New Books in Sociology

By New Books Network

Social Sciences

What's New Books in Sociology about?

Interviews with Sociologists about their New Books
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LAST EPISODE

M. R. Sharan, "Last Among E...

01.30.2023

M. R. Sharan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, studying questions centred around development economics and political economy. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 2020 and was previously at the Delhi School of Economics and ...

New Books in Sociology episodes:

01.30.2023 M. R. Sharan, "Last Among Equals: Power, Caste and Politics in Bihar's Villages" (Westland, 2021) M. R. Sharan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, studying questions centred around development economics and political economy. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 2020 and was previously at the Delhi School of Economics and ...
01.30.2023 Queer Space In this episode of High Theory, Jack Jen Gieseking tells us about queer space. Queer geographies matter alongside queer temporalities. And it turns out that lesbian life in the 1950s cannot be generalized from the specific history of Buffalo, New ...
01.29.2023 Robin Bartram, "Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Though we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The building inspectors of Chicago are at the heart of sociologist Robin Bartram’s analysis of how individuals impact—or attempt ...
01.29.2023 Rukmini S. "Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India" (Context, 2021) How do you see India? Fuelled by a surge of migration to cities, the country's growth appears to be defined by urbanisation and by its growing, prosperous middle class. It is also defined by progressive and liberal young Indians, who ...
01.28.2023 Shailaja Paik, "The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India" (Stanford UP, 2022) The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford UP, 2022) offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public, secular, traveling theater in Maharashtra—and places Dalit Tamasha women who ...
01.26.2023 Batja Mesquita, "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions" (Norton, 2022) Today I talked to Batja Mesquita about her book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (Norton, 2022). To a degree sometimes not realized, we discuss emotions through the lens of what have been called WEIRD cultures, i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, ...
01.25.2023 Stephanie C. Kane, "Just One Rain Away: The Ethnography of River-City Flood Control" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) Not long ago it seemed flood control experts were close to mastering the unruly flows funnelling toward Hudson Bay and the Prairie city of Winnipeg. But as more intense and out-of-synch flood events occur, wary cities like Winnipeg continue to ...
01.25.2023 Kevin Munger, "Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture" (Columbia UP, 2022) In Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture (Columbia UP, 2022), Kevin Munger marshals novel data and survey evidence to argue that generational conflict will define the politics of the next decade. He shows that ...
01.24.2023 Lois Presser, "Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences" (U California Press, 2022) Harm takes shape in and through what is suppressed, left out, or taken for granted. Unsaid: Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences (U California Press, 2022) is a guide to understanding and uncovering what is left unsaid—whether concealed or silenced, presupposed or ...
01.24.2023 Elizabeth Farfán-Santos, "Undocumented Motherhood: Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing" (U Texas Press, 2022) Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter's health ...
01.24.2023 Gillian Tan, "Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet" (Springer, 2018) Tibetan nomads have developed a way of life that is dependent in multiple ways on their animals and shaped by the phenomenological experience of mobility. These pastoralists have adapted to many changes in their social, political and environmental contexts over ...
01.22.2023 Namita Vijay Dharia, "The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction" (U California Press, 2022) What transformative effects does a multimillion-dollar industry have on those who work within it? The Industrial Ephemeral presents the untold stories of the people, politics, and production chains behind architecture, real estate, and construction in areas surrounding New Delhi, India. ...
01.21.2023 David Collier and Gerardo L. Munck, "Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies: Insights and Methods for Comparative Social Science" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) Over the past 50 years, scholars across the social sciences have employed critical juncture analysis to understand how social orders are created, become entrenched, and change. In this book, leading scholars from several disciplines offer the first coordinated effort to ...
01.20.2023 Hil Malatino, "Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad" (U Minnesota Press, 2022) Fatigue, disorientation, numbness, envy, rage, burnout. What good could come from thinking about trans experience and these bad feelings? In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Hil Malatino theorizes the centrality of bad ...
01.20.2023 Surviving the State: Struggles for Land and Democracy in Myanmar How do farmers struggle for land and democracy in Myanmar’s hybrid political system? How might a feminist approach to this question look like and enable novel findings? In which ways can researchers make the most of ethnographic methods to understand ...
01.19.2023 Malini Ambach et al., "Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives" (HASP, 2022) For many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of worship, they are also pilgrimage destinations, centres of learning, political hotspots, and foci of economic ...
01.19.2023 Jennifer Forestal, "Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments" (Oxford UP, 2021) Political Theorist Jennifer Forestal’s new book is a fascinating exploration of contemporary democracy and how it operates in different spaces. Forestal’s avenue into the question of democracy and the space in which it functions comes out of the idea of ...
01.18.2023 James C. Rhoads et al., "Cultivating Q Methodology: Essays Honoring Steven R. Brown" (Bookbaby, 2022) Cultivating Q Methodology is a collection of essays is in honor of Professor Steven R. Brown, the preeminent scholar of Q methodology. Q methodology, innovated by the British physicist/psychologist William Stephenson (1902-1989), Q methodology is a conceptual framework and set ...
01.18.2023 Steffen Mau, "Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century" (Polity Press, 2022) It is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. In Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century (Polity, 2022) Steffen Mau shows that this view is misleading: borders are not getting ...
01.17.2023 The Ideology of Innovation in India Science and Technologies scholar Lilly Irani talks her book, Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Irani’s work examines the ideological role that ideas of “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” have played in India ...
01.16.2023 How Did the Pandemic Transform Workers and Work? The pandemic brought to the fore a group of workers deemed “essential” – frontline healthcare workers, restaurant employees, slaughterhouse workers, and the like – who often faced a difficult choice between risking their health to work or forgoing income that ...
01.16.2023 Eric A. Stanley, "Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable" (Duke UP, 2021) Content note: This episode contains discussions of suicide, as well as allusions to graphic anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Black violence Advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past—marriage equality, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes ...
01.16.2023 Marlene Schäfers, "Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey" (U Chicago Press, 2022) “Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in ...
01.15.2023 Benjamin Hegarty, "The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia" (Cornell UP, 2022) In The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging ...
01.15.2023 On Émile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" (1912) In 1912, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim published The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Centered around the experience of religion in tribal cultures, this masterpiece explores the nature of religion and its social function in society. When The Elementary Forms ...
01.15.2023 Infrastructure and Inequality Daniel Armanios, associate professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, talks about his work on infrastructure and inequality with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Armanios’ recent work has focused on coming up with quantitative measures of ...
01.15.2023 Chris Bilton et al., "Creativities: The What, How, Where, Who and Why of the Creative Process" (Edward Elgar, 2022) How does creativity work? In Creativities: The What, How, Where, Who and Why of the Creative Process (Edward Elgar, 2022), Chris Bilton, a Reader at University of Warwick’s Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, Stephen Cummings, Professor of Strategy ...
01.15.2023 Carwil Bjork-James, "The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia" (U Arizona Press, 2020) In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing ...
01.15.2023 Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) Today I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was originally written and published in Chinese. The English translation has just come out with ...
01.14.2023 Tanya Katerí Hernández, "Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality" (Beacon Press, 2022) Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press, 2022) will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. ...
01.14.2023 Consumed: The Myth and Reality of Cannibalism Cannibalism has been used for centuries to define the lowest form of humanity, but the story isn't as straightforward as it may seem. Turns out, there may be a logic - or even a love - to eating people. Guests ...
01.13.2023 The Future of Inequality: A Discussion with Mike Savage Most people in developed countries think inequality is increasing. And most would also agree that in terms of the global poor, the last 20 years have seen vast improvements with hundreds of millions living much better lives than their parents. ...
01.13.2023 Harald Koberg, "Free Play: Digital Gaming and the Longing for Effectiveness" (Büchner-Verlag, 2021) What needs are satisfied in digital gaming? And what does the shift of these need satisfactions into the digital space say about the social realities in which they are embedded? Harald Koberg lets gamers themselves have their say and follows ...
01.13.2023 Sabrina Mittermeier, "Fan Phenomena: Disney" (Intellect Books, 2023) Sabrina Mittermeier's edited volume Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect Books, 2023) analyzes the fandom of Disney brands across a variety of media including film, television, novels, stage productions, and theme parks. It showcases fan engagement such as cosplay, fan art, and ...
01.12.2023 Forbidden Fruit: Religious Fervor about Food Contemporary diet culture is only the latest manifestation of a long history of religious fervor about food. Guests Isabel Foxen Duke, health coach Alan Levinovitz, Professor of Religious Studies at James Madison University Corrie Norman, Associate Director, Religious Studies at ...
01.12.2023 Heidi K. Gardner and Ivan A. Matviak, "Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work" (HBR Press, 2022) Today I talked to Dr. Heidi K. Gardner about her new book (co-authored with Ivan A. Matviak) Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work (HBR Press, 2022) Diversity doesn’t mean much if a range of ...
01.09.2023 Christopher Loperena, "The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras" (Stanford UP, 2022) The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, ...
01.08.2023 Philippe-Richard Marius, "The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society" (UP of Mississippi, 2022) In The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Richard Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the ...
01.07.2023 Daniel White, "Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety" (Stanford UP, 2022) In Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety (Stanford UP, 2022), Daniel White draws on extensive fieldwork in government ministries and government-adjacent organizations to explore Japan’s current “politics of anxiety,” the ways in which state administrators have transformed ...
01.07.2023 Bin Xu, "The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society" (Polity Press, 2022) Against the bleak backdrop of pressing issues in today’s world, civil societies remain vibrant, animated by people’s belief that they should and can solve such issues and build a better society. Their imagination of a good society, their understanding of ...
01.06.2023 Do We Live in a Christian Country? I asked medieval historian Rachel Fulton Brown if we ought to still think of our nation (or any Western nation) as “a Christian country” in the twenty-first century. My reasoning was that I thought our Judeo-Christian inheritance is the foundation—if ...
01.06.2023 White Balance: How Do Race and Class Intersect? Understanding race in America requires understanding its relationship to class. Guests Joshua Bennett, writer and poet Julian Bourg, Professor of History at Boston College Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our ...
01.06.2023 Carlos Alberto Sánchez, "A Sense of Brutality. Philosophy after Narco-Culture" (Amherst College Press, 2020) Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that ...
01.06.2023 Between the Streets and the Assembly: South Korean Social Movements before and after Democratization Welcome to the third NIAS-Korea episode! In this episode, we invite Prof. Yoonkyung Lee to discuss social movements in South Korea. Since its founding, South Korea has had a longstanding social movement history. One cannot fully understand the country’s democratic ...
01.04.2023 Regine A. Spector, "Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2017) Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia (Cornell UP, 2017) delves into the role of bazaars in the political economy and development of Central Asia. Bazaars are the economic bedrock for many throughout the region--they are the ...
01.04.2023 Samantha Muka, "Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea" (U Chicago Press, 2022) In Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Samantha Muka, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Stevens Institute of Technology, dives into the unexpected world of tank crafting. Throughout ...
01.04.2023 Siv B. Lie, "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (U Chicago Press, 2021) shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France. Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among ...
01.04.2023 Generation Why?: Do We Need "Generations?" Who gets to define generational cohorts and do they obscure more than illuminate? Guests Neil Howe, author of Generations Tony Tulathimutte, author of Why There’s No ‘Millennial’ Novel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by ...
01.03.2023 Joel Robbins, "Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life" (Oxford UP, 2020) Anthropological theory can radically transform our understanding of human experience and offer theologians an introduction to the interdisciplinary nature between anthropology and Christianity. Both sociocultural anthropology and theology have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of human experience and the ...
01.02.2023 Donovan O. Schaefer, "Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin" (Duke UP, 2022) In Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke UP, 2022), Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the conventional wisdom that feeling and thinking are separate. Drawing on science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and contemporary literary criticism, Schaefer ...

Older episodes

New Books in Sociology

What's New Books in Sociology about?

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New Books in Sociology episodes:

M. R. Sharan, "Last Among Equals: Power, Caste and Politics in Bihar's Villages" (Westland, 2021)

Queer Space

Robin Bartram, "Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Rukmini S. "Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India" (Context, 2021)

Shailaja Paik, "The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Batja Mesquita, "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions" (Norton, 2022)

Stephanie C. Kane, "Just One Rain Away: The Ethnography of River-City Flood Control" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

Kevin Munger, "Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Lois Presser, "Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences" (U California Press, 2022)

Elizabeth Farfán-Santos, "Undocumented Motherhood: Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing" (U Texas Press, 2022)

Gillian Tan, "Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet" (Springer, 2018)

Namita Vijay Dharia, "The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction" (U California Press, 2022)

David Collier and Gerardo L. Munck, "Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies: Insights and Methods for Comparative Social Science" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

Hil Malatino, "Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

Surviving the State: Struggles for Land and Democracy in Myanmar

Malini Ambach et al., "Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives" (HASP, 2022)

Jennifer Forestal, "Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments" (Oxford UP, 2021)

James C. Rhoads et al., "Cultivating Q Methodology: Essays Honoring Steven R. Brown" (Bookbaby, 2022)

Steffen Mau, "Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century" (Polity Press, 2022)

The Ideology of Innovation in India

How Did the Pandemic Transform Workers and Work?

Eric A. Stanley, "Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable" (Duke UP, 2021)

Marlene Schäfers, "Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Benjamin Hegarty, "The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia" (Cornell UP, 2022)

On Émile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" (1912)

Infrastructure and Inequality

Chris Bilton et al., "Creativities: The What, How, Where, Who and Why of the Creative Process" (Edward Elgar, 2022)

Carwil Bjork-James, "The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia" (U Arizona Press, 2020)

Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Tanya Katerí Hernández, "Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality" (Beacon Press, 2022)

Consumed: The Myth and Reality of Cannibalism

The Future of Inequality: A Discussion with Mike Savage

Harald Koberg, "Free Play: Digital Gaming and the Longing for Effectiveness" (Büchner-Verlag, 2021)

Sabrina Mittermeier, "Fan Phenomena: Disney" (Intellect Books, 2023)

Forbidden Fruit: Religious Fervor about Food

Heidi K. Gardner and Ivan A. Matviak, "Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work" (HBR Press, 2022)

Christopher Loperena, "The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Philippe-Richard Marius, "The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)

Daniel White, "Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Bin Xu, "The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society" (Polity Press, 2022)

Do We Live in a Christian Country?

White Balance: How Do Race and Class Intersect?

Carlos Alberto Sánchez, "A Sense of Brutality. Philosophy after Narco-Culture" (Amherst College Press, 2020)

Between the Streets and the Assembly: South Korean Social Movements before and after Democratization

Regine A. Spector, "Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2017)

Samantha Muka, "Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Siv B. Lie, "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Generation Why?: Do We Need "Generations?"

Joel Robbins, "Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Donovan O. Schaefer, "Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin" (Duke UP, 2022)