New Books in Sociology
3,001 episodes - English - Latest episode: 13 days ago - ★★★★ - 44 ratingsInterviews with Sociologists about their New Books
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Episodes
Michael Kaler, "Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead" (Duke UP, 2023)
November 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOf 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 U...
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, "Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
November 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOver 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 o...
Rory Coulter, "Housing and Life Course Dynamics: Changing Lives, Places and Inequalities" (Policy Press, 2023)
November 06, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesDeepening 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 an...
Jan Selling, "Romani Liberation: A Northern Perspective on Emancipatory Struggles and Progress" (Central European UP, 2022)
November 05, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesWell-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...
Coastlines, Climate, and Comics: In Conversation with Dr. V. Chitra
November 05, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesHow 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-ins...
Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi, "The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan" (NIAS, 2022)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesThe 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 ...
Anthony Hodgson, "Ready for Anything: Designing Resilience for a Transforming World" (Triarchy Press, 2011)
November 03, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesRecently 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. T...
James K. Beggan, "How Our Love of Dogs Creates Social Conflict" (Lexington Books, 2022)
November 03, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesFor 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...
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, "Why Men?: A Human History of Violence and Inequality" (Hurst, 2023)
November 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHow 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...
Graham Denyer Willis, "Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil" (U California Press, 2022)
November 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourEvery 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 ceme...
Akiko Takeyama, "Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry" (Stanford UP, 2023)
November 02, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesIn 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...
Alexandra Hudson, "The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)
November 02, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesAlexandra 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 pol...
Gerard McCarthy, "Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality, and Resistance in Myanmar" (Cornell UP, 2023)
November 01, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesIn 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, Ou...
Daniele Lorenzini, "The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
November 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA 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 a...
Michael Serazio, "The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It Real in Media, Culture, and Politics" (Stanford UP, 2023)
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn 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 thei...
Dara Z. Strolovitch, "When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA 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 ...
On Wars: A Discussion with Michael Mann
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutes“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,...
Faiza Moatasim, "Master Plans and Encroachments: The Architecture of Informality in Islamabad" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesAmong 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 ...
Claire Jean Kim, "Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhere 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), ...
Simone Varriale, "Coloniality and Meritocracy in Unequal EU Migrations: Intersecting Inequalities in Post-2008 Italian Migration" (Bristol UP, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesHow 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 t...
Sarah Mayorga, "Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism" (UNC Press, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesRacial 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 n...
Utsa Mukherjee, "Race, Class, Parenting and Children's Leisure: Children's Leisurescapes and Parenting Cultures in Middle-Class British Indian Families" (Policy Press, 2022)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesChildren'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 ...
Lesley Nicole Braun, "Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesToday 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 mus...
Arjun Shankar, "Brown Saviors and Their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India" (Duke UP, 2023)
October 28, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn 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 be...
Jeremy Nobel, "Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection" (Avery Publishing Group, 2023)
October 24, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesEven 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 ...
Margaret K. Nelson, "Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s" (NYU Press, 2022)
October 24, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesAll 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 ...
Özge Yaka, "Fighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles" (U California Press, 2023)
October 23, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesFighting 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 ontologic...
Melissa Weininger, "Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century" (Wayne State UP, 2023)
October 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn 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...
The Radical Imagination in Reactionary Times
October 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourProfessors 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 an...
Maitrayee Deka, "Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy" (Stanford UP, 2023)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesMichael 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 tast...
Katherine Mason, "The Reproduction of Inequality: How Class Shapes the Pregnant Body and Infant Health" (NYU Press, 2023)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesCan 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 pregna...
From the Indian Goddess to Icelandic Spirits
October 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA candid conversation with Corinne Dempsey on her wide-ranging, fascinating research in religion, from the Indian Goddess in New York and Icelandic Spirit Work. Books The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York: Breaking Convention and Making Home at a North American Hindu Temple Kerala Christian Sainthood: Collisions of Culture and Worldview in South India Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth: Adventures in Comparative Religion Bridges Between Worlds: Spirits and Spirit Work in Northern Iceland ...
Sébastien Tutenges, "Intoxication: An Ethnography of Effervescent Revelry" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
October 19, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesFor 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 conce...
Katherine Jensen, "The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesIn 2013, as Syrians desperate to escape a brutal war fled the country, Brazil took the remarkable step of instituting an open-door policy for all Syrian refugees. Why did Brazil—in contrast to much of the international community—offer asylum to any Syrian who would come? And how do Syrians differ from other refugee populations seeking status in Brazil? In The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil (U Chicago Press, 2023), Katherine Jensen offers an ethnographic look at t...
Philipp Stelzel, "The Faculty Lounge: A Cocktail Guide for Academics" (Indiana UP, 2023)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesThe life of a scholar is stressful. The best way to muddle through is with a stiff drink. Balancing teaching, research, and service more than merits a cocktail at the end of a long day. So, sit back, relax, and infuse some intoxicating humor into old-fashioned academia. A humorous handbook for surviving life in higher education, The Faculty Lounge: A Cocktail Guide for Academics (Indiana University Press, provides deserving scholars with a wide range of academic-themed drink recipes. Philipp ...
Michael A. Robinson, "Dangerous Instrument: Political Polarization and US Civil-Military Relations" (Oxford UP, 2022)
October 17, 2023 08:00 - 28 minutesAs increasingly contentious politics in the United States raise concerns over the "politicization" of traditionally non-partisan institutions, many have turned their attention to how the American military has been--and will be--affected by this trend. Since a low point following the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military has experienced a dramatic reversal of public opinion, becoming one of the most trusted institutions in American society. However, this trend is more complicated than it a...
Colin Dickey, "Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy" (Viking, 2023)
October 17, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesThe United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, one of the most enduring narratives that defines the United States is simply this: secret groups are conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law. We’d like to assume these panics exist only at the fringes of society, or are unique features of the internet age. But histor...
AI, Post-Truth, and Cultural Transformation
October 16, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesIn this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey talks with economists Luciana Lazzaretti and Stefania Oliva of the University of Florence about the role of artificial intelligence in contemporary cultural transformation. The authors discuss the genesis of computer culture from the garages of California hippies who dreamed of a changed world and unexpectedly unleashed the forces of science and art for the sake of entrepreneurship. Moving forward, the authors discuss the nat...
E. Summerson Carr, "Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
October 14, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesMotivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat alcoholics, MI quickly spread into a variety of professional fields including corrections, medicine, and sanitation. In Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (U Chicago Press, 2023), E. Summerson Carr focuses on the training and dissemination...
Margaret Hillenbrand, "On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China" (Columbia UP, 2023)
October 14, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesMargaret Hillenbrand’s On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China’s exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China’s economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displace...
Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl, "If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)
October 13, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesAcross today’s America, countless people will embark on an adventure. They will prowl among overgrown headstones in forgotten graveyards, stalk through darkened woods and wildlands, and creep down the crumbling corridors of abandoned buildings. They have set forth in search of a profound paranormal experience and may seem to achieve just that. They are part of the growing cultural phenomenon, which is called legend tripping. In If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in Amer...
Working Children: The Luxury and Complexity of Childhood in Lombok, Indonesia
October 13, 2023 08:00 - 26 minutesThe International Labour Organization estimates that in Southeast Asia there are 30 million children engaged in paid work, 17 million in engaged in unpaid work and 50 million who don’t attend school. These figures can be a shock to people living in countries like Australia where childhood is typically a non-productive stage of life more readily associated with schooling and dependence on adults. What is the meaning of “childhood” in contexts of adversity where if you don’t work as a child, yo...
Kristen M. Budd and David C. Lane, "Beyond Bars: A Path Forward from 50 Years of Mass Incarceration in the United States" (Policy Press, 2023)
October 13, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesThe year 2023 marks 50 years of mass incarceration in the United States. This timely volume highlights and addresses pressing social problems associated with the US’s heavy reliance on mass imprisonment. In an atmosphere of charged political debate, including "tough on crime" rhetoric, the editors bring together scholars and experts in the criminal justice field to provide the most up-to-date science on mass incarceration and its ramifications on justice-impacted people and our communities. K...
Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol, "Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party" (Columbia UP, 2023)
October 12, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace. Unions fostered tight-knit communities, touching nearly every aspect of the lives of members--mostly men--and their families and neighbors. They conveyed fundamental worldviews, making blue-collar unionists into loyal Democrats who saw the party as on the side of the working man. Today, unions play a much less significant role in American life. In industrial and formerly industrial Rust Belt town...
Rhoda Kanaaneh, "The Right Kind of Suffering: Gender, Sexuality, and Arab Asylum Seekers in America" (U Texas Press, 2023)
October 10, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesFrom the overloaded courts with their constantly changing dates and appointments to the need to prove oneself the “right" kind of asylum seeker, the asylum system in the United States is an exacting and drawn-out immigration process that itself results in suffering. When anthropologist Rhoda Kanaaneh became a volunteer interpreter for Arab asylum seekers, she discovered how applicants learned to craft a specific narrative to satisfy the system's requirements. Kanaaneh tells the stories of fou...
Resentment: The Complexity of an Emotion and its Effect on Politics
October 10, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesIn this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Rob Schneider, Professor of History at Indiana University-Bloomington, about the political effects of resentment. Schneider begins by discussing the psychological complexity of resentment and then delves into its understanding by other authors such as Nietzsche and its relationship with Catholicism. Moving forward, Schneider discusses how resentment is related to identity politics and how some sectors of the popula...
Evan C. Rothera, "Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880" (LSU Press, 2022)
October 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the latter half of the nineteenth century, three violent national conflicts rocked the Americas: the Wars of Unification in Argentina, the War of the Reform and French Intervention in Mexico, and the Civil War in the United States. The recovery efforts that followed reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas, Evan C. Rothera uses both transnational and comparative methodologies to highlight similarities and differences among the wars and reconstructi...
Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill, "Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets" (Columbia UP, 2022)
October 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhat makes fad diets so appealing to so many people? And how did these fads become so central to conversations about food and nutrition? Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets (Columbia University Press, 2022) shows that fad diets are popular because they fulfill crucial social and psychological needs―which is also why they tend to fail. Authors Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill bring together anthropology, psychology, and nutrition to explore what these programs promise yet rarely fulfill for...
Eric B. Elbogen and Nico Verykoukis, "Violence and Mental Illness: Rethinking Risk Factors and Enhancing Public Safety" (NYU Press, 2023)
October 08, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesMass shootings have become a defining issue of our time. Whenever the latest act of newsworthy violence occurs, mental illness is inevitably cited as a preeminent cause by members of the news media and political sphere alike. Eric B. Elbogen and Nico Verykoukis's book Violence and Mental Illness: Rethinking Risk Factors and Enhancing Public Safety (NYU Press, 2023) exposes how mental illness is vastly overemphasized in popular discussion of mass violence, which in turn makes us all less safe....
Rachel O'Dwyer, "Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform" (Verso, 2023)
October 08, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesPlatform capitalism is coming for the money in your pocket. Wherever you look, money is being re-placed by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like things: phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data--the list goes on. But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks? What new types of control and discrimination emerge when money is tied to specific apps or actions, politics or identities? Tokens opens up this new and expanding world. E...