New Books in Sociology
2,917 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★ - 44 ratingsInterviews with Sociologists about their New Books
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Episodes
Seth D. Kaplan, "Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time" (Little, Brown Spark, 2023)
April 14, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesThe neighborhoods we live in impact our lives in so many ways: they determine who we know, what resources and opportunities we have access to, the quality of schools our kids go to, our sense of security and belonging, and even how long we live. Yet too many of us live in neighborhoods plagued by rising crime, school violence, family disintegration, addiction, alienation, and despair. Even the wealthiest neighborhoods are not immune; while poverty exacerbates these challenges, they exist in z...
Darren Wershler et al,, "The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
April 14, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesA hybrid lab functions in the space between institutions and infrastructure, creating new opportunities for understanding their interconnection. However, their legitimacy remains fuzzy without formal and methodological critique. The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (U of Minnesota Press, 2021) proposes the "extended lab model" to describe the relationship of various facets of a lab and uses a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies. This conversation covers the rol...
Jessica C. Robbins, "Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
April 14, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourHow embedded are the dignity and personhood of the elderly in the collective memory of their nation? In Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood (Rutgers University Press, 2021) anthropologist Jessica C. Robbins-Panko dissects the Polish version of this story, in which the meanings and ideals both of “active aging” programs and of institutions devoted to medium- or long-term care have become caught up in the cultural, political, and economic changes that have o...
Grazia Ting Deng, "Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy" (Princeton UP, 2024)
April 14, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesWhy and how local coffee bars in Italy--those distinctively Italian social and cultural spaces--have been increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since the Great Recession of 2008? Italians regard espresso as a quintessentially Italian cultural product--so much so that Italy has applied to add Italian espresso to UNESCO's official list of intangible heritages of humanity. The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these...
M. Cooper Minister and Sarah J. Bloesch, "Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion: An Introduction to Theories and Methods" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
April 13, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesCultural Approaches to Studying Religion: An Introduction to Theories and Method (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines the analytic tools of scholars in religious studies, as well as in related disciplines that have shaped the field including cultural approaches from anthropology, history, literature, and critical studies in race, sexuality, and gender. Each chapter is written by a leading scholar and includes: the biographical and historical context of each theorist; their approaches and key writings;...
Elizabeth Peterson, "Making Sense of 'Bad English': An Introduction to Language Attitudes and Ideologies" (Routledge, 2019)
April 12, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesBrynn Quick speaks with Dr Elizabeth Peterson about language ideologies and what we think when we hear different varieties of English. The conversation centers around Dr Peterson’s 2020 book Making Sense of 'Bad English': An Introduction to Language Attitudes and Ideologies (Routledge, 2019). The book discusses how the notions of “good” versus “bad” English came about, and some of the consequences of these views of language. The book is a must-use for teachers and professors who introduce the...
Miss Tibet: Representing Tibet through Beauty Pageants
April 12, 2024 08:00 - 22 minutesWhat does the Miss Tibet beauty pageant tell us about what it means to be Tibetan in a globalized world? And what understandings of Tibetan culture does it convey? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Pema Choedon about representations of Tibet and Tibetan culture on the global stage from the vantage point of the Miss Tibet beauty pageant. While such pageants are often thought of as an example of “low-brow culture” and a site of women’s objectification by the male gaze, Choedon shows ...
Cristiana Strava, "Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
April 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhat does living “precariously” mean in Casablanca? In 2014 it meant being labeled tcharmil (seeming to endanger public order) and swept up by the police, if you were an unemployed young man sporting a banda haircut and gathering with your mates on a street corner. Cristiana Strava witnessed this and other neglected aspects of urban vulnerability while conducting extensive fieldwork in Hay Mohammedi, a renowned working-class neighborhood on the margins of modern Morocco’s economic mecca, Casa...
Brooke Larson, "The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia" (Duke UP, 2023)
April 11, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024) by Dr. Brooke Larson maps the moral dilemmas and political stakes involved in the protracted struggle over Indian literacy and schooling in the Bolivian Andes. Dr. Larson traces Bolivia’s major state efforts to educate its unruly Indigenous masses at key junctures in the twentiet...
Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)
April 10, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesA stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, who eventually taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences. Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contri...
Ellie Tomsett, "Stand-up Comedy and Contemporary Feminisms: Sexism, Stereotypes and Structural Inequalities" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesHow is comedy hostile to women? In Stand-up Comedy and Contemporary Feminisms: Sexism, Stereotypes and Structural Inequalities (Bloomsbury, 2023), Ellie Tomsett, a Senior Lecturer in media and film at Birmingham City University, explores the reality of a comedy industry that, despite many changes, still has a sexism problem. The book draws on a huge range of research materials, illustrating the experience of stand-up comic performers, the views of audiences, the impact of digital and social m...
Marc Edelman, "Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change" (Cornell UP, 2024)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesPeasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marc Edelman illuminates the transnational agrarian movements that are remaking rural society and the world's food and agriculture systems. Dr. Edelman explains how peasant movements are staking their claims from farmers' fields to massive protests around the world, shaping heated debates over peasants' rights and the very category of "peasant" within the ag...
Tina Sikka, "Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 18 minutesHealth Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury, 2023) critically examines contemporary health and wellness culture through the lens of personalization, genetification and functional foods. These developments have had a significant impact on the intersecting categories of gender, race, and class in light of the increasing adoption of digital health and surveillance technologies like MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, HealthyifyMe, and Fooducate. These three vec...
Kieran File, "How Language Shapes Relationships in Professional Sports Teams: Power and Solidarity Dynamics in a New Zealand Rugby Team" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesWhile the topic of relationships in professional sports teams is gaining greater attention from researchers and practitioners, the role that coach and athlete language plays in shaping these relationships remains largely unexplored. How Language Shapes Relationships in Professional Sports Teams: Power and Solidarity Dynamics in a New Zealand Rugby Team (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Kieran File addresses this gap by examining how every day, authentic language patterns used by coaches, captains and...
Paul Hansen, "Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan" (SUNY Press, 2024)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesAs an ethnography of a Japanese dairy farm while having theoretical values going beyond the specific context, Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan (SUNY Press, 2024) offers a historical and ethnographic examination of the rapid industrialization of the dairy industry in Tokachi, Hokkaido. The book begins with a history of dairy farming and consumption in Hokkaido from a macro perspective, mapping the transition from survival to subsistence and...
Naomi Cahn, et al., "Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA stirring, comprehensive look at the state of women in the workforce--why women's progress has stalled, how our economy fosters unproductive competition, and how we can fix the system that holds women back. In an era of supposed great equality, women are still falling behind in the workplace. Even with more women in the workforce than in decades past, wage gaps continue to increase. It is the most educated women who have fallen the furthest behind. Blue-collar women hold the most insecure an...
Loren D. Lybarger, "Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile" (U California Press, 2020)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourChicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990s its structures have weakened and Islamic institutions have gained strength. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interview data, Loren D. Lybarger's book Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile (U California Press, 2020) charts the origins of these changes and the multiple effects...
Erin L. Durban, "The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourEvangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism. In The Sexual Politics of the Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti (University of Illinois Press, 2023), author Erin L. Dur...
Alexandrina Vanke, "The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in Everyday Struggle" (Manchester UP, 2024)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesDespite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in Everyday Struggle (Manchester UP, 2024) challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordin...
Robert Bruno, "What Work Is" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourRobert Bruno is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as Director of the Labor Education Program. He is the author of Justified by Work: Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches; Steelworker Alley: How Class Works In Youngstown; and Reforming the Chicago Teamsters: The Story of Local 705. He is the coauthor of A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Chicago Teachers Strike. What Wor...
Ben Highmore, "Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain" (Manchester UP, 2023)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn postwar Britain, journalists and politicians predicted that the class system would not survive a consumer culture where everyone had TVs and washing machines, and where more and more people owned their own homes. They were to be proved hopelessly wrong. Ben Highmore's Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain (Manchester UP, 2023) charts how class culture, rather than being destroyed by mass consumption, was remade from flat-pack furniture, Mediterranean cu...
Robert Willim, "Mundania: How and Where Technologies Are Made Ordinary" (Bristol UP, 2024)
March 30, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesRobert Willim's new book Mundania: How and Where Technologies Are Made Ordinary (Bristol University Press, 2024), takes the reader on a journey through the realm of Mundania, a realm that is both familiar and incomprehensible, banal and uncanny. Mundania is the realm in which technology, which seemed unspeakable before its arrival in our world, becomes an everyday fixture of life, and, more specifically, mundane. Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network! Le...
Ya-Wen Lei, "The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 30, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesSince the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has increasingly shifted away from labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to a process of socioeconomic development centered on science and technology. In The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023) Ya-Wen Lei traces the contours of this techno-developmental regime and its resulting form of techno-state capitalism, telling the stories of those whose lives have been transformed—for bet...
David E. Sutton, "Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples" (Berghahn, 2021)
March 28, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesWhat defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples (Berghahn, 2021) by Dr. David E. Sutton explores these questions by proposing a new theory of the meaning of cooking as a willingness to put oneself and one’s meals at risk on a daily basis. Richly illustrated with examples from the author’s anthropology fieldwork in Greece, Bigger Fish to Fry prop...
SunAh M. Laybourn, "Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants" (NYU Press, 2024)
March 27, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesDr. SunAh M. Laybourn’s Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants (NYU Press, 2024) explores the experiences of Korean adoptees, the largest population of adult transnational adoptees in the United States. Over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted into primarily white US families since the 1950s, and despite being raised as US citizens, still experience both legal and social barriers to national belonging. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Korean adoptee adults, online surve...
Neil Gong, "Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
March 27, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesSociologist Neil M. Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between. In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (U Chicago Press, 2024), sociologist Neil M. Gong traces the divide between the haves and ...
Rana AlMutawa, "Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai" (U California Press, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesEveryday Life in the Spectacular City is a groundbreaking urban ethnography that reveals how middle-class citizens and longtime residents of Dubai interact with the city's so-called superficial spaces to create meaningful social lives. Rana AlMutawa shows that inhabitants adapt themselves to top-down development projects, from big malls to megaprojects. These structures serve residents' evolving social needs, transforming Dubai's spectacular spaces into personally important cultural sites. Th...
Why, How, and Who to Marry: A Conversation with Brad Wilcox *01
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesUniversity of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox *01 delves into some of the popular wisdom surrounding marriage and tells us what the data has to say: is it better to marry young or wait? To move in with your partner before or after marriage? Does marriage hurt your career prospects or your ability to set aside time for your own happiness? What groups in America are doing well with regards to marriage, and what groups aren't doing as well? Along the way, he also addresses some of the political...
Cristina Rocha, "Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhen did Christianity become cool? How did an Australian church conquer the world and expand into Brazil, a country with its own crop of powerful megachurches? In her exciting new book, Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities (Oxford UP, 2023), anthropologist Cristina Rocha analyses the creation of a transnational Pentecostal field between Brazil and Australia, two countries that have been peripheral in the history of Pentecostalism but which more recently h...
Laura Menin, "Quest for Love in Central Morocco: Young Women and the Dynamics of Intimate Lives" (Syracuse UP, 2024)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesFollowing the 2011 wave of revolutions and protests in North Africa and the Middle East, new discussions of individual freedoms emerged in the Moroccan public sphere and human rights discourse. A segment of the public rallied around the removal of an article in the penal code that punished sexual relationships outside of marriage. As debates about personal and sexual freedom gain momentum, love and intimacy remain complex issues. Moving between public, clandestine, and online interactions, Q...
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson et al., "Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesThere is a growing consensus that environmental narratives can help catalyze the social change necessary to address today's environmental crises; however, surprisingly little is known about their impact and effectiveness. In Empirical Ecocriticism, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W. P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder combine an environmental humanities perspective with empirical methods derived from the social sciences to study the influence of environmental stories on our a...
Max Fraser, "Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 20, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourOver the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The “hillbilly highway” was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. In Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class...
Fran Martin, "Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West" (Duke UP, 2021)
March 20, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke UP, 2021) explores the significance of transnational educational mobility in the life aspirations of young, middle-class Chinese women. Based on extensive, long-term ethnographic research, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as profes...
Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, "Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids" (Princeton UP, 2019)
March 20, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesParents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are increasingly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive. Why? Love, Money, and Parenting investigates how economic forces and growing inequality shape how parents raise their children. From medieval times to the present, and from the United States, the United Kingdom, German...
Nancy Folbre, "The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy" (Verso, 2021)
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 29 minutesNancy Folbre’s The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy (Verso, 2021) asks the questions of why and under what conditions overlapping systems of exploitation persist and decline. Folbre adds this book to a long repertoire of studying the economics of care, social reproduction, household-state relations, and women’s coalition building. In making sense of the gender-skewed outcomes of capitalist development, the undervaluation of care, and the dynamics of...
Daniel Feierstein, "Memories and Representations of Terror: Working Through Genocide" (Routledge, 2024)
March 16, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesMemories and Representations of Terror: Working Through Genocide (Routledge, 2024) explores how memories and representations shape our understanding of historical events, particularly the ways in which societies create narratives about genocide and its aftermath, using Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–1983) and its contested legacy as a case study. Feierstein examines how memories and representations of genocide are the terrain in which both the strategic objectives of genocide an...
Jonas Tinius, "State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
March 15, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesState of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration (Cambridge UP, 2023) is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of ...
Charlotte Setijadi, "Memories of Unbelonging: Ethnic Chinese Identity Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
March 15, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesThe ethnic Chinese have had a long and problematic history in Indonesia, commonly stereotyped as a market-dominant minority with dubious political loyalty toward Indonesia. For over three decades under Suharto’s New Order regime, a cultural assimilation policy banned Chinese languages, cultural expression, schools, media, and organizations. This policy was only abolished in 1998 following the riots and anti-Chinese attacks that preceded the fall of the New Order. In the post-Suharto era, Chin...
Foster Care, Family, and Social Class: A Conversation with Rob Henderson
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourRobert Kim Henderson, a recently-minted psychology PhD from Cambridge and prominent essayist, had a troubled childhood. A victim of child abuse, he was shuffled through the foster care system, then finally settled in a family in a working-class California town, only to become a child of divorce. At 17, he enlisted in the U.S. Airforce, and went on to earn his BA from Yale and become a Gates Scholar at Cambridge. His debut book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (Gal...
Pankaj Jain and Jeffery D. Long, "Indian and Western Philosophical Concepts in Religion" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesPhilosophical concepts are influential in the theories and methods to study the world religions. Even though the disciplines of anthropology and religious studies now encompass communities and cultures across the world, the theories and methods used to study world religions and cultures continue to be rooted in Western philosophies. In Indic philosophical systems, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism, one of the common views on reality is that the world both within one self and outside is ...
Authoritarian Practices Go Well Beyond Authoritarian Regimes
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 26 minutesAuthoritarianism is not something that happens only within the borders of authoritarian regimes. In this episode, Marlies Glasius talks with host Licia Cianetti about her work on “authoritarian practices”, how the sabotage of accountability can take place also within democracies, how it can be transnational, how the actors involved are not always the ones you are thinking about, and what this all means for the future of democracy. Marlies Glasius is Professor of International Relations at the...
David E. Gilbert, "Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography" (U California Press, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 32 minutesTwo decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it, repairing the damage done over nearly a century of abuse. Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography (U California Press, 2024) is their story. David E. Gilbert offers an account of the ways...
Xin Gu, "Cultural Work and Creative Subjectivity: Recentralising the Artist Critique and Social Networks in the Cultural Industries" (Routledge, 2023)
March 11, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesHow can artists survive today? In Cultural Work and Creative Subjectivity: Recentralising the Artist Critique and Social Networks in the Cultural Industries (Routledge, 2023), Dr Xin Gu, Director of the Master of Cultural and Creative Industries at Monash University and an expert appointed by UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expression, examines contemporary labour conditions for cultural workers. Drawing on detailed historical and global case st...
Lorraine Daston, "Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate" (Columbia Global Reports, 2023)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesIn Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (Columbia Global Reports, 2023), Lorraine Daston, Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, delves into the 350-year history of one of the most elusive communities of all: the “scientific community.” For the apparent simplicity and relative ubiquity of the expression hides in fact a complex and constantly evolving reality. As Daston puts it to open her book, “The scientific community is by any measure a ve...
Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl, "An Anthropology of Disappearance: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing" (Berghahn Books, 2023)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAll over the world, people disappear from their families, communities and the state’s bureaucratic gaze, as victims of oppressive regimes or while migrating along clandestine routes. An Anthropology of Disappearance: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing (Berghahn Books, 2023) brings together scholars who engage ethnographically with such disappearances in various cultural, social and political contexts. This volume takes an anthropological perspective on questions about human ...
Mara Albrecht and Alke Jenss, "The Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence: Histories, Rhythms and Ruptures" (Manchester UP, 2023)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence: Histories, Rhythms and Ruptures (Manchester UP, 2023) asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular 'urban' social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative capacities, which produces and transforms urban space and time in the long turn, also through the...
Samantha Majic, "Lights, Camera, Feminism?: Celebrities and Anti-Trafficking Politics" (U California Press, 2023)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesRecent years have brought an upsurge in celebrity activism. Not a day goes by without an actor or musician taking to a stage, a podium or the internet to speak on a social issue, address an environmental problem, or adopt a political position. It’s easy to be cynical about the motivations of these privileged and sometimes uninformed people. Many of them come across as self-serving. But others appear genuine. Either way, celebrity activists are here to stay and it is incumbent on us to think a...
Jacqueline Kennelly, "Burnt by Democracy: Youth, Inequality, and the Erosion of Civic Life" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
March 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourBurnt by Democracy: Youth, Inequality, and the Erosion of Civic Life (University of Toronto Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Kennelly traces the political ascendance of neoliberalism and its effects on youth. The book explores democracy and citizenship as described in interviews with over forty young people – ages 16 to 30 – who have either experienced homelessness or identify as an activist, living in five liberal democracies: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the United K...
Emily Lynell Edwards, "Digital Islamophobia: Tracking a Far-Right Crisis" (de Gruyter, 2023)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Digital Islamophobia: Tracking a Far-Right Crisis (De Gruyter, 2023), Emily Lynell Edwards explores this virtual and vicious threat, analyzing how these networks grow, develop, and circulate Islamophobic hate-speech on Twitter. Edwards details how far-right discourse is not merely national, or even transatlantic, but increasingly transnationalized among American, German, as well as Indian and Nigerian digital networks. By tracking and tracing the contours of these far-right digital communi...
Laurie L. Patton, "Who Owns Religion?: Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesIn Who Owns Religion?: Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century (U Chicago Press, 2019), scholar and noted university administrator Laurie Patton looks at the cultural work of religious studies through scholars' clashes with religious communities, especially in the late 1980s and 90s. "Others" about whom scholars wrote to their colleagues were now also readers who could agree or condemn in public forums. These controversies were also fundamentally about something new: the very...