New Books in Sociology

By Marshall Poe

Social Sciences

What's New Books in Sociology about?

Interviews with Sociologists about their New Books

Download our free app to listen on your phone

LAST EPISODE

Brett Frischmann and Evan S...

01.23.2020

Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave ...

New Books in Sociology episodes:

01.23.2020 Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, "Re-Engineering Humanity" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave ...
01.21.2020 Catherine Besteman, "Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine" (Duke UP, 2016) Catherine L. Besteman's book Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Duke University Press, 2016) is an important contribution to our understanding of the process of remaking one’s way of life after war in a new place, and in ...
01.21.2020 Rachel Chrastil, "How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children" (Oxford UP, 2019) In this episode, Jana Byars talks with Rachel Chrastil, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and member of the history department at Xavier University, about her newest book, How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children ...
01.21.2020 Safi Bahcall, "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries" (St. Martins, 2019) Safi Bahcall's Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin's Press, 2019) reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we ...
01.20.2020 Wendy Bottero, "A Sense of Inequality" (Roman and Littlefield, 2020) How should we understand inequality? In A Sense of Inequality (Roman and Littlefield, 2020), Wendy Bottero, a Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester offers a detailed and challenging new approach to how we conceive of, how we study, ...
01.20.2020 Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019) The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible drawbacks of living in an environment that is constantly collecting data? What ...
01.17.2020 Filippo Marsili, "Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to 'Religion' and Empire in Ancient China" (SUNY Press, 2018) Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to 'Religion' and Empire in Ancient China (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how ...
01.17.2020 Josh Reno, "Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness" (U California Press, 2019) Seven decades of military spending during the cold war and war on terror have created a vast excess of military hardware – what happens to all of this military waste when it has served its purpose and what does it ...
01.10.2020 Gediminas Lankauskas, "The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist Lithuania" (U Toronto Press, 2015) Gediminas Lankauskas’ new book The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist Lithuania (University of Toronto Press, 2015) is “an ethnography concerned with the ambiguities, paradoxes, ruptures and incongruities of social life brought about by processes of ...
01.10.2020 John N. Singer, "Race, Sports, and Education: Improving Opportunities and Outcomes for Black Male College Athletes" (Harvard Ed Press, 2019) College sport is a multi-billion dollar industry. The men and women who lead the teams in the most important conferences often make millions of dollars between their coaching salaries and endorsement deals. But what about the athletes themselves? Most get ...
01.09.2020 Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, "Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops" (Routledge, 2019) In her new book Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (Routledge, 2019), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier looks up at the sky, and from there she begins her stories about wifi, pigeons, cacti, the lottery and congas. This dense and ...
01.08.2020 Robert Rozehnal, "Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience" (OneWorld, 2019) What happens when the digital world meets Sufism? This is the question raised in the exciting new book Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience (OneWorld Academic, 2019) by Robert Rozehnal, a professor of Islamic Studies and South ...
01.03.2020 Maria Veri and Rita Liberti, "Gridiron Gourmet: Gender and Food at the Football Tailgate" (U Arkansas Press, 2019) Today we are joined by Maria Veri, Associate Professor of Kinesiology at San Francisco State University, and Rita Liberti, Professor of Kinesiology at California State University, East Bay. Together they are the authors of Gridiron Gourmet: Gender and Food at ...
01.02.2020 John Danaher, "Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work" (Harvard UP, 2019) The future is a constant focus of anxiety, and we are all familiar with the pressures that come distinctively from automation – the transformation by which tasks formerly assigned to humans come to be performed by machines. These days, the ...
01.02.2020 Mark Bartholomew, "Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing" (Stanford Law Books, 2017) Advertising is everywhere. By some estimates, the average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements each day. Whether we realize it or not, "adcreep"―modern marketing's march to create a world where advertising can be expected anywhere and anytime―has come, transforming ...
12.27.2019 Ajantha Subramanian, "The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India" (Harvard UP, 2019) What is merit? How is it claimed? In her much-awaited book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), Ajantha Subramanian addresses the pertinent question of caste inheritance and privilege in the making of merit and ...
12.27.2019 Jennifer Utrata, "Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia" (Cornell UP, 2015) Jennifer Utrata in her book, Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia (Cornell University Press, 2015), investigates what she calls a “quiet revolution” in the Russian family after the fall of the Soviet Union. Based ...
12.26.2019 David Pettinicchio, "Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform" (Stanford UP, 2019) David Pettinicchio has written Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform (Stanford University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. In Politics of Empowerment, David Pettinicchio offers a history ...
12.26.2019 Phoebe Moore, "The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts" (Routledge, 2017) Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, calculating human labour via the use of big data and people analytics by metrics? Phoebe Moore's The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What ...
12.26.2019 Jason Read, "The Politics of Transindividuality" (Haymarket Books, 2017) Many major political questions today revolve around questions of human nature; what sort of people we are and what sort of people we're capable of being constitute both the goals and limits of the sort of society we can and ...
12.23.2019 Sandra Fahy, "Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record" (Columbia UP, 2019) “The things that are happening to North Korea are happening to all of us…they are part of the human community. To say that this is just a problem for North Korea is to say that North Koreans are not part ...
12.21.2019 Xiao Liu, "Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of course, in the US and Great Britain where the field ...
12.19.2019 Sidharthan Maunaguru, "Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War" (U Washington Press 2019) Sidharthan Maunaguru’s Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War (University of Washington Press 2019) is an unusual ethnography of the ‘in-betweenness’ and ‘potential’ of marriage in the time of political violence and conflict. ...
12.19.2019 Davin Phoenix, "The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2020) In the race for the best book of 2020, Davin Phoenix has placed himself in the lead. Phoenix has written The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor of political science ...
12.18.2019 Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen ...
12.18.2019 William Westermeyer, "Back to America: Identity, Political Culture, and the Tea Party Movement" (U Nebraska 2019) With his new book Back to America: Identity, Political Culture, and the Tea Party Movement (University of Nebraska, 2019), Professor William Westermeyer explores the once-powerful Tea Party Movement and the changing nature of political culture in the contemporary United States. ...
12.17.2019 Andrea Kitta, "The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore" (Utah State UP, 2019) Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one. This is the central tenet underlying The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah State University Press 2019) by Andrea Kitta, Associate Professor in the English department at ...
12.16.2019 Joshua Sperber, "Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace" (Lexington, 2019) In Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace (Lexington Books, 2019), Joshua Sperber analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and—sometimes unwittingly—discipline workers through writing and posting online ...
12.16.2019 Zahra Ali, "Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation" (Cambridge UP, 2018) In her powerful new book Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation (Cambridge UP, 2018), Zahra Ali presents a detailed and fascinating account of Muslim feminist discourses and politics in modern Iraq. Women and Gender in Iraq represents ...
12.13.2019 Louis Hyman, "Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream became Temporary" (Viking, 2018) It has become a truism that work has become less secure and more precarious for a widening swath of American workers. Why and how this has happened, and what workers can and should do about it, is the subject of ...
12.13.2019 Miriam Driessen, "Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia" (Hong Kong UP, 2019) I met Dr Miriam Driessen at Oxford University where she works at the China Centre. We spoke about her wonderful new book Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). Through unprecedented ...
12.12.2019 Thomas Yarrow, "Architects: Portraits of a Practice" (Cornell UP, 2019) What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's ...
12.11.2019 Chris Arnade, "Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America" (Sentinel, 2019) A lot of politicians like to say that there are “two Americas,” but do any of them know what life is really like for the marginalized poor? We speak with journalist and photographer, Chris Arnade, about the forgotten towns and ...
12.10.2019 Vicky Pryce, "Women vs. Capitalism: Why We Can't Have It All in a Free Market Economy" (Hurst, 2019) Free market capitalism has failed women, and even the recent progress that had been made in closing the gender wage gap has leveled off in many rich democracies. Vicky Pryce helps us understand the causes of this ongoing discrimination, the ...
12.09.2019 William D. Lopez, "Separated: Family & Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) What happens to families and communities after immigration raids? William D. Lopez answers this question and more in his new book Separated: Family & Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019). Using ethnographic methods and ...
12.09.2019 R. Muirhead and N. L. Rosenblum, "A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2019) From Pizzagate to Jeffrey Epstein, conspiracies seem to be more prominent than ever in American political discourse. What was once confined to the pages of supermarket tabloids is now all over our media landscape. Unlike the 9/11 truthers or those ...
12.09.2019 Maziyar Ghiabi, "Drug Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Iran has one of the planet's highest rates of addiction. Maziyar Ghiabi's Drug Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019) offers a fascinating, new, and nuanced perspective on the control and consumption of substances ...
12.05.2019 Deborah Lupton, "The Quantified Self" (Polity, 2016) With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to promote 'self-knowledge through numbers'. In The Quantified Self (Polity, ...
12.04.2019 Alexandra D'Arcy, "Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context: Eight hundred years of LIKE" (John Benjamins, 2017) Like is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language, exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. Alexandra D'Arcy's book Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context: Eight hundred years of LIKE (John Benjamins, 2017) explores the various ...
12.04.2019 Victoria Reyes, "Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines" (Stanford UP, 2019) Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford, 2019), sociologist Victoria Reyes looks at one such space, the Subic ...
12.03.2019 Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science ...
12.02.2019 Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, "Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In-Between City" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Caroline Wanjiku Kihato's Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In-Between City (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) is a book about home and not-home, eloquently told about the hopes and dreams, fears and hardships of migrant women trying to make life ...
11.27.2019 Mila Dragojević, "Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War" (Cornell UP, 2019) How does violence against civilians become permissible in wartime? Why do some communities experience violence while others do not? In her new book, Mila Dragojević develops the concept of amoral communities to find an answer to these questions. In Amoral ...
11.26.2019 Ann K. McClellan, "Sherlock’s World: Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC’s Sherlock" (U Iowa Press, 2018) In Sherlock’s World: Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC’s Sherlock (University of Iowa Press, 2018), Ann K. McClellan explores fan fiction inspired by one of the most-watch BBC series in history. Even after 130 years, Sherlock Holmes is still ...
11.21.2019 Elizabeth Bernstein, "Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom" (U Chicago, 2018) Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth Bernstein, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College about her newest book, Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom (University of Chicago, 2018). This book provides an overview of feminist ...
11.20.2019 Jonathan Rothwell, "A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society" (Princeton UP, 2019) Inequality in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past decades -- on that there is agreement. There is less agreement on the causes of that inequality, the consequences of it, and, perhaps least of all, what to do about ...
11.19.2019 Susan Opotow, "New York After 9/11" (Fordham UP, 2019) The impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the country have been widely discussed—but what about the impact on New York City, specifically? In their new anthology, New York After 9/11 (Fordham University Press, 2018), Susan Opotow and Zachary Baron ...
11.19.2019 Ruha Benjamin, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019) From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. In Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019), Benjamin argues ...
11.18.2019 Mark Alizart, "Dogs" (Polity, 2019) Man’s best friend, domesticated since prehistoric times, a travelling companion for explorers and artists, thinkers and walkers, equally happy curled up by the fire and bounding through the great outdoors―dogs matter to us because we love them. But is that ...
11.14.2019 Dana Fisher, "American Resistance: From the Women's March to the Blue Wave" (Columbia UP, 2019) Dana Fisher has written a big new book on the movement to oppose Donald Trump, titled American Resistance: From the Women's March to the Blue Wave (Columbia University Press, 2019). American Resistance follows activists from the streets back to their ...

Older episodes

New Books in Sociology

What's New Books in Sociology about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

New Books in Sociology episodes:

Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, "Re-Engineering Humanity" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Catherine Besteman, "Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine" (Duke UP, 2016)

Rachel Chrastil, "How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Safi Bahcall, "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries" (St. Martins, 2019)

Wendy Bottero, "A Sense of Inequality" (Roman and Littlefield, 2020)

Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019)

Filippo Marsili, "Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to 'Religion' and Empire in Ancient China" (SUNY Press, 2018)

Josh Reno, "Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness" (U California Press, 2019)

Gediminas Lankauskas, "The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist Lithuania" (U Toronto Press, 2015)

John N. Singer, "Race, Sports, and Education: Improving Opportunities and Outcomes for Black Male College Athletes" (Harvard Ed Press, 2019)

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, "Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops" (Routledge, 2019)

Robert Rozehnal, "Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience" (OneWorld, 2019)

Maria Veri and Rita Liberti, "Gridiron Gourmet: Gender and Food at the Football Tailgate" (U Arkansas Press, 2019)

John Danaher, "Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Mark Bartholomew, "Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing" (Stanford Law Books, 2017)

Ajantha Subramanian, "The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Jennifer Utrata, "Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia" (Cornell UP, 2015)

David Pettinicchio, "Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform" (Stanford UP, 2019)

Phoebe Moore, "The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts" (Routledge, 2017)

Jason Read, "The Politics of Transindividuality" (Haymarket Books, 2017)

Sandra Fahy, "Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record" (Columbia UP, 2019)

Xiao Liu, "Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

Sidharthan Maunaguru, "Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War" (U Washington Press 2019)

Davin Phoenix, "The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)

William Westermeyer, "Back to America: Identity, Political Culture, and the Tea Party Movement" (U Nebraska 2019)

Andrea Kitta, "The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore" (Utah State UP, 2019)

Joshua Sperber, "Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace" (Lexington, 2019)

Zahra Ali, "Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Louis Hyman, "Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream became Temporary" (Viking, 2018)

Miriam Driessen, "Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia" (Hong Kong UP, 2019)

Thomas Yarrow, "Architects: Portraits of a Practice" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Chris Arnade, "Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America" (Sentinel, 2019)

Vicky Pryce, "Women vs. Capitalism: Why We Can't Have It All in a Free Market Economy" (Hurst, 2019)

William D. Lopez, "Separated: Family & Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

R. Muirhead and N. L. Rosenblum, "A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Maziyar Ghiabi, "Drug Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Deborah Lupton, "The Quantified Self" (Polity, 2016)

Alexandra D'Arcy, "Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context: Eight hundred years of LIKE" (John Benjamins, 2017)

Victoria Reyes, "Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines" (Stanford UP, 2019)

Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)

Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, "Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In-Between City" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Mila Dragojević, "Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Ann K. McClellan, "Sherlock’s World: Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC’s Sherlock" (U Iowa Press, 2018)

Elizabeth Bernstein, "Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom" (U Chicago, 2018)

Jonathan Rothwell, "A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Susan Opotow, "New York After 9/11" (Fordham UP, 2019)

Ruha Benjamin, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019)

Mark Alizart, "Dogs" (Polity, 2019)

Dana Fisher, "American Resistance: From the Women's March to the Blue Wave" (Columbia UP, 2019)

Other shows like New Books in Sociology: