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PODCAST

New Books in Sociology

New Books Network

Interviews with Sociologists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

science social sciences

All Episodes

42:26

Kolby Hanson, "Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/28

In Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kolby Hanson argues that these periods of state toleration do not simply change armed groups' behavior, but fundamentally transform the organizations themselves by shaping who takes up arms and which leaders they follow. This book draws on a set of innovative experimental surveys and 75 in-depth interviews tracing four armed movements over time in Northeast India and Sri Lanka. A powerful new theory of

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34:35

John L. Campbell, "Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/26

Since the Reagan era, conservatives in the United States have championed cutting taxes, especially for wealthy individuals and corporations, as the best way to achieve economic prosperity. In his new book, Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich (Cambridge UP, 2025) John L. Campbell shows that while these claims are highly influential, they are also wrong. Using historical and cross-national evidence, the book challenges and refutes every justification conservatives have made for tax

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49:03

Jacinto Cuvi, "The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/24

How street vendors tangle with the law in São Paulo, Brazil.With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might sell you a number of delights and conveniences familiar to city dwellers—from cold water bottles while you’re sitting in traffic to a popsicle from a cart on a summer afternoon in the park. Such vendors form a significant share of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil, but their ubiquity belies perpetual struggle. Some have the right to practice their trade;

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48:49

Robert F. Carley, "Culture and Tactics: Gramsci,...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/23

While scholars of social and political movements tend to analyze tactics in terms of their effectiveness in achieving specific outcomes, Robert F. Carley argues by contrast that tactics are, above all, what social movements do. They are not mere means to an end so much as they are a public form of expression pointing out injustices and making just demands. Rooted in a highly original analysis of the tactically mediated relationship between race and mobilization in the work of Italian philosopher and

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99:40

Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/22

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was originally written and published in Chinese. The English translation has just come out with Palgrave Macmillan. Self as Method provides a manifesto of intellectual activism that counsels China’s young people to think by themselves and for themselves. Consisting of three conversations between Xiang Biao, a social anthropologist, and Wu Qi, a rising journalist,

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43:02

Tanja Petrovic, "Utopia of the Uniform: Affective...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/21

The compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persisted even after the horrific violence of the 1990s, in which many of these men found themselves on opposite sides of the front lines. In Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army (Duke UP, 2024), Tanja Petrović draws on memories and material effects of dozens of JNA conscripts to show how their experience of military

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28:18

Susan D. Stewart. "On the Rocks: Straight Talk about...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/20

Existing portrayals of women who drink typically fall into two categories: disturbing stories of women hitting “rock bottom,” resulting in ruined careers, families, and futures, or amusing stories of fun and harmless “girls’ nights out,” with women drinking and overindulging as a temporary escape from a never-ending list of work and family demands. Drawing on original research and extensive interviews with a diverse group of women, author Susan Stewart challenges these stereotypes, revealing women’s

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43:46

Joel Best, "Just the Facts: Untangling Contradictory...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/20

Why can’t we seem to agree on facts? In this succinct volume, sociologist Joel Best turns his inimitable eye toward the social construction of what we think is true. He evaluates how facts emerge from our social worlds—including our beliefs, values, tastes, and norms—and how they align with those worlds’ standards. He argues that by developing a sociological perspective toward what we think we know, we can better parse the use of facts and untruths around us.Just the Facts: Untangling Contradictory

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38:44

Shakirah E. Hudani, "Master Plans and Minor Acts:...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/18

Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (U of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Shakirah Hudani examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation?Through extended ethnographic and

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57:48

Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, "Graphic Refuge:...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/17

Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) by Dr. Dominic Davies & Dr. Candida Rifkind is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes,

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48:40

Katherine Eva Maich, "Bringing Law Home: Gender,...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/15

The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging. In Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights (Stanford University Press, 2025), Dr. Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical

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66:48

Kevin Passmore, "The Maginot Line: A New History of...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/13

The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges, and even electric trains. Kilometres of underground galleries led to casements hidden in the terrain, and turrets that rose from the ground to fire upon the enemy. The fortifications were invulnerable to the heaviest artillery and to chemical warfare.Despite this extensive preparation, France fell to Germany in a little under six weeks

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71:32

Simon James Copland, "The Male Complaint: The...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/12

Inspired by leaders such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, the online Manosphere has exploded in recent years. Dedicated to anti-feminism, these communities have orchestrated online campaigns of misogynistic harassment, with some individuals going as far as committing violent terrorist attacks. Although the Manosphere has become a focus point of the media, researchers and governments alike, discussions tend to either over-sensationalize the community or offer simplistic explanations for their

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51:10

Chelsi West Ohueri, "Encountering Race in Albania: An...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/11

Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife (Cornell University Press, 2025) is the first book to interrogate race and racial logics in Albania. Chelsi West Ohueri examines how race is made, remade, produced, and reproduced through constructions of whiteness, blackness, and otherness. She argues that while race is often limited to Western processes of modernity that exclude Eastern Europe, racialization processes are global, and the ethnography of everyday Albanian

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38:05

Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe, "Growing Up...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/10

What do children believe in? In Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England (Princeton UP, 2025) Anna Strhan, a Reader in the Department of Sociology at the University of York and Rachael Shillitoe, a senior social scientist in the UK civil service and honorary fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of York use ethnography and interviews with young people and parents at a variety of schools in England to examine current forms of non-religiosity. The book

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53:07

Stephanie K. Kim, "Constructing Student Mobility: How...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/08

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

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23:15

May Friedman, "Fat Studies: The Basics" (Routledge,...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/08

Fat Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2025) introduces the reading of fat bodies and the ways that Fat Studies, as a field, has responded to waves of ideas about fat people, their lives, and choices.Part civil rights discourse and part academic discipline, Fat Studies is a dynamic project that involves contradiction and discussion. In order to understand this field, the book also explores its intersections with race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability, ethnicity, migration and beyond. In

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58:30

Ruth E. Toulson, "Necropolitics of the Ordinary:...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/07

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore (University of Washington Press, 2025), an ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries,

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53:45

Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/04

Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths. Embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt and Beauvoir but

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31:34

Helen C. Epstein, "Why Live: An Anatomy of Suicide...

New Books in Sociology ·

2025/09/03

What causes suicide epidemics—and how can we prevent them? Many suicides are caused by biological mental illness, but sometimes the suicide rate of a particular group jumps—two-, three-, or even ten-fold—in a short time, behaving like an epidemic. Suicide epidemics unfold more slowly than microbial plagues like flu or malaria, but they happen far too quickly to result from genetic changes and affect far too many people to be explained away as spontaneous cases of brain injury. These epidemics have

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1,621 results

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