New Books in Sociology

Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants are moved through immigration court. With a national backlog surpassing one million cases, court hearings take years and most migrants will eventually be ordered deported. The Slow Violence of Immigration Court: Procedural Justice on Trial (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Maya Pagni Barak sheds light on the experiences of migrants from the “Northern Triangle” (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) as they navigate legal processes, deportation proceedings, immigration court, and the immigration system writ large. Grounded in the illuminating stories of people facing deportation, the family members who support them, and the attorneys who defend them, The Slow Violence of Immigration Court invites readers to question matters of fairness and justice and the fear of living with the threat of deportation. Although the spectacle of violence created by family separation and deportation is perceived as extreme and unprecedented, these long legal proceedings are masked in the mundane and are often overlooked, ignored, and excused. In an urgent call to action, Dr. Barak deftly demonstrates that deportation and family separation are not abhorrent anomalies, but are a routine, slow form of violence at the heart of the U.S. immigration system. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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 emergence of the popular music industry in the early twentieth century not only drove a wedge between music production and consumption, it also underscored a wider separation of labor from leisure and of the workplace from the domestic sphere. These were changes characteristic of an industrial society where pleasure was to be sought outside of work, but these categories have grown increasingly porous today. As the working day extends into the home or becomes indistinguishable from leisure time, so the role and meaning of music in everyday life changes too. In arguing that the experience of popular music is partly conditioned by its segregation from work and its restriction to the time and space of leisure—the evening, the weekend, the dancehall— Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (Goldsmiths Press, 2024) shows how changes to work as it grows increasingly precarious, part-time, and temporary in recent decades, are related to transformations in popular music. Connecting contemporary changes in work and the economy to tendencies in popular music, Take This Hammer shows how song-form has both reflected developments in contemporary capitalism while also intimating a horizon beyond it. From online streaming and the extension of the working day to gentrification, unemployment and the emergence of trap rap, from ecological crisis and field recording to automation and trends in dance music, by exploring the intersections of work and song in the current era, not only do we gain a new understanding of contemporary musical culture, we also see how music might gesture towards a horizon beyond the alienating experience of work in capitalism itself. Paul Rekret is Lecturer in Media Industries in the School of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster, UK. 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 the Language on the Move Podcast is part of the Life in a New Language series. Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book. Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Loy Lising, with a focus on low-skilled migrants and how their experiences are shaped by monolingual ideologies. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go 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 Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease. Dr. Krause shows that scholars in the social sciences and humanities also draw on some cases more than others, selecting research objects influenced by a range of ideological but also mundane factors, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities. Some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways: The French Revolution has profoundly influenced our concepts of revolution, of citizenship, and of political modernity, just like studies of doctors have set the agenda for research on the professions. Based on an extensive analysis of the role of model cases in different fields, Dr. Krause argues that they can be useful for scholarly communities if they are acknowledged and reflected as particular objects; she also highlights the importance of research strategies based on neglected research objects and neglected combinations of research objects and scholarly concerns. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war. The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (FSG, 2024) reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City's tenements and reaching into the United States. Run and inhabited by Mexico's most marginalized populations, they are controversial for their illegality and their use of coercion. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them--the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war. This is the first book ever written on the anexos. Garcia, who spent a decade conducting anthropological fieldwork in Mexico City, draws readers into their many dimensions, casting light on the mothers and their children who are entangled in this hidden world. Following the stories of its denizens, she asks what these places are, why they exist, and what they reflect about Mexico and the wider world. With extraordinary empathy and a sharp eye for detail, Garcia attends to the lives that the anexos both sustain and erode, wrestling with the question of why mothers turn to them as a site of refuge even as they reproduce violence. Woven into these portraits is Garcia's own powerful story of family, childhood, homelessness, and drugs--a blend of ethnography and memoir converging on a set of fundamental questions about the many forms and meanings that violence, love, care, family, and hope may take. Infused with profound ethnographic richness and moral urgency, The Way That Leads Among the Lost is a stunning work of narrative nonfiction, a book that will leave a deep mark on readers. 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 left millions grieving their loved ones without the consolation of traditional ways of mourning. Patients were admitted to hospitals and never seen again. Social distancing often meant conventional funerals could not be held. Religious communities of all kinds were disrupted at the exact moment mourners turned to them for support. These unprecedented circumstances caused dramatic transformations of not only communal rituals but also how people make meaning after the losses of loved ones. Shattered Grief: How the Pandemic Transformed the Spirituality of Death in America (Columbia UP, 2024) is an intimate portrait of how COVID-19 changed the ways Americans approach, understand, and mourn death. Based on extensive interviews incorporating a multitude of perspectives—including funerary and medical professionals, religious leaders, grief counselors, death doulas, spirit mediums, community organizers, and those who lost loved ones—it provides a snapshot of how people renegotiated spiritual and religious traditions, worldviews, identities, and communities during the deadliest pandemic in a century. Through these diverse and powerful voices, Natasha L. Mikles tells the story of spiritual innovation, religious change, and the struggle to achieve personal and national self-understanding against the backdrop of mass casualties. Compelling and accessible, Shattered Grief is an essential book for a range of readers interested in how we make sense of death and dying. Natasha L. Mikles is an assistant professor at Texas State University. Her research interests revolve around lived interpretations of death, mourning, and the afterlife in diverse religious traditions ranging from contemporary American spirituality to nineteenth-century Tibetan Buddhism. She has written on topics like the Tibetan Gesar epics, contemporary Tibetan religion, spiritual mediums during the pandemic, and pedagogical reflections on teaching religion. She is also the editor of Journal of Gods and Monsters, and the co-editor of The Religion Matters Reader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Any serious consideration of Asian American life forces us to reframe the way we talk about racism and antiracism. There are two contemporary approaches to antiracist theory and practice. The first emphasizes racial identity to the exclusion of political economy, making racialized life in America illegible. This approach's prevalence, in the academy and beyond, now rises to the level of established doctrine. The second approach views racial identity as the function of a particular political economy--what is called "racial capitalism--and therefore analytically subordinates racial identity to political economy. In Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (Oxford UP, 2021), Jonathan Tran develops arguments in favor of this second approach. He does so by means of an extended analysis of two case studies: a Chinese migrant settlement in the Mississippi Delta (1868-1969) and the Redeemer Community Church in the Bayview/Hunters Point section of San Francisco (1969-present). While his analysis is focused on particular groups and persons, he uses it to examine more broadly racial capitalism's processes and commitments at the sites of their structural and systemic unfolding. In pursuing a research agenda that pushes beyond the narrow confines of racial identity, Tran reaches back to trusted modes of analysis that have been obscured by the prevailing antiracist orthodoxy and proposes reframing antiracism in terms of a theologically salient account of 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

Around the turn of the millennium, Pentecostal churches began to pepper majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka, setting off a sense of alarm among Buddhists who saw Christianity as a neocolonial threat to the nation. Rumors of foul play in the death of a Buddhist monk, as well as allegations of proselytizing in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and during the final stages of civil war, spurred nationalist anxieties, moral panics, and even episodes of violence by Buddhists against Christians suspected of facilitating “unethical” conversions. Through vivid ethnography and keen observations of media events, Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia UP, 2023) illuminates disputes over religious freedom and pluralism amid the rise of charismatic Christianity in Sri Lanka. Neena Mahadev explores the dueling efforts of Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists to reshape Sri Lanka’s religious, economic, and political landscapes. She considers theological and political impasses between Buddhism’s vast timescales of karma and Christians’ promises of the immediacy of their God’s salvific grace. While Christian missions spread “the Good News,” subsets of Buddhists produced bad press, sting operations, and disparaging media to impede born-again churches from taking root. In gripping detail, Mahadev recounts how modernist and traditionalist Theravāda Buddhists, Pentecostal newcomers, long-established Christian denominations, local deity and spirit cults, and the innovations of mavericks intermingle in a multireligious public sphere. Even amid trenchant conflicts, Karma and Grace demonstrates that social proximity between rivals is also conducive to religious experimentation and the ambiguities of identity that allow Sri Lankans to live with difference. Neena Mahadev is an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale-NUS College and holds a courtesy appointment with the National University of Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Despite a mass expansion of the higher education sector in the UK since the 1960s, young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds remain less likely to enter university than their advantaged counterparts. Drawing on unique new research gathered from three contrasting secondary schools in England, including interviews with children from three year groups and careers advisors, Schooling Inequality: Aspirations, Opportunities and the Reproduction of Social Class (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jessie Abrahams explores the aspirations, opportunities and experiences of young people from different social-class backgrounds against a backdrop of continuing inequalities in education. By focusing both on the stories of young people and the schools themselves, the book sheds light on the institutional structures and practices that render young people more, or less, able to pursue their aspirations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Movements that take issue with conventional understandings of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability, have become increasingly visible. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with participants, Dr. Catherine Tan investigates two autism-focused movements, shedding new light on how members contest expert authority. Examining their separate struggles to gain legitimacy and represent autistic people, she develops a new account of the importance of social movements as spaces for constructing knowledge that aims to challenge dominant frameworks. Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge (Columbia University Press, 2024) examines the autistic rights and alternative biomedical movements, which reimagine autism in different and conflicting ways: as a difference to be accepted or as a sickness to treat. Both, however, provide a window into how ideas that conflict with dominant beliefs develop, take hold, and persist. The autistic rights movement is composed primarily of autistic adults who contend that autism is a natural human variation, not a disorder, and advocate for social and cultural inclusion and policy changes. The alternative biomedical movement, in contrast, is dominated by parents and practitioners who believe in the disproven idea that vaccines trigger autism and seek to reverse it with scientifically unsupported treatments. Both movements position themselves in opposition to researchers, professionals, and parents outside their communities. Spaces on the Spectrum offers timely insights into the roles of shared identity and communal networks in movements that question scientific and medical authority. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux? Through the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of southeast Chicago and a shuttered mining community in Iron County, Wisconsin, Amanda McMillan Lequieu traces the power and shifting meanings of the notion of home for people who live in troubled places. Building from on-the-ground observations of community life, archival research, and interviews with long-term residents, she shows how inhabitants of deindustrialized communities balance material constraints with deeply felt identities. McMillan Lequieu maps how the concept of home has been constructed and the ways it has been reshaped as these communities have changed. She considers how long-term residents navigate the tensions around belonging and making ends meet long after the departure of their community’s founding industry. In Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt (Columbia UP, 2024), Amanda McMillan Lequieu links the past and the present, rural and urban, to shed new light on life in postindustrial communities. Beyond a story of Midwestern deindustrialization, this timely book provides broader insight into the capacious idea of home—how and where it is made, threatened, and renegotiated in a world fraught with change. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a 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 in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging (Beacon Press, 2023) is an unflinching look at the challenges and misunderstandings mixed-race people face in family spaces and intimate relationships across their varying cultural backgrounds. In this emotionally powerful and intellectually provocative blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and theory, scholar and essayist Samira Mehta reflects on many facets of being multiracial. Born to a white American and a South Asian immigrant, Mehta grew up feeling more comfortable with her mother’s family than her father’s—they never carried on conversations in languages she couldn’t understand or blamed her for finding the food was too spicy. In adulthood, she realized that some of her Indian family’s assumptions about the world had become an indelible part of her—and that her well-intentioned parents had not known how to prepare her for a world that would see her as a person of color. Popular belief assumes that mixedness gives you the ability to feel at home in more than one culture, but the flipside shows you can feel just as alienated in those spaces. In 7 essays that dissect her own experiences with a frankness tempered by generosity, Mehta confronts questions about: authenticity and belonging; conscious and unconscious cultural inheritance; appropriate mentorship; the racism of people who love you. The Racism of People Who Love You invites people of mixed race into the conversation on race in America and the melding of found and inherited cultures of hybrid identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Including women in the global South as users, producers, consumers, designers, and developers of technology has become a mantra against inequality, prompting movements to train individuals in information and communication technologies and foster the participation and retention of women in science and technology fields. In In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure: Feminist Technopolitics from the Global South (Stanford UP, 2023), Firuzeh Shokooh Valle argues that these efforts have given rise to an idealized, female economic figure that combines technological dexterity and keen entrepreneurial instinct with gendered stereotypes of care and selflessness. Narratives about the "equalizing" potential of digital technologies spotlight these women's capacity to overcome inequality using said technologies, ignoring the barriers and circumstances that create such inequality in the first place as well as the potentially violent role of technology in their lives. In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure examines how women in the Global South experience and resist the coopting and depoliticizing nature of these scripts. Drawing on fieldwork in Costa Rica and a transnational feminist digital organization, Shokooh Valle explores the ways that feminist activists, using digital technologies as well as a collective politics that prioritize solidarity and pleasure, advance a new feminist technopolitics. Firuzeh Shokooh Valle is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Franklin and Marshall College. Previously, she was a journalist in Puerto Rico covering violence against women, the LGBTQI+ community, migration, racism, and social movements, and earned numerous national awards for her investigative work. 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

The latest developments in robotics and artificial intelligence and a preview of the coming decades, based on research and interviews with the world's foremost experts. If there’s one universal trait among humans, it’s our social nature. The craving to connect is universal, compelling, and frequently irresistible. This concept is central to Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots (St. Martin's Press, 2024). Socially interactive robots will soon transform friendship, work, home life, love, warfare, education, and nearly every nook and cranny of modern life. This book is an exploration of how we, the most gregarious creatures in the food chain, could be changed by social robots. On the other hand, it considers how we will remain the same, and asks how human nature will express itself when confronted by a new class of beings created in our own image. Drawing upon recent research in the development of social robots, including how people react to them, how in our minds the boundaries between the real and the unreal are routinely blurred when we interact with them, and how their feigned emotions evoke our real ones, science writer Eve Herold takes readers through the gamut of what it will be like to live with social robots and still hold on to our humanity. This is the perfect book for anyone interested in the latest developments in social robots and the intersection of human nature and artificial intelligence and robotics, and what it means for our future. Sophia the Robot Tries to Convince the Experts Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action Coalition. Caleb Zakarin is editor at 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

Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Ella van Hest (Ghent University, Belgium) about her ethnographic research related to language diversity at an abortion clinic in Belgium. The conversation focusses on a co-authored paper entitled Language policy at an abortion clinic published in Language Policy in 2023. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial board at Catalyst joined Elizabeth and John back in Fall, 2020, to wrestle with the subtle and complex genealogy of Southern plantation economy and its racist legacy. Adaner offers a complex genealogy of violence, mass incarceration and their roots in the social inequity (and iniquity) of antebellum economic relations. He emphasizes a frequently overlooked fact that a century ago Du Bois had already identified a key issue: the belatedness of African-American access to the social mobility offered by the North's industrialization, thanks to structures of a racist Southern agricultural economy that kept African-American workers away from those high-wage jobs. The result? An explanation for racial injustice that hinges on ossified class imbalances--contingent advantages for certain groups that end up producing (rather than being produced by) bigotry and prejudice. Adaner Usmani and John Clegg, "The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration" (Catalyst 3:3, 2019) Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (2006) Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (2017) Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (1987) 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 the Language on the Move Podcast is part of the Life in a New Language series. Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book. Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Shiva Motaghi Tabari, with a focus on parenting in migration. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. 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 think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our politics and eroding our civic culture. Trolls are changing the norms of democratic politics and shaping how we communicate in the public sphere. Adding a twist to Neil Postman's classic thesis, this book argues that we are not so much amusing as trolling ourselves to death. But how did this come to be? Is this transformation attributable solely to digital technology? Or are there deeper political, economic, and cultural roots? This book moves beyond the familiar picture of trolls by recasting trolling in a broader historical light. It shows how trolling is the logical expression of widespread alienation, cynicism, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism. Drawing from Postman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, this book explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling. It explains the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, "cancel culture," and public shaming. Taking inspiration from G. F. W. Hegel, Paulo F reire, and bell hooks, this book makes a case for building a spirit of trust to counter the culture of mass distrust that feeds the epidemic of political trolling. Dr. Jason Hannan is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the editor of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial (Sydney University Press, 2020). His current book project is Reactionary Speech: Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Denial. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County 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

Balihar Sanghera and Elmira Satybaldieva’s Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents: Power, Morality and Resistance in Central Asia (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) evaluates today’s economic political, social and ecological crises through the lens of rentier capitalism and countermovements in Central Asia. Over the last three decades, the rich and powerful have increased their wealth and political power to the detriment of social and environmental well-being. But their activities have not gone unchecked; grassroots activism has resisted the damaging effects of the neoliberal commodification of things. Providing a much-needed theorisation of the moral economy and politics of rent, this book offers in-depth case studies on finance, real estate and natural resources in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The authors show the mechanisms of rent extraction, their moral justifications and legitimacy, and social struggles against them. This book not only offers insight into social and economic dynamics in Central Asia, but invites us all to interrogate what purpose, and whom, economies ultimately serve. Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based writer and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender, and nationalism - and more specifically on how and which ways these intersect within the Central Asia context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Stringers and the Journalistic Field: Marginalities and Precarious News Labour in Small-Town India (Routledge, 2023) is one of the first ethnographic works on small-town stringers or informal news workers in Indian journalism. It explores existing practices and cultures in the field of local journalism and the roles and spaces stringers occupy. The book outlines the caste, gender, class and region-based biases in the production of Indian-language journalism with a specific focus on stringers working in Telugu dailies in small towns or ‘mofussil’ areas of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, states in south India. Further, it captures their daily work and processes of news production, and the precarious lives they often lead while working in small towns or mofussils. The author, by using Bourdieu’s field theory, introduces the journalistic practices of stringers working on the margins and how they negotiate the complex hierarchies that exist within the journalistic field and outside it. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of ethnography, media sociology, journalism and media studies, labour studies and Area studies, especially South Asian studies. Dr. Nimmagadda Bhargav is a faculty member in the Communications Area. Before joining IIM Indore, Bhargav taught communication theory and media practice courses at Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal. In addition to holding doctoral and master’s level research degrees in Communication Studies and Social Sciences, respectively, from the University of Hyderabad, he has worked as a journalist in both the editorial and reporting sections of national English language dailies. As a postdoctoral Research Assistant, Bhargav was part of a UKRI-funded research project – “Framing the Nation: Citizenship, Conflict, and the Media in Contemporary India”, with Loughborough University as the lead research organisation. Specialising in Media Sociology, his broader research interests fall in the overlapping areas of economics, geography, and communication and digital media studies in India and the Global South. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

While there has been considerable research on digital cultures in the Indian Subcontinent, video games have received scant attention so far. Yet, they are hugely influential. Globally, India is perceived as a ‘sleeping giant’ of the video game industry with immense untapped potential, and Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan also have developed significant gaming cultures. With the already immense and constantly burgeoning smartphone access, the Subcontinent potentially has the largest reach for video games across the world. But how have video games become a part of the culture of the region, keeping in mind its huge diversity and plurality? In this conversation, Xenia Zeiler, professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Helsinki, discusses with Souvik Mukherjee on his book Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent (Bloomsbury, 2023). Mukherjee is assistant professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He is a pioneering researcher on videogames from South Asia and his key interests are videogames as storytelling media, videogames and postcolonialism and gaming cultures in South Asia. He is the author of three monographs on videogames including Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent (Bloomsbury Academic) and is currently researching boardgames in South Asia. Xenia Zeiler is professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research and teaching are situated at the intersection of digital media, culture, and society, specifically as related to India and global Indian communities. Her focus within this wider field of digital culture is video games and gaming research, in India and beyond. She also researches and teaches digital religion, popular culture, cultural heritage, and mediatization processes. 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, Americans have purchased second homes at unprecedented rates. In Privileging Place: How Second Homeowners Transform Communities and Themselves (Princeton UP, 2024), Meaghan Stiman examines the experiences of predominantly upper-middle-class suburbanites who bought second homes in the city or the country. Drawing on interviews with more than sixty owners of second homes and ethnographic data collected over the course of two years in Rangeley, Maine, and Boston, Massachusetts, Stiman uncovers the motivations of these homeowners and analyzes the local consequences of their actions. By doing so, she traces the contours of privilege across communities in the twenty-first century. Stiman argues that, for the upper-middle-class residents of suburbia who bought urban or rural second homes, the purchase functioned as a way to balance a desire for access to material resources in suburban communities with a longing for a more meaningful connection to place in the city or the country. The tension between these two contradictory aims explains why homeowners bought second homes, how they engaged with the communities around them, and why they ultimately remained in their suburban hometowns. The second home is a place-identity project—a way to gain a sense of place identity they don’t find in their hometowns while still holding on to hometown resources. Stiman’s account offers a cautionary tale of the layers of privilege within and across geographies 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

We live in a historical conjuncture characterized by the rise of a range of social movements that aim to challenge different forms of domination: capitalism, patriarchy, racism, settler colonialism, just to name a few. However, critical scholars remain divided about how to think about the relations between these different struggles. The political stakes in these debates are enormous: attributing primacy to particular social processes or structures risks alienating constituencies that also experience other forms of domination, but analzying these processes as separate structures with their own distinct ‘logics’ makes it difficult to find common ground on which to construct viable political coalitions. My guest today, geographer William Conroy, has written a series of articles that deal with thorny questions pertaining to the relationship between race, gender, ecology, and capitalism. We’ll be discussing four articles in particular, the links to which you can find on the episode’s page on the New Books Network web site: Conroy, William. 2023. “Background Check: Spatiality and Relationality in Nancy Fraser’s Expanded Conception of Capitalism.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 55 (5): 1091–1113. Conroy, William. 2024. “Spatializing Social Reproduction Theory: Integrating State Space and the Urban Fabric.” Review of International Political Economy 31 (3): 955–77. Conroy, William. 2024. “Race, Capitalism, and the Necessity/Contingency Debate.” Theory, Culture & Society 41 (1): 39–58. Conroy, William. 2024. “Constitutive Outsides or Hidden Abodes? Totality and Ideology in Critical Urban Theory.” Urban Studies, January 22, 2024. Each of these articles deals with the question of how to study the interactions between forms of domination without succumbing to the dangers of a) reducing all axes of domination to effects of one fundamental antagonism, or b) reaching the bland conclusion that “everything is related to everything else” without specifying how or why forms of domination are related. Will is a PhD candidate at Harvard University, and he is a research affiliate of the Urban Theory Lab, which is housed 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 Professor Zietlyn's words, anthropology “has had enough of the big ideas already” -especially theories with a big ‘T’. In a discipline that seems to be constantly beset by ‘turns’, or agonising over its status and ‘commensurability’ across cultural differences, Professor Zietlyn in his latest book An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts (Berghahn Books, 2022) offers a way through the weeds, in presenting a way “to write about anthropological theory, without making a specific theoretical argument.” Drawing on an immense wealth of fieldwork and ethnographic experience, which has included anything from sociolinguistics and divination, to life-history writing and research on photography and football clubs, the book is also a call to embrace the messiness of writing about others’ lives as best we can, as humbly as possible. The book will appeal to new graduates or veterans alike, presenting through a host of mini-essays an eclectic mix of theoretical concepts he has found helpful over the years. As he explains in the introduction. “This book promotes an eclectic, multi-faceted anthropology in which multiple approaches are applied in pursuit of the limited insights which each can afford…. I do not endorse any one of these ideas as supplying an exclusive path to enlightenment: I absolutely do not advocate any single position. As a devout nonconformist, I hope that the following sections provide material, ammunition and succour to those undertaking nuanced anthropological analysis (and their kin in related disciplines)…. Mixing up or combining different ideas and approaches can produce results that, in their breadth and richness, are productive for anthropology and other social sciences, reflecting the endless complexities of real life. …This is my response to the death of grand theory. I see our task as learning how to deal with that bereavement and how to resist the siren lures of those promising synoptic overviews.” David Zeitlyn has been working with Mambila people in Cameroon since 1985. He taught at the University of Kent, Canterbury, for fifteen years before moving to Oxford as Professor of Social Anthropology in 2010. His recent books include Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (Routledge, 2020) and An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts (Berghan Books, 2022). Gene-George Earle is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at East China Normal University 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

In recent years, scholars have rediscovered Hannah Arendt`s "boomerang thesis" – the "coming home" of European colonialism as genocide on European soil – as well as Raphael Lemkin`s work around his definition of genocide and the importance of its colonial dimensions. Germany and other European states are increasingly engaging in debates on comparing the Holocaust to other genocides and cases of mass killing, memorialization, "decolonization" and attempts to come to terms with the past ("Vergangenheitsbewältigung"). Colonial Paradigms of Violence: Comparative Analysis of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Killing (Wallstein, 2022), part of the European Holocaust Studies series, offers a variety of perspectives on the connections and entanglements of colonialism and mass violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Every protest movement has been dismissed as a mere ‘mindless mob,’ caught in a psychological frenzy. Where did this idea come from, and why does it last? Gustave Le Bon. This is episode one of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. You can also hear a trailer of next week’s episode, the (ir)Rational Rainbow, on their website. 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 Darja Smite, Professor of Software Engineering at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and also research scientist at SINTEF; and, Jarle Hildrum, Director, Deloitte Consulting, Norway; and also, Daniel Mendez, Professor of Software Engineering at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and as well, Senior Scientist heading the research division Requirements Engineering at fortiss. We talk about their paper Work-from-home is here to stay: Call for flexibility in post-pandemic work policies (JSS 2023). Daniel Mendez : "Two key takeaways from our collective experience here are, No.1, figures don't need to be absolute — so, we should really focus on the essence of what we want to convey. And No.2, in terms of what we want to convey, I think that every figure ideally has one key message, one key takeaway." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The Loneliness Room: A Creative Ethnography of Loneliness (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Sean Remond is a remarkably unique book takes the conceit of the loneliness room to show how everyday artistic practice opens up loneliness to new definitions and new understandings. Refusing to pathologise loneliness, the book draws on the creative submissions supplied by its participants to demonstrate that being lonely can mean different things to different people in differing contexts. Filled with the photographs, paintings, videos, songs, and writings of its participants, The loneliness room is a deeply moving account of loneliness today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country. Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia (Princeton UP, 2024), Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across postconflict Cambodia. Drawing on interviews, original econometric analysis, and extensive fieldwork, Lin upends the usual scholarly perspective on the war and its aftermath, presenting the viewpoint of those who suffered the bombing rather than those who dropped the bombs. She shows that Cambodian farmers stay at a subsistence level because much of their land is too dangerous to cultivate—and yet, paradoxically, the same bombs that endanger and impoverish farming communities also protect them, deterring predatory elites from grabbing and commodifying their land. Lin argues that the half-century legacy of American bombs has sedimented the war into the layers of contemporary Cambodian society. Policies aimed at developing or modernizing Cambodia, whether economic liberalization or authoritarian consolidation, must be realized in an environment haunted by the violence of the past. As the stories Lin captures show, the bombing served as a critical juncture in these farming villages, marking the place in time where development stopped. Our guest today is Erin Lin, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). 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 the Language on the Move Podcast is part of the Life in a New Language series. Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book. Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Vera Williams Tetteh, with a focus on the experiences of African migrants. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go 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 Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality (Bloomsbury, 2022), Frederick Klaits compares how members of one majority white and two African American churches in Buffalo, New York receive knowledge from God about their own and others' life circumstances. In the Pentecostal Christian faith, believers say that they acquire divinely inspired insights by developing a "relationship with God." But what makes these insights appear necessary? This book offers a novel approach to this question, arguing that the inspirations believers receive from God lead them to take critical stances on what they regard as ordinary understandings of space, time, care, and personal value. Using a shared Pentecostal language, believers occupying different positions within racial, class, and gender formations reflect in divergent ways on God's designs. In the process, they engage critically with late liberal imaginaries of eventfulness and vitality to envision possibilities of life in a highly unequal society. This text incorporates commentaries on Klaits' ethnography by LaShekia Chatman and Michael Richbart, junior scholars who have also studied and been part of Pentecostal communities in Buffalo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Tribe-Class Linkages: The History and Politics of the Agrarian Movement in Tripura (Routledge, 2023) is a historical study of the development of agrarian class relations among the tribal population in Tripura. Tracing the evolution of Tripura and its agrarian relations from monarchy in the nineteenth century to democracy in the twentieth century, the book discusses the nature of the erstwhile princely state of Tripura, analyses the emergence of differentiation within tribes, and documents the emergence of the tribal movement in the state. It specifically focuses on the tribal movement led by the Ganamukti Parishad, beginning with the historic revolt of 1948-51 against state repression of the tribal people, followed by the mass movements in the 1950s and 1960s, which were founded on a recognition of class relations and the slogan of unity across the tribal and non-tribal (Bengali) peasantry. The first of its kind, the book will be indispensable for students and researchers of tribal studies, agrarian studies, exclusion studies, tribe-class relationships, minority studies, sociology, development studies, history, political science, north-east India studies, and South Asian studies. It will also be useful for activists and policymakers working in the area. Rituparna Patgiri 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 episode we are joined by Thomas Hendriks, an anthropologist studying capitalism and resource extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hendriks' work is amongst the most innovative in the anthropological study of capitalism, drawing upon queer theory, feminist ethnography, and phenomenology to make sense of cutting down large trees in the tropical rainforest. Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession (Duke UP, 2021) Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction. Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott conducts fieldwork on Dakelh Territory in Northern British Columbia, on capitalism, forestry, and colonialism. Elliott is studies contestations over profit, property and territory on Indigenous land. 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

How do Chinese citizens make sense of digital surveillance and live with it? What narratives do they come up with to deal with the daily and all-encompassing reality of life in China? What mental tactics do they apply to dissociate themselves from surveillance? Ariane Ollier-Malaterre explores these questions in her book Living with Digital Surveillance in China (Routledge, 2023). Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Professor of Management and Canada Research Chair on Digital Regulation at Work and in Life at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada talks with Joanne Kaui about her research that investigates Chinese citizens’ imaginaries about surveillance and privacy from within the Chinese socio-political system. Based on in-depth qualitative research interviews, detailed diary notes, and extensive documentation, Ariane Ollier-Malaterre attempts to ‘de-Westernise’ the internet and surveillance literature. In the book, she shows how the research participants weave a cohesive system of anguishing narratives on China’s moral shortcomings and redeeming narratives on the government and technology as civilizing forces. Although many participants cast digital surveillance as indispensable in China, their misgivings, objections, and the mental tactics they employ to dissociate themselves from surveillance convey the mental and emotional weight associated with such surveillance exposure. 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 podcast in this series was inspired by a documentary film made in 2014 called “Black Analysts Speak” as well as some of the findings in the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis published in 2023. It also considered the reasons why racism has persisted so long in America including perspectives from a psychoanalytic vantage point. Mechanism of defense, particularly projective identification was discussed as one specific reason why change has been slow. The host and co-host also talked about the some of the reasons why it is important for white people to listen to the Black experience. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s book, Where do we go from here, Chaos or Community was also considered because of its relevance today. Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited six books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The Violence of Recognition: Adivasi Indigeneity and Anti-Dalitness in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) offers an unprecedented firsthand account of the operations of Hindu nationalists and their role in sparking the largest incident of anti-Christian violence in India’s history. Through vivid ethnographic storytelling, Pinky Hota explores the roots of ethnonationalist conflict between two historically marginalized groups—the Kandha, who are Adivasi (tribal people considered indigenous in India), and the Pana, a community of Christian Dalits (previously referred to as “untouchables”). Hota documents how Hindutva mobilization led to large-scale violence, culminating in attacks against many thousands of Pana Dalits in the district of Kandhamal in 2008. Bringing indigenous studies as well as race and ethnic studies into conversation with Dalit studies, Hota shows that, despite attempts to frame these ethnonationalist tensions as an indigenous population’s resistance against disenfranchisement, Kandha hostility against the Pana must be understood as anti-Christian, anti-Dalit violence animated by racial capitalism. Hota’s analysis of caste in relation to race and religion details how Hindu nationalists exploit the singular and exclusionary legal recognition of Adivasis and the putatively liberatory, anti-capitalist discourse of indigeneity in order to justify continued oppression of Dalits—particularly those such as the Pana. Because the Pana lost their legal protection as recognized minorities (Scheduled Caste) upon conversion to Christianity, they struggle for recognition within the Indian state’s classificatory scheme. Within the framework of recognition, Hota shows, indigeneity works as a political technology that reproduces the political, economic, and cultural exclusion of landless marginalized groups such as Dalits. The Violence of Recognition reveals the violent implications of minority recognition in creating and maintaining hierarchies of racial capitalism. Yash Sharma is a PhD student in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Twitter. Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Electronic Dance Music: From Deviant Subculture to Culture Industry (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) explores the subculture’s emergence as a deviant subculture. This text analyzes how industry professionals, fans, and public officials helped usher in a new age of EDM, arguing that while the defining features of the subculture made it attractive, they also laid the foundations for outsiders to commodify the movement as a culture industry. Chris Conner and David Dickens explore the concept of “commodified resistance” as the mechanism by which the movement's politically dissident features were removed and its place as a multi-billion-dollar industry made possible. Ultimately, this text advocates the continued utility of the culture industry thesis through an empirical analysis of the EDM subculture. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a 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 in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Marxism and psychoanalysis have a rich and complicated relationship to one another, with countless figures and books written on the possible intersection of the two. Our guest today, Adrian Johnston, returns to NBN to discuss his own latest entry into the genre, Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital (Columbia UP, 2024). While the book does retread some already-covered territory, Johnston’s book stands out as a unique entry in a crowded field by emphasizing the theoretical overlap of psychoanalytic concepts with the economic core of Marx’s thinking. Libidinal economics are turned into, well, economics and vice-versa in this detailed and rigorously written study that deserves to become one of the canonical texts in the Freudo-Marxist tradition. Adrian Johnston is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico and a faculty member of the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of numerous books, including three previously discussed on this podcast; A New German Idealism: Hegel, Zizek and Dialectical Materialism, and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism volumes one and two. He is also the coeditor, with Slavoj Zizek and Todd McGowan of the book series Diaeresis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Friendships can be the foundation of our earliest memories and most formative moments. But why are they often seen as secondary to romantic, or familial connection, something to age out of and take a back seat to other relationships? BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship (404 Ink, 2023) by Dr. Anahit Behrooz is an examination of the power of female friendship, not as something lesser, but as a site of radical intimacy, as told through the cultural touchstones around us. From coming-of-age tales through physical intimacy and discovering personhood to break ups and parting of ways, Dr. Behrooz considers the vast significance of our friendships through the work of Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante, Booksmart and Grey’s Anatomy, Insecure, The Virgin Suicides and beyond. To have a life rich in love is often viewed through a specific lens; BFFs shows us that friendship can offer a more expansive and emancipatory understanding of female intimacy, and can be the most important, loving relationships in our lives. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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 episode of the Language on the Move Podcast is part of the Life in a New Language series. Life in a New Language (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book. Today, Brynn chats with Ingrid Piller, one of the book’s six co-authors, with a focus on migrants’ challenges with finding work. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Is involuntary psychiatric treatment the solution to the intertwined crises of untreated mental illness, homelessness, and addiction? In recent years, politicians and advocates have sought to expand the use of conservatorships, a legal tool used to force someone deemed “gravely disabled,” or unable to meet their needs for food, clothing, or shelter as a result of mental illness, to take medication and be placed in a locked facility. At the same time, civil liberties and disability rights groups have seized on cases like that of Britney Spears to argue that conservatorships are inherently abusive. Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia UP, 2023) is an incisive and compelling portrait of the functioning—and failings—of California’s conservatorship system. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with professionals, policy makers, families, and conservatees, Alex V. Barnard takes readers to the streets where police encounter homeless people in crisis, the locked wards where people receiving treatment are confined, and the courtrooms where judges decide on conservatorship petitions. As he shows, California’s state government has abdicated authority over this system, leaving the question of who receives compassionate care and who faces coercion dependent on the financial incentives of for-profit facilities, the constraints of underresourced clinicians, and the desperate struggles of families to obtain treatment for their loved ones. This book offers a timely warning: reforms to expand conservatorship will lead to more coercion but little transformative care until government assumes accountability for ensuring the health and dignity of its most vulnerable citizens. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a 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 in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Cosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Kira Huju narrates the birth, everyday life, and fracturing of a Western-dominated global order from its margins. It offers a critical sociological examination of the elite Indian Foreign Service and its members, many of whom were present at the founding of this order. Dr. Huju explores how these diplomats set out to remake the service in the name of a radically anti-colonial global subaltern, but often ended up seeking status within its hierarchies through social mimicry of its most powerful actors. This is a book about the struggles of belonging: it revisits what it takes to be a recognized member of international society and asks what the experience of historically marginalised actors inside the diplomatic club can tell us about the evident woes of global order today. In interrogating how Indian diplomats learned to live under a Westernised world order, it also offers a sociologically grounded reading of what might happen in spaces like India as the world transitions past Western domination. An awkward balancing act animates the order-making of India's cosmopolitan diplomats: despite a genuine desire to strive toward a postcolonial world founded on diversity, difference, and the symbolic representation of a global subaltern, there is a strong sense of a lingering caricature-like notion of a white, European-dominated homogenous club, to which Indian diplomats feel a deep-rooted and colonially embedded desire to belong. Cosmopolitanism operates inside this balancing act not as an international ethic upholding an equal, tolerant, or liberal global order, but rather as an elite aesthetic which presumes cultural compliance, diplomatic accommodation, and social assimilation into Western mores. Based on 85 interviews with Indian diplomats, politicians, and foreign policy experts, as well as archival work in New Delhi, the book asks what the experience of historically marginalised actors inside the diplomatic club tells us about the social hierarchies of race, class, religion, gender, and caste under global order. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with danah boyd, Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, founder of the Data & Society Research Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University, about her career and work. The pair discuss boyd's the genesis and intellectual background of boyd's now classic text, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Teens (Yale UP, 2014) as well as her more recent work on digital infrastructure and the US Census Bureau. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Women working in the sciences face obstacles at virtually every step along their career paths. From subtle slights to blatant biases, deep systemic problems block women from advancing or push them out of science and technology entirely. Women in Science Now: Stories and Strategies for Achieving Equity (Columbia UP, 2023) examines solutions to this persistent gender gap, offering new perspectives on how to make science more equitable and inclusive for all. This book shares stories and insights of women from a range of backgrounds working in various disciplines, illustrating the journeys that brought them to the sciences, the challenges they faced along the way, and the important contributions they have made to their fields. Lisa M. P. Munoz combines these narratives with a wealth of data to illuminate the size and scope of the challenges women scientists face, while highlighting research-based solutions to help overcome these obstacles. She presents groundbreaking studies in social psychology and organizational behavior that are informing novel approaches for combating historic and ongoing inequities. Through a combined focus on personal experiences and social-science research, this timely book provides both a path toward greater gender equity and an inspiring vision of science and scientists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

People before Markets:: An Alternative Casebook (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents twenty comparative case studies of important global questions, such as 'Where should our food come from?' 'What should we do about climate change?' and 'Where should innovation come from?' A variety of solutions are proposed and compared, including market-based, economic, and neoliberal approaches, as well as those determined by humane values and ethical and socially responsible perspectives. Drawing on original research, its chapters show that more responsible solutions are very often both more effective and better aligned with human values. Providing an important counterpoint to the standard capitalist thinking propounded in business school education, People Before Markets reveals the problematic assumptions of incumbent frameworks for solving global problems and inspires the next generation of business and social science students to pursue more effective and human-centered solutions. Robin Steiner is an economic anthropologist based in Miami, FL. His published work explores economic development, labor, and citizenship in Oman and the Arab Gulf. He teaches in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Robin can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The unintended consequences of youth empowerment programs for Latino boys Educational research has long documented the politics of punishment for boys and young men of color in schools—but what about the politics of empowerment and inclusion? In Good Boys, Bad Hombres: The Racial Politics of Mentoring Latino Boys in Schools (U Minnesota Press, 2024), Michael V. Singh focuses on this aspect of youth control in schools, asking on whose terms a positive Latino manhood gets to be envisioned. Based on two years of ethnographic research in an urban school district in California, Good Boys, Bad Hombres examines Latino Male Success, a school-based mentorship program for Latino boys. Instead of attempting to shape these boys’ lives through the threat of punishment, the program aims to provide an “invitation to a respectable and productive masculinity” framed as being rooted in traditional Latinx signifiers of manhood. Singh argues, however, that the promotion of this aspirational form of Latino masculinity is rooted in neoliberal multiculturalism, heteropatriarchy, and anti-Blackness, and that even such empowerment programs can unintentionally reproduce attitudes that paint Latino boys as problematic and in need of control and containment. An insightful gender analysis, Good Boys, Bad Hombres sheds light on how mentorship is a reaction to the alleged crisis of Latino boys and is governed by the perceived remedies of the neoliberal state. Documenting the ways Latino men and boys resist the politics of neoliberal empowerment for new visions of justice, Singh works to deconstruct male empowerment, arguing that new narratives and practices—beyond patriarchal redemption—are necessary for a reimagining of Latino manhood in schools 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

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and labor-saving technologies like self-checkouts and automated factories, the future of work has never been more uncertain, and even jobs requiring high levels of human interaction are no longer safe. The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton UP, 2024) explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other in these settings is valuable and worth preserving. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions--from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers--Allison Pugh develops the concept of "connective labor," a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other's humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works. Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected 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 do unequal societies function? In Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net (Portfolio, 2024), Jesscia Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examines how America’s DIY society depends on the labour of mothers and excludes the sorts of social supports present in other countries. This dependence has hugely negative social and individual consequences, as demonstrated by the rich qualitiative and quantitative data examined in the book. Alongside the analysis of the problems and consequences of women’s role in the US, the book also thinks through solutions, demonstrating how much political discourse is far from the collective action that is likely to be effective for social change. An outstanding contribution to social science and contemporary politics, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary social inequalities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

As Andrew M. Gardner explains in The Fragmentary City: Migration, Modernity, and Difference in the Urban Landscape of Doha, Qatar (Cornell UP, 2024) in Qatar and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, nearly nine out of every ten residents are foreign noncitizens. Many of these foreigners reside in the cities that have arisen in Qatar and neighboring states. The book provides an overview of the gulf migration system with its diverse migrant experiences. Gardner focuses on the ways that demography and global mobility have shaped the city of Doha and the urban characteristics of the Arabian Peninsula in general. Building on those migrant experiences, the book turns to the spatial politics of the modern Arabian city, exploring who is placed where in the city and how this social landscape came into historical existence. The author reflects on what we might learn from these cities and the societies that inhabit them. Gardner frames the contemporary cities of the Arabian Peninsula not as poor imitations of Western urban modernity, but instead as cities on the frontiers of a global, neoliberal, and increasingly urban future. Andrew M. Gardner is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. He has focused his research on the places, peoples and societies that interact on the Arabian Peninsula, where he has conducted extensive fieldwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology