Lana Del Rey's new album has received praise, but her negative reaction to a mixed review on NPR recently made news.  We discuss the tightrope of criticizing popular artists, the role of persona in artistic production, and the finer details of criticizing celebrities' work.  



In addition to in-house expert Gabriel Rossman (UCLA), author of the acclaimed Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation (Princeton University Press), this episode also features Rachel Skaggs, who has recently published research on country music songwriting.



Rachel Skaggs is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University. She recently published “Socializing Rejection and Failure in Artistic Occupational Communities” in Work and Occupations, and will soon publish “Harmonizing Small Group Cohesion and Status in Creative Collaborations: How Songwriters Facilitate and Manipulate the Co-Writing Process.” in Social Psychology Quarterly.

Criticizing Lana Del Rey

The Annex is a podcast for academic sociologists.  We discuss ideas, news, and research of interest to the academic sociology community.

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In today's episode of The Annex, we discuss the inner world of political campaigns with Daniel Laurison (Swarthmore).  Daniel is the author of Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us (Penguin).

The Inner World of Political Campaigns (Laurison)

In today's episode of The Annex, we explore the relationship between money and science with David Reinecke (Princeton University), whose work examines what happens to large scientific projects when funding runs out.  David is the author of "When Funding Fails: Planetary Exploration at NASA in an Era of Austerity, 1967 - 1976" in Social Studies of Science and "Moonshots to Nowhere? The Metroliner and Failed High-Speed Rail in the United States, 1962- 1977" in Journal of Transport History,

Science When the Money Runs Out (Reinecke)

In today's episode of The Annex, Daniel Morrison (Abilene Christian University) sits down with Seth Abrutyn (University of British Columbia) and Omar Lizardo (UCLA) to discuss classical sociological theory and their Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory (Springer).

Classical Sociology (Lizardo & Abrutyn)

In today's episode of The Annex, we discuss how Americans misunderstand China and its political system.  We imagine a society in which the government controls what people know and what they say.  We hear about government filters and censorship, and how democracy activists are punished for their speech.  But is it all so simple?



In this episode of The Annex Live, we will sit down to learn the details of China's political and government system with two experts.  Ya-Wen Lei (Harvard University) is is the author of The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China (Princeton University Press), a book that examines the development of the Chinese public sphere through during the Internet revolution.  Emily Chua (National University of Singapore) is the author of the upcoming The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era (University of Michigan Press), a book about the detailed inner workings of the Chinese media and how these relationships shape journalism and governance in that country.

How Americans Misunderstand China's Political System (Chua & Lei)

Some manifestations of racism are easily identifiable.  Practices that do things like promoting racial residential segregation, facilitating race-based job discrimination, or the unequal application of criminal law across races are clear examples of social behaviors that harm people of color and perpetuate white supremacy.  Others are difficult to see, even when looking directly at them.  In this episode, we will discuss how white supremacy subtly suffuses culture through a look at Raul Perez's new book, The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (2022, Stanford University Press), and related work being done in the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Minorities.













































Our panelists include:




Raul Perez (University of La Verne)



Ann Morning (New York University)



Victor Ray (University of Iowa)




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Criticizing Lana Del Rey

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