American politics and the particular experiences and issues that women in the United States face in considering a run for public office. Good Reason to Run came out of a collaborative effort between scholars/academics and practitioners, thus the data, information, and analysis in the book weaves together both scholarship on women running for office and the experience of those who work with and for women running for office or in elected office. A standout section of the book harnesses this collaborative information in discussing the role of non-profit organizations in providing a variety of support for female candidates; this section also includes a global comparative analysis of the role of these organizations. The book focuses on the theory of political ambition and how a static understanding of this concept has often shaped the thinking and analysis of electoral politics. Good Reason to Run: Women and Political Candidacy provides a diversity of methodological approaches across the chapters, from field experiments and survey data to deep interviews and descriptive analysis—which makes the text accessible to a broad array of readers. Beyond answering questions about which women choose to run and why they make that choice, Good Reason to Run also includes a section on the role of money in politics, especially as it figures into that decision matrix – and the differences across parties, and countries. Shames, Bernhard, Holman, and Teele have organized and marshaled an engaging text that responds to the literature about women running for office, integrating the established theories and exploring current data, information, and experiences from those in the field. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Political Scientist Daniel Q. Gillion’s new book, The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an incredibly topical and important analysis of the connection between protests and the influence this public activism has on the voting electorate. Tracing the idea of the “silent majority” from Richard Nixon’s characterization of his supporters in the 1960s through to contemporary uses of the term in the 2016 campaign by then-candidate Donald Trump, Gillion examines the construction of this binary framework, that there is a silent majority at home and a vocal minority in the streets, making noise; he also argues that the idea of the silent majority might not apply in our current polarized political world. The Loud Minority brings together a variety of disciplinary perspectives to examine protests—weaving together research and analysis from sociology, history, and political science to more fully understand the protests themselves, but to also get at the impacts that protests have, on politicians and elected officials, on donations to campaigns and candidates, on voting behavior, and on policy implementation and shifts in policy directions. Gillion finds that voters are influenced by protests and activism, especially when it happens in close proximity to them. In a way that may be more useful than other information streams, protests provide the electorate with a kind of shorthand that they can then use to connect policy and political actors. Because of the acute partisan polarization within the American political system, protests fit into ideological bends, as Gillion notes in the interview, the protests themselves are linked to one another through the emphasis or policy thrust of the individual protest and the overarching umbrella under which it may be classified. This linkage then becomes a broader scope for voters to use to assess the records of candidates and elected officials on specific concerns. Gillion is exploring the question, throughout the book, of whether protests work and if so, how do they work? The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy also explains that the answer to the question is not a simple one, necessarily, that the outcome of the protest may not be singular or even initially assessible. This research helps us to understand the potential impact of the many protests we are seeing all around us in the United States (and beyond), while guiding us through the myriad ways that protests act—they are not simple the hours of marching or demonstrating, but the ripples and ramifications of those marches, as the electorate observes and responds, by donating, by voting, by becoming involved in the community, by joining in subsequent protests. Protests are, according to Gillion, “the canaries in the coal mines that warn of future political and electoral change.” Understanding the connection between protests and their influence on the electorate helps us to better understand democracy. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Jana Byars talks with Martina Cvajner, Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Trento, about her new book, Soviet Signoras: Personal and Collective Transformations in Eastern European Migration (University of Chicago Press, 2019). This book focuses on a group of women who migrated from areas in the former Soviet Union to northern Italy, following them from the first days of their arrival and their early work as elderly home caregivers, as they build personal lives and networks, through the establishment of a meaningful community. Dr Cvajner spent almost two decades with the women she studies, developing friendships and long-term connections. This personal interest shines through in the book and in our talk. She has a genuine affection for her subjects and approaches them not just as research material, but as whole humans, with complex stories. As a review noted, “By zeroing in on these elements of personal identity, she reveals previously unexplored sides of the social psychology of migration, colouring our contemporary discussion with complex shades of humanity. ”Our discussion discusses the importance of sexuality, the relationship between gender and migration, and explores the benefits of long-term ethnographic research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
We are schooled to believe that states formed more or less synchronously with settlement and agriculture. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), James C. Scott asks us to question this belief. The evidence, he says, is simply not on the side of states. Stratified, taxing, walled towns did not inevitably appear in the wake of crop domestication and sedentary settlement. Only around 3100 BCE, some four millennia after the earliest farming and settling down, did they begin making their presence felt. What happened in these four millennia is the subject of this book: a deep history by “a card-carrying political scientist and an anthropologist and environmentalist by courtesy”, which aims to put the earliest states in their place. James Scott joins us for the fourth episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to talk about state fragility and state persistence from Mesopotamia to Southeast Asia, the politics of cereal crops, domestication and reproduction, why it was once good to be a barbarian, the art of provocation, the views of critics, and, human and animal species relations and zoonoses in our epidemiological past and pandemic present. To download or stream episodes in this series please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Michele Wakin’s new book Hobo Jungle: A Homeless Community in Paradise (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020) is an up-close exploration of the evolution that has taken place with unsheltered homelessness. She provided an evocative portrait of a jungle encampment that has endured since the Great Depression in one of the wealthiest cities located on California’s south coast. The realities of homelessness are quite complex. For decades unhoused populations have lived in camps or other makeshift settings, even when shelters are available. Is this a chosen act of resistance? Is it an act of self-preservation? Or do homeless people live on the streets (and in the “Jungle”) because they are too addicted, too mentally ill, or too criminal to live by the rules and regulations of a shelter? Michele Wakin, Ph.D. is professor of sociology at Bridgewater State University. She is the author of Otherwise Homeless: Vehicle Living and the Culture of Homelessness. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How did Donald Trump’s leveraging of emotions get him to The White House? Today I discussed this question with Steven E. Schier and Todd E. Eberly, co-authors of the new book How Trump Happened: A System Shock Decades in the Making (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020). Schier is professor emeritus of political science at Carleton College and Eberly is an associate professor of political science at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. This is Schier’s 23rd book as author or editor, and the co-authors fourth book together. Topics covered in this episode include: --The emotive similarities and differences between four political leaders: Donald Trump, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ross Perot, with a special focus on the Trump / Nixon affinity. --Analysis of Trump’s emotional playbook, especially how he elicits and leverages voter anger. --What the lessons are for leaders everywhere in terms of understanding Trump’s successes and failures as the country’s current, all-consuming focal point. A transcript of the episode can be found here. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How is the retail sector going to be best able to survive the Amazon juggernaut? I address this question with B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in a discussion of their book The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020). Pine and Gilmore are the cofounders of Strategic Horizons, LLP. Besides their other books and activities, Pine is a Lecturer at Columbia University and Gilmore teaches at Case Western Reserve University. Topics covered in this episode include: --What have been the relevant emotions in play as the economy has evolved across the four stage of commodities, goods, services, and now experiences and transformations alike. --How is achieving “customer satisfaction” too limiting, and what’s the emotional storyline that, first, Walt Disney and now business leaders worldwide must embrace to survive and thrive. --How does the emotional labor of employees being “on stage” as part of an experience square with workers’ and customers’ desire for authenticity. For a transcript of this episode, click here. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In modern times, death is understood to have undergone a transformation not unlike religion. Whereas in the past it was out in the open, it now resides mostly in specialized spaces of sequestration—funeral homes, hospitals and other medical facilities. A mainstay in so-called traditional societies in the form of ritual practices, death was usually messy but meaningful, with the questions of what happens to the dead or where they go lying at the heart of traditional culture and religion. In modernity, however, we are said to have effectively sanitized it, embalmed it and packaged it—but it seems that death is back. In the current era marked by economic, political and social uncertainty, we see it on television, on the Internet; we see it almost everywhere. In his new book, (Inter)Facing Death: Life in Global Uncertainty (Routledge, 2020), Sam Han analyzes the nexus of death and digital culture in the contemporary moment in the context of recent developments in social, cultural and political theory. It argues that death today can be thought of as "interfaced," that is mediated and expressed, in various aspects of contemporary life rather than put to the side or overcome, as many narratives of modernity have suggested. Employing concepts from anthropology, sociology, media studies and communications, (Inter)Facing Death examines diverse phenomena where death and digital culture meet, including art, online suicide pacts, the mourning of celebrity deaths, terrorist beheadings and selfies. Providing new lines of thinking about one of the oldest questions facing the human and social sciences, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, anthropology, sociology and cultural and media studies with interests in death. Matt Coward-Gibbs is an Associate Lecturer and PhD student in Sociology at the University of York. He is the editor of the forthcoming collection Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead (Emerald, 2020). You can find his university page here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Political Scientist Mary-Kate Lizotte’s new book, Gender Differences in Public Opinion: Values and Political Consequences (Temple University Press, 2020) helps us to understand the concept of the gender gap in American politics and how this gap looks across a host of different policy areas. Lizotte examines four different policy umbrellas: the use of force, environmental policy, social welfare policy, and policy around issues of equality. Making use of American National Election Studies (ANES) data, the research in Gender Differences in Public Opinion digs into these policy umbrellas to tease out distinctions within these policy areas, examining where the gender gap is broader and where it narrows, both in comparison to other issue areas and in context of the issues themselves. While the gender gap is often discussed during election cycles, particularly around presidential vote preferences and the different choices men and women make, Lizotte’s work is much broader and theoretically encompassing, arguing that there is a values gap between men and women and their thinking about policy, and this is connected, then, to their political choices. There is a need to better and more comprehensively explain the gaps (which do range in size) across policy areas and not analyze each particular distinction independently. Lizotte posits that “values offer a novel and comprehensive approach to understanding gender differences in policy preferences.” Values, as such, reflect how an individual conceives of the proper role of the government in society. And thinking about different perspectives on values in this context, according to Lizotte’s thesis, helps to explain the gender gap and the way that it traces through different policy areas. Gender Differences in Public Opinion teaches us how men and women approach policy and political decisions from different perspectives and how that surfaces in specific policy choices. Lizotte also explains that these policy choices are important for candidates and parties to consider—since they need to recruit both male and female voters in order to win elections, and they have to understand the basis for choices made by these voters. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take to the streets, what do they do? Diana Fu’s nuanced ethnography of Chinese labor organizations demonstrates how grassroots non-governmental organizations (NGOs) mobilize under repressive political conditions. Instead of facilitating collective action through public protests or strikes, Fu demonstrates how Chinese activists innovatively coach citizens to challenge authorities – in private spaces. Activists work with individual workers to help them understand and assert their rights in labor negotiations. Activists use individual conversations with workers to create a sense of belonging to a larger community of migrant workers. These “pedagogies of contention” foster collective identity and consciousness: mobilization without the masses. Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is divided into two parts. First, Fu examines the structural conditions of above and underground groups in Beijing and the Pearl River Delta. She reveals and interrogates how the CCP’s policy of “flexible repression” provided opportunities for mobilization without the masses. Second, she looks at the tactics that allowed activists to inspire participants to take individualized and discursive action. Throughout, she describes the contours of a remarkable political compromise in which local authorities do not fully repress activisists (for fear of driving them further underground) yet attend to the PRC’s goal of stability and fear of collective action. The books demonstrates that Chinese civil society organizations can and do play an active role in shaping state-society relations – more than delivering social services or providing policy consultation – by coaching participants to make rights claims against the state. The podcast concludes with a brief discussion of Dr. Fu’s recent article in Foreign Policy regarding the challenges that COVID19 poses to the CCP’s concerns with social stability. Mobilizing Without the Masses was awarded the Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book on Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association International Political Sociology Section’s Best Book Award, and the American Sociological Association’s Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award (co-winner). Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In recent decades, the number of Americans and Canadians who identify has nonreligious has risen considerably. With nearly one quarter of Canadian and American adults identifying as nonreligious, religious "nones" represent a sizable and growing group within the Canadian and American populations. In their recent book, None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the US and Canada (NYU Press, 2020), Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme examine this phenomenon and the implications of the growing religious none population in North America. Joel Thiessen is Professor of Sociology of Ambrose University in Calgary, Alberta. Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Automobiles and their associated infrastructures, deeply embedded in Western cities, have become a rapidly growing presence in the mega-cities of the Global South. Streets, once crowded with pedestrians, pushcarts, vendors, and bicyclists, are now choked with motor vehicles, many of them private automobiles. In Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities (MIT Press, 2020), Govind Gopakumar examines this shift, analyzing the phenomenon of automobility in Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore), a rapidly growing city of about ten million people in southern India. He finds that the advent of automobility in Bengaluru has privileged the mobility needs of the elite while marginalizing those of the rest of the population. Gopakumar connects Bengaluru's burgeoning automobility to the city's history and to the spatial, technological, and social interventions of a variety of urban actors. Automobility becomes a juggernaut, threatening to reorder the city to enhance automotive travel. He discusses the evolution of congestion and urban change in Bengaluru; the “regimes of congestion” that emerge to address the issue; an “infrastructurescape” that shapes the mobile behavior of all residents but is largely governed by the privileged; and the enfranchisement of an “automotive citizenship” (and the disenfranchisement of non-automobile-using publics). Gopakumar also finds that automobility in Bengaluru faces ongoing challenges from such diverse sources as waste flows, popular religiosity, and political leadership. These challenges, however, introduce messiness without upsetting automobility. He therefore calls for efforts to displace automobility that are grounded in reordering the mobility regime, relandscaping the city and its infrastructures, and reclaiming streets for other uses. Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Richard Lachmann’s First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (Verso, 2020) is a two-for-one deal. The first half of the book is a historical analysis of why some empires transform their geopolitical power into global hegemony while others fail to do so, and why hegemons eventually lose their global predominance. Focusing on the great European empires (Spain, France, Britain, and the Netherlands), Lachmann argues that while imperial expansion can deliver more resources to their centers, they can also create dynamics of elite conflict and complacency that can either prevent an empire from attaining global preeminence, or prevent hegemons from undertaking reforms that would be necessary to maintain their power advantages over emerging rivals. His theoretical framework breaks from internalist theories of state formation and regime change by demonstrating how imperial expansion affects political development in the metropole. In the second half of the book, Lachmann uses his theory of elite politics to analyze the decline of US geopolitical power from its post-World War II heights, which has manifested itself in rising inequality, increasing economic instability, and the failure to win wars despite its massive military budget. He shows how financialization has fostered predatory, short-termist accumulation strategies for economic elites, as they prioritize maximizing shareholder value over long-term investment. At the same time, military officers and weapons contractors team up to prevent reorganization of the military away from expensive high-tech conventional weapons towards resources that would be more useful for fighting insurgencies. In both cases, elites have been able to use their organizational resources to secure their own interests at the expense of the national interest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Kevin Duong, a political theorist in the Politics Department at the University of Virginia, has written a fascinating analysis of the way that violence has been used, in a sense, to create or promote solidarity during the course of the “long nineteenth century” in France. Duong explores four separate periods and experiences in France, starting with the French Revolution and the trial of Louis XVI, moving to the long military engagement in Algeria, then to the Paris Commune in later half of the century, and finally to the preparations and the run up to World War I. And while The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France (Oxford University Press, 2020) is about the French engagement with violence, it is a much broader analysis of the role that violence plays, particularly the concept of redemptive violence, in constructing democracy and establishing a cohesive social body among the citizenry. Duong makes a complex and important argument that the establishment of democracy is built on an often-violent overthrow of an old order, and instead of the move from the state of nature that social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke argue for in their texts, the democratic state comes into existence not in the welcome transition from the cruelty of the state of nature, but in the violent convulsions of bloody revolution more like the French experience. In order to create a democratic people, violence is often implemented as the means to pulling people together, and it is a kind of collective violence. Duong’s analysis posits that modern society is held together by social cohesion, which comes out of unifying violent experiences that bring people together. While mass violence is often associated with anarchy and disorder, The Virtue of Violence makes a different case, compelling us to consider how violence solves a kind of social solidarity problem, and is a means of knitting together potentially disparate members of society. While this is a book that explores the French experience, France provides the case studies to consider how violence works constructively within democratic thought, and, how redemptive violence has a kind of revitalizing power in these political contexts. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Sociology of unintended consequences is commonly depicted as a framework for understanding the outcomes that run counter to the initial intentions of social actors because of factors such as ignorance, error and complexity. This conventional approach, however, is now undergoing change under the influence of more encompassing shifts in framing in social sciences. Indeed, in the last few years, the study of the unintended has evidently moved from the question "What are the sources of the unintended?" to the inquiry "What is it that makes the unintended possible?" or "What risks, but also opportunities, do the unintended entail?" Explaining this puzzle in relation to the internal dynamics of sociology of unintended consequences, Adriana Mica makes an erudite journey in relation to its three main analytical frameworks, their semantic shifts, setbacks and theoretical revivals. Certainly, through the examination of the use of protective headgear in boxing, this volume renders explicitly the possibilistic turn not only in the specific research of the unintended, but in sociology more generally. Presenting the contributions of leading sociology theorists in a new light, Sociology as Analysis of the Unintended: From the Problem of Ignorance to the Discovery of the Possible (Routledge, 2020) will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in fields such as theoretical sociology, sociology of substantive issues and sociology of sport. Dr. Adriana Mica (@Adi_Mica) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Social Prevention and Resocialisation at the University of Warsaw. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In recent years, questions around the nature of truth and facts have reentered public debate, often in discussions around journalistic bias, and whether politically neutral reporting is possible, or even desirable. Many pundits have tried to place blame for the increasingly slippery and fickle nature of truth in reporting on the ideas developed in much 20th-century philosophy, particularly postmodern theory. Santiago Zabala, however, argues that this is to mistake a diagnosis with the condition itself, and makes the case in his recent book, Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020), that much of the hermeneutic and postmodern philosophical traditions can help us navigate these times out of joint. Santiago Zabala is a philosopher and cultural critic and ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is author of many books, including Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press, 2017). His opinion articles have appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, and Al-Jazeera among other international media outlets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Muslims living in locations like Australia, Europe, or North America exist within a context dominated by white racial norms and are forced to grapple with those conventions on a daily basis. If they succeed in meeting the presiding criterion of secular liberalism they can be dubbed a “moderate” Muslim by mainstream society. In Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-racial Societies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Yassir Morsi, Lecturer at La Trobe University, explores these contemporary social dynamics and considers the various ways Muslims don a mask in order to navigate the expectations of the dominant society. Here he offers three paradigms, what he calls the “Fabulous Mask,” the “Militant Mask,” and the “Triumphant Mask,” that represent changing tensions for the “moderate” Muslim. Morsi deconstructs the “radical” vs. “moderate” binary through the forces of racialized structures that shape everyday life and the historical circumstances of Muslims in the “West.” This is achieved through an auto-ethnography that destabilizes traditional scholarship and enables the reader to come to a better understanding of the psychological and material effects of being a Muslim in the times of the “War on Terror” and government funded deradicalization programs. In our conversation we discuss the relationship between religion and race, the category “moderate” Muslim, Frantz Fanon, being a cultural translator, U.S. Muslim scholar Hamza Yusuf, an Islamic art museum exhibit, Australian media personality Waleed Aly & comedian Nazeem Hussain, readings of Edward Said’s Orientalism, British commentator Maajid Nawaz, Friedrich Nietzsche, and confronting the theoretical and practical norms of academic scholarship. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Did Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency in 2016 because he was a master of character work – able to sum up opponents in pithy epithets that encourage the public to see them as weak or immoral? What is character work and how do characters with roots in ancient crease help us understand 21st-century politics? While many scholars of politics focus on plots, James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young and Elke Zuern encourage us to look at the characters – particularly the simplified packaging of the intentions, capacities, and actions of public figures. In Public Characters: The Politics of Reputation and Blame (Oxford University Press, 2020), Jasper and his colleagues show how political figures often allocate praise and blame, identify social problems, cement identities and allegiances, develop policies, and articulate our moral intuitions. Democracies need to understand where characters -- heroes, villains, victims, and minions – come from in order to keep their influence within proper bounds. Although part of a Western rhetorical tradition, character work is often done through dress, posters, facial expressions, statues, paintings, photos, and music. In the podcast, Jasper discusses Trump’s conveying of ancient rhetorical symbols through Twitter, the gendered nature of “strength” or “heroism,” and the uncomfortable use of stereotypes that shape group “characters.” Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ashley Mears’ new book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit (Princeton University Press, 2020) provides readers with a closer look at the global party circuit. A lifestyle that offers million-dollar birthday parties, megayachts on the French Riviera, and $40,000 bottles of champagne. In today’s New Gilded Age, the world’s moneyed classes have taken conspicuous consumption to new extremes. In Very Important People, sociologist, author, and former fashion model Ashley Mears takes readers inside the exclusive global nightclub and party circuit—from New York City and the Hamptons to Miami and Saint-Tropez—to reveal the intricate economy of beauty, status, and money that lies behind these spectacular displays of wealth and leisure. Mears spent eighteen months in this world of “models and bottles” to write this captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking narrative. She describes how clubs and restaurants pay promoters to recruit beautiful young women to their venues in order to attract men and get them to spend huge sums in the ritual of bottle service. These “girls” enhance the status of the men and enrich club owners, exchanging their bodily capital for as little as free drinks and a chance to party with men who are rich or aspire to be. Though they are priceless assets in the party circuit, these women are regarded as worthless as long-term relationship prospects, and their bodies are constantly assessed against men’s money. A story of extreme gender inequality in a seductive world, Very Important People unveils troubling realities behind moneyed leisure in an age of record economic disparity. Ashley Mears, Ph.D. is a Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday life. You can learn more about his research by going to his website, following him on twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can we make sense of the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump? What forces moved American politics from the first African-American president and an all-Democratic Congress (2008) to ethno-nationalist rhetoric and GOP control of Congress (2016)? What do the reactions to these political events – the rise of the Tea Party and the Anti-Trump resistance – tell us about these, and future, presidential elections? In there new book Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2019), Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo focus on changing organizational configurations – such as voluntary local citizens’ groups, elite advocacy organizations, consortia of wealthy donors (e.g., Koch’s Americans For Prosperity), and candidate-led political campaigns – to explain these radical shifts. The book has a unique methodology: a rich mix of quantitative and qualitative data analyzed by a collaborative team of authors from political science, sociology, and history. The range is extraordinary, combining what is best about both field work and big data in the social sciences. The authors document the changing organizational configurations – at both the national and state levels – with an emphasis on the states that were pivotal in the 2016 election: Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania. The book offer insights about national trends while capturing the importance of federalism – and attending to unique factors in swing states. The authors excavate how top-down efforts (ultra-free market fundamentalism funded by groups like Americans For Prosperity) combined with bottom-up organizations (popular, local, and diverse groups who often channeled ethno-nationalist resentment) to push Republican politics to the right. Their analysis of progressive groups reacting to the Trump presidency reveals grassroots organizing that is both similar and different to the Tea Party movement. Rather than pushing the Democratic party to the left, the resisters work within the Democratic party (often energizing moribund organizations). Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What does it mean to be a political subject? This is one of the key questions asked by Massimo Modonesi in The Antagonistic Principle: Marxism and Political Action (2019), published as part of the Historical Materialism book series from Brill and Haymarket books. The book takes on the theories of Marx and Gramsci to develop a philosophical triad of subalternity-antagonism-autonomy as a way of studying political subjectification under oppressive conditions and the potential for resistance. The book then looks at political developments in South and Latin America, trying to understand the underlying dynamics of both where it’s coming from, and what its possibilities are for anticapitalist resistance. Massimo Modonesi is professor and chair of the Political and Social Sciences Faculty at the Autonomous National University in Mexico, and is the author of numerous books on political theory and history in Latin America, his most recent in English being Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject. He is a member of the coordinating committee of the International Gramsci Society. Maria Vignau served as a research assistant under Modonesi, and now teaches while working on her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Yaacov Yadgar discusses his new book, Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2020) with Peter Bergamin. An important and topical contribution to the field of Middle East studies, this innovative, provocative, and timely study tackles head-on the main assumptions of the foundation of Israel as a Jewish state. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, Yaacov Yadgar provides a novel analysis of the interplay between Israeli nationalism and Jewish tradition, arriving at a fresh understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through its focus on internal questions about Israeli identity. By critiquing and transcending the current discourse on religion and politics in Israel, this study brings to an international audience debates within Israel that have been previously inaccessible to non-Hebrew speaking academics. Featuring discussions on Israeli jurisprudence, nation-state law, and rabbinic courts, Israel's Jewish Identity Crisis will have far-reaching implications, not only within the state of Israel but on politics, society and culture beyond its borders. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on matters of Jewish identity, nationalism, secularism, modernity and tradition in Israel. He is the author of Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism (2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In the study of religion there are various camps that each approach their subjects in unique ways. Each method is shaped by particular interpretive choices, such as to be objectively neutral, experientially invested, or use scientific measures, for example. Whatever strategy one uses there is a relationship between one’s social identity and the categories shaping theoretical and methodological assumptions. This is what Christopher M. Driscoll, Assistant Professor at Lehigh University, and Monica R. Miller, Associate Professor at Lehigh University, argue in their new book Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion (Lexington, 2018). These dynamics can be witnessed when thinking about how the boundaries of methodological practice are defined in the so-called critical study of religion versus something like the study of black religion, where there is often an assumed identity-interested motivation to analysis. Driscoll and Miller produce a generative set of inquiries that require researchers to consider the role of race and social identity and how that informs their interpretive stance. In our conversation we discuss questions of the “whiteness” of certain methods, the function of the designation “black” in “black religion,” the 1958 meeting of the International Association for the History of Religions, pioneer scholar Charles Long and the Chicago school of History of Religions, the relationship between the categories race and religion, hip hop, and the productive role of writing in tension. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition (Routledge 2020) Professor Nancy J. Chodorow gives name and shape to an American middle group between the ego psychological and interpersonal approaches: The American Independent Tradition or intersubjective ego psychology. Through her careful exegesis of theoreticians like Hans Loewald, Erik Erikson and her contemporaries Warren Poland and James McLaughlin she is able to distill an analytic attitude in which the patient’s individuality takes front and center. We get a measured account of how her thinking about the American Independent Tradition evolved over the last two decades, about its "Americanness" and about a powerful approach to technique in which the patient becomes a centred unit by being centred upon. Turning outward from the consulting room, the in-depth study of psychoanalytic theory is framed by a focus on a larger context, the connection between individuality and society. Chodorow advocates for a return to an interest in the social and social sciences in psychoanalytic thinking. At the same time, she rues the lack of attention within the social sciences to the serious study of individuals and individuality. Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2019) by Julia C. Strauss is a comparative study of regime consolidation in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (Taiwan) after 1949. It examines the ways in which bureaucratic and campaign modalities were deployed in the regime consolidation of the PRC and the ROC by focusing on three paired case studies: state personnel, terror unleased by the state against domestic enemies, and land reform. Throughout it shows that while there were striking similarities in what policies the PRC and ROC implemented, how the polices were conveyed and above all how they were performed differed radically. Meticulously researched and wonderfully nuanced, it is both a fascinating read and an elegant model for how to do comparative history. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the History and East Asian Languages program. She is interested in translation, Manchu books, and anything with a kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? In The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (Yale University Press, 2018), Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false beliefs. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? The Misinformation Age, written for a political era riven by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, shows convincingly that what you believe depends on who you know. If social forces explain the persistence of false belief, we must understand how those forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel. Contact: R.Garfinkel@yahoo.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In her latest book, Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California(Stanford University Press, 2019), Sarah M. A. Gualtieri uncovers the dynamic and complex stories of Arabic-speaking migrant communities who came to call Southern California home. Rather than a simple story of departure and arrival, Gualtieri traces the surprising twists and turns of Syrian migrants who travelled throughout the United States, Latin America, and Canada, transcending, blurring and often unsettling national boundaries. During these international and intranational migrations, Syrian migrants forged interethnic alliances to counter pervasive prejudices and racialized immigration systems. What emerged, argues Gualtieri, were hybrid identities or a “mestizaje,” which complicates and challenges narratives of assimilation and identity formation in narratives about immigration in the United States. A methodologically innovative account, Arab Routes critically examines government records, oral histories, and rich forms of cultural production by generations of Arab Americans, highlighting the important role that Arabic-speaking communities played in creating and shaping a global Los Angeles. With fascinating anecdotes and keen analytical insights, Gualtieri counters historical silences and places the Syrian Pacific at the center of histories of migration in the Americas and the Middle East. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, as well as History, and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California. Joshua Donovan is a PhD candidate at Columbia University’s Department of History. His dissertation examines competing conceptions of identity and subjectivity within the Greek Orthodox Christian community in Syria, Lebanon, and the diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Stacy Wolf of Princeton University about her book Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America (Oxford University Press, 2019), an exploration of the complexities of amateur and local theatre across the United States. From backstage moms to tiny divas to dinner theatres, Wolf demonstrates that this charming pastime of American culture that is anything but past. On the contrary, musical theatre continues to be an important culture touchstone for many and a pipeline to national phenomenon such as the High School Music franchise. Told in a stunning voice with a wealth of attention to its case studies and examples, Beyond Broadway feels like backstage pass combined with a cross-country road trip in early Fall. A must read for anyone interested in the untold story of musical theater, American culture, and truly embedded ethnography with a ground-up point of view. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Stacy about this fascinating book. I’d love to hear from you at rhetoriclee@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @rhetoricleespeaking. Share your thoughts about the interview with the hashtag #newbooksnerd. ~lee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Nick Prior—Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Edinburgh—discusses his new book, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society (SAGE Publications, 2018). The book explores the social, cultural and industrial contexts for the changes that have taken place in popular music since the widespread adoption of digital technology by creators, distributors, and listeners from the early 1980s onward. Joining insights from the sociology of culture with key analytic categories from science and technology studies (STS), Prior examines a variety of contexts in which these changes have been felt, including the novel spaces and structures of both music production and consumption afforded by digitalization, the co-construction of vocal subjects and vocal sound-processing technologies, the tactical use of portable media by young urbanites to mediate their relationship to the city, and the conjunction of music and play in the ever-growing video game sector. In addition to an acute sense for their embeddedness in the social lives of their various users, Prior also demonstrates a notable fluency with the technologies he describes as well as a distinctively musical interest in the sounds that they have been used to produce. Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How can researchers gather information quickly, for instance in the times of COVID-19? IN their new book, Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A Practical Approach and Toolkit for Collaborative Community Research (Routledge, 2020), Thurka Sangaramoorthy and Karen Kroeger present readers with key tips for conducting rapid assessments in various situations. The book provides users with key considerations to keep in mind when conducing REAs including sampling strategies and timelines. The book also explores topics including field notes, field teams, and debriefing, alongside the importance and foci of report writing. This book is a well-laid out and clear guide for researchers and practitioners alike. Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Few places are as politically precarious as Bangladesh, even fewer as crowded. Its 57,000 or so square miles are some of the world's most inhabited. Often described as a definitive case of the bankruptcy of postcolonial governance, it is also one of the poorest among the most densely populated nations. In spite of an overriding anxiety of exhaustion, there are a few important caveats to the familiar feelings of despair—a growing economy, and an uneven, yet robust, nationalist sentiment—which, together, generate revealing paradoxes. In her new book Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford University Press, 2019), Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury offers insight into what she calls "the paradoxes of the popular," or the constitutive contradictions of popular politics. The focus here is on mass protests, long considered the primary medium of meaningful change in this part of the world. Chowdhury writes provocatively about political life in Bangladesh in a rich ethnography that studies some of the most consequential protests of the last decade, spanning both rural and urban Bangladesh. By making the crowd its starting point and analytical locus, this book tacks between multiple sites of public political gatherings and pays attention to the ephemeral and often accidental configurations of the crowd. Ultimately, Chowdhury makes an original case for the crowd as a defining feature and a foundational force of democratic practices in South Asia and beyond. Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why did Muammar Qaddafi and Hugo Chavez nationalize the oil industries in Libya and Venezuela? Machiavelli urged princes to attend to both acquiring and sustaining power. In Power Grab: Political Survival through Extractive Resource Mobilization (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Paasha Mahdavi argues that modern leaders nationalize extractive resources (such as petroleum, metals, and minerals) to extend the duration of their power. By taking control of the means of production and establishing state-owned enterprises, leaders capture revenues that might otherwise flow to private firms. Successful leader then use the increased capital to secure political support within their states. Mahdavi’s fascinating book demonstrates how leaders (both weak and strong) weigh the risks. In this political gamble, nationalizing and reaping immediate gains (at the risk of future prosperity) must be weighed against maintaining private operations and passing on short-term revenue windfalls – to secure long-term fiscal streams. Strong and weak leaders often weigh this risks differently. Mahdavi uses a combination of case studies and cross-national statistical analysis to interrogate this crucial political wager. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How do young men use drill music and social media to gain power? In his new book, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy (Princeton University Press, 2020), Forrest Stuart uses ethnographic and interview methods to explore the lived experiences of young men on Chicago’s south side. Stuart peels back the layers on what is commonly referred to as the digital divide, or the idea that there is unequal access to and use of technology, to instead find what he refers to as digital disadvantage (read the book to find out more!). The book tackles issues including who the audience really is for drill music and the social media output produced by these young men, and how they are sometimes exploited in the process. Exploration of authenticity, micro-celebrity, and self-branding contribute to larger understandings of race, stratification, and power in America. Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 shocked and surprised a number of commentators, especially because his own attitudes seemed to be in conflict with much of what people often associate with conservatism. Matt McManus argues, however, that Trump and other similar figures and movements represent a new form of conservatism, one with a long history of development, and formed as a response to various social dynamics. The goal of his recent book, The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism: Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, and Reactionary Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), is to provide a genealogical analysis of this new form of conservative politics. Matthew McManus received his PhD from the Socio-Legal Studies program at York University, Canada in 2017. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of TEC de Monterrey, Mexico, and is also the author of Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law: A Critical Legal Argument. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 shocked and surprised a number of commentators, especially because his own attitudes seemed to be in conflict with much of what people often associate with conservatism. Matt McManus argues, however, that Trump and other similar figures and movements represent a new form of conservatism, one with a long history of development, and formed as a response to various social dynamics. The goal of his recent book, The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism: Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, and Reactionary Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), is to provide a genealogical analysis of this new form of conservative politics. Matthew McManus received his PhD from the Socio-Legal Studies program at York University, Canada in 2017. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of TEC de Monterrey, Mexico, and is also the author of Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law: A Critical Legal Argument. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In her spellbindingly brilliant new book, Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army (Stanford University Press, 2020), Maria Rashid conducts an intimate and layered ethnography of militarism and death in Pakistan, with a focus on the lives, aspirations, and tragedies of soldiers and their families in rural Punjab. How does the Pakistani military’s regulation and management of affect and emotions like grief authorize and sustain the practice of sacrificing the self in service to the nation? Rashid addresses this question through a riveting and at many times hauntingly majestic analysis of a range of themes including carefully choreographed public spectacles of mourning, military regimes of cultivating martial subjects, fissures between official scripts and unofficial unfoldings of grieving, anxieties over the representation of maimed soldiers, and ambiguities surrounding the appropriation of martyrdom (shahādat) for death on the battlefield. Theoretically incisive, ethnographically charged, and politically urgent, Dying to Serve is a landmark publication in the study of South Asia, Pakistan, and modern militarism that is destined to become a classic. It is also written with lyrical lucidity, making it an excellent text to teach in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on modern Islam, South Asia, religion and violence, gender and masculinity, affect studies, and theories and methods in anthropology and religion. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Fantasy sports have the opportunity to provide a sporting community in which gendered physical presence plays no role—a space where men and women can compete and interact on a level playing field. Whose Game?: Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports (Temple UP, 2020) shows, however, that while many turn to this space to socialize with friends or participate in a uniquely active and competitive fandom, men who play also depend on fantasy sports to perform a boyhood vision of masculinity otherwise inaccessible to them. Authors Rebecca Kissane and Sarah Winslow draw on a rich array of survey, interview, and observational data to examine how gender, race, and class frame the experiences of everyday fantasy sports players. This pioneering book examines gendered structures and processes, such as jock statsculinity—a nerdish form of masculine one-upmanship—and how women are often rendered as outsiders. Ultimately, Whose Game? demonstrates that fantasy sports are more than just an inconsequential leisure activity. This online world bleeds into participants’ social lives in gendered ways—forging and strengthening relationships but also taking participants’ time and attention to generate negative emotions, stress, discord, and unproductivity. In this interview, Dr. Kissane, Dr. Winslow, and I discuss displays of masculinity, “jock statsculinity” as a type of hybrid masculinity, and connections to social networks, exclusionary practices, and heterosexuality. Whose Game? is an excellent analysis of how fantasy sports contributes to the production and reproduction of gender in leisure activities. Likewise, the book contributes to the literature on the intersection of gender, class, and sexuality in sport. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in sociology of sport, gender and masculinity, media, and sexuality. Dr. Rebecca Kissane is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College and Editor-in-Chief of Sociology Compass. Dr. Sarah Winslow is the Senior Associate Director of the Honors College, Director of the National Scholars Program, and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Clemson University. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In recent years, commodity chain analysis – the scholarly effort to piece together the production and consumption ends of various commodities – has really taken off. For goods ranging from cotton to coffee & tobacco to tea, scholars have brought cultivators and laborers into the same frame as factory workers, retailers, taste-makers, and consumers. At first glance, Mythri Jegathesan’s new book Tea & Solidarity: Tamil Women & Work in Postwar Sri Lanka (University of Washington Press, 2019) appears like yet another contribution to a burgeoning literature on the politics of tea’s supply chain. But the book, in fact, is so much more. Based on the author’s rich fieldwork conducted amongst Hill Country Tamil women living on tea plantations, the book uses feminist and decolonial methods to tell the long story of marginalization and struggle in a war-torn Sri Lanka. Hill Country Tamil women trace their descent from indentured coolies brought to Ceylon from southern India; as such, their stories have long been narrated largely as stories of victimization, of structural violence, landlessness, and dispossession. Challenging these conventional narratives, this book aims to recenter Tamil women’s long struggle for dignity on and off tea plantations by paying attention to the aspirations and labors with which they demand recognition for their work, make homes in the wake of dispossession, and desire better futures than those currently on offer. With clear, heartfelt prose, methodological imaginativeness, and careful attention to intersecting axes of power and distinction, this book not only makes essential contributions to the fields of anthropology and gender studies but also to scholars interested in South Asia, decoloniality, and ethical research methods. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University studying the reproduction of inequality through development projects in rural western India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life you had ever known? Dr. Ayala Fader explores this question in Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in a Digital Age––her new book with Princeton University Press (2020). She tells the fascinating, often heart-wrenching stories of married ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women in twenty-first-century New York who lead “double lives” in order to protect those they love. While they no longer believe that God gave the Torah to Jews at Mount Sinai, these hidden heretics continue to live in their families and religious communities, even as they surreptitiously break Jewish commandments and explore forbidden secular worlds in person and online. The internet, which some ultra-Orthodox rabbis call more threatening than the Holocaust, offers new possibilities for the age-old problem of religious uncertainty. Fader shows how digital media has become a lightning rod for contemporary struggles over authority and truth. Drawing on five years of fieldwork with those living double lives and the rabbis, life coaches, and religious therapists who minister to, advise, and sometimes excommunicate them, Fader delves into universal quandaries of faith and skepticism, the ways digital media can change us, and family frictions that arise when a person radically transforms who they are and what they believe. Dr. Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University investigating contemporary North American Jewish identities and languages in urban centers. She is the author of another book from Princeton University Press: Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In his new book, Tween Pop: Children’s Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture. Starting with how Kidz Bop and Disney’s High School Musical (2006), Bickford argues that tween music culture flourished due to the commodification of childhood and the rise of television and pop music stars. Focusing on the ways that femininity and whiteness are markers are innocence and childhood, Bickford examines Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana through a postfeminist discourse of work life balance, Taylor Swift’s longstanding relationship with girlhood and whiteness, and Justin Bieber’s label as child prodigy as a way to cement his position as a super star. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to be marketed to, Bickford demonstrates the importance of children's music to core questions of identity politics, consumer culture, and the public sphere. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Since the mid-1990s, there has been a seismic shift in attitudes toward gay and lesbian people, with a majority of Americans now supporting same-sex marriage and relations between same-sex, consenting adults. However, support for transgender individuals lags far behind; a significant majority of Americans do not support the right of transgender people to be free from discrimination in housing, employment, public spaces, health care, legal documents, and other areas. Much of this is due to deeply entrenched ideas about the definition of gender, perceptions that transgender people are not "real" or are suffering from mental illness, and fears that extending rights to transgender people will come at the expense of the rights of others. So how do you get people to rethink their prejudices? In their book Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights (Oxford University Press, 2020), Melissa R. Michelson and Brian F. Harrison examine what tactics are effective in changing public opinion regarding transgender people. The result is a new approach that they call Identity Reassurance Theory. The idea is that individuals need to feel confident in their own identity before they can embrace a stigmatized group like transgender people, and that support of members of an outgroup can be encouraged by affirming the self-esteem of those targeted for attitude change. Michelson and Harrison, through their experiments, show that the most effective messaging on transgender issues meets people where they are, acknowledges their discomfort without judgment or criticism, and helps them to think about transgender people and rights in a way that aligns with their view of themselves as moral human beings. In this interview, Dr. Michelson, Dr. Harrison, and I discuss common issues faced by transgender people, and the ideologies that contribute to anti-transgender discrimination. We then discuss three of the nine experiments conducted by Michelson and Harrison that provide empirical evidence to support the claims in their book. Lastly, we discuss potential ways to change discriminatory beliefs towards transgender people. I recommend this book for people interested in public opinion, social psychology, and LGBTQ issues. Dr. Melissa R. Michelson (@profmichelson) is Professor of Political Science at Menlo College. Dr. Brian F. Harrison is a Lecturer at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Founder and President of Voters for Equality. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India (Duke UP, 2016), Jyoti Puri tracks the efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in India to show how the regulation of sexuality is fundamentally tied to the creation and enduring existence of the state. Since 2001 activists have attempted to rewrite Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which in addition to outlawing homosexual behavior is often used to prosecute a range of activities and groups that are considered perverse. Having interviewed activists and NGO workers throughout five metropolitan centers, investigated crime statistics and case law, visited various state institutions, and met with the police, Puri found that Section 377 is but one element of how homosexuality is regulated in India. Through a cleverly conceptualized multi-sited ethnography and rigorous historical analysis, Puri masterfully shows how the hypervisibility of Section 377 has consequences for the ways in which sexuality, and the regulation of sexuality, is imagined and reproduced in rationalities of governance.This statute works alongside the large and complex system of laws, practices, policies, and discourses intended to mitigate sexuality's threat to the social order while upholding the state as inevitable, legitimate, and indispensable. By highlighting the various means through which the regulation of sexuality constitutes India's heterogeneous and fragmented "sexual state," Puri provides a conceptual framework to understand the links between sexuality and the state more broadly. That it does so in the context of a postcolonial state like India makes the conceptual framework even more vibrant and provocative. This book is an invaluable contribution to the existing literature that delves into the paradoxes and possibilities of law, biopolitics, and state power and authority in everyday life. Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Published by Routledge in 2019, Drag, Interperformance, and the Trouble with Queerness is a comparative ethnography of drag king and drag queen performances in Cleveland Ohio. It uses the concept of interperformance as a framework for identity formation and coalition building that provides strategies for repairing longstanding rifts in the LGBT community. Katie Horowitz’s Drag, Interperformance, and the Trouble with Queerness is the first book centered on queer life in this growing midwestern hub and the first to focus simultaneously on kinging and queening. It shows that despite the shared heading of drag, these iconically queer institutions diverge in terms of audience, movement vocabulary, stage persona, and treatment of gender, class, race, and sexuality. Horowitz argues that the radical (in)difference between kings and queens provides a window into the perennial rift between lesbians and gay men and challenges the assumption that all identities subsumed under the queer umbrella ought to have anything in common culturally, politically, or otherwise. Drawing on performer interviews about the purpose of drag, contestations over space, and the eventual shuttering of the bar they called home, Horowitz offers a new way of thinking about identity as a product of relations and argues that relationality is our best hope for building queer communities across lines of difference. Dr. Katie Horowitz is Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at Davidson College. Her teaching and research areas are situated in rhetoric, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, and American studies. Broadly, she is interested in the tensions between discursive and embodied experiences of racial, sexual, and gender identities as they emerge from "low," marginal, and underground cultures. More specifically, this has led her to study and write about pornography, abortion, drag, sex work, and queer, feminist, and transgender performance art. Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Memphis. Her forthcoming book uses Carnival as a vehicle to understand social and cultural changes in Mobile, Alabama (USA) in the second half of the 20th century. Her new research project is an investigation of different generations of artists and performers who challenge gender normativity in Monterrey, Nuevo León (Mexico). She also works as an Assistant Producer for the Sexing History podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Technology has been instrumental in allowing audiences to encounter expressions of culture to which they may have no direct connection. The popular commercial platforms like Twitter and Instagram mediate culture, the affordances of each determining how aspects of culture translate on the sites. In his new book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (NYU Press, 2020), Andre Brock, an associate professor at Georgia Tech, theorizes what it means to be Black online, particularly when the physical body can neither be understood nor constrained. Though considering topics like afro-pessimism and the digital divide, Brock particularly focuses on Black joy – “the embodied cognition where Black people express their relationship to the world through our joy in moving through it.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Beginning with Etan Patz's disappearance in Manhattan in 1979, a spate of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children stoked anxieties about the threats of child kidnapping and exploitation. Publicized through an emerging twenty-four-hour news cycle, these cases supplied evidence of what some commentators dubbed "a national epidemic" of child abductions committed by "strangers." In Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020), Paul M. Renfro narrates how the bereaved parents of missing and slain children turned their grief into a mass movement and, alongside journalists and policymakers from both major political parties, propelled a moral panic. Leveraging larger cultural fears concerning familial and national decline, these child safety crusaders warned Americans of a supposedly widespread and worsening child kidnapping threat, erroneously claiming that as many as fifty thousand American children fell victim to stranger abductions annually. The actual figure was (and remains) between one hundred and three hundred, and kidnappings perpetrated by family members and acquaintances occur far more frequently. Yet such exaggerated statistics-and the emotionally resonant images and narratives deployed behind them-led to the creation of new legal and cultural instruments designed to keep children safe and to punish the "strangers" who ostensibly wished them harm. Ranging from extensive child fingerprinting drives to the milk carton campaign, from the AMBER Alerts that periodically rattle Americans' smart phones to the nation's sprawling system of sex offender registration, these instruments have widened the reach of the carceral state and intensified surveillance practices focused on children. Stranger Danger reveals the transformative power of this moral panic on American politics and culture, showing how ideas and images of endangered childhood helped build a more punitive American state. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Have you ever thought about how much energy goes into avoiding sexual violence? The work that goes into feeling safe goes largely unnoticed by the women doing it and by the wider world, and yet women and girls are the first to be blamed the inevitable times when it fails. We need to change the story on rape prevention and ‘well-meaning’ safety advice, because this makes it harder for women and girls to speak out, and hides the amount of work they are already doing trying to decipher ‘the right amount of panic’. With real-life accounts of women’s experiences, and based on the author’s original research on the impact of sexual harassment in public, this book challenges victim-blaming and highlights the need to show women as capable, powerful and skillful in their everyday resistance to harassment and sexual violence. In this interview, Dr. Fiona Vera-Gray and I discuss the fear of crime paradox, factors that contribute to fear of crime, the concept of safety work, and how we can move forward in combating sexual harassment and violence against women. I recommend this book for anyone interested in gender, victimology, women’s practices of safety work and experiences with sexual harassment and sexual violence. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation about such important work. Dr. Fiona Vera-Gray, author of The Right Amount of Panic: How Women Trade Freedom for Safety (Polity Press, 2018). Dr. Vera-Gray is a researcher based at Durham University working on violence against women and girls. She has over a decade of frontline experience in sexual violence and has written widely on the topics of sexual violence, sexual harassment, women’s safety work, and sexual violence prevention. You can find her on Twitter at @VeraGrayF. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The ubiquity of technology that collects massive volumes of all kinds of data lends itself to one overarching question: “What?” As in what is the purpose(s) of this collection? What are the benefits? And, what are the impacts? In his new book, Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (MIT Press, 2020), Jathan Sadowski explores this question and those related in an investigation of the expansion of “smart” technologies – networked devices enabling automated data collection and use. In exploring the interests inherent in the design and deployment of smart technology, Sadowski, a Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Law at Monash University, investigates the political economy of digital capitalism, and the implications of continued reliance on and permeation of smart technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
From moral panics about immigration and gun control to anxiety about terrorism and natural disasters, Americans live in a culture of fear. While fear is typically discussed in emotional or poetic terms—as the opposite of courage, or as an obstacle to be overcome—it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Persistent fear negatively effects individuals’ decision-making abilities and causes anxiety, depression, and poor physical health. Further, fear harms communities and society by corroding social trust and civic engagement. Yet politicians often effectively leverage fears to garner votes and companies routinely market unnecessary products that promise protection from imagined or exaggerated harms. Drawing on five years of data from the Chapman Survey of American Fears—which canvasses a random, national sample of adults about a broad range of fears—Fear Itself: The Causes and Consequences of Fear in America (NYU Press, 2020), offers new insights into what people are afraid of and how fear affects their lives. The authors--Christopher Bader and his colleagues-- also draw on participant observation with Doomsday preppers and conspiracy theorists to provide fascinating narratives about subcultures of fear. Fear Itself is a novel, wide-ranging study of the social consequences of fear, ultimately suggesting that there is good reason to be afraid of fear itself. In this interview, Bader and I discuss Americans’ greatest fears, conspiracies, preppers, and fear of crime. We then discuss how xenophobia and the media perpetuate fear. Lastly, Dr. Bader reviews the consequences of fear and how to ameliorate some of the negative effects of fear and how people can best manage their fears. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in crime and deviance, religion, collective behavior, and the social components of fear. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations - Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time Thomas Piketty, the French economist, was dubbed the modern Marx by The Economist in the wake of his bestselling Capital in the 21st Century, which presented historical data reaching back to the eighteenth century and focused on the dynamics of the distribution of wealth and income and the destabilizing force represented by: r > g – that is, the private rate of return on capital over time can be much higher than the rate of growth of income and output. Readers noted however, in addition to pointing out this ‘central contradiction of capitalism’ Professor Piketty was also clear that the purpose of social science is not to produce mathematical certainties that substitute for inclusive democratic debate. More importantly, he made the case for the progressive taxation of capital, and among many other things for going back to using the term ‘political economy’ for the field of economics – all of which did not render his analysis Marxist, although admittedly, the label made for more catchy magazine column titles in 2014. Six years in the making Piketty has extended the hopeful reach of his analysis by including a much larger global sampling of historical data – not just Western market economies this time, and by expanding the focus to include the political and ideological in his comparative analysis of capital accumulation and ‘inequality regimes’. The professor does so with the same underlying optimism and realistic eye on promoting the social learning process in which we all find ourselves as individuals within various cultures and societies. Enter his expanded interdisciplinary contribution to comparative political economy – Capital and Ideology (Harvard University Press, 2020) – essential reading. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, and a Director of The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences. Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Alzheimer's disease has not only profound medical consequences for the individual experiencing it but a life-changing impact on those around them. From the moment a person is suspected to be suffering from Alzheimer's or another form of dementia, the interactions they encounter progressively change. Baptiste Brossard's new book Forgetting Items: The Social Experience of Alzheimer’s Disease (Indiana University Press, 2019) focuses on that social experience of Alzheimer's, delineating the ways disease symptoms manifest and are understood through the interactions between patients and the people around them. Mapping out those interactions takes readers through the offices of geriatricians, into patients' narratives and interviews with caregivers, down the corridors of nursing homes, and into the discourses shaping public policies and media coverage. Revealing the everyday experience of Alzheimer's helps us better understand the depth of its impact and points us toward more knowledgeable, holistic ways to help treat the disease. In this interview, Dr. Brossard and I discuss the changing social role of individuals diagnosed with Alzheimers. Likewise, we discuss how credibility and deference are key components to the interactions between patients, caregivers, and physicians. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in medical sociology, health and illness, gerontology, and social psychology. Dr. Baptiste Brossard received his Ph.D. in sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (2011). His primary areas of research are mental health, sociological theory, qualitative methods and utopian studies. He is currently a Lecturer in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at Australian National University. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Pawan Dhingra's new book Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (NYU Press, 2020) is an up-close evaluation of the competitive nature of the United States education system and the extra-curricular and co-curricular activities associated with them. Dhingra reveals the subculture of high-achievement in education and after-school learning centers, spelling bees, and math competitions that have spawned as a result of a competitive markets in higher education and in life. This world is one in which immigrant families compete with Americans to be intellectually high-achieving and expect their children to invest countless hours in studying and testing in order to gain an upper-hand in the believed meritocracy of American public education. This is a world where enrichment centers, like Kumon, are able to capitalize and make profitable gains from parents who enroll their children as early as three years of age. There are even families and teachers who avoid after-school academics that are getting swept up in the competitive nature of this subculture called hyper education. Dr. Dhingra draws from more than 100 in-depth interviews with teachers, tutors, principals, children, and parents for this study. He delves into the narratives that parents of elementary and junior high school provide about this phenomenon and examines the roles played by schools, families, and communities. He moves beyond the “Tiger Mom” caricature that is often given to Asian American and white families who practice hyper education and asks if it makes sense. This book provides a behind-the-scenes look at hyper education from parents who have their children participate in Scripps National Spelling Bee, math competitions, and other national competitions, as well as after school learning centers. Dr. Dhingra shows that parents observe an increasingly competitive market for higher education and perceive good schools, good grades, and good behavior to not be enough for their high-achieving students. Pawan Dhingra, Ph.D. is a Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic inquiry into pandemic anxieties in the mid-2000s when such an event was widely anticipated by experts. Examining how experts in the United States framed a catastrophe that has not happened yet, the book trains a lens on the many generative ways in which the absence of a disease made preparedness a permanent project. Drawing on fieldwork among scientists and public health professionals in New York City, the book investigates how experts, government actors and institutions co-produced pandemic prophecies that were made meaningful to communities on the ground through the framework of catastrophe. Centered on the question how to engage a disease such as influenza in anticipation of potential crisis, this monograph analyses the infelicities of failure and the limits of planning. The pandemic - past, present and future – is arguably always with us, even in its absence. In this episode, we discuss the pandemic when it was a ‘perhaps’, unpack the blurring of reason and faith among expert interlocutors and draw out lessons on preparedness and its paradoxes for the present global coronavirus crisis. Carlo Caduff is a Reader in the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King’s College, London. Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. Singapore. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
American masculinity is being critiqued, questioned, and reinterpreted for a new era. In Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Miriam J. Abelson makes an original contribution to this conversation through in-depth interviews with trans men in the U.S. West, Southeast, and Midwest, showing how the places and spaces men inhabit are fundamental to their experiences of race, sexuality, and gender. In this interview, Dr. Abelson and I discuss the various types of masculinity she identified in her study, such as hypermasculine men, regular guys, and men who seek to embody what Abelson calls “Golidlocks masculinity.” Additionally, we discuss how race and space affect expressions and embodiment of masculinity. For example, trans men in rural spaces were more likely to embody a redneck masculinity. On the other hand, urban trans men were more likely to embody a masculinity of the “urban thug.” Lastly, Abelson explains the significance of health care settings and public bathroom as spaces for upholding the gender binary and potential instances of violence. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in gender, sexuality, race, and studies of place. Dr. Miriam Abelson (@AbelsonDr) is an Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Mumbai's textile industry is commonly but incorrectly understood to be an extinct relic of the past. In The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2019), Maura Finkelstein examines what it means for textile mill workers—who are assumed not to exist—to live and work during a period of deindustrialization. Challenging the view that archives are (just) locational, Finkelstein shows how mills are ethnographic archives of the city where documents, artifacts, and stories exist in the buildings and in the bodies of workers. Workers' pain, illnesses, injuries, and exhaustion narrate industrial decline; the ways in which they live in tenements exist outside and resist the values expounded by modernity; and the rumors and untruths they share about textile worker strikes and a mill fire help them make sense of the industry's survival. In outlining this archive's contents, Finkelstein conceptualizes these mills as lively ruins and shows how infrastructures are experienced by those who are rendered “unvisible” in the imagination of the city. An evocative ethnography, Finkelstein’s book, presents us with a lens through which to challenge, reimagine, and alter ways of thinking about the past, present, and future in Mumbai and beyond. Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
How best to teach history and, for that matter any social science subject, to college students? The traditional answer has been to lecture them. Given that the typical length of an attentive lecture-listener is about 15 minutes, this might not be the best way to get the job done. Beginning in the late 1990s, a group of professors offered another technique now called "Reacting to the Past." You can read all about it here. Essentially, the "Reacting" technique asks students to play the roles of historical actors and to re-enact particular events and situations. The instructors using the method have had great success. Today I talked to Kelly McFall, a "Reacting" practitioner, about the techniques and his experience using it. McFall created a "Reacting" module called The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations, and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994 (W. W. Norton, 2018). In the interview, McFall talks about how the particular modules are created, how they are used in the classroom, and how any college teacher can become involved in creating new modules. Here are some resources for those interested in using "Reacting" series and getting involved in creating new modules. --The "Reacting to the Past" website is here. --The publisher's (W. W. Norton) website on the "Reacting to the Past" series is here. --The "Reacting to the Past" Facebook group is here. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In their new book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2020), political scientists Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird explore the political behavior of African American voters in the United States and examine extensive data to determine how this particular group of voters have operated as a fairly unified voting block over the course of many election cycles. The research is fascinating, delineating the ideological fissures within the African-American community while also analyzing the voting patterns of African Americans and their inclination to remain loyal Democratic voters. Steadfast Democrats spends time examining the historical roots of this unified voting behavior, noting the roles that slavery and segregation played in creating the tightly connected communities in which many African Americans live and work. White and Laird pay particular attention to how these connections operate in terms of norms in political behavior, building on linked fate theories, but distinguishing differences in terms of understanding how ideology and political behavior operate in context of partisan loyalty. White and Laird explain these dynamics through their theory of racialized social constraint and they build their research from survey data about voting patterns and behaviors, while adding in supplemental, experimental research to test these dynamics and norm enforcement. The research is not necessarily limited to black political behavior in the U.S., and the conclusion of Steadfast Democrats takes the theoretical framework of norm enforcement and community unity and examines other groups in the United States that operate along similar patterns and dynamics. Steadfast Democrats: is a window into understanding why and how African American voters in the United States remain a strongly unified voting bloc, even among many differences of opinion, a diversity of perspective, and a variety of lived experiences. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Claude Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques is one of the great books of the 20th century: intellectually bold, morally capacious, and it aims to understand nothing less than the elemental workings of the human mind. Ostensibly a travelogue and ethnographic account of a European's fieldwork among indigenous people in mid-20th century Brazil, it is a work of impassioned curiosity and, even though it's a pessimistic diagnosis of the damage humans (especially Europeans) have inflicted on the planet, it's brimming with hope. The hope to grasp the essence of who we are and we continue to be below the threshold of thinking and above society: call it beauty, call it wisdom, call it human. Claude Lévi-Strauss invented the field of structural anthropology. In the 1930s he set out to Brazil and studied the indigenous cultures there. Guided by his three deities of Freud, Marx, and geology (all examining the substrata of our existence), he found that human beings make sense of their place in the world - whether they are Parisian living in mid-20th century Europe or indigenous nomadic tribes in the plains and rain forests of South America - through myths that follow certain patterns. What he wrote is a reflection on the devastation Europe wreaked around the world, and whether by studying and thinking with indigenous cultures, we may locate a position from which to think about our own situation in an increasingly overpopulated world. For Lévi-Strauss myths are not fairytales or children's stories to delight or frighten us. Myths are the deeper patterns by which we make sense of our existence. They are different in all cultures but have underlying shared and universal structures. By recognizing how other cultures make sense of their place in the world, we learn that we, too, rely on similar patterns to make sense of ours. He has startling things to say in this book, for instance that freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, but deeply linked to the material conditions of a given human's life on earth. I spoke with Denis Hollier, an expert of French literature, philosophy and culture, about Lévi- Strauss’s radical reinterpretation of what constitutes a culture, about his pessimism, about his relation to academic philosophy, existentialism and deconstruction, and about what we may learn from this giant of a mind who shaped thinkers in all disciplines. Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the relationship between inequality and classical music? In Class, Control, and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anna Bull, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Portsmouth and co-director of the 1752 Group, explores the intersections of class, race, and gender to explain the exclusive, and excluding, nature of classical music in contemporary society. The book is based on a detailed study of young people’s engagement with classical music, along with a broader understanding of music education and the sociology of culture. The book is also deeply engaged with the question of what, if anything, classical can do to transform, rather than reproduce, social inequalities. It is essential reading across both music and sociology, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary culture and social inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The fear of campus sexual assault has become an inextricable part of the college experience. Research has shown that by the time they graduate, as many as one in three women and almost one in six men will have been sexually assaulted. But why is sexual assault such a common feature of college life? And what can be done to prevent it? Drawing on the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) at Columbia University, the most comprehensive study of sexual assault on a campus to date, Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan present an entirely new framework that emphasizes sexual assault’s social roots—transcending current debates about consent, predators in a “hunting ground,” and the dangers of hooking up. Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (Norton, 2020) is based on years of research interviewing and observing college life—with students of different races, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Hirsch and Khan’s landmark study reveals the social ecosystem that makes sexual assault so predictable, explaining how physical spaces, alcohol, peer groups, and cultural norms influence young people’s experiences and interpretations of both sex and sexual assault. Through the powerful concepts of “sexual projects,” “sexual citizenship,” and “sexual geographies,” the authors offer a new and widely-accessible language for understanding the forces that shape young people’s sexual relationships. Empathetic, insightful, and far-ranging, Sexual Citizens transforms our understanding of sexual assault and offers a roadmap for how to address it. In this interview, Dr. Hirsch, Dr. Khan, and I discuss three concepts that are central to their argument regarding the prevalence and prevention of sexual assault: Sexual projects, sexual citizens, and sexual geographies. Hirsch and Khan argue that sexual assault is connected to features of the university setting (e.g., alcohol, Greek life), race, class, and gender, and (mis)understandings of sex and consent. Additionally, the authors go on to discuss their research methods and how schools, parents, administrators, and other members of the campus community can take active steps to address and prevent sexual assault on college campuses. I highly recommend this book for both a general audience and those with a scholarly interest in sexual violence and/or elite educational institutions. Sexual Citizens would be a great book for undergraduate or graduate courses related to gender, gender-based violence, sexual assault, and organizations. Jennifer S. Hirsch is a professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and codirects SHIFT, the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, at Columbia University. Shamus Khan is a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he is the chair of the department. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He was a co-Principal Investigator of SHIFT, a multi-year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. But, as Owen Whooley’s sweeping new book tells us, peering deep into the human mind is, well, really hard. On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing (University Chicago Press, 2019) begins with psychiatry’s formal inception in the United States in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to define and redefine mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley’s book is no anti-psychiatric screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving. On the Heels of Ignorance draws from intellectual history and the sociology of professions to portray an ongoing human effort to make sense of complex mental phenomena using an imperfect set of tools, with sometimes tragic results. In this interview, Dr. Whooley and I discuss the sociology of knowledge and ignorance that guide this book. We then discuss the changing identity of the field of psychiatry, how the DSM affected the legitimacy and perception of the discipline, and ways of managing ignorance. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in sociology of knowledge, health and illness and medical sociology, historical sociology, and mental health. Dr. Owen Whooley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Mexico and Senior Fellow, UNM Center for Health Policy. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In contemporary Manila, slums and squatter settlements are peppered throughout the city, often pushing right up against the walled enclaves of the privileged, creating the complex geopolitical pattern of what sociologist Marco Garrido calls the “patchwork city.” Synthesizing literature in political sociology and urban studies, Garrido shows how experiences along the housing divide in Manila constitute political subjectivities and shape the very experience of democracy in contemporary Philippines. The Patchwork City: Class, Space and Politics in Metro Manila (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is a beautifully written ethnography is divided into two parts. In the first part, Garrido documents the fragmentation of Manila into a mélange of spaces defined by class, particularly slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. He calls the pattern of urban fragmentation “interspersion” and persuasively argues that it is a spatial form distinct to cities in the Global South. This distinction is marked not by increasing segregation (as is the case with cities in the Global North) but by increasing proximity and dependence. For enclave residents, the proximity of slums is a source of insecurity, compelling them to impose spatial boundaries on slum residents. For slum residents, the regular imposition of these boundaries creates a pervasive sense of discrimination. Within this everyday, and almost normalized, sense of discrimination, the urban poor and middle class emerge not as labor and capital but as “squatters” and “villagers,” Manila’s name for subdivision residents. In other words, economic identities are unflinchingly spatialized. In the second part, Garrido looks beyond urban fragmentation to delineate its effects on class relations and politics, arguing that the proliferation of these slums and enclaves and their subsequent proximity have intensified class relations. Going beyond the realm of “the urban”, Garrido examines the politicization of this socio-spatial divide with the specific case of the populist president Joseph Estrada. The book ultimately argues that the two sides – middle-class and urban poor – are drawn into contention over not just the right to the city, but the nature of democracy itself. In all, The Patchwork City illuminates how segregation, class relations, and democracy are all intensely connected. It makes clear, ultimately, that class as a social structure is as indispensable to the study of Manila—and of many other cities of the Global South—as race is to the study of American cities. Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
"Most lawyers, most actors, most soldiers and sailors, most athletes, most doctors, and most diplomats feel a certain solidarity in the face of outsiders, and, in spite of other differences, they share fragments of a common ethic in their working life, and a kind of moral complicity." – Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict. There are many more examples of professional solidarity, however fragmented and tentative, sharing the link of a common ethic that helps make systems, and the analysis of them, possible in the larger political economy. Writing from a law professor’s vantage point, Katharina Pistor, in her new book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2019) explains how even though law is a social good it has been harnessed as a private commodity over time that creates private wealth, and plays a significant role in the increasing disparity of financial outcomes. As she points out in this interview, and her chapter ‘Masters of the Code’, it is ‘critical to have lawyers in the room’, and they clearly have the lead role in her well-researched and nuanced thesis centered on the decentralized institution of private law. Professor Pistor builds on Rudden’s ‘feudal calculus’ providing the long view of legal systems in maintaining and creating wealth and draws on historical analogies including the enclosure movements as she interweaves her analysis of capital asset creation with a broader critique of professional and institutional agency. Polanyi and Piketty figure into Pistor’s analysis among many others, as does the help of the state’s coercive backing as she draws on the breadth of her own governance research and analysis of the collapsed socialist regimes in the 1990s, and a research pivot toward western market economies following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Professor Pistor is a comparative scholar with a keen interdisciplinary eye for the relationship between law, values, and markets, dovetailing larger concepts with detailed descriptions of the coding of ‘stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations—assets that exist only in law.’ All of which informs her inquiry into why some legal systems have been more accommodating to capital’s coding cravings and others less so, as she describes the process by which capital is created. She moves beyond legal realism’s less granular critiques, and as reviewers such as Samuel Moyn have suggested – this book ‘deserves to be the essential text of any movement today that concerns itself with law and political economy’. Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law, and the Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law School. Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen's new book The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (Columbia University Press, 2020) is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development. Incorporating research findings spanning a variety of social science disciplines and comprehensive empirical data detailing the status of women around the globe, the book shows that female subordination functions almost as a curse upon nations. A society’s choice to subjugate women has significant negative consequences: worse governance, worse conflict, worse stability, worse economic performance, worse food security, worse health, worse demographic problems, worse environmental protection, and worse social progress. Yet despite the pervasive power of social and political structures that subordinate women, history—and the data—reveal possibilities for progress. The First Political Order shows that when steps are taken to reduce the hold of inequitable laws, customs, and practices, outcomes for all improve. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence, explaining what the international community can do now to promote more equitable relations between men and women and, thereby, security and peace. With comprehensive empirical evidence of the wide-ranging harm of subjugating women, it is an important book for security scholars, social scientists, policy makers, historians, and advocates for women worldwide. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2019) is a pirate story of a different kind. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Somalia, the UK and other parts of Africa and the Middle East, Jatin Dua describes a tale that is not often told: how piracy works in the everyday lives of those involved in its grip. Professor Dua’s book draws from interviews and participant observation with pirates, merchants who were seized by pirates, merchants who supply pirates, insurance brokers who indemnify pirates’ victims and many others who are involved in the intimate, social and entirely real world of modern-day piracy in the Red and Arabian Seas. Jeffrey Bristol is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Boston University and a practicing attorney. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The city of Chicago is one of the US' most diverse cosmopolitan areas. Given the array of people who live in the city, it is reasonable to assume that the goals of the various communities differ in regard to sport and its social functions. Gerald R. Gems' new book, Sport and the Shaping of Civic Identity in Chicago (Lexington Books, 2020) provides readers with an extensive overview of how the diverse stakeholders of the metropolis have "used" sport in their neighborhoods (as well as the broader community) to claim their share of athletic life in the Windy City. Gems' research enlightens readers as to how, for example, African Americans, Latinos, and others, have played certain sports and used such endeavors to challenge assumptions about their respective groups' racial/ethnic, physical and intellectual capabilities. Additionally, the study provides insight into how women and members of different class and religious groups have done likewise. Finally, the work considers how the aficionados of the city's pro-sport franchises, particularly the denizens of the "Friendly Confines" have created a unique identity that is recognized nationwide. All in all, Gems' research enables those of us who live elsewhere to see how sport has helped to shape daily life among the numerous and varied communities that make the city of Chicago. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
For the third installment in our special series on interpretive political and social scientific research, Frederic C. Schaffer joins us to discuss his Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide (Routledge, 2015). In it, Fred explains why social scientists doing interpretive work need to be especially attentive to concepts and conceptualization. Contrasting positivist reconstruction of concepts with interpretivist elucidation of them, he proposes and spells out three elucidating strategies: grounding, locating and exposing. Elucidating Social Science Concepts is both a hands-on text for social scientific conceptualization and an agenda-setting publication that emerges out of Fred’s longstanding commitment to interpretivist methodologies and methods. The second of the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods featured on New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, this is a book that is clear in its goals, patient in its explanations and economical in its prose, accessible to graduate students but also full of instructive reminders and cautions for seasoned researchers. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in the symposium on Elucidating Social Science Concepts published in Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, available for free download. And to download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Why does an estimated 5% of the general population intentionally and repeatedly hurt themselves? What are the reasons certain people resort to self-injury as a way to manage their daily lives? In Why do We Hurt Ourselves? Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2018), sociologist Baptiste Brossard draws on a five-year survey of self-injurers and suggests that the answers can be traced to social, more than personal, causes. Self-injury is not a matter of disturbed individuals resorting to hurting themselves in the face of individual weaknesses and difficulties. Rather, self-injury is the reaction of individuals to the tensions that compose, day after day, the tumultuousness of their social life and position. Self-harm is a practice that people use to self-control and maintain order—to calm down, or to avoid "going haywire" or "breaking everything." More broadly, through this research Brossard works to develop a perspective on the contemporary social world at large, exploring quests for self-control in modern Western societies. In this interview, Dr. Brossard and I discuss how he came to study self-injury, managing the stigma of self-injury, how people use online forums for community, the discrete nature of self-injury, and the role of gender. I recommend this book for people interested in mental health, stigma, deviant behavior, and qualitative methods. Dr. Baptiste Brossard, (@BaptistBrossard) a French sociologist, is a lecturer at the Australian National University. He received his PhD in sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (2011). His primary areas of research are mental health, sociological theory, qualitative methods and utopian studies. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The rise of digital technology is transforming the world in which we live. Our digitalized societies demand new ways of thinking about the social, and this short book introduces readers to an approach that can deliver this: digital sociology. In What is Digital Sociology (Polity, 2019), Neil Selwyn examines the concepts, tools and practices that sociologists are developing to analyze the intersections of the social and the digital. Blending theory and empirical examples, the five chapters highlight areas of inquiry where digital approaches are taking hold and shaping the discipline of sociology today. The book explores key topics such as digital race and digital labor, as well as the fast-changing nature of digital research methods and diversifying forms of digital scholarship. In this interview, Dr. Selwyn and I discuss the overarching question guiding this book: what is digital sociology? We go on to discuss how the classical figures in sociology wrote about, and engaged with, technology, the distinctiveness of contemporary digital sociology, key methodologies, and the research ethics related to digital sociological research. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in digital humanities, big data and computational methods, or science and technology studies. This would be a great book for both undergraduate and graduate courses related to digital media and social science. Dr. Neil Selwyn is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. His research and teaching focuses on the place of digital media in everyday life, and the sociology of technology (non)use in educational settings. Neil has written extensively on a number of issues, including digital exclusion, education technology policymaking and the student experience of technology-based learning. You can find him on Twitter @Neil_Selwyn. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Has can theatre confront racial inequality? In Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Performing Arts Workforce (Routledge, 2020), Tobie S. Stein, Professor Emerita in the Department of Theater, Brooklyn College, CUNY, analyses the longstanding failure of America’s theatre industry to address issues of diversity. Drawing on interviews with 70 practitioners, as well as a rich and detailed engagement with the structures of the theatre industry and cultural policy, the book makes clear the unequal opportunities and career paths that result from racial inequality. The book also draws on co-authors to reflect historical, institutional, and international perspectives, adding depth and breadth to an already excellently extensive account. It is an essential read across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in arts and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
From the unending quest to turn metal into gold to the major discoveries that reveal how the universe works, experiments have always been a critical part of the hard sciences. In recent decades social scientists have started to catch up and the results are shifting the way we do nearly everything. Randomized control trials, called RCT’s, have a logic so simple that anyone can understand how they work and even run them themselves. It’s simple. You come up with an idea to get something to happen. You take a group of subjects and randomly split it in half. You try your idea on one group and leave the other group alone. The difference in outcomes will tell you if your idea works or not. In Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World (Yale University Press, 2018), Andrew Leigh demonstrated the impact that social scientists are making with this powerful tool. From opportunity experiments to changing your socks, researchers are putting old ideas to the test and finding out what works and what doesn’t. The book reads like a series of interesting examples places beautifully together to shed light on how it is that we can be better at finding out what we do and do not know. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher; they employ a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a time-management tool. They see everything as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimized, and subverted. In Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents (MIT Press, 2019), Joseph Reagle examines these attempts to systematize living and finds that they are the latest in a long series of self-improvement methods. Life hacking, he writes, is self-help for the digital age's creative class. Reagle chronicles the history of life hacking, from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack through Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. He describes personal outsourcing, polyphasic sleep, the quantified self movement, and hacks for pickup artists. Life hacks can be useful, useless, and sometimes harmful (for example, if you treat others as cogs in your machine). Life hacks have strengths and weaknesses, which are sometimes like two sides of a coin: being efficient is not the same thing as being effective; being precious about minimalism does not mean you are living life unfettered; and compulsively checking your vital signs is its own sort of illness. With Hacking Life, Reagle sheds light on a question even non-hackers ponder: what does it mean to live a good life in the new millennium? John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ahmet T. Kuru’s new book Islam, Authoritarianism and Underdevelopment, A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is a ground-breaking history and analysis of the evolution of the state in Muslim countries. Thoroughly researched and accessibly written, Kuru’s work traces the template of the modern-day state in many Muslim-majority countries to fundamental political, social and economic changes in the 11th century. That was when Islamic scholars who until then had by and large refused to surrender their independence to the state were co-opted by Muslim rulers. It was a time when the merchant class lost its economic clout as the Muslim world moved from a mercantile to a feudal economy. Religious and other scholars were often themselves merchants or funded by merchants. The transition coincided with the rise of the military state legitimized by religious scholars who had little choice but to go into its employ. They helped the state develop a forced Sunni Muslim orthodoxy based on text rather than reason- or tradition based interpretation of Islam with the founding of madrassahs or religious seminaries that were designed to counter the rise of Shiite states in North Africa and counter less or unorthodox strands of the faith. Kuru’s history could hardly be more relevant. It lays bare the roots of modern-day, illiberal, authoritarian or autocratic states in the Muslim world that are characterized by some form of often rent-driven state capitalism and frequently expansionary in their effort to ensure regime survival and increase rents. These states feature education systems that fail to develop critical thinking and religious establishments that are subservient to their rulers. Kuru’s book also in effect describes one of the original sources of the civilizational state that has become a fixture in the struggle to shape a new world order. With his book, Kuru has made an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the stagnation as well as the turmoil that has swept the Middle East and North Africa as well as the wider Islamic world. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What do prisoner laborers, graduate students, welfare workers, and college athletes have in common? According to sociologist Erin Hatton, they are all part of a growing workforce of coerced laborers. Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment (University of California Press, 2020) explores this world of coerced labor through an unexpected and compelling comparison of these four groups of workers, for whom a different definition of "employment" reigns supreme—one where workplace protections do not apply and employers wield expansive punitive power, far beyond the ability to hire and fire. Because such arrangements are common across the economy, Hatton argues that coercion—as well as precarity—is a defining feature of work in America today. Theoretically forceful yet vivid and gripping to read, Coerced compels the reader to reevaluate contemporary dynamics of work, pushing beyond concepts like "career" and "gig work." Through this bold analysis, Hatton offers a trenchant window into this world of work from the perspective of those who toil within it—and who are developing the tools needed to push back against it. In this interview, Hatton and I discuss how she chose her unique cases for the book (graduate students, inmates, workfare workers, and college athletes), coercion related to status, agency and resistance, and the often harsh, punitive power of work supervisors and employers. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in labor, social stratification, qualitative methods, and culture. Erin Hatton, PhD, is an associate professor in the SUNY Buffalo Department of Sociology. Professor Hatton’s research focuses on work and political economy, while also extending into the fields of social inequality, labor, law and social policy. You can find her on Twitter at @eehatton. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Throughout her new book, HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth (University of Michigan Press 2019), Elizabeth A. Wheeler uses a fictional place called HandiLand as a yardstick for measuring how far American society has progressed toward social justice and how much remains to be done. In a rich array of chapters, Wheeler considers the new prominence of youth with disabilities in contemporary young adult and children’s literature. From these and other sources, she derives principles for understanding social justice from the everyday experiences of adults and families with disabilities, including her own. Wheeler intersperses literary analysis with personal memoir in an effort to fashion tool kits for those whose “work, ideas, and hands touch young people with disabilities,” which is all of us. Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
The Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek’s prolific quips on various cultural and political issues around race and related issues, found either in short YouTube clips or lengthy books have gained a lot of attention, much of it admittedly confused and occasionally offended and frustrated. Part of this is likely due to Žižek’s style, which tends to jump around in a blur of philosophical and cultural references, sometimes obscuring what his actual point is. However, his eclectic style shouldn’t deter us from trying to use Žižek’s theories of fantasy and ideology to understand the racial dimensions of our current political situation. This is the project set out by Zahi Zalloua, with his new book Žižek on Race: Towards an Anti-Racist Future (Bloomsbury, 2020), which seeks to use Žižekian philosophy to arrive at more complicated, but also more productive and emancipatory visions of racial oppression and emancipation might look like. Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells professor of Philosophy and Literature, and Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College. He is also the author of Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek, as well as Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature and Philosophy. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer.Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What are the arguments in favor of social hierarchies? Are there differences in how hierarchy is viewed and valued in China compared with other countries? Which forms of social hierarchy are morally justified and how can they be promoted in the future? Drawing on a wide range of philosophical arguments, historical examples, and social science evidence from various cultural traditions, Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei have developed their argument that different hierarchical principles should govern distinct kinds of social relations with chapters devoted to citizens, countries, animals and machines. In Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World (Princeton University Press, 2020) the authors take aim at the egalitarian ideal of individual rights as being too narrow, and not necessarily the right one for all societies. Available in hardcover and Kindle editions ‘Just Hierarchy examines how hierarchical social relations can have a useful purpose, not only in personal domains but also in larger political realms.’ Daniel A. Bell is dean of the school of political science and public administration at Shandong University, and Wang Pei is an assistant professor at Fudan University’s China Institute. Currently, both are working on the Chinese translation of their book. The interview was conducted in Shanghai about two months after the initial outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic in China. Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Increased redevelopment, the dismantling of public housing, and increasing housing costs are forcing a shift in migration of lower income and transit dependent populations to the suburbs. These suburbs are often missing basic transportation, and strategies to address this are lacking. This absence of public transit creates barriers to viable employment and accessibility to cultural networks, and plays a role in increasing social inequality. In her book Lost in the Transit Desert: Race, Transit Access, and Suburban Form (Routledge, 2017), Diane Jones Allen investigates how housing and transport policy have played their role in creating these "Transit Deserts," and what impact race has upon those likely to be affected. Jones Allen uses research from New Orleans, Baltimore, and Chicago to explore the forces at work in these situations, as well as proposing potential solutions. Mapping, interviews, photographs, and narratives all come together to highlight the inequities and challenges in Transit Deserts, where a lack of access can make all journeys, such as to jobs, stores, or relatives, much more difficult. Alternatives to public transit abound, from traditional methods such as biking and carpooling to more culturally specific tactics, and are examined comprehensively. This is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in transport planning, urban planning, city infrastructure, and transport geography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What does music tell us about society? In Connecting Sounds: The Social Life of Music (Manchester University Press, 2020), Nick Crossley, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, introduces a relational sociology of music. The book thinks through the social and individual practices of music, the music industry, and the music ‘worlds’ of mainstreams, alternatives, and subcultures. The book also considers music’s relation to inequalities, including of patterns of taste, politics, and the public sphere. As well as the sociological perspective, Connecting Sounds discusses the role of individuals, as they use music for meaning and sense of identity, and as practitioners and consumers. Packed with examples, as well as a rich range of theoretical discussions, the book is essential reading for social science and music scholars, as well as for anyone interested in the role of music in our social world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
In her new book, Doctors’ Orders: The Making of Status Hierarchies in an Elite Profession (Columbia University Press, 2020), Dr. Tania Jenkins engages readers in readers in a ethnography where she spent years observing and interviewing American, international, and osteopathic medical residents in two hospitals to reveal the unspoken mechanisms that are taken for granted and that lead to hierarchies among supposed equals. She found that the United States does not need formal policies to prioritize American-trained MDs. By relying on a system of informal beliefs and practices that equate status with merit and eclipse structural disadvantages, the profession convinces international and osteopathic graduates to participate in a system that subordinates them to American-trained MDs. Offering a rare ethnographic look at the inner workings of an elite profession, Doctors’ Orders sheds new light on the formation of informal status hierarchies and their significance for both doctors and patients. This social separation can be observed by looking at the social class of residents and practitioners; sponsorship; status beliefs, bias, and stigma; structural inequality among training programs; and differences in merit that result from these inequalities. The United States does not have enough doctors. Each year there are residency positions available for internationally trained and osteopathic medical graduates to fill as a result of there being too few American-trained MDs. These international and osteopathic medical graduates also outperform their American MD counterparts to have the same likelihood of getting a residency position. They, however, often end up in lower-prestige training programs while the American-trained MDs tend to occupy elite training positions. Some of the most prestigious programs are even fully segregated and accept exclusively U.S. medical graduates or non-U.S. medical graduates. Tania Jenkins, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in the Department of Sociology. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it presents in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What is the role of the ambulance in the American city? The prevailing narrative provides a rather simple answer: saving and transporting the critically ill and injured. This is not an incorrect description, but it is incomplete. Drawing on field observations, medical records, and his own experience as a novice emergency medical technician, sociologist Dr. Josh Seim reimagines paramedicine as a frontline institution for governing urban suffering. Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering (University of California Press, 2020) argues that the ambulance is part of a fragmented regime that is focused more on neutralizing hardships (which are disproportionately carried by poor people and people of color) than on eradicating the root causes of agony. Whether by compressing lifeless chests on the streets or by transporting the publicly intoxicated into the hospital, ambulance crews tend to handle suffering bodies near the bottom of the polarized metropolis. Dr. Seim illustrates how this work puts crews in recurrent, and sometimes tense, contact with the emergency department nurses and police officers who share their clientele. These street-level relations, however, cannot be understood without considering the bureaucratic and capitalistic forces that control and coordinate ambulance labor from above. Beyond the ambulance, this book motivates a labor-centric model for understanding the frontline governance of down-and-out populations. In this interview, Dr. Seim and I discuss the idea of urban suffering, his in-depth, immersive ethnographic methods, how ambulance crews categorize and sort patients, and interactions between institutions like the police, hospitals, and ambulance crews. Bandage, Sort, Hustle is one of the best monographs I have read. Dr. Seim’s writing about his experience made the entire study more interesting to read because of his unique perspective as a sociologist on the front lines as an Emergency Medical Technician. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in labor, medical sociology, culture, ethnography, or urban sociology. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Since 2008, the Tea Party and the Resistance have caused some major shake-ups for the Republican and Democratic parties. The changes fall outside the scope of traditional party politics, and outside the realm of traditional social science research. To better understand what’s going on Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Strategy at Harvard and Director of the Scholars Strategy Network, convened a group of researchers to study the people and organizations and at the heart of these grassroots movements. Skocpol joins us this week to discuss their findings and the new book (co-edited with Caroline Tervo) Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her work in particular focuses on the Tea Party and includes interviews with Tea Party members across the country. We also discuss the Resistance and whether these oppositional forces to the party in power are likely to continue after November’s election. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State, host of the Democracy Works podcast, produced by Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely's new book Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance (Oxford University Press, 2020) explores the rise of finance in American life over the last forty years and its implications for American workers, families, and economies. The authors argue that finance has transformed from a servant to the economy to its master - from a means of creating a prosperous society to an end in itself. The consequences of this shift are profound: the authors identify the many ways finance is implicated in the yawning growth in inequality in the US and how a financialized society redistributes resources from working people to owners, executives, and financial professionals. Using historical analysis, quantitative and qualitative data, the book offers a clear, comprehensive, and compelling account of one of the most important economic developments of our time. Patrick Sheenan is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
What can online social spaces like Reddit’s r/gaming reveal about gender attitudes, masculinized spaces, and turning points in gamer communities? In their new book Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit’s r/gaming Community (Palgrave Pivot, 2019), Marcus Maloney, Steven Roberts, and Timothy Graham utilize computational and qualitative methods to explore conversations happing on the social media platform Reddit’s gaming subreddit. They explore masculine and feminine gendered comments and discourse using the online platform’s functions like upvoting and downvoting, in addition to textual analysis of comments. Maloney, Roberts, and Graham reveal a continuum of discourses from marginalization to inclusion and contribute to our greater understanding of gendered discourse online.
This book would be a great addition to any gender course, both undergraduate and graduate, as it provides clear theoretical analysis of a popular social media platform. This book will be of interest to Sociologists of gender and culture, as well as scholars of media studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.
Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.
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Jerome Whitington's Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the dynamics and discourses centered around the development of hydropower dams in the Mekong River Basin. Through deep and connected ethnographies, the book traces how such projects create ecologically uncertain environments and the surprising ways they offer new capacities for being human. Along the way, this study unpacks puzzles such as why corporate developers would engage with activists in environmental sustainability initiatives even in the absence of legal compulsion, the evasion strategies of rural peoples struggling with the currents of such developments and the managerial tactics as well as failures among hydrological experts. By viewing large-scale development projects as collaborations between infrastructural developers, financiers and activists, the book is able to interrogate “late industrialism” not as a high modernist project but in terms of uncharted temporalities.
In our conversation, we discuss how infrastructure like dams can lead to uncertainty, the limits of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a conceptual framework, how uncertainty was utilized and managed by various stakeholders who might not see themselves as environmental actors as well as the new positioning of white male experts in Asia.
Jerome Whitington is a visiting assistant professor at the Gallatin School in New York University.
Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. She is completing her first monograph on dialectical relationships between landscape and religious conversions in maritime Southeast Asia. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien
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There’s a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation’s school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it’s no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower “lunch ladies” to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children?
Jennifer E. Gaddis' new book The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools (University of California Press, 2019) aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and moral heft, The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.
In this interview, Dr. Gaddis first describes her experience conducting fieldwork in multiple public school cafeterias across the United States. Gaddis then reviews her book’s discussion of current state of school lunch and cafeteria work in American public schools, activism related to school lunch and cafeteria workers, the role of care and care work in the practice of serving school lunch, and how the structure of the National School Lunch Program magnifies and supports existing class and racial inequalities.
Jennifer E. Gaddis is an assistant professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You can find her on Twitter @JenniferEGaddis.
Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar.
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For some time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been treated with a certain level of skepticism because of his engagement with the Nazi party, a skepticism that has resurfaced with the publication of the Black Notebooks, private journals he kept throughout the last several decades of his life. In his new book Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Richard Polt starts by taking a close look at his Being and Time (1927), followed by a close analysis of his philosophical development in the 1930’s. He shows through a close textual analysis that Heidegger’s political engagement stemmed from certain philosophical commitments and errors. The book then ends with an attempt to see what, if anything, can be salvaged from Heidegger’s philosophy for political thinking.
Richard Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University, and is the author of, among other things, Heidegger: An Introduction and The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. He is co-editor with Gregory Fried of the book series New Heidegger Research, and together they have translated a number of Heidegger’s lectures including Introduction to Metaphysics, Nature, History, State, and Being and Truth.
Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer.
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We want to be happy, we want to get what we want, we want to love and be loved. But life, even when our basic needs are met, often makes us unhappy. You can't always get what you want, Freud noted in his 1930 short book, Civilization and its Discontents. Our desires are foiled not by bad luck, our failures, or the environment -- but by the civilization meant to make life better. So why isn't civilization set up to maximize our happiness and pleasure? Why does more civilization also mean more psychological suffering?
In his trenchant short book, Freud shows how culture is not the refinement of humanity but an effort to socialize everyone into a system that produces the types of "discontents" and "unease" which characterize modern existence.
I spoke with Peter Brooks, an expert on Freud who has taught at Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of Virginia and other universities. He's authored many books, including: Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000), Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994), Reading for the Plot (1984), and, with Alex Woloch, Whose Freud? (2000). Professor Brooks linked Freud's Civilization and its Discontents to the earlier Thoughts for the Times on War and Death where Freud noticed that the veneer of civilized behavior was thin indeed, and that within months of the beginning of World War I people who had co-existed peacefully were capable of inflicting the most gruesome violence on their neighbors.
I asked him: if civilization and progress inevitably leads to more psychological suffering, what's our way out?
Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"
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Christopher D. Bader and Joseph O. Baker's book Deviance Management: Insiders, Outsiders, Hiders, and Drifters (University of California Press, 2019) examines how individuals and subcultures manage the stigma of being labeled socially deviant. Exploring high-tension religious groups, white power movements, paranormal subcultures, LGBTQ groups, drifters, recreational drug and alcohol users, and more, the authors identify how and when people combat, defy, hide from, or run from being stigmatized as “deviant.” While most texts emphasize the criminological features of deviance, the authors’ coverage here showcases the diversity of social and noncriminal deviance. Deviance Management allows for a more thorough understanding of strategies typically used by normalization movements to destigmatize behaviors and identities while contributing to the study of social movements and intra-movement conflict.
This interview with co-author Joseph Baker covers how deviance management occurs in contemporary examples, such as bigfoot watch groups and the Westboro Baptist Church. Additionally, Baker discusses how he and his co-author conducted this research using a mixed-methods approach and how the authors gained access to these stigmatized communities. Other topics covered in the interview include what makes something or someone deviant, in-depth explanations of the processes of deviance management, and the future of deviance research—including how sociologists should approach the study of deviance moving forward.
Christopher D. Bader is Professor of Sociology at Chapman University. Joseph O. Baker (@ParadoxOfBelief) is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at East Tennessee State University.
Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. Specifically, Krystina is interested in how LGBTQ individuals experience their bodies and the relationship between gender, sexuality, and eating disorders. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar.
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Processes of globalization—the liberalization of national markets, the rapid movement of goods, services, and labor across national borders—have had profound impacts on local contexts, perhaps especially so in the Global South. While some people in the worlds of business, media, and even academia praise such policies for benefitting the poor in these countries, others, particular actors on the left, are highly critical of them for leaving impoverished populations and places behind.
Entering this conversation with a fresh take and a novel case is sociologist Patrick Inglis, whose new book Narrow Fairways: Getting By and Falling Behind in the New India (Oxford University Press, 2019) uses the interactions between elite members of golf clubs in city of Bangalore and the caddies who carry their bags to examine how globalization is both upending and reproducing a status quo of extreme inequality. Based on more than ten years of ethnographic fieldwork, Inglis takes readers inside these clubs to show how the concentrated wealth and the increased privatization of institutions and social services in India—e.g. education, healthcare—have made the low-income, highly precarious caddies highly dependent on the members they serve. Through “upward servility,” a set of strategies of servility and deference, the caddies attempt to show members their worthiness for support and guidance and overcome a caste status they claim doesn’t influence their chances at upward mobility. By showcasing the lives and voices of the caddies, Inglis shows how globalization may not be creating polarized societies of haves and have-nots, but situations in which the rich and poor find themselves closely intertwined and in dubiously sustainable relationships.
Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017) and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014).
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In her new book Fat, Pretty, and Soon to Be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society (AK Press 2019), sociologist and storyteller Kimberly Dark considers what it means to look a certain way. Integrating memoir with cultural critique, Dark describes her experience navigating the world as a fat, queer, white-privileged, gender-conforming, eventually disabled, and inevitably aging “girl with a pretty face.” Her essays take on self-improvement, self-acceptance, sexual attraction, language, aging, queer visibility, fashion, family, femininity, feminism, yoga culture, airplane seats, and the vilifying of fatness in the name of good health, among other compelling topics. Along the way, Dark edges readers toward a deeper understanding of how privileged (and stigmatized) appearances function in everyday life, and how the architecture of the social world constrains us all.
Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu.
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How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike.
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Imagining Religious Communities: Transnational Hindus and their Narrative Performances (Oxford University Press, 2019) tells the story of the Gupta family through the personal and religious narratives they tell as they create and maintain their extended family and community across national borders. Based on ethnographic research, the book demonstrates the ways that transnational communities are involved in shaping their experiences through narrative performances.
Jennifer B. Saunders demonstrates that narrative performances shape participants' social realities in multiple ways: they define identities, they create connections between community members living on opposite sides of national borders, and they help create new homes amidst increasing mobility. The narratives are religious and include epic narratives such as excerpts from the Ramayana as well as personal narratives with dharmic implications. Saunders' analysis combines scholarly understandings of the ways in which performances shape the contexts in which they are told, indigenous comprehension of the power that reciting certain narratives can have on those who hear them, and the theory that social imaginaries define new social realities through expressing the aspirations of communities. Imagining Religious Communities argues that this Hindu community's religious narrative performances significantly contribute to shaping their transnational lives.
For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship.
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Published by intellect books in 2016, and currently distributed by The University of Chicago Press, Entering Transmasculinity: The Inevitability of Discourse is a holistic study of the intersecting and overlapping discourses that shape the identities of people who were assigned the female sex at birth and do not identify with that designation. Using a wide range of sources such youtube videos, academic texts, counseling literature, educational pamphlets, popular media, and personal blogs, matthew heinz examines the mediated and experienced transmasculine subjectivities and aims to capture the apparent contradictions that structure transmasculine experience, perception, and identification.
Dr. matthew heinz is vice-provost of Graduate and Interdisciplinary Studies, dean of the College of Interdisciplinary Studies and a professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, Canada. His scholarly work focuses on the intersections of language, gender identity and culture. He examines intercultural and international communication via performative writing, qualitative studies and discourse analysis. A native of Germany, he spent 20 years in the United States as a student, print journalist, communication specialist and professor before moving to Canada.
Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Memphis. Her forthcoming book uses Carnival as a vehicle to understand social and cultural changes in Mobile, Alabama (USA) in the second half of the 20th century. Her new research project is an investigation of different generations of artists and performers who challenge gender normativity in Monterrey, Nuevo León (Mexico). She also works as an Assistant Producer for the Sexing History podcast.
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How has the expansion of the Black American middle class and the increase in the number of Black immigrants among them since the Civil Rights period transformed the cultural landscape of New York City? In her new book The New Noir: Race, Identity & Diaspora in Black Suburbia (University of California Press, 2019), Orly Clergé explores this question and more. Exploring the lived experiences of the people in Queens and Long Island through ethnographic methods, Clergé discovers a racial consciousness spectrum and heterogeneity of experiences among and between people living in these two suburbs of NYC. Presenting deep and rich exploration of history of racial and social stratification, the book investigates issues of urbanization and suburbanization, migration, race, class, and family.
This book would be an excellent addition to many graduate level Sociology courses, including any that focus on migration, race, stratification, or neighborhoods. This book will also be of interest to anyone interested in the history and development of NYC.
Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.
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In When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Megan Burke considers the relationship of sexual violence to lived time by reexamining and building upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, and in conversation with Judith Butler, María Lugones, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and many others. Through developing a feminist phenomenology of time, Burke allows us to consider how racialized colonial sexual domination structures feminine subjectivity. By focusing our attention on temporality, Burke deepens our understanding of how the past haunts the present, giving rise to sexual domination, as well as how we can actualize latent possibilities to lay those ghosts to rest.
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In Jewish Family: Identity and Self-Formation at Home (Indiana University Press, 2018), Alex Pomson and Randal Schnoor examine the impact of the family on Jewish identity. Through interviewing a sample of families over a 10-year period, Pomson and Schnoor analyze a complex web of factors that guides the level of Jewish engagement throughout a family’s life course. This illuminating and nuanced study examines the complexities of Jewish identity and praxis, and more broadly, what it means to be a North American Jew in the twenty-first century.
Alex Pomson is a researcher and managing director of Rosov Consulting. Randal Schnoor is a sociologist who teaches Jewish Studies at the Koschitzky Center for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto.
Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
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The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years―because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.
Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems―rather than humans―control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.
In Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St. Martin's, 2018), Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.
The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.
This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.
John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.
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Public art is a form of communication that enables spaces for encounters across difference. These encounters may be routine, repeated, or rare, but all take place in urban spaces infused with emotion, creativity, and experimentation. In Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter (Temple University Press, 2019), Caitlin Frances Bruce explores how various legal graffiti scenes across the United States, Mexico, and Europe provide diverse ways for artists to navigate their changing relationships with publics, institutions, and commercial entities.
Painting Publics draws on a combination of interviews with more than 100 graffiti writers as well as participant observation, and uses critical and rhetorical theory to argue that graffiti should be seen as more than counter-cultural resistance. Bruce claims it offers resources for imagining a more democratic city, one that builds and grows from personal relations, abandoned or under-used spaces, commercial sponsorship, and tacit community resources. In the case of Mexico, Germany, and France, there is even some state support for the production and maintenance of civic education through visual culture.
In her examination of graffiti culture and its spaces of inscription, Bruce allows us to see moments where practitioners actively reckon with possibility.
Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.
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In our efforts to comprehend the systematic dispossession of indigenous peoples in settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, or Israel, the notion that "invasion is a structure, not merely an event," first articulated by Patrick Wolfe, has become something of a maxim for critical theorists. Part of this structure, as Patrick Wolfe described it, was a logic of elimination: after all, the settler must eliminate the native in order to secure her claim to the native's territory. But whom does the Native/settler binary exclude? And what do we fail to understand about how settler colonialism functions, as a result?
These are just some of the questions to which Iyko Day speaks in her new book, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism(Duke University Press, 2016). Centering Asian racialization in the United States and Canada in relation to Indigenous dispossession and structures of anti-blackness, Day explores how the historical alignment of Asian bodies and labor with capital's abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler colonialism's foundational and defining features. Romantic anti-capitalism, in turn, allowed white settlers to gloss over their complicity with capitalist exploitation.
In treating Asian North American cultural production as a transnational genealogy of settler colonialism’s capitalist logic, Day does no less than re-theorize settler colonialism itself: Alien Capital pushes us to consider how settler colonialism functions not within a Native/settler binary, but rather as a dynamic triangulation of Native, settler, and alien positionalities. Listen in for the knitty-gritty.
Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she examines Jewish philanthropy and racialization in the late- and post-Ottoman Middle East from a global and comparative perspective. She can be reached at [nancy.ko@columbia.edu].
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Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street―our environments are themselves products of our behavior. Under the Influence explains how to unlock the latent power of social context. It reveals how our environments encourage smoking, bullying, tax cheating, sexual predation, problem drinking, and wasteful energy use. We are building bigger houses, driving heavier cars, and engaging in a host of other activities that threaten the planet―mainly because that's what friends and neighbors do.
In the wake of the hottest years on record, only robust measures to curb greenhouse gases promise relief from more frequent and intense storms, droughts, flooding, wildfires, and famines. In Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work (Princeton UP, 2020), Robert H. Frank describes how the strongest predictor of our willingness to support climate-friendly policies, install solar panels, or buy an electric car is the number of people we know who have already done so. In the face of stakes that could not be higher, the book explains how we could redirect trillions of dollars annually in support of carbon-free energy sources, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone.
Most of us would agree that we need to take responsibility for our own choices, but with more supportive social environments, each of us is more likely to make choices that benefit everyone. Under the Influence shows how.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).
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In her new book, Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry (NYU Press, 2020), Dr. Angela Jones engages readers in a five-year mixed-methods study she conducted on the erotic webcam industry where she tells a pornographic story about the multibillion-dollar online sex industry that is colloquially known as “camming.”
Through camming, millions of people from all over the globe have found decent wages, friendship, intimacy, community, empowerment, and pleasure. This interview is full of stories from a diverse sample of cam models from all over the world whom Jones interviewed and observed as part of her five-year mixed-methods study. Cam models, like all sex workers, must grapple with exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and stigmatization. Using an intersectional lens, Jones was attentive to how the overlapping systems of neoliberal capitalism, White supremacy, patriarchy, cissexism, heterosexism, and ableism shape all cam models’ experiences in camming as a new global sex industry.
This thorough examination of the camming industry provides a unique vantage point from which to understand and theorize around gender, sexuality, race, and labor in a time when workers globally face increasing economic precariousness and worsened forms of alienation, and desperately desire to recapture pleasure in work. Despite the serious issues cam models face, Jones’s focus on pleasure will help people better understand the motivations for engaging in online sex work, as well as the complex social interactions between cam models and customers. In Camming, Jones pioneers an entirely new subfield in sociology—the sociology of pleasure. The sociology of pleasure can provide new insights into the motivation for social behavior and assist sociologists in analyzing social interactions in everyday life.
Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it presents in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.
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In the United States, the number of megachurches increased from 350 in 1990 to over 1,600 in 2011 with that number continuing to grow exponentially in subsequent years. By 2015, a Hartford Institute for Religion Research study showed that over five million people were attending services at a megachurch weekly which accounts for 50 percent of all American churchgoers.
High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America (Oxford University Press, 2020) by James K. Wellman Jr., Katie E. Corcoran, and Kate J. Stockly, is the first book to delve into why these churches have conquered the churchgoing market of America. Based on nearly 300 transcripts of focus groups and interviews, High on God highlights a commonality in the way attendees liken their religious experiences to that of a drug addiction. Using French sociologist Emile Durkheim's concept of homo duplex, the authors plot the structures that megachurches employ to satisfy the core human craving for personal meaning and social integration, as well as personal identity and communal solidarity.
High on God is an honest account of the positive role megachurches play on bonding people together to lead lives of integrity, community, and responsibility. This book challenges the megachurch skeptics and shares insight into the experiences attendees have had and tells the history of this church model through present-day.
Jim Wellman highlights these elements in this interview. Dr. Wellman is Professor and Chair of the Comparative Religion Program in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Wellman's publications include an award-winning book, The Gold Coast Church and the Ghetto: Christ and Culture in Mainline Protestantism and Evangelical vs. Liberal: The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest; edited volumes: Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence Across Time and Tradition, and Religion and Human Security: A Global Perspective.
Will Sipling is currently an independent scholar, with published research on religion and psychology, liturgical studies, and Frankfurt School social theory. He was previously a fellow of the Department of Catholic Studies and the Thomas J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) while earning a master’s degree. Will previously studied at Dallas Theological Seminary, writing a thesis on sacramental and liturgical theology. You can follow his work at williamsipling.com or at @WSipling.
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How should we understand humanitarian NGOs? In Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Shai M. Dromi, a lecturer in sociology at Harvard University, uses insights from cultural sociology to reframe the history of the Red Cross. The book blends a detailed historical analysis with field theory and the strong programme in cultural sociology to show the longstanding influence of key individuals and texts, as well as accounting for influences of nationalism and Christianity. The historical analysis of the Red Cross presents crucial lessons for our current context, as well as providing the basis for comparisons with other approaches to humanitarian interventions. The book is both an excellent example of the strengths of the strong programme, along with a fascinating analysis of a key element of our modern world.
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In her new book, The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place (NYU Press, 2019), Germaine R. Halegoua rethinks everyday interactions that humans have with digital infrastructures, navigation technologies, and social media as we move through the world. Dr. Halegoua draws from five case studies from global and mid-sized cities to illustrate the concept of “re-placing." In this book, Dr. Halegoua shows have different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to create built environment into places with deep meaning and emotional attachments. She argues that people use digital media to create a unique sense of place within rapidly changing urban environments and that a sense of place is integral in understanding the complex relationships humans have with digital media.
In this interview, Dr. Halegoua talks about the multidisciplinary nature of her work as well as the distinct contribution she sees film and media studies providing her in studying the digital, place, place making, and the concept of “re-placing”. Dr. Halegoua shares that her research could be considered multidisciplinary and we agreed that value is added to the body of research when a topic is studies across multiple disciplines. She also shared that film and media studies contributes some unique aspects that other disciplines do not provide.
Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.
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In Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short (Basic Books, 2019), Matthew Gutmann examines how cultural expectations viewing men as violent and sex driven becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Dubious interpretations of the scientific study of the effects of testosterone, comparisons to the animal kingdom and the persistence of sex segregation reinforces ideas about what is natural. The idea that masculinity is the result of biology allows the “boys will be boys” excuse and reinforces patriarchal values harmful to women and setting false limits for male behavior. Presenting a cross-cultural survey Gutmann demonstrates how the variations across culture from Mexico to China contradict notions of a fixed masculinity. Seeing masculinity as a product of culture and malleable allows us to reimagine fathering, who is capable of leadership and offers new possibilities for how men and women will relate to each other.
Matthew Gutmann is professor of anthropology at Brown University.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.
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Less and less Christian demographically, America is now home to an ever-larger number of people who say they identify with no religion at all. These non-Christians have increasingly been demanding their full participation in public life, bringing their arguments all the way to the Supreme Court. The law is on their side, but that doesn't mean that their attempts are not met with suspicion or outright hostility.
The book I’m looking at today is Our Non-Christian Nation: How Atheists, Satanists, Pagans, and Others Are Demanding Their Rightful Place in Public Life, by Jay Wexler. In it, he travels the country to engage the non-Christians who have called on us to maintain our ideals of inclusivity and diversity. With his characteristic sympathy and humor, he introduces us to the Summum and their Seven Aphorisms, a Wiccan priestess who would deck her City Hall with a pagan holiday wreath, and other determined champions of free religious expression. As Wexler reminds us, anyone who cares about pluralism, equality, and fairness should support a public square filled with a variety of religious and nonreligious voices. The stakes are nothing short of long-term social peace.
A Professor at Boston University School of Law, Jay Wexler is also a humorist, short story writer, and novelist. A one-time clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and former lawyer at the US Department of Justice, he has written for National Geographic, The Boston Globe, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Salon, and many other outlets. His non-fiction books include When God Isn't Green (2016) , The Odd Clauses (2011), and Holy Hullabaloos (2009). He joins me today, to talk about Our Non-Christian Nation.
Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.
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Activists have been working to dismantle patriarchal structures since the feminist and civil rights movements of the last century, and yet we continue to struggle with patriarchy today. In their new book, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (Polity, 2018), Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider use psychoanalysis and psychology as frameworks for understanding the vexingly enduring power of this social structure. They offer a cogent and eye-opening theory addressing the fear of loss against which patriarchy aims to protect us, and the consequent impingements on our ability to enter into genuine relationships. In our interview, Carol and Naomi talk about how this book came about and what their ideas offer for our understanding of current political events.
Carol Gilligan is a writer, activist, University Professor at New York University, and the author of In a Different Voice, one of the most influential feminist books of all time.
Naomi Snider is a research fellow at New York University, co-founder of NYU’s Radical Listening Project, and a candidate in psychoanalytic training at the William Alanson White Institute.
Eugenio Duarte is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge).
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Rebgong, in the Northeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau (China’s Qinghai Province), is in the midst of a ‘Battle for Fortune.’ That is, a battle to both accumulate as much fortune, but also a battle to decide which definitions of fortune are going to dominate Tibetan society: a material fortune based in ‘authoritarian capitalism’ or a Buddhist form of ‘counterdevelopment’ based in traditional ideas about language, landscapes, and compassion.
In The Battle for Fortune: State-led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China (Cornell University Press, 2018), Charlene Makley, Professor of anthropology at Reed College, intermixes these tensions while also exploring her own experience attempting to conduct fieldwork immediately before and after a series of demonstrations rocked Tibet in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Using a form of multi-sited, ‘dialogic ethnography’ from linguistic anthropology, Charlene Makley considers Tibetans’ encounters with development projects as a historically situated interpretive politics, in which people negotiate the presence or absence of moral and authoritative persons and their associated jurisdictions and powers. Because most Tibetans view the active presence of deities and other invisible and autochthonous beings as the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes, Makley also takes divine beings as some of the important interlocutors for Tibetans. The Battle for Fortune, therefore challenges readers to grasp the unique reality of Tibetans’ values and fears in the face of their marginalization in China.
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In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change, and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the “death of expertise,” or is the handwringing about an “assault on science” merely the hysterical reaction of threatened elites?
In this new book, The Crisis of Expertise (Polity, 2019), Gil Eyal argues that what needs to be explained is not a one-sided “mistrust of experts” but the two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance on science and expertise, on the one hand, coupled with increased skepticism and dismissal of scientific findings and expert opinion, on the other. The current mistrust of experts is best understood as one more spiral in an on-going, recursive crisis of legitimacy. The “scientization of politics,” of which critics warned in the 1960s, has brought about a politicization of science, and the two processes reinforce one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture.
This timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and to anyone concerned about the political uses of, and attacks on, scientific knowledge and expertise.
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In his majestic and encyclopedic new book Slavery and Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2019), Jonathan A. C. Brown presents a sweeping analysis of Muslim intellectual, political, and social entanglements with slavery, and some of the thorniest conceptual and ethical problems involved in defining and writing about slavery. Self-reflective and bold, Slavery and Islam also offers a remarkable combination of intellectual and social history, anchored in layers of complex yet eminently accessible textual analysis. What makes talking about slavery so difficult? What are the dominant discourses on and attitudes about slavery that have dominated Muslim history? What are some of the major points of overlap and fissure between Western and Muslim understandings of slavery? And how must one confront the ethical and interpretive challenges brought by the presence of slavery in Islam? These are among the questions Brown explores and addresses in this monumental work of scholarship that is sure to spark many conversations and debates, within and outside Islamic Studies.
SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.
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Overseas Vietnamese are estimated to remit 15 billion dollars annually to family that remains in Vietnam. Ivan V. Small moves beyond the numbers to examine how remittances affect sociality and human relations in his book Currencies of Imagination: Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam (Cornell University Press, 2018). Although remittances flow back to Vietnam with relative ease, bodies have more difficulty migrating and tend to remain in place. This condition reorients the gaze towards overseas horizons and opens up imaginative possibilities for labor, expectations about their own country, and desires for physical mobility. Small tracks remittances in Saigon, small coastal towns, and in Southern California, thus producing a transnational ethnography of monetary flows and relations. He notes remittances’ shifting forms from goods, to money, and charitable contributions. Although remittances are often thought of only through economic terms, Small argues that they contribute to ongoing social transformations at individual and social levels.
Ivan V. Small is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University.
Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on race, blackness, and visual representation in Brazil. She is on Twitter @ReighanGillam.
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In this episode we consider vital role of play, and what it does to expand a child’s creativity and resilience.
Urban sociologist Tamara Mose is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, and author of The Playdate: Parents, Children and the New Expectations of Play (NYU Press, 2016). She tells us about the strengths and perils of playdates, and the need for children to have unstructured play.
Educational consultant and teacher, Lucy Crehan, is the author of Cleverlands: The Secrets Behind the Success of the World’s Education Superpowers (Random House, 2017), an exploration of the lessons learned from the world’s top-performing education systems. Her research also highlights the importance of play in the learning process.
In Finland, where math and reading scores are among the highest in the world, “they don’t start education formally until seven-years-old,” says Lucy. Instead of meeting academic targets in kindergarten or first grade, “they’re focusing on a much broader educational and social development before they start formal learning.
Solutions discussed include: The need for diversity during playdates and in children’s lives, and the developmental role played by unsupervised play. The importance of high academic expectations for older children, and the creative role of play during the school year.
Richard Davies and Jim Meigs are the host of the terrific podcast “How Do We Fix It?,” on which they talk to the world’s most creative thinkers about, well, how to fix things. Lots of things. Important ones. Highly recommended. You can find “How Do We Fix It” on Apple Podcasts.
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Sean Jacobs, Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York City. Jacobs is also the founder and editor of the acclaimed Africa is A Country website, a leader His new book Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization, published by Indiana University Press in 2019.
In it, Jacobs makes a potent argument about the role of the media, in its many new and old forms, as an arbiter of belonging and citizenship in our information-saturated age. Using South Africa since the 1994 “transition” from Apartheid to democracy as his case study, Jacobs analysis demonstrates the importance of not only understanding an ever-changing media landscape as part of any study of politics, but also how the media shapes how public goods as made accessible to whom and how.
Media in Postapartheid South Africa is also a study of how the processes and structures of colonialism mix with the discursive tricks of political elites during Apartheid and after 1994, and how the media shapes how South Africans see themselves, in advertising, soap operas and reality shows.
Susan Thomson is associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University.
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Tocqueville and Putnam insist that civil society helps individuals flourish and resist authority, but Daniel C. Mattingly’s decade of research in rural China leads him to conclude that civil society offers officials leverage over citizens that strengthens the state’s coercive capacity. In his book The Art of Political Control in China(Cambridge University Press, 2020), Mattingly argues that civil society can encourage contributions to public goods like roads, schools, and charities, civil associations increase the prestige and authority of local elites who can help insure political compliance. Civil society groups help officials in rural China tamp down protest, requisite land, and enforce mandatory birth quotas. Instead of focusing on oppressive formal institutions such secret police or the military, Mattingly looks to the ways in which civic associations may be used to apply hidden pressure on citizens through informal institutions.
Mattingly’s extensive field work, experiments embedded in face-to-face surveys, and datasets from villages point to three ways in which the state uses civil society to coerce. First, the state collects information and tracks behavior – such that the presence of a temple or lineage associations leads to more land requisitions and few protests. Second, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) coopts local elites by including them in political bodies. These local officials understand which citzens have grievances and are the most likely to mobilize against the state. Last, the state creates infiltrating institutions with street level agents are able to spy, coax, or snitch. This rich book combines detailed qualitative case studies with clear prose. Mattingly provides details for those well-versed in Chinese political systems and translates for political scientists seeking a more nuanced understanding of authoritarianism and civil society.
Mattingly is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University.
Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).
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America has the largest incarcerated population in the world. This staggering and troubling fact has driven a great deal of scholarship. Much of this research has shown that mass incarceration in America is facilitated by systemic racial discrimination, which disproportionately affects African-American and Latinx communities. Only recently have scholars focused on the role of religion in American prisons.
In American Prisons: A Critical Primer on Culture and Conversion to Islam (First Edition Design, 2017), SpearIt, Professor in the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, brings the subject of incarcerated Muslims into focus. The collection of essays synthesizes SpearIt’s legal and academic work on issues of conversion, radicalization, and Muslim prisoner rights. Overall, the collection demonstrates that prisons are a crucial space for understanding the history of Muslims in America. In our conversation we discussed how Muslims have shaped religious life in prisons, the everyday challenges of incarceration, prison as a center for religious conversion, reasons prisoners chose Islam while incarcerated, prison administrators’ and policy makers’ definitions of radicalization, Muslim hip hop in the age of mass incarceration, incarcerated Latinx communities, and strategies to improve the criminal justice system.
Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.
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In her new books, Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?: A Modern Guide to Parenting Digital Teens, Derived from Lessons of the Past (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), Allison Ochs combines experiences from her childhood with her research and expertise on teens and teen culture to write about experiences of teens and parents in navigating smartphones and increasing access to digital spaces. Ochs work examines social media, bullying, porn, gaming, sexting, and media usage, addressing some of the major questions and concerns of parents today. Ochs combines her stories of the past, talking about how being a teenager has in some ways changed, but in others continues to be a difficult space to navigate and fit in. Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s? gives suggestions on how to approach teens about emotional issues that all teens experience with the additional to the availability and usage of digital devices. Her works encourages readers to think about how they talk with teens learning to navigate the digital world.
Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.
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If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.
Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.
Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.
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“Black lives matter before death.” (p.132) In her powerful new book, You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America (University of California Press, 2019), Andrea S. Boyles provides vivid ethnographic work and in-depth interviews from the Ferguson protests. She shares discussions and experiences that illustrate that protestor’s actions are both spontaneous and deliberate, but she also explores how peaceful protesting can become framed in a compromising way for the participants. Boyles leaves readers with important implications and take-aways that include recognizing and paying homage to activists on the ground who are continuing this work today.
This book would be an excellent addition to any upper-level undergraduate or graduate level Sociology course. Although the focus of the book is on protest movements and race, the materials cover a wide variety of Sociological material that would make it an important addition to any course. Any courses or scholars interested in qualitative methods would benefit from reading Boyle’s account of her complex and in-depth methodology.
Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.
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Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies.
In Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves (Routledge, 2017), Alexis Elder develops a robust and rigorous ontology of friendship: what it is, how it functions, what harms it, and how it relates to familiar ethical and philosophical questions about character, value, and well-being. In Part II she applies this ontology to emerging trends in social robotics and human-robot interaction, including robotic companions for lonely seniors, therapeutic robots used to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and companionate robots currently being developed for consumer markets. Elder articulates the moral hazards presented by these robots, while at the same time acknowledging their real and measurable benefits. In the final section she shifts her focus to connections between real people, especially those enabled by social media. Arguing against critics who have charged that these new communication technologies are weakening our social connections, Elder explores ways in which text messaging, video chats, Facebook, and Snapchat are enabling us to develop, sustain, and enrich our friendship in new and meaningful ways.
John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.
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Why and how is fiction important to women? In Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives (Oxford University Press, 2020), Helen Taylor, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Exeter, explores this question to give a detailed and engaging picture of fiction in women’s lives. The book presents women’s narratives about fiction, interpretations of key texts, and perspectives on writers and the publishing industry. As the book makes clear, reading is not just another hobby for women, as it occupies a crucial role in women’s lives. Full of examples and women’s stories of how reading matters, discussions of gender and genre, the role of women as authors, along with analysis of book clubs and literary festivals, the book is essential reading across the humanities, social sciences, and for anyone interested in reading!
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Lindsay Mayka’s new book examines the idea and implementation of participatory institutions, asking the question about when they actually work, and when they do not work, and why this is the case, especially in Latin America. Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America: Reform Coalitions and Institutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 2019) explores, especially in the introductory and concluding chapters, the countries that make up Latin America, but the thrust of the book focuses specifically on Brazil and Colombia. The concept of participatory institutions is tied to considerations of building citizenship within democracies and especially within the institutions that form the governmental structures of a democracy. Mayka’s research looks at particular cases in both Brazil and in Colombia to understand the variables that contributed to success and to see what may have been missing in situations that proved less successful. This is a complex examination of the dynamics that thread through the creation of participatory institutions and how those ideas are then moved from paper to concrete, functioning institutions and processes. Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America examines different cases to assess the different dynamics and components at play in building these institutions, taking the reader through comparative and distinct policy arenas and exploring the differences in citizenship engagement between Brazil and Colombia in these issue areas.
Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
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Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In Re-Engineering Humanity(Cambridge University Press, 2018), Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what's happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better.
John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.
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In this episode, Jana Byars talks with Rachel Chrastil, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and member of the history department at Xavier University, about her newest book, How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children (Oxford University Press, 2019). This book is, at its heart, a history book, exploring the most personal of women’s decisions from the 1500s on. It also makes a stab at providing childless women with a narrative to support their own choices. From the introduction, “Childless women may think that they are alone in this experience, but, in fact, they can draw on a long history of childlessness that extends for centuries. With the exception of the baby boom, widespread childlessness has been a long-standing reality in northwestern European towns and cities from around 1500 onward.” This books attempts the difficult task of marrying scholarship with modern cultural study. The work is excellent, and the conversation fun.
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Safi Bahcall's Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries(St. Martin's Press, 2019) reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs.
Bahcall, a physicist and entrepreneur, shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing new ideas to rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice. Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice.
Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how a new kind of science can help us become the initiators, rather than the victims, of innovative surprise.
Over the past decade, researchers have been applying the tools and techniques of this new science―the science of phase transitions―to understand how birds flock, fish swim, brains work, people vote, diseases erupt, and ecosystems collapse. Loonshots is the first to apply this science to the spread of breakthrough ideas. Bahcall distills these insights into practical lessons creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries can use to change our world.
Along the way, readers will learn what James Bond and Lipitor have in common, what the movie Enigma Game got wrong about WWII, and what really killed Pan Am, Polaroid, and the Qing Dynasty.
Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer are the hosts of the excellent podcast Curiosity Daily. Subscribe to Curiosity Daily here.
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Catherine L. Besteman's book Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Duke University Press, 2016) is an important contribution to our understanding of the process of remaking one’s way of life after war in a new place, and in a new culture. Besteman writes about her ethnographic encounter in the 1980s with Somalis from the village of Banta who she then re-encounters in 2006 in the town of Lewiston, the so-called “Armpit of Maine.” The result is an intimate account of the trajectory of Somali Bantus from their home in the Jubba Valley, their experience flight to refugee camps in neighboring Kenya and their eventual relocation to cities and towns in the United States. Readers also learn that assimilation is not just a one-sided affair, as Besteman narrates how the arrival of Somali Bantus in Lewiston impacts residents there, neighbors and government officials alike. As such, Making Refuge reminds us that resettlement is more than the arrival of refugees; it is also a process by which receiving communities adapt to their foreign neighbors. In other words, Besteman’s work is a study of mutual transformation.
Susan Thomson is associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University.
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How should we understand inequality? In A Sense of Inequality(Roman and Littlefield, 2020), Wendy Bottero, a Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester offers a detailed and challenging new approach to how we conceive of, how we study, and how we might challenge, social inequality. The book contends we need a new approach to the everyday subjective experience of inequality, appreciating people’s constrained resistance to often highly unequal social situations. Whilst never downplaying the reality of inequality, the book challenges social theories that ignore everyday practices in explanations of the persistence of inequality. Empirically detailed, with extensive global examples, as well as theoretically rich, the book is essential reading across the social sciences.
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The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible drawbacks of living in an environment that is constantly collecting data? What important data is ignored when it is not easily translated into 1s and 0s? In his new book, The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, critical data scientist Ben Green, an Affiliate and former Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics, critically examines what it means for a city to be smart enough to fulfill the promises of urbanism, while at the same time taking into account the very real drawbacks of constant data collection, and overreliance on digital technology. To do this, Green examines various case study examples, while offering philosophical and critical histories of the city-related technologies that have led us to this era.
Jasmine McNealy is a scholar of media and technology. She teaches at the University of Florida.
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Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to 'Religion' and Empire in Ancient China (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome’s empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while representing an analytical template for studying other ancient empires.
Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (141–87 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults. He was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader, who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsili reinterprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and noncanonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven Is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial reassessment of “religion” before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic systemic, identitary, and exclusionary notions of the “sacred” to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities.
Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.
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Seven decades of military spending during the cold war and war on terror have created a vast excess of military hardware – what happens to all of this military waste when it has served its purpose and what does it tell us about militarism in American culture? Josh Reno’s Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness (University of California Press, 2019), explores the myriad afterlives of military waste and the people who witness, interpret, manipulate, and reimagine them.
In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, he talks to host Jacob Doherty about how engineers within the military industrial complex conceptualize waste, how artists try to demilitarize surplus air force planes, how near earth orbit has filled up with the debris, and how militarized culture shapes the way we understand mass shootings.
Josh Reno is an associate professor of anthropology at Binghampton University and the author of Waste Away.
Jacob Doherty is a lecturer in the anthropology of development at the University of Edinburgh.
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College sport is a multi-billion dollar industry. The men and women who lead the teams in the most important conferences often make millions of dollars between their coaching salaries and endorsement deals. But what about the athletes themselves? Most get a “free ride” (tuition, food and board), but is that sufficient?
Given that the majority of the athletes in the major sports (read that to be football and men’s basketball) are African American, what type of recompense are they getting for their toil and sweat on the gridiron and the hardcourt? Since the overwhelming majority of these men do not make it to the NFL or the NBA, are they benefiting from being student-athletes, or are they being taken advantage of by schools and universities that make money off of their efforts and provide little in return?
It is important questions such as these that John N. Singer addresses in his book, Race, Sports, and Education: Improving Opportunities and Outcomes for Black Male College Athletes (Harvard Education Press, 2019). By interviewing athletes, Singer gets to the heart of the debate about the value (or not) of collegiate athletics. Many of the subjects interviewed did benefit, but they relate how the machinery of college athletics still continues to exploit its principal workers: African American young men. Singer’s work opens the door to the voices of such individuals, and they have much to say about the current (sorry) state of things, and how the athletes themselves can work (with concerned faculty and administrators) to bring about change.
Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University.
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Gediminas Lankauskas’ new book The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist Lithuania (University of Toronto Press, 2015) is “an ethnography concerned with the ambiguities, paradoxes, ruptures and incongruities of social life brought about by processes of global 'modernization' in a periphery of post-socialist Eastern Europe” (5). In the book, Lankauskas explores Lithuanians’ pursuit of “modernity”, combining archival and ethnographic data. Anthropological theory problematizes both the perceived universal character of Western modernity and the expected, linear development for its achievement. Research in post-socialist countries is an important consideration in these discussions, as people there have already been exposed to more than one modernization projects during a short time span. Lankauskas explores how the multiple modernities which Lithuanians have dreamt of and experienced interact with each other, with “tradition” and with Lithuanianness. The author embeds this discussion in the context of the Lithuanian, urban wedding celebration, a rite of passage in which references to both the past and the future are salient.
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In her new book Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (Routledge, 2019), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier looks up at the sky, and from there she begins her stories about wifi, pigeons, cacti, the lottery and congas. This dense and surprising ethnography considers the everyday lives of Cubans as they navigate, invent, and strategize ways to sustain what is most important to them. The book offers a new account of what has been called the Special Period in Cuba, and it does so through powerful storytelling. The emphasis here is on the ambiguous role of the state, the condition of infrastructures, and the nature of belief and faith and the ongoing transnational connections beyond Cuba. With compelling prose and evocative artwork, this book makes essential intellectual and aesthetic contributions.
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What happens when the digital world meets Sufism? This is the question raised in the exciting new book Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience (OneWorld Academic, 2019) by Robert Rozehnal, a professor of Islamic Studies and South Asian Religions and the founding director of the Center for Global Islamic Studies at Lehigh University. This exhilarating new book explores how the Inayati Order, the oldest Sufi community in the west, under the current leadership of Zia Inayat Khan, utilizes cyber tools in their pedagogical practices, ritual performances, and social engagement. By investigating this one particular American Sufi community’s presence in the digital world (such as on Facebook, webpages, and etc.), Rozehnal highlights how “cyber Sufis” create complex identities both on- and offline, all the while evading any easy categorizations of Sufism, Islam, and new age spirituality. Some of the noted digital transformations unfolding within the Inayati Order are in many ways, not novel, but rather reflective of historical legacies, such as in the case of South Asian Sufism of the Chishtis that influences the Inayati Order. Methodologically, the book is deeply sensitive of and also models how to conduct digital ethnography and highlights the significance of studying digital religions, especially from an Islamic studies perspective. The book is accessible and thus is a great teaching resource for undergraduates, especially for courses on digital religions, ritual studies, media studies, American Islam, and Sufism.
Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca
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Today we are joined by Maria Veri, Associate Professor of Kinesiology at San Francisco State University, and Rita Liberti, Professor of Kinesiology at California State University, East Bay. Together they are the authors of Gridiron Gourmet: Gender and Food at the Football Tailgate (University of Arkansas Press, 2019), one of the most compelling books on sports studies to come out this year.
In our conversation, we discussed the origins of tailgating in the United States, the way that tailgate gender roles changed throughout the 20th century; the interplay between the gender of tailgaters, cooking technologies, and food ways of tailgating; and the future possibilities and current limitations of the tailgating community.
In Gridiron Gourmet, Liberti and Veri trace the long history of American tailgate practices and use that history to unpack tailgating in several sites across the contemporary USA. They base their study on a wide range of sources, including newspaper, cartoon, television shows, cookbooks, and ethnographic and observational research in locations as varied as the Bay Area, Buffalo, and Louisiana. They discover how the practices of tailgating shifted from one emphasizing feminine domesticity in the first half of the 20th century to the valorisation of hyper masculinity in the 1970s.
Their work is organized thematically with chapters on technology and spectacle; gender, class and cooking; race, gender, and class on the black top; and the creation of long-term tailgating communities. Considered together their research shows how tailgating provides men with “culinary cover” to enact traditionally female role such as cook and even nurturer in the shadow of the stadium. Innovative tailgaters further expand their roles through creative reconstruction of masculine identities, even as not all people are able to equally participate in the tailgate lots.
Gridiron Gourmet will appeal to scholars broadly interested in sports studies, American football, food studies, and cultural studies.
Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au.
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The future is a constant focus of anxiety, and we are all familiar with the pressures that come distinctively from automation – the transformation by which tasks formerly assigned to humans come to be performed by machines. These days, the stakes seem to be higher, as technology now seems poised to render nearly all human labor obsolete. What lies in store for us, and for the flourishing and meaning of our lives, once technology has relieved humans of the need to work?
In Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work (Harvard University Press, 2019), John Danaher explores the issues facing us as we confront our own obsolescence. He defends the idea that a workless future is not only possible, but possibly utopian.
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Advertising is everywhere. By some estimates, the average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements each day. Whether we realize it or not, "adcreep"―modern marketing's march to create a world where advertising can be expected anywhere and anytime―has come, transforming not just our purchasing decisions, but our relationships, our sense of self, and the way we navigate all spaces, public and private.
In Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing (Stanford Law Books, 2017), Mark Bartholomew journeys through the curious and sometimes troubling world of modern advertising. Bartholomew exposes an array of marketing techniques that might seem like the stuff of science fiction: neuromarketing, biometric scans, automated online spies, and facial recognition technology, all enlisted to study and stimulate consumer desire. This marriage of advertising and technology has consequences. Businesses wield rich and portable records of consumer preference, delivering advertising tailored to your own idiosyncratic thought processes. They mask their role by using social media to mobilize others, from celebrities to your own relatives, to convey their messages. Guerrilla marketers turn every space into a potential site for a commercial come-on or clandestine market research. Advertisers now know you on a deeper, more intimate level, dramatically tilting the historical balance of power between advertiser and audience.
In this world of ubiquitous commercial appeals, consumers and policymakers are numbed to advertising's growing presence. Drawing on a variety of sources, including psychological experiments, marketing texts, communications theory, and historical examples, Bartholomew reveals the consequences of life in a world of non-stop selling. Adcreep mounts a damning critique of the modern American legal system's failure to stem the flow of invasive advertising into our homes, parks, schools, and digital lives.
John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.
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What is merit? How is it claimed? In her much-awaited book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), Ajantha Subramanian addresses the pertinent question of caste inheritance and privilege in the making of merit and meritocracies. Focusing her attention on the premier institutions of engineering education in India, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Subramanian provides an insightful account of their emergence is post-independence India as a set of distinct and “world class” institutions underwritten by the Indian state. As Subramanian traces the colonial career of technical knowledge as the prehistory of the formation of IITs as well as the global circulation of ‘Brand IIT’, she provides us an account of how the alibis of caste inheritance emerge against graded inequalities. Whether it is through the language of law that only names caste discrimination as the basis of non-achievement while leaving unnamed caste inheritances as the basis of achievement, or through the judicial monikers of ‘general category’ and ‘reserved category’ or better still the ‘middle classness’ of those who claim educational achievement as their only capital, Subramanian’s book unravels the claims to casteless-ness crucial to the discourse on meritocracy in India and in the United States.
Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Tune in to listen to the author talk about the dual value of technical education, the relationships between caste and mobility, the Indian diaspora in the Silicon Valley and the methodological repertoire and dilemmas of (not) talking about caste privilege.
Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University.
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Jennifer Utrata in her book, Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia (Cornell University Press, 2015), investigates what she calls a “quiet revolution” in the Russian family after the fall of the Soviet Union. Based on over 150 interviews with single mothers, non-resident fathers, and dutiful grandmothers, Utrata seeks to dispel many myths that surround single motherhood, namely that a single mother’s life is defined by material struggles. In order to achieve this, Utrata delves into the ways that Russians have come to define motherhood and fatherhood, with the former understood widely in Russian society as essential and powerful and the latter understood as nonessential and weak. Indeed, Utrata demonstrates that men and women have internalized the failure of Russian men to materially support their families. This portrayal of men, in combination with the failed Soviet state which removed many protective measures for mothers, has produced a social discourse about family life in which single mothers are not stigmatized. Utrata’s observations, although rooted in evidence taken from the New Russia, nevertheless have relevance to the larger discussion about the factors that have led to a global rise in single motherhood.
Chelsea Gibson is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Binghamton University. Her research explores the reception of Russian terrorist women in the United States before 1917.
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Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, calculating human labour via the use of big data and people analytics by metrics?
Phoebe Moore's The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts(Routledge, 2017) highlights how,whether it be in insecure ‘gig’ work or office work, such digitalisation is not an inevitable process – nor is it one that necessarily improves working conditions. Indeed, through unique research and empirical data, Moore demonstrates how workplace quantification leads to high turnover rates, workplace rationalisation and worker stress and anxiety, with these issues linked to increased rates of subjective and objective precarity.
Scientific management asked us to be efficient. Now, we are asked to be agile. But what does this mean for the everyday lives we lead?
With a fresh perspective on how technology and the use of technology for management and self-management changes the ‘quantified’, precarious workplace today, The Quantified Self in Precarity will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Science and Technology, Organisation Management, Sociology and Politics.
John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.
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David Pettinicchio has written Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform (Stanford University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto.
In Politics of Empowerment, David Pettinicchio offers a history of the political development of disability rights in the United States. Since the 1920s, policy makers have framed and re-framed the obligations of the federal government to those with disabilities. Over time, disability rights emerged, establishing a set of guarantees for public accommodations. At the same time, disability policies were challenged as too expensive and unfeasible, a new threat to the disability community. Pettinicchio follows these ebbs and flows by integrating sociological and political science theories on policy change, social movements, and interest groups.
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Many major political questions today revolve around questions of human nature; what sort of people we are and what sort of people we're capable of being constitute both the goals and limits of the sort of society we can and ought to try and create. Jason Read's The Politics of Transindividuality (Haymarket Books, 2017) looks at a number of figures who've used trandindividuality to explore the ways in which our social context generates various forms of subjectivity, and how those forms of subjectivity can in turn generate the society they occupy. The book covers a variety of figures in topics, going as far back as Spinoza, Hegel and Marx before turning to contemporary thinkers such as Balibar, Simondon, Virno and Lazzarrato, and interrogates the sort of people we are being made into.
Jason Read is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. In addition toThe Politics of Transindividuality, he is also the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx on the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY, 2003).
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“The things that are happening to North Korea are happening to all of us…they are part of the human community. To say that this is just a problem for North Korea is to say that North Koreans are not part of the human community.” In her new book, Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record (Columbia University Press, 2019), Sandra Fahy gives a thorough and compelling analysis of testimonies and reports on North Korea. Fahy explores the United Nation’s report as well as North Korea’s response to the report. The book also tackles issues of famine and hunger, information control, movement within the country and outside it, in addition to other pertinent issues. The book is full of detailed reporting on the issues but is still written in an accessible way in order to help readers understand more about North Korea and its people.
Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.
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International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of course, in the US and Great Britain where the field initially began to coalesce. Now, Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) makes a massive contribution to the field by opening up a fascinating new vista for scholars of cybernetics, film studies, literature, media studies, science and technology studies, and beyond.
Liu’s meticulously researched and crisply written book takes us from the heady days of China’s “qi gong craze” and notions of the human body as a transparent medium through which “information waves” could pass, through investment and research into “a theory of metasynthetic wisdom” that could lead to a “global human-machine intelligent system,” the evolution of “expert systems” to provide knowledge and guidance in the absence of human experts, the novel deployment of Ross Ashby’s theory of “ultrastability” to describe China’s supposed resistance to modernization, information aesthetics within a new rising tide of advertising and market activity, and much, much more.
All of this combines to a reveal a China after Mao, vigorously employing the theoretical tools of cybernetics to, not only re-configure its socio-political image on a national scale, but to actually craft a new post-socialist subjectivity at the scale of the individual citizen. Illustrating the profound impacts of, and reactions to, these efforts through provocative samplings from Chinese literature, film, and popular culture writ large, Liu manages, in the words of Oxford’s Margaret Hillenbrand to “entirely reconfigure our understanding of the media landscape in 1980’s China."
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Sidharthan Maunaguru’s Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War (University of Washington Press 2019) is an unusual ethnography of the ‘in-betweenness’ and ‘potential’ of marriage in the time of political violence and conflict. Maunaguru sketches for us the journeys and scenes of transnational Sri Lankan Tamil marriage between Sri Lanka, India, the United Kingdom and Canada during the ‘wedding season’ and the lives of those involved in making it happen across time and space. Marriage brokers, relatives and friends, astrologers and priests, wedding photographers and immigration lawyers enact different kinds of possibilities for those seeking to ‘marry for a future’. The fragmented communities from the civil war between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamil militants strive to recreate the communities, rituals and relatedness which is now dispersed across the globe. Maunaguru takes the readers through the offices of the wedding brokers, the guest houses where weddings are celebrated, the archives of colonial law on marriage, the immigration cases and documents of refusal and redress where this striving occurs – first to be united in marriage and then to be reunited as a couple and family.
Listen to Maunaguru talk about living with hope in shadow of conflict, the trouble with the dichotomy between ‘arranged marriage’ and ‘love marriage’ and the authority of the ‘modern wedding album’ in the global immigration regime. This is one of the most significant contributions to the anthropological study of migration, mobility, diaspora and kinship.
Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University.
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In the race for the best book of 2020, Davin Phoenix has placed himself in the lead. Phoenix has written The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. The Anger Gap answers dozens of the most important questions of our time. Throughout the book, Phoenix pushes for more data and more nuanced answers. We know from this book that anger is animating politics, but the ways that anger is expressed and translated into political participation, varies greatly by race, gender, and age.
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From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even warn of a national ‘sperm crisis’ (jingzi weiji).
Ayo Wahlberg book Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China (U California Press, 2018) explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged, shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social configurations that make up China’s restrictive reproductive complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made available to couples who can afford it.
Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.
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With his new book Back to America: Identity, Political Culture, and the Tea Party Movement (University of Nebraska, 2019), Professor William Westermeyer explores the once-powerful Tea Party Movement and the changing nature of political culture in the contemporary United States. Through extended fieldwork with local Tea Party groups, he documents the distinctive cultural world of the Tea Party Movement and the personal journeys that drew participants to it. He identifies feelings of political dislocation and disempowerment among Tea Party members, as well as fears about the perceived decline of the country due to secularization. Westermeyer addresses issues of race within the Tea Party as well, arguing that dismissing the Tea Party as a white supremacist movement misses the complexity of how Tea Party members think about and talk about race. He also considers tensions and differences within and between local Tea Party groups, as well as their varying relationships to the national movement. Ultimately, Westermeyer argues, understanding the Tea Party movement—its popularity and the cultural world it figured—is as crucial today as it was during the Party’s heyday, for while the Tea Party Movement and Trumpism are not the same thing, Westermeyer writes, “as Mark Twain might have said, they sure rhyme.”
Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu.
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Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one. This is the central tenet underlying The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah State University Press 2019) by Andrea Kitta, Associate Professor in the English department at East Carolina University, examines the discourses and metaphors of contagion and contamination in vernacular beliefs and practices across a number of media and forms. Using ethnographic, media, and narrative analysis, chapters discuss the changing representations of vampires and zombies in popular culture, the online discussions of Slenderman in relation to adolescent experiences of bullying, the misogyny embedded in legends about kisses that kill, and the racialized nature of patient-zero narratives that surrounding the spread of things like ebola, and the ways in which the HPV vaccine to homophobia. Issues like tellability and the stigmatized vernacular loom large throughout. Although folklorists will already recognize the social importance of vernacular narrative and belief, The Kiss of Death also shows how medical professionals have often failed to take vernacular forms into account. Through attention to narrative and vernacular belief, folklorists can model new forms of engaging with public health professionals and local communities.
Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet.
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In Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace (Lexington Books, 2019), Joshua Sperber analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and—sometimes unwittingly—discipline workers through writing and posting online reviews. Sperber uses case studies of the websites Yelp and Rate My Professors (RMP), to explore how online reviewing, a popular contemporary hobby, tells us much about the collapse of the barriers separating work and leisure as well as our need for collective purpose and community wherever we can find it. This book explores the economic implications of online reviews, as reviews provide both valuable free content for websites and surveillance of, respectively, restaurant servers and college instructors.
Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digitalin peoples lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.
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In her powerful new book Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation (Cambridge UP, 2018), Zahra Ali presents a detailed and fascinating account of Muslim feminist discourses and politics in modern Iraq. Women and Gender in Iraq represents historical anthropology at its best; it combines careful attention to the historical contexts and contingencies that have shaped feminist politics in Iraq with an intimate ethnography of the major actors and conditions that continue to drive the narrative of feminist politics and horizons in the country. In our conversation, we talked about the formations of urban middle class gender politics and women's political activism in Iraq before and after the Ba’th period, "the communilization of the Iraqi political system" and its impact on women political activism in the country, the pressures and fissures generated by transnational networks of social and political activism, the "NGOization of women's activism" in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the importance of this book in relation to the currently unfolding political developments in Iraq. This lucidly written book, in addition to attracting the interest of a range of scholars, will also make a great text for courses on Islam, gender, Middle East politics and history, feminist thought, sociology, and anthropology.
SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.
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It has become a truism that work has become less secure and more precarious for a widening swath of American workers. Why and how this has happened, and what workers can and should do about it, is the subject of a wide-ranging new book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream became Temporary (Viking, 2018). In Temp, Louis Hyman, Professor of History at the Industrial and Labor Relations School of Cornell University, presents a detailed history of the unraveling of steady work. Hyman acknowledges that secure, lucrative, meaningful work has never been equally available to all Americans, even amidst the prosperity of the post-WWII era. He also argues compellingly that the shift toward privileging shareholders over employees and short-term profit over long-term prosperity was not inevitable, nor is it irreversible. Jobs are less secure today not because the market demanded it but because, starting as early as the 1950s, executives, consultants, and policy makers decided to make them that way. He details the rise of temp agencies and consultancies as well as the broader political, cultural, economic, and technological shifts that fueled and furthered the move toward insecure work. Listen in as I talk with Professor Hyman about his fascinating work and his ideas about what the path forward might look like for American workers.
Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu.
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I met Dr Miriam Driessen at Oxford University where she works at the China Centre. We spoke about her wonderful new book Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). Through unprecedented ethnographic research among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Driessen finds that the hope of sharing China’s success with developing countries soon turns into bitterness, as Chinese workers perceive a lack of support and appreciation from Ethiopian laborers and local institutions. The bitterness is compounded by their position at the margins of Chinese society, suspended as they are between China and Africa and between a poor rural background and a precarious urban future. Workers’ aspirations and predicaments reflect back on a Chinese society in flux as well as China’s shifting place in the world.
I started our conversation asking a short introduction on her background and the origin of the book. We mentioned the influence on her research of the work by C.K. Lee and particularly the book Against the Law. Miriam explained how she ended studying the Ethiopian case and road construction over other sectors. We then moved to her findings on the resistance and agency of African workers and the ‘hopes and bitterness’ of the Chinese workers. We discussed how it is possible to identify different classes among Chinese workers in Ethiopia (as well as in China) and the varieties of migrants, each with different background, ambitions, working conditions and destiny.
We concluded our conversation addressing the controversial topic of China’s presence in Africa and whether this should be defined as neo-colonialism or not. Revealing the intricate and intimate dimensions of these encounters, Driessen conceptualizes how structures of domination and subordination are reshaped on the ground. The book skillfully interrogates micro-level experiences and teases out how China’s involvement in Africa is both similar to and different from historical forms of imperialism.
Miriam also told us about her new project as she is about to move to Ethiopia for another year of fieldwork. Thanks to her bright anthropological skills and her ability to communicate in both Amharic and Chinese, it will be yet another amazing scholarly contribution.
Miriam Driessen is an anthropologist and a writer of literary nonfiction in English and her native Dutch. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the China, Law and Development Project, hosted by the University of Oxford China Centre. Miriam completed a DPhil at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at Oxford (2014/15), and held a fellowship at Peking University (2014–2016). She has also been a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS) and a Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford.
Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.
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What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity.
Architects: Portraits of a Practice (Cornell University Press, 2019) rethinks "creativity," demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.
Prue Chiles is Professor of Architectural Design Research at Newcastle University
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A lot of politicians like to say that there are “two Americas,” but do any of them know what life is really like for the marginalized poor?
We speak with journalist and photographer, Chris Arnade, about the forgotten towns and people of back row America. In 2011, Chris left a high-powered job as a bond trader on Wall Street, hit the road, and spent years documenting the lives of poor people, driving 150 thousand miles around the U.S.
His new book is Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America (Sentinel, 2019). In his many columns in The Guardian, Chris writes about broken social systems that have betrayed poor people on the margins of society. He speaks to us about drug addicts and prostitutes he met, and their faith, resilience and ties to community.
"I think if I had one suggestion to policy people, it would be get out of your bubble," says Chris. "I think when you blame a group of people for their behavior, without addressing the situation they find themselves in, then you are doing it wrong."
In this episode we explore the stark division between elite, globalized "front row kids" in the media and knowledge industries, and most of the poor and working-class people in the back row.
Richard Davies and Jim Meigs are the host of the terrific podcast “How Do We Fix It?,” on which they talk to the world's most creative thinkers about, well, how to fix things. Lots of things. Important ones. Highly recommended. You can find “How Do We Fix It” on Apple Podcasts.
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Free market capitalism has failed women, and even the recent progress that had been made in closing the gender wage gap has leveled off in many rich democracies. Vicky Pryce helps us understand the causes of this ongoing discrimination, the harm it does not just to women and their families but to productivity and economic growth, and what governments can do about it.
Women vs. Capitalism: Why We Can't Have It All in a Free Market Economy (Hurst, 2019) is a fresh and timely reminder that, although the #MeToo movement has been hugely important, empowerment of the mind will not achieve full power for women while there remains economic inequality. Pryce urgently calls for feminists to focus attention on this pressing issue: the pay gap, the glass ceiling, and the obstacles to women working at all. Only with government intervention in the labor market will these long-standing problems finally be conquered.
From the gendered threat of robot labor to the lack of women in economics itself, this is a sharp look at an uncomfortable truth: we will not achieve equality for women in our society without radical changes to Western capitalism.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).
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What happens to families and communities after immigration raids? William D. Lopez answers this question and more in his new book Separated: Family & Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019). Using ethnographic methods and interviews to deep dive into the aftermath of a local immigration raid, Lopez provides the stories of community members affected by the event and how their lives are changed forever after. The book provides a robust background of information regarding policy issues relevant to the current immigration climate, like the REAL ID act, as well as experiences from a myriad of perspectives. Lopez also draws on lessons from the Black Lives Matter movement and provides a rich discussion of his positionality (called "reflexivity" in research methods). Overall, this book provides a powerful testimony to events happening in our communities and neighborhoods and is written to a wide audience.
This book would align well with graduate level courses on policy, families, race and ethnicity, and/or immigration, but would also be accessible to undergraduates. Anyone interested in these topics, inside and outside of higher education, should check this book out.
Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University Michigan. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.
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From Pizzagate to Jeffrey Epstein, conspiracies seem to be more prominent than ever in American political discourse. What was once confined to the pages of supermarket tabloids is now all over our media landscape. Unlike the 9/11 truthers or those who questioned the moon landing, these conspiracies are designed solely to delegitimize a political opponent — rather than in service of finding the truth. As you might imagine, this is problematic for democracy.
Democracy scholars Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum call it “conspiracy without the theory” and unpack the concept in their book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy(Princeton UP, 2019). Russell is the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth. Nancy is the Senator Joseph Clark Research Professor of Ethics in Politics at Harvard.
As you’ll hear, the new conspiricism is a symptom of a larger epistemic polarization that’s happening throughout the U.S. When people no longer agree on a shared set of facts, conspiracies run wild and knowledge-producing institutions like the government, universities, and the media are trusted less than ever.
Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station.
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Iran has one of the planet's highest rates of addiction. Maziyar Ghiabi's Drug Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019) offers a fascinating, new, and nuanced perspective on the control and consumption of substances in Iran. Based on ethnographic and historical research, this fully Open Access book reveals the complex and at times progressive nature of drug policy in Iran. The book showcases drug policy in Iran as well as the everyday lives of users. And, in doing so, Ghiabi argues that the Islamic Republic of Iran's image as an inherently conservative state is not only misplaced and inaccurate, but in part a myth.
Maziyar Ghiabi is a Lecturer at the University of Oxford.
Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.
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With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to promote 'self-knowledge through numbers'.
In The Quantified Self (Polity, 2016), Deborah Lupton critically analyses the social, cultural and political dimensions of contemporary self-tracking and identifies the concepts of selfhood and human embodiment and the value of the data that underpin them.
The book incorporates discussion of the consolations and frustrations of self-tracking, as well as about the proliferating ways in which people's personal data are now used beyond their private rationales. Lupton outlines how the information that is generated through self-tracking is taken up and repurposed for commercial, governmental, managerial and research purposes. In the relationship between personal data practices and big data politics, the implications of self-tracking are becoming ever more crucial.
John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.
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Like is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language, exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. Alexandra D'Arcy's book Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context: Eight hundred years of LIKE (John Benjamins, 2017) explores the various contexts of like, each of which contributes to the reality of contemporary vernaculars: its historical context, its developmental context, its social context, and its ideological context. The final chapter examines the ways in which these contexts overlap and inform current understanding of acquisition, structure, change, and embedding. The volume also features an extensive appendix, containing numerous examples of like in its pragmatic functions from a range of English corpora, both diachronic and synchronic. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, language variation and change, discourse-pragmatics and the interface of these fields with formal linguistic theory.
Carrie Gillon and Megan Figueroa are the hosts of the terrific The Vocal Fries, a podcast about language and linguistic discrimination. You can find it on Apple Podcasts here.
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Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford, 2019), sociologist Victoria Reyes looks at one such space, the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, in the Philippines, to understand how they are contested and imagined by different sets of actors in everyday life. She sees freeport zones, places intended to attract foreign investment through the relaxing of domestic economic laws, as examples of what she calls “global borderlands,” or “a place controlled by foreigners and one where the rules that govern socioeconomic life differ from those outside its walls” (2) (other examples include Acapulco, NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, and any embassy or consulate around the world). They are where two or more legal systems coexist, and where the very notion of state sovereignty gets negotiated on the ground. Through ethnographic and historical-comparative analysis, Reyes shows the origins of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, and looks in-depth at the wide array of contexts—military agreements, family arrangements, intimate encounters, shopping, and workplaces—to reveal these meanings and their underlying mechanisms. The result is a conceptual framework that social science scholars can apply to any space where international political, economic, and cultural tensions emerge.
Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2012) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Contemporary Sociology, Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Finally, he is the director of the MA program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.
However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.
In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.
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Caroline Wanjiku Kihato's Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In-Between City (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) is a book about home and not-home, eloquently told about the hopes and dreams, fears and hardships of migrant women trying to make life and livelihoods in inner city Johannesburg. The result is an honest, raw and poignant ethnography of life “in-between” home and away, urban and rural, local and global, of what mobility means to those who seek the security of home in an unwelcoming place.
Susan Thomson is associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University.
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How does violence against civilians become permissible in wartime? Why do some communities experience violence while others do not? In her new book, Mila Dragojević develops the concept of amoral communities to find an answer to these questions. In Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War (Cornell University Press, 2019), Dragojević studies how, in places where ethnic and political identities become linked, targeted violence against civilians becomes possible through the exclusion of moderates and the production of borders. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in Croatia, as well as Guatemala and Uganda, Dragovević’s book illuminates the patterns make collective violence possible, while also drawing important insights for why violence does not occur, and how it might be prevented.
Jelena Golubović is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Simon Fraser University.
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In Sherlock’s World: Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC’s Sherlock (University of Iowa Press, 2018), Ann K. McClellan explores fan fiction inspired by one of the most-watch BBC series in history. Even after 130 years, Sherlock Holmes is still one of the most popular detectives ever to appear in print and on the screen. The recent BBC series Sherlock, set in modern-day London, brings Sherlock, John Watson, and other characters and events from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s nineteenth century London to a new group of fans. The series has inspired a large fan following across the globe, and with it fan fiction that continues to reimagine the characters beyond their lives in London.
McClellan examines the series through the lenses of fan fiction studies, genre studies, and world building. Grounding the recent series and fandom in the larger historical fandom culture of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s popular detective, McClellan deftly presents how fan culture has evolved throughout the past century. Focusing on fan fiction, Sherlock’s World presents the ways that fans both change the canon as well as establish its position as the source text for their work. McClellan focuses on slash, world building, alternate universe, and real person fiction fan fiction as ways to explore how fans have pushed the boundaries of genre, character, canon, and reality.
Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.
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Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth Bernstein, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College about her newest book, Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom (University of Chicago, 2018). This book provides an overview of feminist discourse on sex trafficking from its earliest incarnations, through its present form, noting the ongoing, and occasionally uneasy partnership between radical feminists and evangelical Christians. This lively discussion, the author explains the capitalist, neo-liberal, often religious groups spearheading the global anti-trafficking movement. We talk about “carceral feminism,” reality tourism, and the corporations who make money through the women they “save.” Bernstein’s book, in her own words, reveals, “the complex intertwining of gender and sexuality with state and metastate interests.”
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Inequality in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past decades -- on that there is agreement. There is less agreement on the causes of that inequality, the consequences of it, and, perhaps least of all, what to do about it. Join us to hear Jonathan Rothwell talk about his new book, A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), which pushes back against some of the conventional wisdom about the sources of inequality to offer his own provocative diagnosis of the problem and proposed remedies for it.
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The impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the country have been widely discussed—but what about the impact on New York City, specifically? In their new anthology, New York After 9/11 (Fordham University Press, 2018), Susan Opotow and Zachary Baron Shemtob examine how life in New York City was drastically altered as examined from various perspectives such as psychology, public health, medicine, architecture, and others. For our interview, Susan Opotow and I discuss the long-term effect of 9/11 on New Yorkers’ lives—how their psyches, relationships, and day-to-day patterns of living were changed for good. We also take up how government entities responded to the tragedy and what can be learned from such responses for informing future disaster-readiness. This interview will be of interest not only for New Yorkers but for anyone interested in the impact of catastrophes on people and places.
Susan Opotow, Ph.D. is a social psychologist and Professor at the City University of New York, where she is a core faculty member of sociology at John Jay College and of psychology at the Graduate Center.
Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge).
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From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.
In Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019), Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.
This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.
Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.
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Man’s best friend, domesticated since prehistoric times, a travelling companion for explorers and artists, thinkers and walkers, equally happy curled up by the fire and bounding through the great outdoors―dogs matter to us because we love them. But is that all there is to the canine’s good-natured voracity and affectionate dependency?
In his new book Dogs (Polity, 2019), Mark Alizart dispenses with the well-worn clichés concerning dogs and their masters, seeing them not as submissive pets but rather as unexpected life coaches, ready to teach us the elusive recipes for contentment and joy. Dogs have faced their fate in life with a certain detachment that is not easy to understand. Unlike other animals in a similar situation, they have not become hardened, nor have they let themselves die a little inside. On the contrary, they seem to have softened. This book is devoted to understanding this miracle, the miracle of the joy of dogs – to understanding it and, if at all possible, to learning how it’s done.
Weaving elegantly and eruditely between historical myth and pop-culture anecdote, between the peculiar views of philosophers and the even more bizarre findings of science, Alizart offers us a surprising new portrait of the dog as thinker―a thinker who may perhaps know the true secret of our humanity.
Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.
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Dana Fisher has written a big new book on the movement to oppose Donald Trump, titled American Resistance: From the Women's March to the Blue Wave (Columbia University Press, 2019). American Resistance follows activists from the streets back to their congressional districts around the country. Fisher analyzes how Resistance groups turned anger into activism and electoral action. Beginning with the first Women’s March in 2017 and following the movement through the 2018 midterm Congressional elections, Fisher shows how the work the Resistance paid off in a wave of Democratic victories. She reveals the lessons for turning grassroots passion into electoral gains, and what comes next.
Fisher is professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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9/11 was an inside job. The Holocaust is a myth promoted to serve Jewish interests. The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School were a false flag operation. Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government.
These are all conspiracy theories. A glance online or at bestseller lists reveals how popular some of them are. Even if there is plenty of evidence to disprove them, people persist in propagating them. Why? In his new book Conspiracy Theories (Polity, 2019), philosopher Quassim Cassam explains how conspiracy theories are different from ordinary theories about conspiracies. He argues that conspiracy theories are forms of propaganda and their function is to promote a political agenda. Although conspiracy theories are sometimes defended on the grounds that they uncover evidence of bad behaviour by political leaders, they do much more harm than good, with some resulting in the deaths of large numbers of people.
There can be no clearer indication that something has gone wrong with our intellectual and political culture than the fact that conspiracy theories have become mainstream. When they are dangerous, we cannot afford to ignore them. At the same time, refuting them by rational argument is difficult because conspiracy theorists discount or reject evidence that disproves their theories. As conspiracy theories are so often smokescreens for political ends, we need to come up with political as well as intellectual responses if we are to have any hope of defeating them.
Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.
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In Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), the geographer Serin Houston complicates Seattle’s liberal and progressive reputation through a close ethnographic study of its urban governance. She sheds light on the institutional classism and racism and market-orientated thinking that pervades the decisions and practices of environmentalism and economic growth in the city. Houston’s finds three major social values--social justice, sustainability, and creativity—pervade policy creation in the city and condition privileges and oppressions.
Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern United States history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltate
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In 2018, Nicolle R. Holliday and Daniel Villarreal published the results of a study they conducted asking people to rank how “black” President Obama sounded when given four different examples of his speech. Dr. Nina Sun Eidsheim’s latest book, The Race of Sound: Listening Timbre and Vocality in African American Music (Duke University Press, 2019) explores the values, stereotypes, and cultural norms that underline such a question. Through examples ranging from black opera singers in the nineteenth century to user’s responses to the vocal synthesis technology called Vocaloid, Eidsheim sheds light on the ways that listeners invest racial and gendered meanings in vocal timbre. Contending that vocal timbre is an even stronger marker for race and gender than physical appearance, Eidsheim explores the consequences of and reasons for the cognitive dissonance caused by of the seeming “mismatch” between the bodies and vocal timbres of African American jazz singer Jimmy Scott and Norwegian child singer and Billie Holiday impersonator, Angelina Jordan. She takes on the significant political and social results of essentialized understandings of race, gender, age, and ethnicity that support cultural constructions of identity and investigates the central role vocal timbre plays in creating and reinforcing those ideas.
Nina Sun Eidsheim is a Professor of Musicology in the Herb Alpert School of Music at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.
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When millions of people took to the streets for the 2017 Women’s Marches, there was an unmistakable air of uprising, a sense that these marches were launching a powerful new movement to resist a dangerous presidency. But the work that protests do often can’t be seen in the moment. It feels empowering to march, and record numbers of Americans have joined anti-Trump demonstrations, but when and why does marching matter? What exactly do protests do, and how do they help movements win?
In How to Read a Protest: The Art of Organizing and Resistance (University of California Press, 2018), organizer and journalist L.A. Kauffman delves into the history of America’s major demonstrations, beginning with the legendary 1963 March on Washington, to reveal the ways protests work and how their character has shifted over time. Using the signs that demonstrators carry as clues to how protests are organized, Kauffman explores the nuanced relationship between the way movements are made and the impact they have. How to Read a Protest sheds new light on the catalytic power of collective action and the decentralized, bottom-up, women-led model for organizing that has transformed what movements look like and what they can accomplish.
Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station.
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Jonathan Rosa's new book Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the emergence of linguistic and ethnoracial categories in the context of Latinidad. The book draws from more than twenty-four months of ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in a Chicago public school, whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican, to analyze the racialization of language and its relationship to issues of power and national identity. It focuses specifically on youth socialization to U.S. Latinidad as a contemporary site of political anxiety, raciolinguistic transformation, and urban inequity.
Rosa's account studies the fashioning of Latinidad in Chicago's highly segregated Near Northwest Side; he links public discourse concerning the rising prominence of U.S. Latinidad to the institutional management and experience of raciolinguistic identities there. Anxieties surrounding Latinx identities push administrators to transform "at risk" Mexican and Puerto Rican students into "young Latino professionals." This institutional effort, which requires students to learn to be and, importantly, sound like themselves in highly studied ways, reveals administrators' attempts to navigate a precarious urban terrain in a city grappling with some of the nation's highest youth homicide, dropout, and teen pregnancy rates. Rosa explores the ingenuity of his research participants' responses to these forms of marginalization through the contestation of political, ethnoracial, and linguistic borders.
Carrie Gillon and Megan Figueroa are the hosts of the terrific The Vocal Fries, a podcast about language and linguistic discrimination. You can find it on Apple Podcasts here.
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As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.
How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.
Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.
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How should we understand work? In What’s Wrong with Work? (Policy Press, 2019), Lynn Pettinger, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, explores how work is organised, interconnected, and what work does. The book offers a history of work, as well as challenging and destabilising taken for granted categories such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ work, foregrounding what is usually taken to be invisible and is deleted. The book covers a range of theoretical territory too, but is written in a clear and accessible style, serving as both a detailed and engaging overview of key issues such as technology and environmental sustainability. The book will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand work!
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Perla Guerrero is the author of Nuevo South: Asians, Latinas/os, and the Remaking of Place (University of Texas Press, 2017). Nuevo South explores the history of an ever diversifying U.S. South by examining the mixed reactions refugees, immigrants, and migrants, from different countries, received in Arkansas in the latter half of the 20th century. Comparing the experiences of Vietnamese, Cuban, and Mexican refugees and migrants, Guerrero demonstrates why we need a more nuanced understanding of how these groups, and others, changed the face of the South and its many regional racial thinking.
Perla Guerrero is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland – College Park. Guerrero studies race and ethnicity, with a focus on Latinas/os/xs and Asian Americans, space and place, immigration, labor, U.S. history, and the U.S. South specifically.
Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.
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Do immersion trips really transform those who participate and how so? In his new book Empathy Beyond US Borders: The Challenges of Transnational Civic Engagement(Cambridge University Press, 2019), Gary J. Adler, Jr. explores this question and more. Using mixed methods, including surveys, interviews, and ethnography, Adler investigates how an immersion travel organization located on the U.S./Mexico border uses particular pedagogy in their programming, as well as the cultural fractures that may occur in between the program and the people attending and participating. This book pushes the reader to think deeper about these types of programs and the power and pitfalls that can occur.
This book would be enjoyed by anyone working in immersion programs, in addition to any non-profits working in the field in general. In addition, Sociologists of culture, stratification, and religion may find the book of particular interest. This would be a great addition to any grad level course that tackles social inequality.
Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.
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In his short book, Theory of the Hashtag (Polity, 2019), Andreas Bernard traces the origins and career of the hashtag. Following the history of the # sign through its origins in the Middle Ages and how it became a common symbol through its placement on American typewriters and touch tone phones. He examines the hashtag’s role in changing how we define and discuss keywords. Focusing on the use of the # on Twitter and Instagram, Bernard looks at how the sign is used in activism and marketing, addressing these different fields and how they apply the hashtag to meet their own needs. In this short volume, Bernard gives insight into the symbol that has changed how we bundle discourse and organize public discussion and debate. Although other texts have talked about the hashtag as a form of social media activism, with his analysis of the history of the symbol and it’s use by marketing and advertising corporation, Bernard forces readers to think about the hashtag’s complexities and the ways in which the use of the symbol is changing the public sphere.
Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.
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The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers(West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).
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What happens when market-oriented policy reforms butt heads with a single-party state’s strictly maintained limits on political freedoms? That question sets the terms for Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in New Saigon (University of California Press, 2016) by Erik Harms, an ethnography of two districts in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, the one a gleaming model of high modernist urban planning and building through party state-endorsed private enterprise, the other a demolition site. Though the residents of both speak of civic duties and advocate for civil rights, in the one these are realized through the manner in which people choose to live, while in the other they are undermined through the ways in which they are dispossessed.
Erik Harms joins us for this New Books in Southeast Asian Studies interview, to talk about detritus and condominiums, civility and civil society, liberalism and neoliberalism, the paradoxes of struggles for rights fought over contested land, the view from a suspension bridge, and the merits of open-access publishing through subvention.
Luxury and Rubble is available for free download here.
Do you have comments about this episode or any other on the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel? Perhaps you have suggestions for authors whom we ought to interview? If so, mail the hosts at nick.cheesman [at] anu.edu.au or p.jory [at] uq.edu.au. We look forward to hearing from you.
Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2019 a visiting researcher at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, and Ritsumeikan University, also in Kyoto.
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In his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country (Stanford University Press 2018), Professor Francesco Duina asks why impoverished Americans espouse such great and abiding love for their country even as they suffer and struggle to get by. By many standards, America’s poor are objectively less well off than the poorest members of most other developed countries—they work longer hours, have lower chances of upward mobility, and experience some of the largest wealth and income gaps relative to the rich. Yet they espouse greater levels of patriotism than poor people nearly anywhere else. To understand this puzzle, Duina talked to poor Americans themselves, in laundromats, homeless shelters, bus stations, public libraries, senior centers, and fast food restaurants. Ultimately he identified three overarching narratives among those he spoke with centered around hope, prosperity, and freedom. He presents compelling statistics alongside extended interview excerpts to explain not only what poor Americans think but why what they think matters, not just for scholars but for the country and its future.
Carrie Lane is Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu.
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What is social network data and what are the issues associated with collecting it? In his new book Gathering Social Network Data (Sage, 2019), jimi adams focuses on the principles necessary for gathering social network data. adams provides the reader with an overview of main concepts, like ties, nodes, and points, so that they can understand the language behind social network data. The book also discusses strategies for sampling and measuring social networks, tackling the question of “how complete is complete” when gathering data and things to consider regarding missing data. In addition, adams explores ethical issues in collecting social network data, including the trickiness of defining who exactly are human subjects when respondents may report on other people.
This book would be easily digested by undergraduates interested in social network and will be an important pillar in any graduate level course on social network data or analysis.
Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.
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What is the future of work? In What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Future of Work? (Sage, 2019), Melanie Simms, a Professor of Work and Employment at the University of Glasgow offers an overview off a vast range of issues associated with work- in a short and accessible book. The book asks us to remember the continuities of problems associated with work, as well as the emerging future trends. The latter include automation, an aging population and pensions, emotional and aesthetic labour, skills, universal basic income, and flexible forms of working. By placing these trends in an appropriate historical setting the book offers lessons about how societies can respond, focusing in particular on rights and regulation, enforcement, and the role of unions and collective action. The book will be essential reading for anyone who works!
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Rita Kesselring’s important book Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2017) seeks to understand the embodied and everyday effects of state-sponsored violence as well the limits of the law to produce social repair. Of particular interest in Kesselring’s theorizing of the relationship between the body and the law as a mechanism to critique South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Dr. Kesselring’s book is an innovative study of the TRC, with a focus on embodiment and the ways in which formal justice institutions do not consider the everyday violence of injustice. Her study illuminates this tension, of people craving justice from institutions that are not designed to deliver it, leading the women of the civil society organization Khulumani to file suit in the United States under alien tort laws.
Kesselring recommends three books to listeners keen to dive deeper into issues of reparation, law and justice after Apartheid in South Africa. They are Charles Abrahams’ Class Action: In Pursuit of a Larger Life (Penguin South Africa, 2019); Fiona Ross’ Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Pluto Press, 2002); and Georg Kries’ Switzerland and South Africa 1948-1994 (Peter Lang Publishers, 2007).
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Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have written an accessible and important book about the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and broader considerations of, essentially, how we got to where we are, in the United States, in regard to race and racism. They also go on to suggest and encourage readers and citizens to move towards a more equal and better future.
Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter (NYU Press, 2019) compiles social science research and data to explain the current situation for white citizens, African-American citizens, Latinx citizens, and citizens of other races in the United States. By laying out, in facts and figures, the very different experiences and daily lives of citizens, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith demonstrate not only the way many individuals live profoundly separate and different lives in the United States, but also to show the many ways in which we, as Americans, speak past each other when we are talking about the fraught issue of race, racism, and racial inequality. Stay Woke provides substantial social science data to buttress the discussion and analysis of race and racism in the United States, and it also has an excellent chapter that provides definitions, context, and understanding of so many of the terms that are used, and often differently conceptualized, by citizens in thinking about race, inequality, and social and political dynamics. The authors also examine the history around structural racism and racial inequality. At the end of each chapter Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith also include other resources that contributed to their research and that extends the substance of each chapter—the resources include podcast, films, documentaries, television shows, websites, books and articles. These resources along with the questions provided for discussion and debate help readers and students think about what they are learning from each section of the book. The final part of the book provides more options for activism while positioning these actions within the American federal system. This book can be used in classes across a variety of disciplines; it is also a text that is accessible and of interest to any citizen who might want to learn more and work towards a better future.
Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
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Why Don′t Women Rule the World?: Understanding Women′s Civic and Political Choices (Sage, 2019) is a comprehensive and useful addition to the established literature on women and politics. This book, authored by four political scientists with a diversity of training and expertise, delves into a broad and extensive overview of the issues that have long surrounded women in civic life and in pursuing positions of power and leadership. J. Cherie Strachan and Lori M. Poloni-Staudinger, Shannon L. Jenkins, Candice D. Ortbals start with an anthropological understanding of how and where sex-specific societal roles were established, leading to the establishment of patriarchal structures and societal norms, and how these structures, norms, expectations, and roles have long kept women out of the public sphere. The thrust of Why Don’t Women Rule the World? is to help students and scholars understand women and politics, analyzing the limits that women have faced, and exploring how and where these limits have been dismantled and where they still remain. While the book is generally focused on women and politics in the United States, it is not limited to this perspective, and ably integrates comparative analyses and global examples of women and politics. The book also provides “ambition activities” at the end of each chapter, allowing readers, especially students, to consider their own capacities within the context of the information and knowledge they are learning about throughout the book. This is an excellent textbook for anyone teaching or working within the field of women and politics, but it is also accessible and useful for general readers who want to learn more about women and politics.
Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
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In No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement (Cornell University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Cullen Dunn describes in a very on point and straight forward way how displacement has become a chronic condition for more than 60 million people.
Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful practice have been blown apart. No Path Home is the engaging result of more than sixteen years of fieldwork in Georgian IDP camps.
Anna Domdey is a post-graduate student in Cultural Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Goettingen, Germany.
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In this episode, we talk with Stephen Hamnett about Planning Singapore: The Experimental City(Routledge, 2019), a book he edited with Belinda Yuen.
Two hundred years ago, Sir Stamford Raffles established the modern settlement of Singapore with the intent of seeing it become ‘a great commercial emporium and fulcrum’. But by the time independence was achieved in 1965, the city faced daunting problems of housing shortage, slums and high unemployment. Since then, Singapore has become one of the richest countries on earth, providing, in Sir Peter Hall’s words, ‘perhaps the most extraordinary case of economic development in the history of the world’. The story of Singapore’s remarkable achievements in the first half century after its independence is now widely known.
Stephen Hamnett is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of South Australia and a Commissioner of the Environment, Resources and Development Court of South Australia. Belinda Yuen is Professorial Research Fellow and Research Director at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design.
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What are the experiences of mixed-race men? In Black Mixed-Race Men: Transatlanticity, Hybridity and 'Post-Racial' Resilience (Emerald Publishing, 2018), Remi Joseph-Salisbury, a Presidential Fellow in Sociology at the University of Manchester, explores the double consciousness of black mixed-race men in America and the UK. Theoretically rich, with detailed empirical case studies, the book explores the everyday life and experiences, as well as the broader social context, of black mixed-race men. The book considers masculinity, friendships, microaggressions, hair, dating, and many other subjects and issues to give a comprehensive look at black mixed-race men’s lives. At a time when discussions of race are prominent in popular and media discourses, the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding race and society, as well as for scholars across social science and the humanities.
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Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter.
Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's book The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019) is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world.
In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”
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Perhaps there’s something in the air in the Middle East, something that elevates spirituality. The Middle East, particularly Israel, is the legendary home of spiritual searching, of prophecy and religious expression. And in this historical birthplace of monotheism – of Judaism and its daughter religions, Christianity and Islam – religious vitality is as vibrant today as ever.
Although traditional forms of religious practice dominate throughout the Middle East, not everyone finds their spiritual needs satisfied by these practices. To some, traditional religious practices just don’t feel genuine. Yearning for authenticity and meaning in their religious lives, they are left frustrated.
We live in what has been called an “age of authenticity,” where the pervasive background belief maintains that individuals have their own particular way of being human - and of seeking transcendence - to which they can be true or untrue.
In Jews In The Age Of Authenticity: Jewish Spiritual Renewal In Israel (Peter Lang, 2016, Rachel Werczberger examined two Israeli communities of spiritual seekers in Israel. Under the guidance of charismatic leadership, these communities tried to effect Jewish spiritual renewal by integrating Jewish tradition – especially Kabbalah and Hasidism – with New Age spirituality. Seeking authenticity, the two communities tried to construct a new Jewish spiritual identity with re-invented rituals. This is their story.
Renee Garfinkel is a clinical psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom
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The political protests of the “Red Shirts” movement in Thailand in April-May 2010 ended in tragedy, with the security forces killing over 90 people and injuring thousands more. Thailand’s political protests have been studied from many different angles, but perhaps the most unusual approach to this subject is to be found in Benjamin Tausig’s book, Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, & Constraint(Oxford University Press, 2019). This book examines the protests and the associated violence from a sound studies perspective. The book is an ethnographic study of the sounds that accompanied the protests: music, rally speeches, sound trucks, mobile phone ringtones, whistle-blowers, hand-clappers, and much more. All these sounds, in Tausig’s words, “pulse with meaning”. A fascinating theoretical argument weaves the different sounds discussed in the book together: that constraints on movement in the political realm are reflected in constraints on movement in the sonic world. And towards the end of the book, in a Bangkok backstreet, Mark Zuckerberg makes an appearance.
An audio version of Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, & Constraint is available here.
Listeners to this episode might also enjoy listening to Tyrell Haberkorn talking about her new book,In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (U. of Wisconsin Press, 2018) or, to Andrew Walker about his book, Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy (U Wisconsin Press, 2012).
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In Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India(University of Washington Press, 2019), anthropologist Dolly Kikon offers a rich account of life in the midst of a landscape defined by multiple overlapping extractive industries and plantation economies, and of the social relations through which a resource frontier comes into being. Examining the foothills at the border between the states of Assam and Nagaland, she describes the histories of tea plantations, oil exploration, and coal mining, the role of mobility and migration, the security apparatuses that has evolved over decades of conflict and militarization, and, most strikingly, the way these forces shape and are manifest in the daily course of life of those inhabiting the region. In this episode of New Books in anthropology, Dolly Kikon and host Jacob Doherty talk about the role of hospitality in constructing resource frontiers, how morom (‘love’) works as an idiom to police ethnic purity and critique the state, the sociality of local markets, and the dreams and fantasies engendered by the carbon economy.
Dolly Kikon is a senior lecturer in anthropology and development studies at the Univerity of Melbourne. She is the author of the book Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (Cambridge, 2019), and, among many others, the article “Fermenting Modernity” (South Asia, 2015).
Jacob Doherty is a lecturer in anthropology of development at the University of Edinburgh and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History.
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In True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the 20th Century (New York University Press, 2017), Emily Skidmore weaves in a vibrant discussion on how trans men created community and crafted their lives in rural America at the turn of the twentieth century. As Skidmore contends, “True Sex reveals not only did trans men at the turn of the twentieth century often chose to live in small towns and rural outposts, but they also often sought to pass as normative men aligning themselves with the values of their chosen communities rather than seeking consolation in the presence of other queer individuals.” Her work contributes and also challenges conventional understandings of LGBT community formation. By incorporating the stories of Harry Gorman, Jack Garland, Frank Dubois, George Green, Ralph Kerwineo, and many more, Skidmore illustrates that local newspapers and residents understood queer embodiment under heteronormativity, whiteness, and acceptability, but this positionality was not always in accordance with national newspapers. And more specifically, Skidmore finds that U.S. involvement in global affairs also influenced the ways in which Americans understood the lived experiences of trans men at the turn of the century. Skidmore has conducted meticulous research and thereby opens a window for understanding the richness that comes from relying on digital advancements for writing LGBT histories. Turn the volume up and listen in to this episode!
Tiffany Jasmin González is a Ph.D. candidate of History at Texas A&M University. Her research centers on the 20th Century US, Latinx history, American politics, social movements, borderlands, and women & gender. Her dissertation, Representation for a Change: Women in Government and the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement in Texas showcases the labor that Latinas conducted for the realignment of the Democratic Party since the 1970s. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez
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Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), by Ashanté M. Reese, examines the ways in which residents of the Deanwood neighborhood navigate the surrounding area to acquire food. Reese examines the historical processes that gave rise to the decrease of supermarkets, general stores, and other locations to purchase food thus constraining options. Residents articulated a commitment to self-reliance in meeting their culinary needs through their strategies for accessing food markets, nostalgia for and memories of the past, practice of connection and community, and belief in personal responsibility. Reese emphasizes the role of structural racism and inequality in generating the conditions of decreased food options while holding in tension residents’ insistence upon relying on their own actions to forge futures of abundance and community. Reese examines a corner store and a community garden as local sites for residents to work towards and articulate responses to their current situation. The term food desert tends to emphasize lack and emptiness, occlude agency, and sideline the historical processes that conditioned such limited food options. Black Food Geographies offers a powerful critique of the food desert by emphasizing the agency of African American people, the forces of racism and inequality, and by showing that these spaces are rich with the lives, hopes, and outlooks of the people who live there.
Ashanté M. Reese is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on race, blackness, and visual representation in Brazil. She is on Twitter @ReighanGillam.
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How have memes changed politics? In Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts(Routledge, 2019), Anastasia Denisova, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Westminster, gives both a history of internet memes as well as an analysis of key case studies of their impact on politics and society. Offering a rich and detailed engagement with Russian and American politics, as well as a nuanced and even-handed assessment of specific and well-known memes. In the current complex political moment the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone seeking to understand how the internet may shape forthcoming elections.
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Cities are extremely complex institutions to understand and are continually changing. A central place to make sense of the complexities of a city is the food that is grown and sold in these areas. Mark Winne, author of Food Town USA: Seven Unlikely Cities that are Changing the Way We Eat (Island Press, 2019) and my guest for this episode, observed the way community and place is constructed in seven different cities across the United States. Winne shares there is a synergistic interaction between food and community. Food is embedded in community and history. In our interview, Winne discusses how this study was shaped from major past events in the communities where these interviews took place. There were some difficult situations Winne gained entrance to and it was only his connections that gained him access to some of this information and some of the areas.
Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University and a Master of Public Administration from Iowa State University. He is currently working on a study focused on how humans are effected by embodiment of historical characters during festivals that celebrate community heritage.
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This is the third of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my individual interviews with Howe and Boyer about their separate volumes, Ecologics and Energopolitics. In this interview, I talk to both authors together about their experiences with collaborative research and writing, and about the wider significance of their scholarship.
Ecologics and Energopolitics follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced. Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.
Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu.
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Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Native Americans. So argues science writer Harriet Washington in A Terrible to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (Little, Brown Spark 2019). While acknowledging IQ is a biased and flawed metric, she contends it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Using copious data and synthesizing a generation of studies, Washington calculates the staggering, population-scale neurological effects of marginalized communities having been forced to live and work in landscapes of waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, asthma, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as drags on cognitive development to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected—and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem.
Harriet A. Washington has been the Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, and a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law. She is the author of Deadly Monopolies, Infectious Madness, and Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.
Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy.
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The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia—still active today.
In The Ethics of Staying: Social Movements and Land Rights Politics in Pakistan (Stanford University Press, 2019), Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.
Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here.
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It is common to see science and religion portrayed as mutually exclusive and warring ways of viewing the world, but is that how actual scientists see it? For that matter, which cultural factors shape the attitudes of scientists toward religion? Could scientists help show us a way to build collaboration between scientific and religious communities, if such collaborations are even possible?
The book we’re looking at today, Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019), aims to answer these questions and more. Scholars Elaine Howard Ecklund, David Johnson, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Kirstin Matthews, Steven Lewis, Robert Thomson Jr, and Di Di collaborated to complete the most comprehensive international study of scientists' attitudes toward religion ever undertaken, surveying more than 20,000 scientists and conducting in-depth interviews with over 600 of them. From this wealth of data, the authors extract the real story of the relationship between science and religion in the lives of scientists around the world. The book makes four key claims: there are more religious scientists then we might think; religion and science overlap in scientific work; scientists––even atheist scientists––see spirituality in science; and finally, the idea that religion and science must conflict is primarily an invention of the West. Throughout, the book couples nationally representative survey data with captivating stories of individual scientists, whose experiences highlight these important themes in the data. Secularity and Science leaves inaccurate assumptions about science and religion behind, offering a new, more nuanced understanding of how science and religion interact and how they can be integrated for the common good.
Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Rice University, as well as founding director of the Religion and Public Life Program there. David Johnson is an assistant professor of higher education leadership at the University of Nevada Reno in the College of Education.
Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.
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American anthropologists consider Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead to be foundational figures, but outside the academy few people know the details of their ideas. In this new volume, Charles King provides a carefully-researched and beautifully-written history of the Boas Circle that everyone will enjoy reading. King covers the period from Boas's birth to the publication of Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, combining the personal and intellectual histories of authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and of course Boas himself. Above all, Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century(Doubleday, 2019) is a reminder of the central ideas of Boasian anthropology: a recognition that gender roles and racial assumptions are cultural constructions and not biological facts, and that we must be willing to question our own comfortable assumptions while the same time recognising the validity of careful scientific work. In an America where racial intolerance is on the rise, it seems likely that the insights of the Boasians will be as relevant in 2020 as they were in 1920, which makes it all the more important to revisit these seminal figures.
In this episode of the podcast Charles talk to host Alex Golub about the romantic and professional drama of the Boasians, the need for a science that can be self-critical without abandoning self-confidence, the continuing legacy of race in the United States, and how and why Charles wrote such a wide-ranging history of anthropology.
Charles King is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University. He is the author of six previous books, including Midnight at the Pera Palace, which received the French Prix du livre de voyage; and Odessa, winner of a National Jewish Book Award.
Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles.
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I spoke with Dr Adem Yavuz Elveren about his book on the economics of military spending; this is a very original theoretical and empirical contribution
Adem Yavuz Elveren is Associate Professor at Fitchburg State University, U.S.A. His research focuses on gender and social security and the effect of military spending on the economy. The Economics of Military Spending offers a comprehensive analysis of the effect of military expenditures on the economy. It is the first book to provide both a theoretical and an empirical investigation of how military spending affects the profit rate, a key indicator of the health of a capitalist economy.
We discussed the origin of the book and its main contribution. I asked the author to define what is the economic effect of military spending and how does it compare today with the past? We then reviewed what economic theory says about military spending. We then focused on military Keynesianism. I asked the author to explain the notion of military-industrial complex; what economists and politicians think about it. We then moved to what does a Marxist perspective add to the study of military spending. We concluded our conversation focusing on the empirical analysis on the nexus of military spending and profit rate.
The book presents a general discussion on the economic models of the nexus of military spending and economic growth, as well as military Keynesianism and the military-industrial complex. Including an account of the Marxist crisis theories, it focuses on military spending as a counteracting factor to the tendency of rate of profit to fall. Using a range of econometric methods and adopting a Marxist perspective, this book provides comprehensive evidence on the effects of military spending on the rate of profit for more than thirty countries. The findings of the book shed light on the complex linkages between military spending and the profit rate by considering the role of countries in the arms trade.
Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.
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This is the second of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my interview with Howe about her volume, Ecologics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work.
Dominic Boyer’s Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019) and its partner volume, Ecologics, by Cymene Howe, follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.
In Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind development in Mexico to think through how the energy and environmental crises of global warming require new approaches to political theory. Following the windmills upstream from farmers’ fields to regional and national capitals and overseas to international investors and green energy corporations, Boyer provides a unique, full picture of the participants, negotiations, and conflicts involved. In doing so, he arrives at a compelling description of how new energic infrastructures are reshaping political experience.
Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.
Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu.
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In The Chicana M(other)work Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolucion (University of Arizona Press, 2019) editors Cecilia Caballero, Yvette Martinez-Vu, Judith Perez-Torres, Michelle Tellez, and Christine Vega, bring together a diverse collective of Women of Color Mother-Scholars to end the silence experienced by Mothers of Color in academia. In this expansive collection of research, testimonios, and essays, the authors share the networks, tools, and strategies created by working-class Women of Color as they confront and overcome societal and institutional barriers to pursuing higher education and advancing in the professorate. Chicana M(other)work, the editors explain, is “care work that includes the care provided in homes, classrooms, communities, and selves.” As such, this labor permeates and informs the praxis performed by Mothers of Color in their overlapping spheres of influence. As part of the larger Chicana M(other)work Project, which includes managing a website, blog, podcast, and engaging in grassroots activism, this anthology serves as a rallying call and platform for Mothers of Color seeking to transform communities, universities, and societal institutions from the bottom-up.
David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the development of multi-ethnic/racial cities, and the evolution of Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the relationship between Latina/o politics and the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. You may follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.
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This is the first of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019). Also listen to my interview with Boyer about his volume, Energopolitics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work.
Cymene Howe’s Ecologics and its partner volume, Energopoltics by Dominic Boyer follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Boyer and Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.
In Ecologics, Howe examines the aborted Mareña Renovables wind park to understand the resistance of indigenous residents to renewable energy development and to analyze the consequences of their exclusion from the decisions that impact their lives. Howe further argues that a full accounting for the dynamics of energy development and its consequences cannot be achieved without including the nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and geophysical forces that shape and are shaped by wind power.
Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.
Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu.
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Being Japan’s largest and most influential new religious organization, Soka Gakkai (Society for the Creation of Value) and Soka Gakkai International (SGI) claims to have 12 million members in 192 countries around the world. Founded in the 1930s by a group of teachers focused on educational reform, Soka Gakkai has since evolved from its grassroot origins as a movement inspired by Nichiren Buddhism to a highly significant source of influence in contemporary Japanese education and politics. In Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution: The Rise of A Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Levi McLaughlin argues that Soka Gakkai comprises a great deal more than Buddhism and is instead best conceived as the product of “twin legacies” – lay Nichiren Buddhism and modern Euro-American humanist imports. Drawing on nearly two decades of archival and non-member fieldwork in the Soka Gakkai communities in Japan, McLaughlin offers a comprehensive study of the new religious movement and suggests a new framework which understands Soka Gakkai as mimetic of the nation-state in which it took place. To demonstrate this argument, McLaughlin traces in his book Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution the history of the movement from intellectual collective to religion and examines their creation of new religious canon, such as Ikeda Daisaku’s The Human Revolution, as well as pedagogy in the movement through standardized education and the Soka Gakkai idea of women as Good Wives, Wise Mothers.
Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. She mainly researches on Buddhism in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. Her research interests also include the role Buddhism plays in modernity, colonialism, and transnational/transregional networks.
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Suzanne Scott’s new book Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (NYU Press, 2019) provides an overview of the convergence culture industry and the world of fandom while examining the role that gender and misogyny has played in understanding who is and is not considered an “authentic” fan. Scott delves into the realm of geek culture and explores how this has evolved as a social identity, and where the gender bifurcation became more acute within this cultural milieu. Fandom, Fan Studies, and fan communities were, for quite some time, female dominated, producing fan fiction, fan art, and female-populated spaces focused around fan engagement. Over the past decade, as fan engagement became much more interactive through social media, there has also been a shift in gender dynamics, as fanboys became more vocally engaged in fan activities, and also became more strident in policing who gets to be a fan, or who is a more authentic fan. Fake Geek Girls examines these shifting structures and communities, while also analyzing where the media industry became involved in these changes and in trying to control and manage fan discourse. The book discusses how the media industry, with production bottom lines always in mind, worked to closely manage intellectual properties and their residual profits, and thus also has had a significant hand in trying to regulate and constrain, in some capacity, fan engagement. Not only does Fake Geek Girls provide a clear and insightful analysis of convergence culture and fandom, but it also highlights the connections and overlaps between the misogyny in contemporary fan culture and the dynamics within the American electorate at large. There is much to be learned from Suzanne Scott’s work from a host of disciplinary perspectives, and with regard to how powerful systems and stakeholders operate within the media-cultural community.
Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
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What is the future, and what is the past, of the African American Museum? In Diversity and Philanthropy at African American Museums: Black Renaissance(Routledge, 2019), Patricia Banks, an associate professor of sociology at Mount Holyoke College, explores the rise of the African American museum and its patrons and philanthropists. Combining sociology of culture with organisational and institutional analysis, the book offers both contemporary and historical analysis of some of the most important cultural institutions in America. Crucially, the book restates the importance of understanding race to sociology of culture, particularly in understanding elites. The book also reveals the changing nature of giving, with younger patrons expecting a different mode of engagement, as well as distinctive political and collecting practices. The book is essential reading across social science and humanities, as well as museum and arts professionals, and anyone interested in contemporary culture.
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Can there be a political science of the Holocaust? Evgeny Finkel, in his new book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust(Princeton University Press, 2017), answers Charles King's question with a resounding yes.
Finkel is interested in a very specific question: What made individual Jews choose from a variety of different strategies in responding to the threat posed by German violence. He lays out several possible strategies for survival, ranging from cooperation and collaboration to coping and compliance to evasion and resistance. Each of these strategies offered very real possibilities and risked very real dangers. Jews in every location adopted some combination of these strategies. But the mix of strategies adopted varied widely from place to place.
Finkel's research helps us understand why specific communities tended to employ a distinctive mix of strategies. He argues that the nature of the prewar environment in which Jews lived--the way local governments treated Jews, the degree of assimilation and interaction between Jews and non-Jews, the historical experiences of violence and oppression, all shaped wartime choices. By doing so, he argues, we remember that Jews had choices (even though ones with significant constraints and with limited possible outcomes) and it is important for us to understand how individuals made these choices.
Beyond this, though, FInkel hopes to show that a political science of the Holocaust is not simply possible, but that it offers new and important answers. It's a important and persuasive claim, one that all researchers should wrestle with and respond to.
Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.
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Shortly after the conclusion of the Women's World Cup earlier this summer, a friend suggested to me that it signaled the long-awaited arrival of soccer as a mainstream sport in the U.S. I thought a second, remembering the commercials around the game and the way the television cameras shot the crowd. Then I responded that I thought it wasn't really the long-awaited arrival of soccer, but the emergence of women's sports into the mainstream of American culture.
This is something of an exaggeration. But the summer of the World Cup is perhaps a perfect time to think through the position of women's sports in global society. Nancy Lough and Andrea N. Geurin do just that in their new edited Routledge Handbook of the Business of Women's Sport (Routledge, 2019). Lough and Guerin bring together forty different authors to survey the status of women's sports in 2019. The essays range from discussions of the history of women's sports to analyses of media representation of women in sports to the economics and management of women's sports. Collectively, it is a remarkable accomplishment. Lough and Guerin offer a comprehensive survey of the field while pointing to future questions and topics of research. The coverage is scholarly, but with an eye to the political and sports culture in which women's sports exists. Anyone interested in understanding the business of women's sports should start here.
Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press, and (with Abigail Perkiss) Changing the Game: Title IX, Gender and Athletics in American Universities, to be published by W. W. Norton in November 2019.
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William Elison's The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai(University of Chicago Press, 2018) explores how slum residents, tribal people, and members of other marginalized groups use religious icons to mark urban spaces in Mumbai. Interestingly, not all of Elison's interview subjects identify as Hindu, which bolsters has argument that sacred space in Mumbai is created by visual and somatic practices performed across religious boundaries. Join as as we discuss Elison's rich fieldwork in the streets, slums, and movie studios of Mumbai.
For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com.
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On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Belinda Stillion Southard (she/hers)--Assoc. Prof. of Communication at the University of Georgia--on the illuminating new book, How to Belong: Women’s Agency in a Transnational World from Penn State University Press (2018). In How to Belong, Dr. Stillion Southard examines the discourse of international women leaders seeking agency for women, the traditional subjects of violence across the global south. From the Liberian Women’s Initiative (LWI) to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to Michelle Bachelet, Stillion Southard argues that the rhetorical choices of these actors embodied their particular transnational context, pushing back against the violent entails of nationalism and citizenship, traditionally conceived. As part of a broader conversation centered on exposing the violence of national citizenship and proposing ways of rejecting that violence, this book seeks to provide answers through the powerful rhetorical practices of resilient and inspiring women who have successfully negotiated what it means to belong, to be included, and to enact change beyond the boundaries of citizenship.
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This episode is the first in a new series, New Books in Interpretive Social Science, which will feature works on interpretive research design and practice alongside recently published exemplary interpretive social scientific studies. To get the ball rolling, the editors of the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods, and co-authors of the first book published in that series, Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (Routledge, 2012), discuss what interpretive methods are, why they matter, and how they became authors and editors of works on interpretive social science. They are Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, professor of political science at the University of Utah, and Dvora Yanow, professor of social science at Wageningen University. Renowned interpretive scholars of politics and public policy respectively, Peri and Dvora bring their wealth of experience as researchers, educators and writers to the microphone for a lively exchange about the what, how and wherefore of interpretive research. Wherever you stand on interpretive modes of inquiry, this is an episode not to be missed: it sets the agenda for interpretive social science and the tone for the series of interviews to follow.
Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and currently a visiting research scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel.
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How can this happen? If there's any question that people interested in genocide ask, it's this one. How can people do this to each other? How can this be possible? What is wrong with this world that this can happen?
Maureen Hiebert's book Constructing Genocide and Mass Violence: Society, Crisis, Identity (Routledge, 2017) offers an answer to this question. Hiebert is a political scientist and approaches the subject through that lens. She reminds us that societies engage in genocide because it offers the most plausible answer to their dilemma, but that many others in the same situation have opted for different solutions. The question, then, is to understand why some governments opt for genocide. Hiebert lays out a framework in which elites reimagine an already existing minority as both fundamentally alien and existentially threatening. It is this sense of existential danger, where the minority group threatens the state by the very fact of its existence, that leads elites to choose genocide.
Hiebert is refreshingly honest in the interview about questions her theory can't answer. And she has important insights about how genocide scholars might help policy makers understand how academic theories apply to them. As such, she is participating in a long discussion amongst scholars and citizens about how to understand genocide.
Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.
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In Non-Humans in Amerindian South America: Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals, and Songs (Berghahn, 2018), eleven researchers bring new ethnographies to bear on anthropological debates on ontology and the anthropocene. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, the book’s editor Juan Javier Rivera Andía talks with host Jacob Doherty about the importance of ethnography for refreshing theoretical conversations, historicizing indigenous cosmologies in the centuries long waves of extractivism that have remade Amerindian worlds, and the persistence of more than human relationships in the face of violence and ecological crisis.
Juan Javier Rivera Andía is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the Americas, the University of Bonn; his research examines rituals and oral tradition among indigenous groups of the Andes of South America, particularly Quechua-speaking people of central and Northern Peruvian highlands.
Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor of Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History.
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The authors of Chains of Finance: How Investment Management is Shaped (Oxford University Press, 2017) make points that professionals already know and that end-investors ought to know: that there are a lot of cooks in the investment kitchen, and that the investment process is materially shaped by the chain of individuals and institutions that go into manufacturing investment products. Advisors, consultants, compliance, sales, portfolio managers, analysts, traders, distributors, custodians---these job titles are just part of that machinery. And they all interact with one another in a variety of ways. Most people operating in a complex industry understand that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that affects the ultimate outcome of the manufacturing process or service generation. Investment management is the same. Chains of Finance is part of a growing literature in the social studies of finance that highlights that investment is an interactive social process, not a cut and dried application of some algorithm, even when it is promoted as a computer-driven, machine only exercise. Please listen to my interview with one of the authors, Philip Grant, here....
Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com
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In Changing Saudi Arabia, Art, Culture and Society in the Kingdom (Lynne Rienner, 2019), Sean Foley offers eye-opening insights into a changing society that is under the international magnifying glass. Using the prism of an exploding arts scene populated by artists, comedians, actors, directors and masters of new media from diverse backgrounds, Foley paints a granular picture of a country that figures prominently in global geopolitics. Breaking with the traditional geopolitical, political and economic paradigm that dominates scholarship and analysis of a kingdom widely viewed as increasingly autocratic and brutal under de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Foley illustrates the margins within which the arts scene seeks to stimulate conversations on often taboo subjects and express criticism by couching it in constructive rather than explicitly critical terms. It involves a balancing act in which artists are forced to be critical and supportive of the regime at the same time. In describing the evolution of the arts scene, Foley also paints a much more layered picture of Prince Mohammed whose reputation as a reformer has been sullied by his crackdown on dissent and the killing in 2018 of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. The evolution of a non-traditional arts scene is as much organic as it is a reflection of the generational transition in the kingdom’s absolute monarchical rule and an instinctive understanding that survival in the 21st century rests on a more complex set of factors than it did in the last century. With his well-written and erudite analysis, Foley has made a significant contribution to the literature and understanding of the dynamics that are changing the kingdom for better or for worse.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.
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A recent UNDP report makes the astonishing claim that India has halved its poverty between 2006 and 2016. Moving us past the rosy picture, Alpa Shah and her co-author's multi-authored, masterful Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st-Century India (Pluto Press, 2017) focuses on those left behind by, and indeed ground down by, India’s much touted growth. Based on intensive fieldwork in multiple locations across India, the book finds that in particular it is India’s ‘untouchables’ (Dalits) and ‘tribals’ (Adivasis) who toil at the bottom of the pyramid in thankless conditions and for little reward. Instead of eradicating inequalities of caste and tribe, the intensification of capitalism has in fact further entrenched them, transforming them into new mechanisms of oppression and accumulation. Analytical rigor paired with lucid prose makes this co-researched and co-authored book indispensable for scholars and citizens concerned with the Global South, inequality, capitalism, economic growth, and social difference.
Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student at Harvard University with interests in agrarian capitalism in rural Rajasthan.
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Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, but government credit has been part of American life since the nation’s founding. Sarah L. Quinn’s new book dissects the political and social development of these policies in American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation (Princeton University Press, 2019). Quinn is associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington.
From the 1780s, when national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, Quinn examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs. American Bonds shows that since the Westward expansion, the U.S. government has used financial markets to manage America’s complex social divides, and politicians and officials across the political spectrum have turned to land sales, home ownership, and credit to provide economic opportunity without the appearance of market intervention or direct wealth redistribution.
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How do women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries? In Women, Inequality and Media Work (Routledge, 2019), Dr Anne O’Brien, lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University, answers this question with a case study of the Irish media industry. Blending a critical engagement with feminist and media theory with a wealth of empirical material, the book looks at the barriers to women in media occupations. The book highlights the subjectivities within media industries that resist and are responsible for these inequalities, ultimately demanding change in both Irish and Global modes of media production. The book is an important and essential read across a range of academic readers, and for anyone interested in why we have the media we have, and how we can change it.
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The 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought the issues of police violence, racial discrimination, and misogyny to the fore. Jaime Alves’s book the Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows that, from the perspective of Black Brazilians, these forces have deep roots in the nation’s history. Alves makes a powerful contribution to urban anthropology, describing the spatial contours of “Brazilian Apartheid” in Sao Paulo, the role of police violence in the constitution of the city’s racial-spatial order, and the ways that national sovereignty is exercised on individual bodies. Richly ethnographic, The Anti-Black City explores these themes through an account of the lives and activism of black residents of Sao Paulo’s favelas. In this episode, Jaime Alves talks with Jacob Doherty about how his background shaped the research leading to the book, about the entanglement of neoliberal moral government through community and the deployment of police terror, and about his conceptual engagements with Afro-pessimist philosophy.
Jaime Alves is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and a research affiliate at the Centro de Estudios Afrodiasporicos at Universidad Icesi, Colombia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin. His work has appeared in the Journal of Black Studies, Antipode, Journal of Latin American Studies, Identities, and Critical Sociology.
Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History.
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Academic discussions of ethnic food have tended to focus on the attitudes of consumers, rather than the creators and producers. In this ground-breaking new book, The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury, 2016), Krishnendu Ray reverses this trend by exploring the culinary world from the perspective of the ethnic restaurateur.
Focusing on New York City, he examines the lived experience, work, memories, and aspirations of immigrants working in the food industry. He shows how migrants become established in new places, creating a taste of home and playing a key role in influencing food cultures as a result of transactions between producers, consumers and commentators.
Based on extensive interviews with immigrant restaurateurs and students, chefs and alumni at the Culinary Institute of America, ethnographic observation at immigrant eateries and haute institutional kitchens as well as historical sources such as the US census, newspaper coverage of restaurants, reviews, menus, recipes, and guidebooks, Ray reveals changing tastes in a major American city between the late 19th and through the 20th century.
Written by one of the most outstanding scholars in the field, The Ethnic Restaurateur is an essential read for students and academics in food studies, culinary arts, sociology, urban studies and indeed anyone interested in popular culture and cooking in the United States.
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How do women -- especially poor and low-income women with histories of childhood sexual trauma and drug addiction -- respond to and deal with an HIV/AIDS diagnosis? How do some manage to not merely rebuild their lives, but remake them entirely? Why do others fail? Join us to talk to Celeste Watkins-Hayes about her book Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality(University of California Press, 2019). You'll hear what she learned from a decade’s long immersion in the lives of these remarkable women, and what lessons that has to offer to politicians, policymakers, and service-providers.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).
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Does a person’s well-being go well beyond how much money they have in their bank account? In Social Poverty: Low-Income Parents and the Struggle for Family and Community Ties (NYU Press, 2019), Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin provides an in-depth picture of the social ties among low-income, unmarried parents, highlighting their often-ignored forms of hardship. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 31 couples who participated in a government-sponsored relationship education program called Family Expectations, Dr. Halpern-Meekin brings necessary attention to the relational and emotional dimensions of socioeconomic disadvantage.
Halpern-Meekin takes an unconventional approach by focusing on social poverty as more than just a derivative of economic poverty, having its own condition, which also perpetuates poverty. In Social Poverty, Halpern-Meekin sheds light on the fundamental place of core socioemotional needs in the lives of humans. The author highlights a new direction for policy and poverty research that can enrich scholars’ understanding of disadvantaged families around the nation.
Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on student outlook on classroom technology.
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The dawn of the new millennium bore witness to an unprecedented transformation of the population in the Southeastern United States as evidenced by Dr. Jennifer A. Jones in her new book The Browning of the New South (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Jones, an Assistant Professor of Sociology as well as Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the evolution of race relations in the face of rapid demographic change as Mexican immigrants move into the traditionally biracial American South. Employing a community-based ethnographic approach, Jones vividly illustrates shifting Southern race relations through the case study of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Browning of the New South contributes to the scholarship on immigration and racial formation by revealing the mechanisms that spur collaboration (rather than division) between Latino immigrants and African Americans in a process that Jones calls “minority linked fate.” Counter to a generally national conception of racial formation, Jones emphasizes its local nature, not simply based on preexisting racial hierarchies or phenotype but instead on personal experiences of discrimination, unique social pressures, and local political dynamics. Ultimately, this study of the newly triracial South has immense implications for the future of U.S. politics and our understanding of how race is made.
Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr.
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Susan Ellison’s Domesticating Democracy: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2018) explores the world of foreign-funded alternate dispute resolution (ADR) organizations working in El Alto, Bolivia. Ellison’s engaging ethnography takes readers into the streets, homes, and workplaces of Alteños who use ADR to avoid state bureaucracies and juridical procedures as well as the conflictólogos who make a living practicing ADR. Ellison captures the nuances of both groups’ relationships to ADR while still noting the disciplinary effects of programs aimed to create stable market conditions. Domesticating Democracy suggests that ADR programs foster a kind of counterinsurgent citizenship, encouraging residents of Bolivia’s most famously rebellious city to be less contentious in their dispute resolution and to resolve conflicts at an interpersonal rather than systemic level. Domesticating Democracy earned an Honorable Mention for the 2018 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing and won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award for outstanding work in the humanities and social sciences. Ellison is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College with extensive experience working in Bolivia.
Elena McGrath is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Carleton College. She is a historian of race, revolution, and natural resources in the Andes.
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How are markets made? In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an assistant professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores the history of the finance industry to understand the role of markets and technologies in contemporary capitalism. The book offers a detailed theoretical engagement with the personalities and technological changes underpinning the modern system of automated finance. It uses the case study of the development of the London Stock Exchange, looking at the social relations embedded in financial markets, before moving to look at the global, American system. Charting the move from trading floors to trading screens, the book considers individuals and broader social systems shaping enabling and constraining behaviour in the world of finance. Overall the book offers a rethinking of the meaning of markets, and is essential reading across social science, history, and management studies.
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As my first guest, I’d would like to introduce Susan Brownell, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri – St Louis, one of the authors of The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics (University of California Press, 2018). During the course of the interview, we covered the subfield of sport anthropology, the marginalization of traditional games, the recent Caster Semenya case, and the contemporary transnationalism of sport.
In The Anthropology of Sport, understandably, the authors enlighten us about what the subfield entails, how anthropology is well suited to dissect the nature of sport, and provide us with ample anecdotes and observations of the world of sport through an ‘anthropological gaze.’ The chapters are structured in a way that cover all the relevant aspects in the study of sport, including history, class, race/ethnicity, sex/gender, nationalism, and globalization. Two important additions to the field of sport studies include a chapter on sport, health, and the environment (3), as well as sport as a cultural performance (6). In the former, which can be taken as a foundational text on the subject, the history of sport medicine and non-Western perspectives on sport and the body are enlightening, with anecdotes about the history of yoga and the Falun Gong movement. In the latter, the performative turn and ritual theory are used to dissect the contemporary global sport mega-event infrastructure. In conclusion, the authors point out that “more than any other form of human activity, sport embodies some of the fundamental questions that anthropology poses” (258), and this book lives up to its lofty title.
Brownell, Besnier, and Carter’s work is a new text in a yet undefined field – it may be the start of something new. If interested in the global nature of sport today, The Anthropology of Sport is a necessary read.
Tom Fabian is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada) and an assistant professor of sport management at St. Francis Xavier University (Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada). His field, broadly, is the sociocultural history of sport, and he focuses on the globalization of folk games. Specifically, he is interested in the safeguarding of folk games through the UNESCO heritagization process, as well as the trend of adopting traditional games as national sports. Secondary research interests include the histories of the Universiade, volleyball, and Hungarian water polo. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at tfabian@uwo.ca.
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Chika Watanabe’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich ethnographic study of the work of a Japanese NGO called the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement. Watanabe’s deep dive into the daily workings of OISCA explores the “moral imagination” of constructing unity based on a distinctly Japanese-marked set of ideals and practices within the confines of an unusual Japanese NGO working for decades in Mynamar. OISCA is intriguing in its own right, with roots in a postwar new religion (Ananaikyō) and connections both to right-wing politics in Japan, and with commitments both to a kind of new Shinto-derived global environmentalism and also to a Japanist/culturalist social reform agenda. Becoming One is especially significant as an object of study given not just the NGO’s unusual pedigree, but also the historical relationship between modern Japan and Burma-Myanmar and the ways in which OISCA forces us to reexamine the politics of international aid and development. Watanabe’s book is attuned to the “muddy” (dorokusai) processes of making people (hitozukuri) and constructing a shared sense of home (furusato) that animate the everyday workings of OISCA, as well as the tensions that these goals create on the ground in the training camps.
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The increasing presence of interracial relationships is often read as an antidote to racism or as an indicator of the decreasing significance of race. In her book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (NYU Press, 2019), Chinyere K. Osuji examines how interracial couples push against, navigate, and often maintain racial boundaries. In-depth interviews with black-white couples in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Los Angeles demonstrate how couples negotiate racial difference with their spouses, within their families, and during public encounters. This comparative study of interracial couples in Brazil and in the United States shows just how race can be constructed differently, while racial hierarchies persist. This book would be of interest to those in fields such as racial and ethnic studies, family and kinship studies, gender studies, and Latin American studies.
Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on race, blackness, and visual representation in Brazil. She is on Twitter @ReighanGillam.
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Eric Blanc is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics(Verso, 2019). Blanc is a former teacher, journalist, and doctoral student in sociology at New York University. He has written for The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin magazine.
Red State Revolt explains the emergence and development of the historic wave of teacher strikes in Arizona, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. Blanc embedded himself into the organizations that helped plan the walkouts, gaining access to internal planning meetings and secret Facebook groups. The result is a rich portrait of the labor movement and contemporary political organizing.
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More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. In American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford University Press, 2019), professor Diana Pasulka examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system she asserts is changing and even supplanting traditional religions.
Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, Pasulka interviewed successful and influential scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thereby disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society believe in UFOs. She argues that widespread belief in aliens is due to a number of factors including their ubiquity in modern media such as The X-Files, which can influence memory, and the believability lent to that media by the search for planets that might support life. American Cosmic explores the intriguing question of how people interpret unexplainable experiences and argues that the media is replacing religion as a cultural authority that offers believers answers about non-human intelligent life.
Diana Walsh Pasulka is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Her research focuses on religion and technology, including supernatural belief and its connections to digital technologies and environments. She is also a history and religion consultant for movies and television, including The Conjuring (from 2013).
Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.
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A pivotal development in the history of psychology was the invention of family systems theory by psychiatrist Murray Bowen. He was among the first to observe families in a naturalistic setting, and his observations informed his ideas about families as ‘systems’ that functioned as ‘emotional units.’ Michael E. Kerr served as Dr. Bowen’s right-hand-man for many years, and he recently published a book showcasing the unique insights offered by family systems theory, entitled Bowen Theory’s Secrets: Revealing the Hidden Life of Families (Norton & Company, 2019). In our interview, Dr. Kerr discusses Murray Bowen’s journey from curious psychiatry resident to household name, and he explains with unique clarity and thoroughness some of the most revolutionary ideas from systems theory. This interview will interest anyone interested in better understanding how families function and the reciprocal influences between individuals and their families.
Michael E. Kerr, M.D. is a psychiatrist who has specialized in the practice of Bowen theory-guided family therapy for over 45 years. He became Emeritus Director of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family in 2011 after succeeding Murray Bowen ad directing the Center for 20 years. He is President of the Bowen Theory Academy in Islesboro, Maine.
Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is also a university psychologist at Florida International University’s Counseling and Psychological Services Center, where he coordinates the eating disorders service. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (Routledge, 2018).
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What is the social role of data? In The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception (Sage, 2019), David Beer, a professor of sociology at the University of York, considers this question by introducing the concept of the data gaze. The book is the third in Beer’s loose trilogy of work on data. It draws on Foucault’s work in The Birth of the Clinic to think through various theoretical and empirical examples of how the data gaze functions. The book considers theories of temporality and acceleration, along with the practices of analysts, engineers, and organisations in data capitalism, with the aim of questioning the objectivity assumed to be inherent in ‘data’. It will be essential reading to anyone seeking to understand contemporary, data, society.
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This volume introduces a new concept to explore the dynamic relationship between folklore and popular culture: the "folkloresque." With "folkloresque," Foster and Tolbert name the product created when popular culture appropriates or reinvents folkloric themes, characters, and images. Such manufactured tropes are traditionally considered outside the purview of academic folklore study, but the folkloresque offers a frame for understanding them that is grounded in the discourse and theory of the discipline. Fantasy fiction, comic books, anime, video games, literature, professional storytelling and comedy, and even popular science writing all commonly incorporate elements from tradition or draw on basic folklore genres to inform their structure. Through three primary modes--integration, portrayal, and parody--the collection offers a set of heuristic tools for analysis of how folklore is increasingly used in these commercial and mass-market contexts. Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert's edited collection The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World (Utah State University Press, 2015) challenges disciplinary and genre boundaries; suggests productive new approaches for interpreting folklore, popular culture, literature, film, and contemporary media; and encourages a rethinking of traditional works and older interpretive paradigms.
Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.
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Almost 30 years ago, following the lead of scholars and thinkers of color and from the global South, anthropologist Faye Harrison and some of her colleagues published Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation. Harrison asked her readers: "How can anthropological knowledge advance the interests of the world’s majority during this period of ongoing crisis and uncertainty?" The lives of many have become even more precarious in the ensuing decades, among them people who have emigrated to the United States in search of greater economic stability.
Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Duke University Press, 2019) responds directly to Harrison's call. The book explores ways in which ethnography, as practiced by people who have historically been objects of ethnographic study, can yield transformative and liberatory results. During former President Obama's second term, immigrant activists Lucía López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García conducted ethnographic research on the effects of the securitization of immigration on the undocumented people of a New Jersey community, in collaboration with Professors Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein of Rutgers University. The work of these four people on the project is captured in their coauthorship of the book.
During their work on the study, Lucía and Mirian frequently were able to educate and exhort those they interviewed to exercise their rights under state and federal law. And the four authors collaborated on and performed in a play based on Mirian's work injury and successful court case. The entire play is available to the reader in the book in both English and Spanish and it is the authors' hope that it will be performed for the education and inspiration of other undocumented people.
The book features illustrations by Peter Quach.
Amy E. Brown, who is a cohost of the Critical Theory channel, is a writer and liberal arts enthusiast. Her professional and academic background includes technical communication, law, and history. She tweets occasionally at @AmyEBrown3 and you can also find her on LinkedIn.
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Throughout the 20th century, especially during and immediately after WWII, New York Jews changed their names at rates considerably higher than any other ethnic group. Representative of the insidious nature of American anti-Semitism, recognizably Jewish names were often barriers for entry into college, employment, and professional advancement. College and job application forms were intentionally used as a means to “control” the Jewish population in a given college or institution. As such, many Jewish families legally changed their names in an effort to thwart pervasive anti-Semitism and discrimination. In A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (New York University Press, 2018), Kirsten Fermaglich nuances the misconceptions and common assumptions made about name-changers and engages in a rich and meticulously researched study examining this trend.
Kirsten Fermaglich is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Michigan State University.
Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
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In Charros: How Mexican Cowboys Are Remapping Race and American Identity (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Laura R. Barraclough tells a surprising story about the urban American West. Barraclough, the Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor in American Studies at Yale University, writes the history of elite Mexican and Mexican-American cowboys – charros – and how charro culture served as a site of contested national identity in the mid twentieth century United States. In Western cities such as Los Angeles, Denver, and San Antonio, Chicano men and women used charro organizations and events as places where one could assert both Mexican and American, as well as middle- and upper-class, identities. Rather than the archetypical image of a white, dusty, cowboy riding alone across a desolate mesa, Charros portrays a Western ranching culture that is more urban, more flamboyant, more crowded, and less white than many Americans may assume.
Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.
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Where in the world do working moms have it best? In her new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press, 2019), Caitlyn Collins explores how women balance motherhood and work across the globe. Using interviews with middle class working mothers in Sweden, East and Western Germany, Italy, and the United States, Collins digs deep into how policies and cultural values shape these women’s lives. This book will be of interest to any working parent and would be a great addition to any sociology of family or sociology of work course.
Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch
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The social history of Turkey across the twentieth century has produced a tension between state governance and religion. This history informs and shapes modern subjects as they try to live out an authentic vision of the present. In Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jeremy F. Walton, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, explores how members of three contemporary Muslim groups, the Nur community, the Gülen movement, and Alevis, articulate religiosity within the Turkish public sphere. His rich ethnographic account takes the reader through Istanbul and Ankara to see how Islam is negotiated through religious classes, public conferences, charitable services, museum spaces, and the recollection of history. In our conversation we discuss twentieth century Turkish history, Muslim non-governmental organizations, religious gatherings, museum exhibits, Rumi, the Turkish state’s relationship to Islam and secularism, interreligious tolerance and pluralism, nostalgia for Ottoman heritage, the ideal of “religious freedom,” and the recent shift in political and religious practices.
Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.
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In her innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II–era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms.
Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and pleasure in modern sexual life.
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American society is deeply divided at this moment—not just on values and opinions but on basic perceptions of reality. In their latest book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Morgan Marietta and David Barker attribute such division to the natural human tendency towards having different versions of reality. They introduce the concept of ‘dueling fact perceptions’ based on years of research, and for our interview, Morgan Marietta explains how they arrived at such conclusions and their implications for our country’s future. We have a sobering conversation about how fact-checking and greater education will not fix the problem of dueling fact perceptions, and we address the importance of trust—in our politicians, media, and other information sources—can ultimately shape how we use information to advance our beliefs. This interview is essential for those seeking to making sense of our current political climate and will provide realistic but thoughtful answers to many of your persistent questions about it.
Morgan Marietta is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he studies the political consequences of belief. His prior books include The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Influence, and A Citizen’s Guide to American Ideology: Conservatism and Liberalism in Contemporary Politics. He and co-author David Barker write the "Inconvenient Facts" blog at Psychology Today.
Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is also a university psychologist at Florida International University’s Counseling and Psychological Services Center, where he coordinates the eating disorders service. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (Routledge, 2018).
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In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Duke University Press 2018), Dorinne Kondo brings together critical race studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis and her critically keen awareness of the politics and potential of theatre production and reception to ask how theatre ‘makes, unmakes and remakes’ race. Building on over 20 years of experience as an ethnographer, dramaturg and playwriter, Kondo exposes the racial structures that are mutually constitutive of the theatre specifically, and the arts more generally. So doing, she attends to the economic forces and representational practices that have not only enabled the affective violence through which the theatre so often operates; she also draws attention to how these forces and practices can produce the grounds for theatre’s restorative and transformative potential.
Dorinne Kondo is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on cultural theory, performance, aesthetics and politics, cross-racial identification/ multiracial collaboration, modes of embodiment, ethnography and genre, the integration of "creative" and "critical" writing.
She is also the author of About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, and Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace.
Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these relate to formations of nation, gender, sexuality and religion. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology form Oxford University, and is the author of Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017).
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In recent years, Confucius Institutes—cultural and language programs funded by the Chinese government—have garnered attention in the United States due to a debate over whether they threaten free speech and academic freedom. In addition to this, much of the scholarly work on Confucius Institutes analyzes policy documents. Anthropologist Jennifer Hubbert seeks to ask more complex questions and in-depth research in her new book China in the World: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Power, and Globalization (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). She considers what China’s soft power efforts look like in implementation, in addition to policy, and what this can tell us about China’s changing place in the world. Over the course of five years (2011-2016), Hubbert conducted transnational, multiscalar, multisited ethnographic and archival research in Confucius Institutes in the United States and on Confucius Institute-sponsored travel-study trips to China. She observed and interviewed students, parents, teachers, and administrators about their perceptions of Confucius Institutes and the Chinese state. Ultimately, she concludes that the soft power of the Confucius Institutes is intended to present China as a modern, globalized country not only for Americans and other international audiences but also to a domestic audience in China.
Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu and on Twitter (@LDickmeyer).
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On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an almost revolutionary work of theory and critique: Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019). Ornamentalism offers arguably the first sustained theory of the yellow woman and, beyond that, a nuanced reflection on the way in which women of color are subjects-turned-into-things but that not every woman of color becomes-thing in the same way. Cheng insists on the term ornamentalism as both a lever of critique and of emancipation, resisting the easy distinction between person/thing and skin/substance to investigate how a theory of radical style offers ontological possibilities for thriving among injury.
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Is alcohol a universal feature of human society? Why is problematic in some countries and not others? How was alcohol helped build the modern state? These are just a few of the questions that sociologist John O'Brien addresses in States of Intoxication: The Place of Alcohol in Civilisation(Routledge, 2018). His book offers a broad and diverse perspective on alcohol use and suggests that booze has been an important element in developing communities and building up tax bases. In the era of "superpubs" and microbreweries, O'Brien lends insight into contemporary discussions around alcohol.
Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.
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On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Melanie Madeiros (she/hers)--Asst. Prof. of Cultural Anthropology at SUNY Geneseo--on the cutting-edge research presented in Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil: Black Women’s Perspectives on Love, Respect, and Kinship from Rutgers University Press (2018). We are joined as well by a third colleague, linguistic anthropologist Dr. Jennifer Guzman (she/hers), for a fascinating discussion of modernismo, nervos, conviver, and telenovelas in Brogodo, Bahia, Brazil as told by the women with whom Dr. Madeiros has built relationships over the past decade. Using an intersectional approach, Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil explores rural, working-class, Black Brazilian women’s perceptions and experiences of courtship, marriage and divorce. In this book, women’s narratives of marriage dissolution demonstrate the ways in which changing gender roles and marriage expectations associated with modernization and globalization influence the intimate lives and the health and well being of women in Northeast Brazil. Dr. Medeiros explores the women’s rich stories of desire, love, respect, suffering, strength, and transformation.
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In her book Solidarity in Practice: Moral Protest and the US Security State (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Chandra Russo explores how solidarity activists contest the practices of the US security state both within its borders and abroad. Russo follows three social movement organizations (The School of the Americas Watch, the Migrant Trail Walk, and Witness Against Torture) that combine high-risk tactics with the practice of solidarity witnessing. She explores how, through their involvement, solidarity activists put into question Human Rights violations perpetrated by the United States government while going themselves through a process of self-transformation. This book should be of interest for those wanting to know more about how some Americans question the atrocities that their government does, as well as scholars interested in the complexities of solidarity mobilization.
Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.
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In her stunning new book, Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times (University of California Press, 2019), Amira Mittermaier, Associate Professor of Religion and Anthropology at the University of Toronto, conducts a dazzling and at many times moving ethnography of an Islamic economy of giving and charity in Egypt. By presenting an intimate portrait of a range of actors and organizations, who both give and receive charity, Mittermaier highlights often unrecognized political practices and horizons that disrupt dominant liberal secular logics of humanitarian charity. In our conversation, we discussed a range of topics including the productive tension between revolutionary politics and everyday practices of giving, competing visions of the “poor” and of the interaction of charity and justice, intersections of social and divine justice, the relationship between eschatology, pious practices of charity, and the materiality of the everyday, and the political possibilities offered by “Giving to God” in a moment in Egypt marked by the rise and dominance of neoliberal authoritarianism. This splendidly written book will be widely discussed and debated by scholars of Islam, anthropology, religion, and the Middle East; it will also make a terrific text for courses on these and other topics.
SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.
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Joseph C. Sternberg's book The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future (PublicAffairs, 2019) is an analysis of the economic condition of the Millennial generation, which was as cohort of people born between 1981 and 1996. This generation has experienced much trauma in the last decade, especially as a result of the Great Recession of 2008. Sternberg reviews the economic health of this generation, covering issues such as home ownership rates, higher education, employment prospects, and consumption patterns. He finds that although Millennials have many choices that make them the envy of much of the rest of the world, in the American context this generation suffers from bleaker prospects for wealth accumulation and security than any prior generation since the end of World War II. Sternberg reviews the intentional and unintentional consequences of public policies supported by the Baby Boomer generation, such as investment, monetary, and housing policies at the national level. He also reviews the lessons Europe and Japan have for how to respond to the political and economic problems presented by the demographic changes occurring as the Baby Boomers retire.
Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.
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The Chinese landscape is dramatically changing. Modernization has drastically altered Chinese infrastructure, urban zones, waterways, and even rural spaces. These changes have also affected Chinese burial practices and the resting places of the deceased. In The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2019), collaborators explore the various histories of the modern loss of Chinese burial space. The edited project is part of Stanford University Press’ commitment to Digital Humanities, which are cutting edge peer-reviewed born digital volumes. Contributors combine narrative analysis, visualized data, and dynamic maps with exceptional ease to introduce readers to infant burial practices in late imperial China, grave and cemetery relocation in Shanghai from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and grave relocation during the contemporary period. In my conversation with editor Thomas S. Mullaney, Professor at Stanford University, we discuss common Chinese burial practices, the logics behind grave relocation, using historical data with interactive maps, the pre-history of absence, the importance of Stanford University Press and its digital humanities efforts, and the relationship between researcher and developers.
Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.
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Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future. If we are to have healthy downtowns, we need to understand what downtown is all about; how and why some American downtowns never stopped thriving (such as San Jose and Houston), some have been in decline for half a century (including Detroit and St. Louis), and still others are resurging after temporary decline (many, including Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles). The downtowns that are prospering are those that more easily adapt to changing needs and lifestyles.
In The Heart of the City: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century (Island Press, 2019), distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts—of both successes and failures—of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns.
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In Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory (New York University Press, 2018), Long T. Bui examines the complicated relationship between the Vietnamese diasporic community and its home country, the former South Vietnam. Central to Bui’s argument is his use of Richard Nixon’s definition of Vietnamization as a way to frame the postwar afterlives of South Vietnamese refugees, their descendants, and those remaining in Vietnam today. While Nixon used this term as a military strategy to pull the U.S. military out of Vietnam, Vietnamization for Bui is a way to highlight how this Cold War term continues to function as an ideology and a discourse in the Vietnamese American community. Bui utilizes an interdisciplinary approach that includes discourse analysis, interviews, archival research, and personal narrative, in tackling questions of memory, loss, national identity, sovereignty, and agency. This book is both a critical investigation and a tribute to the refugee community that is a legacy of the Vietnam War.
Laura Ha Reizman is a PhD candidate in Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA.
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