An eye-opening, urgent call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US.
Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? Yes: changing the class dynamics driving American politics.
The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories —from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response (and more)— Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions disadvantaging the working-class. Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy or a politician or social justice warrior in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

When life gets hard, we turn to our female friends. Husbands, partners, and jobs come and go, but close friendships are our bedrock. Until they're not.

What happens when these bonds sabotage instead of support? Who among us has the courage to walk away? And how can we protect ourselves from further heartbreak?

In Estranged: How Strained Female Friendships Are Mended Or Ended (Meridian Editions, 2025) Susan Shapiro Barash takes a deep dive into the complexities of female friendships. By peeling back the societal narrative that our friendships are meant to last forever, she uncovers a more nuanced reality: the closest bonds do falter. Through groundbreaking research and 150 interviews with women ranging in age from 20-80, Barash reveals an emerging trend - estrangement among female friends.

Estranged is an eye-opening investigation/practical guide for women navigating murky waters of suboptimal friendships. The book sheds light on unspoken pain of estrangement - both for the "estranger" who walks away and the "estrangee" who is left behind. Amid candid confessions of betrayal and grief, Barash challenges women to reimagine their friendships and take the bold step of letting go when necessary.

This cutting-edge book offers an empowering path forward: learning to prioritize self-worth, stability and authenticity over loyalty to friendships that no longer serve us.

Susan Shapiro Barash has written more than a dozen nonfiction books including Tripping the Prom Queen, Toxic Friends and You're Grounded Forever, but First Let's Go Shopping. For more than 20 years she taught gender studies and Marymount Manhattan College and has guest taught creative nonfiction at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. Her fiction is published under her pen name, Susannah Marren.

Deidre Tyler, PhD - Sociologist, Instructional Technologist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Kevin Anderson’s The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso, 2025) encourages to look again at the intellectual and political work of a figure some may assume has been exhausted: Karl Marx. Following on from his earlier landmark study Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016), this volume turns specifically to the ‘late Marx’. In this period (1869-82), Marx spent much of his time engrossed in the study of colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies, and gender among many other less known topics of his interest. His notes, especially what come to be known as The Ethnological Notebooks, along with letters, essays and a scattering of published texts remain only poorly known (and in some cases unpublished or not yet fully translated into English) and form the backbone of Anderson’s study. They evidence a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. Anderson shows how the late Marx sees a wider revolution that included the European proletariat being touched off by revolts by oppressed ethno-racial groups, peasant communes, and Indigenous communist groups, in many of which women held great social power.

In our discussion, we highlight some of the key themes in the late Marx, bringing out the ways in which Marx is making connections across his writings, how colonial subjects in Ireland and India share commonalities and what can be seen when we look at communal social forms in Russia and among Native Americans. We also discuss why Marx can be seen as a decolonial thinker, consider what he might have produced had he lived longer and the ways in which the late Marx can be presented to students to complement his central themes of class and capitalism.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), along with other texts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, Dr. Brittany Friedman delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques—including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists—to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Dr. Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

This episode considers: what the official records omit, how the questions we ask guide the answers we find, pattern mapping, racial categorization systems, surveillance mechanisms, the importance of outsider archives, protecting your sources, and why we need to awaken.

Our guest is: Dr. Brittany Friedman, who is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

The Social Constructions of Race

Hands Up, Don't Shoot

The Names of All the Flowers

Freemans Challenge

Stitching Freedom

The Emerson Prison Initiative

The Journal of Higher Education in Prison

Education Behind The Wall

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help to support the show by posting about, downloading, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

This book is a sociological study of knowledge and knowers and explores the production and perceived value of 'yogic knowledge', how distinction is curated, and how access to this knowledge is gained. The book focuses on the organization Shanti Mandir (SM) in India, a new religious movement, which was founded in 1987 by Swami Nityananda Saraswati. By identifying the structuring forces of the guru's discourse, and focusing on the marketing strategies and subsequent exchanges of capital and affective emotions, this monograph documents what the legitimate yogic identity promoted by SM is within the context of the transglobal yoga industry. A highly original and incisive portrait of an Indian devotional community with strong transnational connections, this book will be of interest to researchers studying South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, Indian religion and yoga.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) links two seminal moments in Egypt’s history – the Revolution of 25th January 2011 and the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser – through various cultural manifestations. It conceives the concept of “collective dreaming” to map out the subliminal feeling that runs deep through experiences of socially transformative moments. Sarah Nagaty has extensively studied the structure of feelings that encompasses the experiences not only of activist minorities but the broader mass of revolutionary movements. In certain historical moments, hopes and aspirations bind together millions of people from all walks of life: students, workers, farmers, and middle-class professionals. Nagaty calls this phenomenon the “collective dream”, something which has been carried through generations of Egyptians.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Sarah Nagaty to discuss the conceptual roots of the collective dream and the overlooked histories of Nubian displacement during the construction of the High Dam. They also explored how thinkers like Raymond Williams and Lauren Berlant shaped Nagaty’s method of reading revolutionary time and cultural memory, as well as how vernacular poetry, reportage, and graffiti served as vital archival traces of collective feeling.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with historian Beth Linker, Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, about her recent book, Slouch: Postural Panic in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2024). Slouch examines the history of conceptions of “bad posture” as they arose over the course of the 20th century. The book is a beautiful example of taking a perhaps seemingly small topic and showing how it connects to many, both surprising and well-known, themes in history. The pair also discuss a few of the potential projects Linker may be turning to next, all of which sound fascinating.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

What do Russians really want? Do they want authoritarianism and are they prepared to go along with a war of conquest and destruction? Or do they want something else? A landmark contribution to the field, Morris is the only social researcher to have carried out fieldwork in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, engaging with communities in Moscow, regional cities, as well as rural areas to bring perspectives on Russian everyday lives that are now entirely inaccessible to the West. Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) uses the lens of micropolitics, defined not as politics in miniature but instead as taking seriously the political content of people's normal lives revealed in their practices, interactions and discussions. Based on decades-long interactions with people from a diverse cross-section of society in Russia – from security service officers to factory workers, from unemployed young men to citizen journalists and activists, this is the most comprehensive insight to date into the complexity of Russian attitudes toward war, their government and the post-1991 political trajectory.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation

By Jessica Vasquez-Tokos, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon

W.E.B. Du Bois famously pondered a question he felt society was asking of him as a Black man in America: “How does it feel to be a problem?” Jessica Vasquez-Tokos uses this question to examine how communities of color are constructed as “problems,” and the numerous ramifications this has for their life trajectories. Uncovering how various members of racial groups understand and react to what their racial status means for inclusion in, or exclusion from, the nation, Burdens of Belonging examines the historical underpinnings of the racial-colonial hierarchy, the influence this hierarchy has on lived experience, and how racialized life experience influences the feelings, perspectives and goals of people of color.
Burdens of Belonging is based on interviews with people in Oregon from various racial groups, and brings multiple racial groups’ opinions together to weigh in on the ways in which race contours national belonging and affects sense of self, everyday life and wellness, and aspirations for the future. This book highlights the value of inquiring how people from various racial backgrounds perceive their fit in the nation and reveals how race matters to belonging in multifaceted ways.
Filling a gap in research on the everyday effects of accumulated racial disadvantage, Burdens of Belonging brings to the fore an analysis of how racial inequality, settler colonialism, and race relations penetrate multiple layers of social life and become etched into bodies and futures.

Michael L. Rosino, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Molloy University

Recent Books:

Democracy is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside Grassroots Political Organizing (UNC Press) 30% off with code: 01UNCP30

Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and the Media (Routledge)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

A lively story of death, What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Robert Garland explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Dr. Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought—in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours—to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery.
What to Expect When You’re Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?
Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, What to Expect When You’re Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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