New Books in Sociology

In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John spoke back in 2020 with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence (U Chicago Press, 2020). The book relates the decades-long history in which hundreds of people (mostly Black men) were tortured by the Chicago Police. Fascinatingly, it is framed as a series of open letters that explore the layers of silence and complicity that enabled torture and the activist movements that have helped to uncover this history and implement forms of collective redress and repair. Elizabeth and John ask Laurence about that genre choice, and he unpacks his thinking about responsibility, witnessing, trauma and channels of activism. Arendt’s “banality of evil” briefly surfaces. Mentioned in this episode: Laurence Ralph, Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago (U Chicago Press, 2014) James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me Mahomedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, “banality of evil”; not optimism but hopefulness) Recallable …..Stuff Frederick Douglas, A Speech given at the Unveiling…… Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (here introduced by Angela Davis) Read Here: 45 Global Policing 3 Laurence Ralph: Reckoning with Police Violence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The Cambodian Civil War and genocide of the late 1960s and ’70s left the country and its diaspora with long-lasting trauma that continues to reverberate through the community. In Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023), Briana L. Wong explores the compelling stories of Cambodian evangelicals, their process of conversion, and how their testimonials to the Christian faith helped them to make sense of and find purpose in their trauma. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Cambodian communities in the metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Paris, and Phnom Penh, Wong examines questions of religious identity and the search for meaning within the context of transnational Cambodian evangelicalism. While the community has grown in recent decades, Christians nevertheless make up a small minority of the predominantly Buddhist diaspora. Wong explores what it is about Christianity that makes these converts willing to risk their social standing, familial bonds, and, in certain cases, physical safety in order to identify with the faith. Contributing to ongoing dialogues on conversion, reverse mission, and multiple religious belonging, this book will appeal to students and scholars of world Christianity, missiology, and the history of Christianity, as well as Southeast Asian studies, secular sociologies, and anthropologists operating within the field of religious studies. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, with a concentration 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

In this interview, we talk with Stefan Tanaka, professor emeritus of UCSD and a specialist in modern Japanese history. He is author of two books on modern Japan, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993) and New Times in Modern Japan (2004), and his most recent book is History Without Chronology (Lever Press, 2019) which we discuss here! The host, Sarah Kearns, was introduced to Tanaka's work at a Digital History and Theory Conference and became very interested in becoming a "mystic" of scholarly communications and how narrative and comic books could facilitate a different understanding of history and time. The 1884 project is here. A bit about the book, which is available open access: Although numerous disciplines recognize multiple ways of conceptualizing time, Stefan Tanaka argues that scholars still overwhelmingly operate on chronological and linear Newtonian or classical time that emerged during the Enlightenment. This short, approachable book implores the humanities and humanistic social sciences to actively embrace the richness of different times that are evident in non-modern societies and have become common in several scientific fields throughout the twentieth century. Tanaka first offers a history of chronology by showing how the social structures built on clocks and calendars gained material expression. Tanaka then proposes that we can move away from this chronology by considering how contemporary scientific understandings of time might be adapted to reconceive the present and pasts. This opens up a conversation that allows for the possibility of other ways to know about and re-present pasts. A multiplicity of times will help us broaden the historical horizon by embracing the heterogeneity of our lives and world via rethinking the complex interaction between stability, repetition, and change. This history without chronology also allows for incorporating the affordances of digital media. Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely drinking mushroom tea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances. Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essay collection also acknowledges a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Pavitra Sundar's book Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema (U Michigan Press, 2023) is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries. Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women's playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community. Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. @KhadeejaAmenda. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, China, The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era (U Michigan Press, 2023) brings its readers into the lives of the people who write, publish, and profit from news in this milieu. The book shows that far from working as mere cogs in a Party propaganda machine, these individuals are immersed in fluidly shifting networks of formal and informal relationships, which they carefully navigate to pursue diverse goals. In The Currency of Truth, Emily H. C. Chua argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West. The book encourages readers to set out from the preexisting assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its public(s). It also suggests researchers further explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice. Emily Chua is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, working at the intersections of digital technology, media, capital and authoritarian state politics in China and Singapore. Her articles are published in journals including JRAI, Ethnography, Science, Technology and Society, Asian Studies Review, and China Quarterly. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structural philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Dr. Halsall’s Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis (Ohio State UP, 2023) has four primary objectives. One, it explores this visual and literary medium that is heavily invested in the representation of children and youth, especially in relation to the depiction of particular experiences (social, political, cultural, racial, sexual, ableist, etc.) that young people have undergone and continue to live through. These texts contest images of childhood victimization, passivity, and helplessness, presenting instead children as actors who attempt to make sense of the challenges that affect them. Two, it examines the many circuitous routes that graphic literature for young people takes in and out of discourses of nation, belonging, ableism, and identity, moving with and oftentimes against currents of power. Three, it participates in a crucial intersectional trend in children’s publishing that looks to complicate and diversify the content and characters produced for young readers in the Global North. Specifically, it highlights visual representations of a range of young people, including child soldiers, migrants, Indigenous peoples in Canada, queers, and young people living with impairments and/or undergoing particular medical life events. In its investigation of such subjects it also considers questions of age and audience. Finally, it considers the reader as a source tension itself: the reader that is produced by the graphic text and the empirical reader (who might be an adult, child, etc.). Ultimately, this project considers graphic narratives for children and about children, an under-explored field in itself, and one that provides surprising insight into the types of reading material that young readers gravitate towards and that complicate assumptions of readerly innocence. (Halsall 2023: P8) In this interview Dr. Halsall talks about frameworks for analyzing comics aimed at young readers, how contemporary culture and politics can influence access to these works, and hopes for the creation of a new comics archive. Dr. Alison Halsall is an Associate Professor at York University in Toronto, Canada, and the coordinator of the Children, Childhood and Youth Program, part of the Department of Humanities. Her work is interdisciplinary and trans-generic – in addition to children’s literature she specializes in Victorian and modernist literatures, with a particular emphasis on Visual Cultures, which includes the study of paintings and illustrations, contemporary film, comics and graphic novels. Alison Halsall and co-editor Jonathan Warren received the 2023 Will Eisner Awards for Best Academic/Scholarly Work for editing The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions. Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category. Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at 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

Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul (MIT Press, 2023) challenges the popular image of the international student in the American imagination, an image of affluence, access, and privilege. In this provocative book, higher education scholar Stephanie Kim argues that universities -- not the students -- create the paths that allow students their international mobility. Focusing on universities in the United States and South Korea that aggressively grew their student pools in the aftermath of the Great Recession, Kim shows the lengths to which universities will go to expand enrollments as they draw from the same pool of top South Korean students. Using ethnographic research gathered over a ten-year period in which international admissions were impacted by the Great Recession, changes in US presidential administrations, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Constructing Student Mobility provides crucial insights into the purpose, effects, and future of student recruitment across the Pacific. Constructing Student Mobility received the Best Book Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education Council on International Higher Education. Stephanie Kim is a scholar, educator, author, and practitioner in the field of comparative and international higher education. She teaches at Georgetown University, where she is an Associate Professor of the Practice and Faculty Director of Higher Education Administration in the School of Continuing Studies. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Asian Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service. Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University. You can follow her activities 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 body of the seafarer is a fulcrum upon which global systems of power, longstanding maritime traditions, and gendered and racialised pressures all rest. In this vital new essay, scholar Laleh Khalili draws on her ongoing research and experiences of travelling on cargo ships to explore the embodied life of these labourers. She investigates an experience riddled with adversities – loneliness, loss, and violence, stolen wages and exploitative shipowners – as well as ephemeral moments of joy and solidarity. In the unique arena of the ship, Khalili traces the many forms of corporeality involved in work at sea and the ways the body is engaged by the institutions that engulf seafarers’ lives and work. Illustrated throughout with the author’s own photographs, this book takes in both scholarly and literary accounts to describe with care and imagination the material and physical realities of contemporary commerce at sea. Drawing on the insights of feminists and scholars of racial capitalism, it centres the lives of those so often forgotten or dismissed in enterprises of capital accumulation and the raced and gendered hierarchies that shape them. Laleh Khalili is an Al-Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. Among her published books: "Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: the Politics of National Commemoration" (Cambridge 2007) and "Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgency" (Stanford 2013), both of which delve into the representations and practices of violence. She also co-edited a volume with Jillian Schwedler titled "Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion" (Hurst 2010). Her most recent book, "Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula" (Verso 2020), explores the pivotal role of maritime infrastructures in facilitating the movement of technologies, capital, people, and cargo. Tamara Fernando is an assistant professor in the History of the Global South, at Stony Brook University, New York. Her research and teaching interests are located at the intersection of labor, environment, and science histories, with a specific focus on the nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian Ocean world. Her current book project, "Shallow Blue Empire: Knowing the Littoral across the Indian Ocean," aspires to uncover a "history below the water line" through a trans-national account of the pearling industry across the northern Indian Ocean. This work centers on the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar, and the Mergui/Myeik archipelago, elucidating how modes of knowledge about the littoral zone of the ocean were determined in the context of the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. She is deeply committed to employing trans-regional and interdisciplinary methods in the study of the past, as well as addressing the question of how to craft global histories of science. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. 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 at [email protected] 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

Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned. Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions. Huwy-min Lucia Liu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University. 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

An essay collection exploring the board game's relationship to the built environment, revealing the unexpected ways that play reflects perceptions of space. Board games harness the creation of entirely new worlds. From the medieval warlord to the modern urban planner, players are permitted to inhabit a staggering variety of roles and are prompted to incorporate preexisting notions of placemaking into their decisions. To what extent do board games represent the social context of their production? How might they reinforce or subvert normative ideas of community and fulfillment? In Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space (MIT Press, 2023), Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky have curated a collection of thirty-seven fascinating essays, supplemented by a rich trove of photo illustrations, that unpack these questions with breadth and care. Although board games are often recreational objects, their mythologies and infrastructure do not exist in a vacuum—rather, they echo and reproduce prevalent cultural landscapes. This thesis forms the throughline of pieces reflecting on subjects as diverse as the rigidly gendered fantasies of classic mass-market games; the imperial convictions embedded in games that position player-protagonists as conquerors establishing dominion over their “discoveries”; and even the uncanny prescience of games that have players responding to a global pandemic. Representing a thrilling convergence of historiography, architectural history, and media studies scholarship, Playing Place suggests not only that tabletop games should be taken seriously but also that the medium itself is uniquely capable of facilitating our critical consideration of structures that are often taken for granted. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH 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

Through compelling ethnography, Homelessness and Housing Advocacy: The Role of Red-Tape Warriors (Routledge, 2022) reveals the creative and ambitious methods that social service providers use to house their clients despite the conflictual conditions posed by the policies and institutions that govern the housing process. Combining in-depth interviews, extensive fieldwork, and the author's own professional experience, this book considers the perspective of social service providers who work with people experiencing homelessness and chronicles the steps they take to navigate the housing process. With assertive methods of worker-client advocacy at the center of its focus, this book beckons attention to the many variables that affect professional attempts to house homeless populations. It conveys the challenges that social service providers encounter while fitting their clients into the criteria for housing eligibility, the opposition they receive, and the innovative approaches they ultimately take to optimize housing placements for their clients who are, or were formerly, experiencing homelessness. Weaving as it does between issues of poverty, social inequality, and social policy, Homelessness and Housing Advocacy will appeal to courses in social work, sociology, and public policy and fill a void for early-career professionals in housing and community services. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Reality TV shapes and reflects how we see ourselves, and what we regard as normal. Professor Danielle J. Lindemann watched thousands of hours of reality tv to decode its influence on society. She joins us to discuss her book True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us (FSG, 2022). Danielle J. Lindemann is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University interested in gender, sexuality, the family, and culture. She is the author of Commuter Spouses: New Families in a Changing World and Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism and Control in the Dungeon. Her research has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has spoken about her work on National Public Radio and has written op-eds for CNN, Newsweek, Salon, Fortune, and Quartz. The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Learn about our MA Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Feminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race-based oppression. Kathleen Mcphillips and Naomi Goldenberg edited volume The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State (Routledge, 2020) proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better comprehend and confront the systematic disempowerment of women and marginalized groups. Utilising feminist and post-colonial analysis of access, equity and violence, contributors draw on recent critical theory to collapse accepted boundaries between religion and secularity with the aim of understanding that religion is a technology of governance in its function, meaning and history. The volume includes case studies focusing on how the category of religion is deployed to perpetuate male hegemony and racist inequities in Australia, Mexico, the United States, Britain and Canada. This trenchant feminist critique and academic analysis will be of key interest to scholars and students of Religion, Sociology, Political Science and Gender Studies. Naomi Goldenberg is professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her publications include Resurrecting the Body (Crossroad Publishing, 1993), The End of God (University of Ottawa Press, 1981), and Changing the Gods (Beacon Press, 1979). This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his 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 this episode, I talk to Vicki Howard and Sarah Elvins, both contributors to Volume 6 of the anthology A Cultural History of Shopping. Jon Stobart is the series editor, and Vicki Howard is the editor of Volume 6: A Cultural History of Shopping in the Modern Age. The chapters of this volume include: Practices and Processes, by Sarah Elvins, Spaces and Places, by Alison Hulme, Shoppers and Identities, by Joshua L. Carreiro, Luxury and Everyday, by Vicki Howard, Home and Family, by Helen Sheumaker, Visual and Literary Representations, by Angelica Michelis, Reputation, Trust and Credit, by Franck Cochoy, by Johan Hagberg and Hans Kjellberg, Governance, Regulation and the State, by Jan Logemann. 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

In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Colin McFarlane, through Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Verso, 2023), makes a call to action on one of modern urban life's most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All. The book outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city. Adopting Henri Lefebvre's concept of 'the right to the city', it uses the notion of 'citylife' to reframe the discourse on sanitation from a narrowly-defined policy discussion to a question of democratic right to public life and health. In doing so, the book shows that sanitation is an urbanizing force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life. 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 about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at 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 Bond movies have influenced portrayals of masculinity and femininity for decades, but the Daniel Craig-era saw a revolution in depictions of sex, gender, and inclusivity. The UConn PopCast discusses with Professor Susan Burgess, author of LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imagination, and Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2023) The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Learn about our MA Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Of all the musical developments of rock in the 1960s, one in particular fundamentally changed the music’s structure and listening experience: the incorporation of extended improvisation into live performances. While many bands—including Cream, Pink Floyd, and the Velvet Underground—stretched out their songs with improvisations, no band was more identified with the practice than the Grateful Dead. In Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead (Duke UP, 2023), Michael Kaler examines how the Dead’s dedication to improvisation stemmed from their belief that playing in this manner enabled them to touch upon transcendence. Drawing on band testimonials and analyses of early recordings, Kaler traces how the Dead developed an approach to playing music that they believed would facilitate their spiritual goals. He focuses on the band’s early years, the significance of their playing Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties, and their evolving exploration of the myriad musical and spiritual possibilities that extended improvisation afforded. Kaler demonstrates that the Grateful Dead developed a radical new way of playing rock music as a means to unleash the spiritual and transformative potential of their music. Michael Kaler is Associate Professor, teaching stream, at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy at the University of Toronto Mississauga and author of Flora Tells a Story: The Apocalypse of Paul and Its Contexts. 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

Over the past 40 years, lawmakers in America's two major political parties have taken increasingly extreme positions on ideological issues. Voters from the two parties have become increasingly distinct and hostile to one another along the lines of race, religion, geography, and culture. In Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young illustrates how political leaders and media organizations capitalize on social and cultural identities to separate, enrage, and mobilize people. Because humans are motivated to comprehend, to feel in control, and to be part of a community, they seek information that satisfies these needs – including misinformation that favors their political team. They don’t want to be wrong. Bringing together tools from political science, communications, and social psychology, Dr. Goldthwaite Young creates a model to explain how public officials, journalists, and social media platforms encourage what she calls identity distillation. Dr. Young both describes the dynamics and provides suggestions for how to disrupt “identity-driven wrongness.” These include journalists abandoning conflict framing in the coverage of politics, social media platforms increasing transparency about their algorithmic content rankings and ad targeting, and individuals cultivating intellectual humility and disrupting performances of political identity to increase the demand for democracy-centered political information. Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a professor of Communications and Political Science at the University of Delaware. Her areas of expertise include political media effects, media psychology, public opinion, and the psychology of misinformation. I’m delighted to welcome her to the New Books Network. George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast. 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

Deepening inequalities and wider processes of demographic, economic, and social change are altering how people across the Global North move between homes and neighbourhoods over the lifespan. Housing and Life Course Dynamics: Changing Lives, Places, and Inequalities (Policy Press, 2023) presents a life course framework for understanding how the changing dynamics of people's family, education, employment, and health experiences are deeply intertwined with ongoing shifts in housing behaviour and residential pathways. Particular attention is paid to how these processes help to drive uneven patterns of population change within and across neighbourhoods and localities. Integrating the latest research from multiple disciplines, the author shows how housing and life course dynamics are together reshaping 21st-century inequalities in ways that demand greater attention from scholars and public policy makers. Rory Coulter is a specialist in the socio-spatial dynamics of cities, with a particular focus on issues of inequality, segregation, and the impact of urban policies on marginalised communities. He is Associate Professor of Human Geography at University College London where his teaching spans population, urban, and economic geography as well as quantitative methods. His research examines population mobility, housing dynamics, and neighbourhood change. 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

How can we use comics to present ethnographic research in new and unique ways? In this episode, we talk with Dr V Chitra about the fieldwork and comics in her soon-to-be-released book Drawing Coastlines. She talks about the ethnographic insights on contamination and climate change that came from sorting fish, and her process of developing comics that portray the everyday experiences and environmental degradation of coastal communities in Mumbai. She also discusses future problems on human-insect and human-dog relations, questioning our own capacity to accept the feral. Finally, she ends with a few recommendations of ethnographies for our listeners: Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds, Marisol de la Cadena; Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas, Radhika Govindrajan; On Line and On Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering, Kathryn Henderson; and When Species Meet, Donna Haraway. And related to comics: Making Comics, Lynda Barry; Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud; and Forecasts: A Story of Weather and Finance at the Edge of Disaster, by Caroline E. Schuster and illustrated by Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Alex Diamond is Assistant Professor of sociology at Oklahoma 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

Well-known for his work in Critical Romani Studies, Jan Selling talks with Lavinia Stan about his latest book. Centered on Scandinavia, Romani Liberation: A Northern Perspective on Emancipatory Struggles and Progress (Central European UP, 2022) challenges the stereotype describing Romani as passive and incapable of responsibility and agency. Selling also criticizes benevolent but paternalistic attitudes that center on Romani victimhood. The interview offers an overview of the various chapters, the rationale behind the book, its link to Critical Romani Studies, and analysis of Romani emancipation in Sweden and beyond. In an engaging interview that shows listeners his passion for the topic, Selling highlights how various historical contexts have enabled or impeded the success of the struggles against discrimination and for equal rights, emphasizing Romani activism as a precondition for liberation. Listen to the interview to find out more! Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan (NIAS Press, 2022) is an edited volume of ethnographic research organized around a cluster of key themes such as affective labor and the commodified performance of gender in contemporary Japan. Refreshingly, the chapters consist exclusively of the work of early-career scholars, tied together with an introductory chapter and epilogue by the book’s editors, Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi. The authors are attentive to the spatial and temporal boundaries of gender performance, and the interactions between fantasy, play, performance, and identity in the marketplace of gendered service. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. 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 at least 20,000 people go missing in São Paulo, Brazil. Many will be found, sometimes in mundane mass graves, but thousands will not. Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (U California Press, 2022) explores this phenomenon and why there is little concern for those who vanish. Ethnographer Graham Denyer Willis works beside family members, state workers, and gravediggers to examine the rationalization behind why bodies are missing in space--from cemeteries, the criminal coroner's office, prisons, and elsewhere. By accompanying the bereaved as they confront an indifferent state and a suspicious society and search for loved ones against all odds, this gripping book reveals where missing bodies go and the reasons why people can disappear without being pursued. Recognizing that disappearance has long been central to Brazil's everyday political order, this humanistic account of the silences surrounding disappearance shows why a demand for a politics of life is needed now more than ever. 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 last twenty-thousand years, dogs and people have shared a unique bond in the animal kingdom. In How Our Love of Dogs Creates Social Conflict (Lexington Books, 2022), Dr. James K. Beggan uses symbolic interaction to examine the meaning that dogs have for people as friends and family members. Although many animal rights advocates express dismay over the subordinate status ownership implies, the author argues that ownership creates a powerful psychological connection that makes it easier for people to imbue dogs with humanlike characteristics. Dr. Beggan outlines how dogs’ sensitivity to inequity, in combination with a high degree of cognitive capacity, makes it possible for dogs to be active agents in creating conflict between people. The author's analysis of social conflict between people over their dogs connects to profound philosophical concepts about the nature of mind, the relationship between humans and animals, and the moral responsibility human beings have to dogs and other animals. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

How did humans, a species that evolved to be cooperative and egalitarian, develop societies of enforced inequality? Why did our ancestors create patriarchal power and warfare? Did it have to be this way? These are some of the key questions that Dr. Nancy Lindisfarne and Dr. Jonathan Neale grapple with in Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality (Hurst, 2023). Elites have always called hierarchy and violence unavoidable facts of human nature. Evolution, they claim, has caused men to fight, and people—starting with men and women—to have separate, unequal roles. But that is bad science. Why Men? tells a smarter story of humanity, from early behaviours to contemporary cultures. From bonobo sex and prehistoric childcare to human sacrifice, Joan of Arc, Darwinism and Abu Ghraib, this fascinating, fun and important book reveals that humans adapted to live equally, yet the earliest class societies suppressed this with invented ideas of difference. Ever since, these distortions have caused female, queer and minority suffering. But our deeply human instincts towards equality have endured. This book is not about what men and women are or do. It’s about the privileges humans claim, how they rationalise them, and how we unpick those ideas about our roots. It will change how you see injustice, violence and even yourself. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

Recently I had a chance to sit down for a long overdue chat with Anthony (Tony) Hodgson. When we last spoke it happened to be for my very first episode of Systems and Cybernetics. We talked about his newest book at the time: Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). That was in the summer of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was seemed to be experiencing more turbulence than it ever had. Fast forward to late 2023. The world, by all accounts—wars, climate chaos, mass shootings, and a lingering virus that will probably never go away—is turbulent beyond the tolerance threshold of the planet itself, not to mention its inhabitants. It seemed a fitting time to talk to Tony about his more recent Ready for Anything: Designing Resilience for a Transforming World, 2nd Edition (Triarchy, 2021). First published a decade ago, Ready for Anything starts by describing a 'global predicament', characterized by reductionist modes of thinking that are increasingly unsuited to what is really going on, and our fixation on short-term results—a pattern often referred to as shifting the burden. Hodgson writes that "complex messes are often the result of interactions between multiple complex adaptive systems, resulting in the emergence of unpredictable behaviours" (p. 18). In Ready for Anything, Hodgson introduces 'The World System Model'. The model encompasses 12 nodes ranging from Dominant Worldviews, to Wealth and Power, to Climate Change impact, and aims to provide a much-needed platform for a design revolution that harmonizes humanity, ecology and technology by integrating knowledge across disciplines around the major systemic issues confronting our world. Hodgson brought the model to the International Futures Forum (IFF) where it was implemented as the IFF World Game (follow the link for a visual of the model and examples of how it's put to use), which makes the model accessible to any kind of group in a highly participative manner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Alexandra Hudson, daughter of the "Manners Lady," was raised to respect others. But as she grew up, Hudson discovered a difference between politeness--a superficial appearance of good manners--and true civility. In this timely book, Hudson sheds light on how civility can help bridge our political divide. From classical philosophers like Epictetus, to great twentieth-century thinkers like Martin Luther King Jr., to her own experience working in the federal government during one of the most politically fraught eras in our nation's history, Hudson examines how civility--a respect for the personhood and dignity of others--transcends political disagreements. Respecting someone means valuing them enough to tell them when you think they are wrong. It's easy to look at the divided state of the world and blame our leaders, the media, or our education system. Instead, we should focus on what we can control: ourselves. The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves (St. Martin's Press, 2023) empowers readers to live tolerantly with others despite deep differences, and to rigorously protest wrongs and debate issues rather than silencing disagreements. A robust public discourse is essential to a truly civil society, and respecting others means telling hard truths. If enough of us decide to change ourselves, we might be able to change the world we live in, too. Alexandra Hudson is a writer and the founder of Civic Renaissance. She is an adjunct professor at the Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy. 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

In a world dominated by the notion of autonomy, free choice, and consent, Akiko Takeyama takes us on a thought-provoking journey into the heart of Japan's adult video industry in her groundbreaking book, Involuntary Consent The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry. With an ethereal blend of ethnography and critical analysis, Takeyama challenges the pervasive idea that participation in the adult entertainment industry is always a matter of free will. Instead, she introduces us to the complex concept of "involuntary consent," shining a light on a phenomenon that resonates far beyond the boundaries of Japan's AV industry. The Paradox of Involuntary Consent At the core of Takeyama's narrative lies the paradox of involuntary consent, a concept that questions the very foundations of modern societies built on principles of autonomy, choice, and equality. In a world where the adult entertainment industry alone generates billions of dollars annually, the narrative of consent has taken center stage. However, Takeyama's meticulous exploration reveals that beneath this facade of consent often lies a murky world of coercion and pressure. Behind-the-Scenes Realities "Involuntary Consent" delves into the behind-the-scenes negotiations and abuses within Japan's adult video industry. While the industry's glossy exterior may suggest willing participation, Takeyama uncovers a troubling reality where sex workers, predominantly women, are frequently pressured to comply with production companies' expectations and demands. This issue extends beyond the borders of Japan, as the US Department of State has recognized forced performance as a human rights violation. Dualistic Contract-Making One of the book's central arguments is that the framework of contract-making within the adult entertainment industry is inherently dualistic. It often creates a binary where consent and pleasure are pitted against coercion and pain. Sex workers, employed on a contractual basis, find themselves outside the protective purview of standard labor and employment laws, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Global Implications The book's significance transcends the borders of Japan. The series of arrests and trials of former talent agency owners and executives within the Japanese AV industry led to a call for systematic investigations. The US Department of State's recognition of forced performance as a human rights violation underscores the global ramifications of the issue. "Involuntary Consent" serves as a poignant reminder that the exploitation and coercion within the adult entertainment industry are not confined to one nation but are indicative of broader systemic issues. Akiko Takeyama is a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. She is also the Director of the Centre for East Asian Studies. Bing Wang receives her PhD at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include diasporic Chinese cultural identity and critical heritage 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 groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault’s history of truth. Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today. Dr. Richard Grijalva is an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) 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 late 2015 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi led Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to a smashing general election victory. In one of her first public appearances since the win, Suu Kyi went to a roadside to be photographed by journalists picking up garbage. Why? What was she doing there? The obvious answer to that question is: launching a nationwide trash clearance campaign. The less obvious but more interesting one is: outsourcing the polity. That’s the title of a new book by Gerard McCarthy, Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar (Cornell University Press, 2023), which is the subject of this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. In it McCarthy explains how the NLD government’s failure to break with the political economy of military dictatorship was not due to structural constraints alone, but was ideologically motivated. Drawing on years of ethnographic and survey research in Myanmar, he shows how welfare capitalism can slip between regime types, and insidiously undermine programs for social justice through redistribution of wealth. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Tamas Wells, Narrating Democracy in Myanmar Jane Ferguson, Repossessing Shanland Nick Cheesman is Associate Professor, Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University. He hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on 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 deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States. From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do? In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis. Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied. Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century. Dara Z. Strolovitch is Professor of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science at Yale University, where her research and teaching focus on political representation, social movements, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Host Ursula Hackett is Reader 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. 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, authenticity has become an American obsession. It animates thirty years' worth of reality TV programming and fuels the explosive virality of one hot social media app after another. It characterizes Donald Trump's willful disregard for political correctness (and proofreading) and inspires multinational corporations to stake activist claims in ways that few "woke" brands ever dared before. It buttresses a multibillion-dollar influencer industry of everyday folks shilling their friends with #spon-con and burnishes the street cred of rock stars and rappers alike. But, ironically, authenticity's not actually real: it's as fabricated as it is ubiquitous. In The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It Real in Media, Culture, and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2023) journalist and scholar Michael Serazio combines eye-opening reporting and lively prose to take readers behind the scenes with those who make "reality"—and the ways it tries to influence us. Drawing upon dozens of rare interviews with campaign consultants, advertising executives, tech company leadership, and entertainment industry gatekeepers, the book slyly investigates the professionals and practices that make people, products, and platforms seem "authentic" in today's media, culture, and politics. The result is a spotlight on the power of authenticity in today's media-saturated world and the strategies to satisfy this widespread yearning. In theory, authenticity might represent the central moral framework of our time: allaying anxieties about self and society, culture and commerce, and technology and humanity. It infects and informs our ideals of celebrity, aesthetics, privacy, nostalgia, and populism. And Serazio reveals how these pretenses are crafted, backstage, for audiences, consumers, and voters. 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 about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at 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

“Irrationality rules” in war, Michael Mann writes in his magisterial 2023 book, On Wars (Yale UP, 2023), a history that begins with the Roman Republic and ancient China and works its way through the world wars of the 20th century and up to present times. Mann is a Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His irrationality thesis, which posits that many wars are the product of miscalculations by over-confident rulers with little regard for their own people, offers an insightful and persuasive challenge to the Realist school on war, which stresses a rational aspect to the designs of war-making states. Then, too, Mann notes, wars can be driven by religious convictions and by a lust for revenge. Our conversation touches on the conflict in Israel-Palestine reignited by the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians in October, 2023 as well as on the ongoing Russian-Ukraine war launched by Vladimir Putin in February, 2022. 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

Where do Asian Americans fit into the U.S. racial order? How do we understand anti-Asian racism in relation to structural anti-Blackness? Are Asian Americans subordinated comparably to Black people or permitted adjacency to whiteness? For Dr. Claire Jean Kim, the police murder of George Floyd and the surge in anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic make these questions urgent – and the answers may alter the US racial order. In Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World (Cambridge UP, 2023), Dr. Kim argues that understanding US racial dynamics requires careful analysis of two forces: anti-Blackness and white supremacy. Dr. Kim’s meticulously researched book treats White supremacy and anti-Blackness as “kinetic forces or energy flows that have shaped and been shaped by the structural regimes of slavery, colonialism, capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire across the globe.” White supremacy lifts up one group as it pushes down all others. Anti-Blackness “abjects Blackness and elevates not-Blackness.” Based on her detailed analysis of law, history, and politics, Dr. Kim demonstrates how Asian Americans are “dynamically constituted as not-white, but above all not-Black” – and that Not-Blackness is a “vital form of property in an anti-Black world.” The construction of Asian Americans as not-white but above all not-Black has determined their positionality for nearly two centuries. Asian Americans are “dynamically positioned and weaponized by the U.S. state as it seeks to preserve structural anti-Blackness.” How Asian Americans choose to respond to their not-Black status will help to define racial politics in the U.S. in the twenty-first century. Can “Asian Americanness be reimagined as a force that destabilizes, rather than stabilizes, an anti-Black world? Dr. Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on race, politics, and human-animal studies. She is the author of two previous award-winning books, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press, 2000) and Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 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

Among urban designers and municipal officials, the term encroachment is defined as a deviation from the official master plan. But in cities today, such informal modifications to the urban fabric are deeply enmeshed with formal planning procedures. Master Plans and Encroachments: The Architecture of Informality in Islamabad (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) examines informality in the high-modernist city of Islamabad as a strategic conformity to official schemes and regulations rather than as a deviation from them. For the new administrative capital of Pakistan designed in 1959 by Greek architect and planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, Islamabad's master plan offers a clear template of formal urban design within which informal spaces and processes have been articulated. Drawing on deep archival research, wide-ranging interviews, and an array of visual material, including photographs, maps, and architectural drawings, Dr. Faiza Moatasim shows how Islamabad's master plan is not simply a blueprint that guides future urban development or makes its violations apparent; it is used by both city officials and citizens to develop informal spaces that accommodate unfulfilled needs and desires of those living and working in the city. Master Plans and Encroachments is the first book that examines the informal practices of both the privileged and the underprivileged. The book highlights how low-, middle-, and upper-income people do not randomly build informal spaces; they strategically use architectural techniques to support their informal claims to space, which are often met with the government's tacit approval. In this episode, Tayeba Batool talks to Dr. Faiza Moatasim about the spatial, material, class, and gendered negotiations and experiences that are imprinted on the city through Masterplans. Dr. Moatasim also shares how her research on a postcolonial city such as Islamabad projects onto urbanisms and encroachments elsewhere, and what we can learn the complexities of urban planning and architecture. The conversation also creates a space to address experiences with publishing inter-disciplinary research and highlight the necessity of learning from cities that are often overlooked in the dialogue about and on urban spaces. Dr. Faiza Moatasim is an Assistant Professor of Architecture in Urbanism and Urban Design at the USC School of Architecture. 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 do migrants make sense of migration? In Coloniality and Meritocracy in unequal EU migrations: Intersecting Inequalities in Post-2008 Italian Migration (Bristol UP, 2023), Simone Varriale, Lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough University, explores the experiences of Italian migrants to Britain to critique notions of meritocracy. Combining a rich set of interview data with a deep understanding of theories of colonialism, and inequality, the book rethinks the recent history of migration in the EU. The book challenges existing narratives of both who is a migrant and the meaning of migration, as well as critiquing stereotypes associated with Northern and Southern Europe. The book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, as well as for anyone wishing to understand inequality and migration today. 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

Racial capitalism, invisible but threaded throughout the world, shapes our lives. Focusing on the experiences of white, Black, and Latinx residents of Cincinnati, Sarah Mayorga argues that residents' interpretations of their circumstances, what she calls urban specters, are often partial recognitions of the exploitation and dehumanization produced by racial capitalism. In Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism (UNC Press, 2023), much scholarly work on racial capitalism has necessarily focused on historical, theoretical, and macro-level accounts. Mayorga takes these vital insights and applies them to two contemporary working-class neighborhoods, centering the lives of working-class and poor people. Using data from interviews with 117 residents, Mayorga maps how racial capitalism creates the everyday harms people know all too well. Chronic underdevelopment, private property, and policing, she shows, have produced these harms. In this enlightening book, Mayorga identifies small windows into abolitionist possibilities that create different types of relations, ones based on care and connection. This is a guide for anyone trying to understand urban inequality, but also more importantly, for how we might create a different world. 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

Today I spoke with Lesley Nicole Braun to talk about her new book on Congo's dancers. Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family lives of the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among the various genres popular in the capital city of Kinshasa, Congolese rumba occupies a special place and can be counted as one of the DRC’s most well-known cultural exports. The public image of rumba was historically dominated by male bandleaders, singers, and musicians. However, with the introduction of the danseuse (professional concert dancer) in the late 1970s, the role of women as cultural, moral, and economic actors came into public prominence and helped further raise Congolese rumba’s international profile. In Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa (U Wisconsin Press, 2023), Lesley Nicole Braun uses the prism of the Congolese danseuse to examine the politics of control and the ways in which notions of visibility, virtue, and socio-economic opportunity are interlinked in this urban African context. The work of the danseuse highlights the fact that public visibility is necessary to build the social networks required for economic independence, even as this visibility invites social opprobrium for women. The concert dancer therefore exemplifies many of the challenges that women face in Kinshasa as they navigate the public sphere, and she illustrates the gendered differences of local patronage politics that shape public morality. As an ethnographer, Braun had unusual access to the world she documents, having been invited to participate as a concert dancer herself. 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

Children's leisure lives are changing, with increasing dominance of organised activities and screen-based leisure. These shifts have reconfigured parenting practices, too. However, our current understandings of these processes are race-blind and based mostly on the experiences of white middle-class families. Drawing on an innovative study of middle-class British Indian families, this book brings children's and parents' voices to the forefront and bridges childhood studies, family studies and leisure studies to theorise children's leisure from a fresh perspective. Demonstrating the salience of both race and class in shaping leisure cultures within middle-class racialised families, Utsa Mukherjee's Race, Class, Parenting and Children's Leisure: Children's Leisurescapes and Parenting Cultures in Middle-Class British Indian Families (Policy Press, 2022) is an invaluable contribution to key sociological debates around leisure, childhoods and parenting ideologies. 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. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Brown Saviors and Their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India (Duke UP, 2023), Arjun Shankar draws from his ethnographic work with an educational NGO to investigate the practices of “brown saviors”—globally mobile, dominant-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who drive India’s help economy. Shankar argues that these brown saviors actually reproduce many of the racialized values and ideologies associated with who and how to help that have been passed down from the colonial period, while masking other operations of power behind the racial politics of global brownness. In India, these operations of power center largely on the transnational labor politics of caste. Ever attentive to moments of discomfort and complicity, Shankar develops a method of “nervous ethnography” to uncover the global racial hierarchies, graded caste stratifications, urban/rural distinctions, and digital panaceas that shape the politics of help in India. Through nervous critique, Shankar introduces a framework for the study of the global help economies that reckons with the ongoing legacies of racial and caste capitalism. Arjun Shankar is Assistant Professor of Culture and Politics at Georgetown 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

Even before the Covid pandemic began in 2020, chronic loneliness was a private experience of profound anguish that had become a public health crisis. Since then it has reached new heights. Loneliness assumes many forms, from enduring physical isolation to feeling rejected because of difference, and it can have devastating consequences for our physical and mental health. Jeremy Nobel founded Project UnLonely to bring creativity as well as social and medical strategies to address this societal problem. In his book Project UnLonely: Healing our Crisis of Disconnection (Avery, 2023), Dr. Nobel unpacks our personal and national experiences of loneliness to discover its roots and to show how we can take steps to find comfort and connection. Dr. Nobel brings together many voices, from pioneering researchers, to leaders in business, education, the arts, and healthcare, to lonely people of every age, background, and circumstance. He discovers that the pandemic isolated us in ways that were not only physical, and that, at its core, a true sense of loneliness results from a disconnection to the self. He clarifies how meaningful reconnection can be nourished and sustained. And he reveals that an important component of the healing process is engaging in creativity, a powerful opportunity he shows us can be accessed by all. Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical and science reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

All families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays A lesbian partnership, a “bastard” son, an aunt who is a prostitute, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unravelled a family at an earlier moment in history. In Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s (NYU Press, 2023), Dr. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise would risk eliciting not only embarrassment or discomfort, but profound shame and, in some cases, danger. Drawing on over 150 memoirs describing childhoods in the period between the aftermath of World War II and the 1960s, Dr. Nelson highlights the importance of history in creating family secrets and demonstrates the use of personal stories to understand how people make sense of themselves and their social worlds. Keeping Family Secrets uncovers hidden stories of same-sex attraction among boys, unwed pregnancies among teenage girls, the institutionalisation of children with mental and physical disabilities, participation in left-wing political activities, adoption, and Jewish ancestry. The members of ordinary families kept these issues secret to hide the disconnect between the reality of their own family and the prevailing ideals of what a family should be. Personal accounts reveal the costs associated with keeping family secrets, as family members lie, hurl epithets, inflict abuse, and even deny family membership to protect themselves from the shame and danger of public knowledge. Keeping Family Secrets sheds light not only on decades-old secrets but pushes us to confront what secrets our families keep today. 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

Fighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles (U California Press, 2023) portrays women's intimate, embodied relationships with river waters and explores how those relationships embolden local communities' resistance to private run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. Building on extensive ethnographic research, Özge Yaka develops a body-centered, phenomenological approach to women's environmental activism and combines it with a relational ontological perspective. In this way, the book pushes beyond the "natural resources" frame to demonstrate how our corporeal connection to nonhuman entities is constitutive of our more-than-human lifeworld. Fighting for the River takes the human body as a starting point to explore the connection between lived experience and nonhuman environments, treating bodily senses and affects as the media of more-than-human connectivity and political agency. Analyzing local environmental struggles as struggles for coexistence, Yaka frames human-nonhuman relationality as a matter of socio-ecological justice. Özge Yaka is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Geographical Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin. 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

In her book, Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State University Press, 2023), Melissa Weininger theorizes a new category of "diaspora Israeli culture" that is formed around and through notions of homeland and complicates the binary between diaspora and Israel. The works addressed here inhabit and imagine diaspora from the vantage point of the putative homeland, engaging both diasporic and Zionist models simultaneously through language, geography, and imagination. These examples contend with the existence of the state of Israel and its complex implications for diaspora Jewish identities and nationalisms, as well as the implications for Zionism of those diasporic conceptions of Jewish national identity. This dynamic understanding of both an Israeli and a Jewish diaspora works to envision a non-hegemonic Jewish nationalism that can negotiate both political imagination and reality. Melissa Weininger is an assistant professor of Jewish studies at California State University, Northridge. 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

Professors Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven are authors of a book called The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (Bloomsbury, 2014). Their book examines how social movements imagine (and build) radical new futures. Additionally, the book critically intervenes in broader social movement theory, and suggests new approaches for scholar-activists. As part of a recent episode of Darts and Letters, “Mutual Aid & the Anarchist Radical Imagination,” we spoke to Alex and Max about how these ideas help us make sense of autonomous and anarchist-styled movement building. However, we had a much broader conversation about the book, its legacy, and how we should understand it today. That longer conversation is here. We cover: the history of social movement theory, how it (mis)understands prefigurative politics, and how to make sense of the burgeoning far right. In a time where reactionary movements offer radical visions – space colonization, transhumanist enhancement, life extension, and more – how are we to make sense of the radical imagination? Do they have a kind of new reactionary radical imagination, or is it more of the same? We discuss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Michael O. Johnston sits down with Maitrayee Deka, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex to discuss her new book Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy (Stanford University Press, 2023). The term "tinker" calls to mind nomadic medieval vendors who operate on the fringe of formal society. Excluded from elite circles and characterized by an ability to leverage minimal resources, these tradesmen live and die by their ability to adapt their stores to the popular tastes of the day. In Delhi in the 21st century, an extensive network of informal marketplaces, or bazaars, has evolved over the course of the city's history, across colonial and postcolonial regimes. Their resilience as an economic system is the subject of this book. Today, instead of mending and selling fabrics and pots, these street vendors are primarily associated with electronic products—computers, cell phones, motherboards, and video games. This book offers a deep ethnography of three Delhi bazaars, and a cast of tinkers, traders, magicians, street performers, and hackers who work there. It is an exploration, and recognition, of the role of bazaars and tinkers in the modern global economy, driving globalization from below. In Delhi, and across the world, these street markets work to create a new information society, as the global popular classes aspire to elite consumer goods they cannot afford except in counterfeit. 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 about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at 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

Can you run a marathon, drink coffee, eat fish, or fly on a plane while pregnant? Such questions are just the tip of the iceberg for how most pregnant women's bodies are managed, surveilled, and scrutinized during pregnancy. The Reproduction of Inequality: How Class Shapes the Pregnant Body and Infant Health (NYU Press, 2023) examines the intense social pressure that expectant and new mothers face when it comes to their health and body-care choices. Drawing on interviews with dozens of pregnant women and new mothers from poor, middle-class, and mixed-class backgrounds, Katherine Mason paints a vivid picture of the immense weight of expectation that comes with the early stages of motherhood. The women in Mason's study universally sought to give their children a healthy start in life; however, their chosen approaches varied based on their socio-economic class. Whereas middle-class mothers attempted a complete lifestyle change and absolute devotion to the achievement and maintenance of "the healthy pregnant body," poorer women made strategic choices about which health goals to prioritize on a limited budget, lacking the economic and cultural capital required to speak and perfectly adhere to the language of "good health." The unfortunate result is that middle-class mothers are more likely to be seen by others and by themselves as "good" parents, whereas the efforts of working-class mothers are often misread as displaying inadequate concern about their health and that of their child. This in turn contributes to longstanding stereotypes about poor families and communities, and limits their children's chances for upward mobility. The Reproduction of Inequality is a compelling analysis of the impact of class on new mothers' approaches to health and wellness, and a sobering examination of how inequality shapes mothers' efforts to maximize their own health and that of their children. 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, Sébastien Tutenges has conducted research in bars, nightclubs, festivals, drug dens, nightlife resorts, and underground dance parties in a quest to answer a fundamental question: Why do people across cultures gather regularly to intoxicate themselves? Vivid and at times deeply personal, Intoxication: An Ethnography of Effervescent Revelry (Rutgers UP, 2022) offers new insights into a wide variety of intoxicating experiences, from the intimate feeling of connection among concertgoers to the adrenaline-fueled rush of a fight, to the thrill of jumping off a balcony into a swimming pool. Tutenges shows what it means and feels to move beyond the ordinary into altered states in which the transgressive, spectacular, and unexpected take place. He argues that the primary aim of group intoxication is the religious experience that Émile Durkheim calls collective effervescence, the essence of which is a sense of connecting with other people and being part of a larger whole. This experience is empowering and emboldening and may lead to crime and deviance, but it is at the same time vital to our humanity because it strengthens social bonds and solidarity. The book fills important gaps in Durkheim’s social theory and contributes to current debates in micro-sociology as well as cultural criminology and cultural sociology. Here, for the first time, readers will discover a detailed account of collective effervescence in contemporary society that includes: an explanation of what collective effervescence is; a description of the conditions that generate collective effervescence; a typology of the varieties of collective effervescence; a discussion of how collective effervescence manifests in the realm of nightlife, politics, sports, and religion; and an analysis of how commercial forces amplify and capitalize on the universal human need for intoxication. 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 about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at 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