New Books in Sociology

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself. These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country's Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical South, The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026) explores the material and immaterial legacies of socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity, polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political center in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness within the regional dynamics of the Global South. David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin.  This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee, PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The 21st Century in 100 Games (Routledge India, 2024) is an interactive public history of the contemporary world. It creates a ludological retelling of the 21st century through 100 games that were announced, launched and played from the turn of the century. Aditya Deshbandhu is Senior Lecturer of Communications, Digital Media Sociology at the University of Exeter, UK. A researcher of video game studies, new media, and the digital divide, he examines how people engage with digital artefacts and seeks to understand how these interactions shape everyday lives. As someone who actively examines digital acts of leisure, his research in the last decade has examined social media and streaming platforms alongside video games and digital cultures. He is also the author of Gaming Culture(s) in India: Digital Play in Everyday Life and also serves as an editor for this book series. Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

How queer men in Kazakhstan navigate dating apps in a context of stigma, surveillance, and limited legal protections. It shows how platforms like Grindr, Hornet, Tinder, and VKontakte function as spaces where trust, visibility, and safety must be continuously negotiated. This episode explores how queer men in Kazakhstan navigate dating apps in contexts shaped by stigma, surveillance, and limited legal protections. Drawing on interviews and platform analysis in Shymkent and Almaty, the research challenges the idea of dating apps as neutral or purely liberating spaces, showing instead how they function as ‘ambivalent infrastructures' where connection is always intertwined with risk. Rather than simple tools for meeting partners, apps like VKontakte, Grindr, Hornet, and Tinder are used as distinct social environments that require careful interpretation and strategy. Users constantly assess authenticity, safety, and potential harm, often moving across multiple platforms, starting with apps, then shifting to messaging services like WhatsApp or Telegram, and using calls and additional checks to verify identity before meeting offline. Set against Kazakhstan's broader socio-political context, where queer visibility can lead to harassment, outing, or violence, the episode highlights how digital intimacy becomes a form of ongoing risk management. It ultimately reframes dating apps not as spaces of free connection, but as complex systems where trust, visibility, and safety must be continuously negotiated. Yerkebulan Sairambay is a scholar at risk based at the Centre for Oriental studies in the University of Tartu (Estonia). His research interests involve, but are not limited to, the following areas of expertise: political participation, new media, civil society, climate change, clan politics, democratisation, queer studies, academic freedom, transitional justice, and nation- and state- building with a particular focus on the countries of post-communist Europe and former Soviet Union. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, and IMRCEES Erasmus Mundus Master's Double Degrees in Russian, Central and East European studies (University of Glasgow) and political science (Corvinus University of Budapest). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In this episode of the New Books Network, I spoke with Dr Olga Burlyuk and Dr Ladan Rahbari about their new edited volume, From the Margins: Migrant Academics' Narratives of Precarity (Open Book Publishers, 2026). The book is open access. As universities promote internationalisation while maintaining labour systems that leave many migrant scholars vulnerable, this volume builds on the editors' 2023 collection (also featured on New Books Network) by incorporating global perspectives. Through personal and autoethnographic narratives, contributors examine visa insecurity, institutional exclusion, racialisation, loneliness, and overwork, while also highlighting joy, solidarity, and “resilience”. By treating lived experience as critical knowledge, From the Margins offers a strong critique of contemporary academia and invites readers to consider whom universities serve, whose labour sustains them, and what a more equitable academic future could look like. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Religion and Theology within the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research examines the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, particularly within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In this episode hosts Salman Sayyid and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by William Barylo to discuss his most recent book ‘Muslims in the Neoliberal Era: Resisting, Healing, and Flourishing in the Metacolonial Era'. The discussion centred on the differing nature of the Muslim experience in France, the UK, and beyond, and the ways in which Muslims find spaces and forms of community resistance in view of the dominant structures. William Barylo is a research fellow in Sociology at the University of Warwick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were sociologists, or at the very least precursors to the subject? Does it, for example, mean that intellectuals of 18th Century Scotland had the same concerns as we do today? Alternatively, does it mean we should think of sociology as an elite discipline, developed by men who were attached to power, albeit with some often critical insights? In turn, if we accept these thinkers as doing something distinct, how can this sociologically be explained? These are the questions which animate Alex Law's The Roots of Sociology: Scottish Enlightenment and the Civilising Process (Routledge, 2026). Structured around two sections, Sociology and the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as Sociology of the Scottish Enlightenment, Law sees these thinkers as thinking through what Elias would later call the civilising process. He so doing he explores how questions of state formation, violence and emerging commercial society structured their interest and how the particular position of Scotland, a stateless nation experiencing rebellion, provided the space for what he calls their ‘pre-sociology'. In our podcast we discuss how Law's attempt to see the Scottish Enlightenment thinks as concerned with the civilising process differs from other attempts to claim them for sociology, the legacy of the Act of Union for these writers and how one became a thinker in these times. We also discuss why Adam Smith is, for Law, an ‘ambivalent' figure for sociology and what we can learn from these writers about the scope and historical insight sociology should have. 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) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) 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

Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans saw children as joyful omnivores who were naturally curious and eager to eat. Of course, this doesn't make sense today. Don't kids have special taste buds? Aren't they highly sensitive to food's texture and color? Aren't children incapable of liking “adult foods,” and don't parents risk harming kids psychologically by urging them to eat?But Americans in the past didn't think any of those things. They assumed that children could enjoy the same foods as adults, and children almost always did. They loved spicy relishes, vinegary pickles, and bitter greens. They spent their allowances on raw oysters and looked forward to their daily coffee. So how did modern kids become such incredibly narrow eaters? The story is fascinating – and about much more than rising abundance. Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History (St Martin's Press, 2026) by Dr. Helen Veit shows how fussy eating came to define "children's food" and reshape American diets at large. Maybe most importantly, it explains how we can still use the tools that parents used in the past to raise happy, healthy, wildly un-picky kids today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

How did black suits become so ubiquitous? Why has men's business clothing been so plain for the last 250 years? How did a style adopted by the Founding Fathers to differentiate themselves from European contemporaries become the dominant style for men around the globe? Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (Oxford University Press, 2026) traces the shift from the colorful, flamboyant attire of the eighteenth century to the plain dark suit of the nineteenth century, characterizing this style evolution as a "Sartorial Revolution." In this book, American historian and costume designer Chloe Chapin traces the evolution of masculine style from the American Revolution through the Civil War and shows how men's suits shaped relationships of gender and power. Drawing on a wealth of visual and written sources, she shows how the plainness of suits symbolized new ideals of rationality and democracy and played a crucial role in framing the lasting identity and authority of American men. This richly illustrated book analyzes fashion history's impact on gender dynamics and emphasizes the dynamic relationships between bodies, clothing, and personal identity. Suitable demonstrates the significance of fashion beyond mere appearance, illustrating the key role modern men's suits have played in shaping the modern world. Chloe Chapin holds a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University and master's degrees in fashion and textile studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology and costume design from the Yale School of Drama. She has taught fashion history, costume design, gender studies, and anthropology. As a costume designer for over twenty years, her credits include Broadway musicals, opera, and Shakespeare. She works at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era (Harvard Education Press, 2026), Julie J. Park offers deft analysis of the changes to college admissions and campus life since the US Supreme Court ruled to restrict race-conscious policies in two 2023 cases: Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Park offers clear explanations of the rulings, their historical context, and their implications for higher education policy. She highlights how the Supreme Court still allows campuses to consider the role of race in students' experiences and that numerous tools to advance diversity in admissions remain. In this lively, timely work, Park points out the swift and stark post-ruling shifts in campus demographics and grapples with questions of how to push toward a more equitable admissions system. She investigates alternative initiatives, such as test-optional and test-free admissions, percent plans, and others, weighing their merits and drawbacks. She also examines inequality affecting college applications themselves and offers ideas for reform. Integrating up-to-the minute research on admissions, standardized testing, enrollment management, and the campus racial climate, Park recommends actions that can advance equity-oriented access to higher education despite the current restrictions on race-conscious admissions. Park ends with a call to campus leaders, policymakers, and practitioners to reimagine selective college admissions and attendance and offers a glimpse of what the future could hold. Julie J. Park is a professor in the College of Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. An expert on race and diversity in higher education, she served as a consulting expert in the landmark case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard on the side of Harvard. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history's deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic, a global outbreak that began in China in the 1850s and claimed an estimated 15 million lives by the mid-twentieth century. This was the first major pandemic recognized by scientists as zoonotic—spread from animals to humans—and it marked a turning point in both medical science and global health. Through a gripping historical investigation, Professor Lynteris explores how rats entered the medical imagination of the time. He reveals how scientific thinking about disease vectors evolved in tandem with colonial power structures as plague responses unfolded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From laboratory discoveries to imperial interventions, the rat became central not just to understanding plague, but to shaping new forms of epidemiological reasoning. This provocative book shows how zoonosis emerged as a politically charged concept in the context of empire and pandemic crisis. It is a powerful history of how science, society, and colonialism converged around a creature now inseparable from the story of epidemic disease. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echoing out from the municipal markets. Generations of New Orleanians—Black and white, enslaved and free, men and women, wealthy and working class—gathered in public to feed the city.In Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans (Oxford UP, 2025), historian Dr. Ashley Rose Young illuminates the central role of food in shaping the vibrant culture of New Orleans. While the city's dynamic culinary scene fostered bonds between some communities, under the surface, groups viciously vied for control over who bought and sold food and where they could do it. Dr. Young traces the intricate systems of food vendors and their customers, and how those relationships were affected by race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. She shows how vendors and customers alike exercised considerable influence over the city's food economy and the laws that regulated it by negotiating prices, shaping taste preferences, liaising with government officials, and even openly defying ordinances they felt were unfair. The power each group gained and lost determined the success of their businesses, the well-being of their families, and their ability to shape food retail and local laws to meet their needs.Nourishing Networks vividly depicts a city that throughout its history has struggled to feed its population safely and affordably, and in documenting those challenges, it offers lessons for building a better food future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Campus Whisper Networks: Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors (Rutgers University Press, 2026) examines how personal knowledge about student sexual assault circulates within college campus communities. Based upon both qualitative and quantitative survey data, Dr. Janet Hinson Shope and Dr. Richard Pringle's research demonstrates that students who have been sexually assaulted tell someone—almost always a friend. Most college students know someone who has been assaulted. Simply knowing, by means of relationships, that one or more peers have been assaulted affects the knowers, and the effects reverberate unevenly across campuses.  Dr. Shope and Dr. Pringle highlight the structural properties that prohibit relational knowledge from becoming official institutional knowledge, confining it to whispers and secrecy within informal spheres of knowledge. The rules governing the circulation of such knowledge create an uneven epistemic field of sexual assault. This uneven field is consequential for the communities, affecting survivors and their confidants and shaping student views of the college community. Campus Whisper Networks demonstrates how personal and institutional avoidance, both the “need to not know” and “no need to know,” creates knowledge gaps that hide the community's wounds and prevent personal knowledge from becoming social knowledge.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

What explains the rise of religious populism in contemporary Turkish politics and society? How does industrialization help to explain change and continuity in social and religious life in Muslim majority countries? In his new book Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers (University of California Press, 2025), Utku Balaban examines Turkey's rapid post-Cold War industrialization and argues that the answers to these questions lie in a class analysis centered on the relationships between employers and employees situated within larger contexts of globalization and historical Islamization. Political and religious transformations occurring in the 1980s and 1990s are not the result of a cultural backlash to or rejection of “Westernization,” or a nostalgia for an idealistic past. Rather, Balaban argues they are related to the rise of a socio-economic-political class he calls the “faubourgeosie” that strategically employ Islamic populism as a method of protecting their interests against other primary class actors. These changes are internal to the mechanics and logics of capitalism as shifts in the traditional relations of production produced new alliances and networks based on small-scale capital accumulation. Balaban's Turkish case study can be applied to other Muslim-majority countries in which small-scale industrialists similarly dealt with economic anxiety and aspirations through recourse to popular Islamist rhetoric not as a specifically moral strategy, but as a political one. Industrial Islamism recently received the best new book in the category of international political economy from the International Studies Association. Dr. Utku Balaban is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Xavier University. He is the author of A Conveyor Belt of Flesh: Urban Space and the Proliferation of Industrial Labor Practices in Istanbul's Garment Industry (2011) and Social Inclusion Practices in Turkey (2015). Dr. Jaclyn Michael is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. These imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. More recently, we have seen a menacing rise of Islamic "terrorism," political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a "failed state" or economic insecurity and cultural backlash. In ⁠Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the "Lazy Native" and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines⁠ (University of Georgia Press, 2026), however, Dr. George Baylon Radics explains this forgotten part of U.S. history with emotions as a driving force behind social action. The Philippines is currently experiencing the longest-running Muslim-Christian conflict in the modern world and an increasingly anti-Western populist government. By unpacking the role of emotions from the American colonial period to the present, Emotional Filipinos blurs the line between American colonizer and Muslim-Filipino "terrorist," highlighting the lasting effects of America's footprint in Southeast Asia. Radics humanizes this fraught history and reveals unexplored connections between past and present. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose ⁠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. You can find Miranda's interviews on ⁠New Books with Miranda Melcher⁠, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market (Cornell UP, 2026) is a study of the power that shapes the forms of the homes Chinese citizens strive for and the possible paths they may take to realize their home ownership dreams. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Mengqi Wang discusses how the Chinese real estate industry functions in the everyday, welding aspirational middle-class families, especially migrant families, to the property-owning class and the urban growth machine. Urban housing was a socialist benefit in China until the market reforms and privatization in the 1990s. Today, most Chinese citizens consider homeownership a necessity rather than an economic privilege. Wang analyzes the making of homeownership ideologies through "inflexible demand" (gangxu)—a concept that real estate brokers, developers, homebuyers, and the government in China use to craft homeownership as indispensable for fulfilling dreams of urban citizenship. The ethnography shows that gangxu helps to articulate diverse attempts to accumulate value through housing at China's urbanizing city periphery, while giving shape to a housing-based, postsocialist right to the city. Anxious Homes argues that homeownership does not necessarily engender independence but suggests further inclusion of citizens within the dominant regime of accumulation. Mengqi Wang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research interests include economic anthropology, urban anthropology, political economy, gender studies, and science and technology studies. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In a world marked by increasingly destructive ecological and meteorological upheavals, Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius (Ohio UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Rouphail offers a historical analysis of how these catastrophes shape people's understanding of themselves, their collective history, and their relationship to the institutions that govern them. An examination of cyclonic disasters in the multiethnic Indian Ocean island of Mauritius throws into stark relief how deep histories of diasporic identity formation, of imperial governance, and of the informal practices of racial difference making graft onto how everyday people interpret these moments of loss and the futures that emerge in their wake.Cyclonic Lives shows that disasters are not only events; they are also processes through which people evaluate and rethink the most elemental social and cultural categories that give meaning to their lives. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing until the early postcolonial era, this book tracks, for example, how Mauritians of African descent integrated these disasters into broader collective histories and memories of the Indian Ocean slave trade, how Hindu Indo-Mauritians understood cyclones' ecological effects as material elements to be accounted for in a broader Hindu diasporic space, and how the late colonial and early postcolonial state built infrastructures—material, conceptual, and financial—to mitigate the threats posed by these storms and ensure their own long-term durability.The increasing political, social, and economic instability that climate change has already triggered demands that humanists develop analytical geographies and methodologies that shed light on how power can modulate in asymmetrical ways at moments of crisis. If there is one central takeaway from this historical study of this small island in a big ocean, it is that catastrophic events are not things that merely happen to people; they are processes that remake them. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

While most English-language histories of Taiwan focus on its geopolitical role, Taiwan: A People's History (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Evan N. Dawley centres on the people of Taiwan themselves and explores how they have formed a unique polity, telling the story of the Indigenous Taiwanese, the Hoklo and Hakka who came from China before the twentieth century, Japanese colonialism and the Chinese who arrived after 1945. Dr. Dawley describes how successive waves of immigration changed Taiwan and how these diverse groups of Indigenous tribes and settlers interacted economically and culturally, creating new Taiwanese identities in the process. Over the last century Taiwan has developed from an authoritarian state to one of the world's most vibrant democracies and advanced economies. It is a successful independent society, albeit one whose existence remains under a shadow. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Hotels represent nations, hosting visiting monarchs, politicians, and diplomats. Hotels underpin global networks of travel and communication, on which national and international prosperity have increasingly depended since the end of the First World War. Yet hotels are also places where people can be anonymous; where murderers and thieves mix with adulterers and con artists; and where prejudice finds expression in who is refused access, and in the forms of 'service' provided by staff in the lowest-paid roles. The Secret Life of the Hotel: Sex, Crime and Protest in British Guesthouses Since 1918 (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Professor Eloise Moss is the first book to uncover how hotels entrenched inequality, prejudice, and exploitation in Britain's tourist sector, and in wider society and culture, during the 20th century.Professor Moss delves into hotel murders, swindles, and scandals, including the history of Agatha Christie's disappearance in 1926, the 'Margate Hotel Murder', and the divorce of Wallis Simpson in 1936 so she could marry King Edward VIII. Professor Moss's exploration of the hotel also shines a light on the fight against the colour bar, the formation of the British civil rights movement, and the visit to London of Martin Luther King Jr.The Secret Life of the Hotel uniquely tells the story of Britain's relationship with the world during the 20th century through the prism of its hotels, showing how their infrastructure and 'welcome' had profound consequences for women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ citizens, and people with disabilities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In this episode hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Amani Hassani, to discuss her most recent work around Islamophobia and Muslimness in Denmark. Hassani discussed Danish colonial histories and the surveilling nature of the Danish welfare state, and how these are employed to construct a narrative of Danish benevolence while simultaneously marking Muslims in Denmark as ‘other' and deserving of intolerance in an otherwise tolerant nation. Amani Hassani is a lecturer at Brunel University and her work spans urban ethnography, sociology, anthropology and human geography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Whispers in the Pews: Evangelical Uniformity in a Divided America (NYU Press, 2026) reveals how mundane social interactions in an evangelical church silence difference and reinforce right-wing conformity Small talk, whether enjoyed or despised, is often thought of as trivial and largely useless. In certain situations, however, it can be surprisingly powerful. Whispers in the Pews offers a bottom-up explanation of Christian nationalism, revealing how cultural homogeneity within evangelical church communities is upheld by an active, manufactured effort to dodge reflective engagement with topics that could stir up diverging points of view. Whispers in the Pews exposes how small talk is utilized to construct an appearance of social and political sameness in evangelical church communities. Based on an ethnography of a church that appeals to students, working class residents, and racial minorities alike in a politically divided Southern college town, McDowell showcases how churchgoers avoid consequential issues that could expose disagreements on border control, electoral politics, race and gender. By confining themselves to blander topics, the church, which prides itself on inclusivity, positions itself as welcoming to all. But by creating an environment in which certain topics are discouraged from discussion, a façade is developed in which everyone is assumed to believe the same things, and any sort of debate is silenced. Whispers in the Pews shows that the presumption that everyone is of the same mind makes it difficult for churchgoers to articulate or contemplate progressive views, and by extension, advances the idea that differences of opinion are un-Christian, and therefore un-American. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Professor Rina Bliss teaches in the sociology department at Rutgers University, and has written on the social significance of genetic studies on intelligence, race, and social factors.   In What's Real About Race: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society (W.W. Norton, 2025) Bliss explores the history of race as a genetic category, its haphazardness across research, medical, and social contexts, and its implications for knowledge production. In this work, Bliss sheds light on the real impacts of racism on bodies and lives, and on how these myths structure modern science and industries. This interview is a conversation between Rina Bliss and a group of Princeton graduate students/visiting faculty involved in an interdisciplinary (IHUM) STS Reading group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The field of Strategic Studies, which studies the use and threat of force for political purposes, has seen the repeated rise of concepts to dominate discourses and research agendas, only to eventually fall to the margins again. What explains this cyclical pattern? What are the consequences for our understanding of war?Reconceptualizing War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Chiara Libiseller examines these questions by likening the coming and going of theories to fashions. While in vogue, fashionable concepts are used widely, becoming broader and vaguer until essentially stripped of meaning. At the same time, they are bestowed with authority and power that allows them to withstand criticism and marginalizes alternative perspectives. These characteristics severely affect the quality, depth, and diversity of research by narrowing and siloing the field of inquiry.Tracing three concepts—revolution in military affairs, counterinsurgency, and hybrid warfare—through their fashion lifecycle, Dr. Libiseller demonstrates how fashionability affects the concepts themselves, related research, and the field more generally. Embedded within a discussion of the history and dynamics of Strategic Studies, the book calls for more reflexivity in the study of war and strategy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Zeina Al-Azmeh's Syrian Intellectuals in Exile: The Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving (Cambridge UP, 2026) captures a group of intellectuals forced to leave Syria, primarily after the events of 2011. Having wound up in either Paris or Berlin these intellectuals are forced to reconsider their relation to their homeland, including the ongoing revolution, while navigating their new Western homes. As Al-Azmeh shows, this creates a diverse intellectual field which, while shaped by different intellectual and personal positions shares the need to navigate how they think of the revolution and the expectation of their hosts. In the course of the book, Al-Azmeh shows us a group of intellectuals who, while adopting a ‘double gaze' of critiquing and at points valuing the West increasingly (though not wholly) adopt a position of ‘radical embeddedness' towards the revolution, giving their role as leaders and instead seeing themselves as followers of the people. In the podcast we discuss the process that led these intellectuals to this position and the problems it posed for their relevance. We also discuss the contributions Al-Azmeh makes across the sociology of intellectuals, postcolonial theory and the idea of ‘trauma work'. There are also reflections on how one navigates one's participants also being source of literature and what has changed following the fall of the Assad regime. 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 (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) 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

Today's political debates are fiercely polarized. But looking beyond the headlines, The Trigger Points: Inequality and Political Polarization in Contemporary Society (Policy Press, 2026) shows that ordinary citizens hold much more nuanced, less divided views. Drawing on rich survey data and group discussions, this work maps four major areas of conflict: migration, climate change, diversity, and economic justice. Across these conflicts, most citizens take positions that are middle-of-the-road, contradictory, or undecided. It is only certain ‘trigger points' – like gendered pronouns or refugee admissions – that predictably ignite tensions and deep disagreement. Political entrepreneurs know this and weaponize trigger points for their agenda. Yet the real key to contemporary conflicts, the book argues, lies in social inequality. This is a vital work that maps today's political landscape without sensationalism, offering a fresh lens on public debate. This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Her research focuses on human mobilities and her new book has been published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Prince George's County, Maryland, is a suburban jurisdiction in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and is home to the highest concentration of Black middle-class residents in the United States. As such, it is well positioned to overcome white domination and anti-Black racism and their social and economic consequences. Yet Prince George's does not raise tax revenue sufficient to provide consistent high-quality public goods and services. In Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia (Russell Sage Foundation, 2026) sociologist Angela Simms examines the factors contributing to Prince George's financial troubles. Dr. Simms draws on two years of observations of Prince George's County's budget and policy development processes, interviews with nearly 60 Prince George's leaders and residents, and budget and policy analysis for Prince George's County and its two Whiter, wealthier neighbors, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia. She argues legacy and ongoing government policies and business practices—such as federal mortgage insurance policy prior to 1968, local government reliance on property taxes, and private investment patterns—have resulted in disparities in wealth accumulation between Black and white Americans, not only for individuals and families but local jurisdictions as well. Fighting for a Foothold is an in-depth analysis of the fiscal challenges experienced by Prince George's County and by the suburban Black middle-class and majority-Black jurisdictions, more broadly. The book reveals how race, class, and local jurisdiction boundaries in metropolitan areas interact to create different material living conditions for Americans. Our guest is: Dr. Angela Simms, who is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Fighting for a Foothold. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: House of Diggs The Social Constructions of Race The Fight To Save The Town Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress Of Bears and Ballots Remembering Lucille The Names of All the Flowers What Might Be The End of White Politics Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ 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

While nationalism is a term that is often associated with instability, violence, extremism, terrorism, wars and even genocide, in fact most forms of nationalism are nonviolent.  Beyond politics, it is a set of discourses and practices that shape economic, social, legal, and cultural life all over the globe.  Siniša Malešević's Nationalism as a Way of Life: The Rise and Transformation of Modern Subjectivities (Cambridge University Press, 2025) explores the global rise and transformation of nationalism and analyses the organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional mechanisms that have made it the dominant way of life in the twenty-first century.  In a series of case studies across time and space, the book zooms in on three key forms of lived experience: how nationalism operates as a multi-faceted meta-ideology, how national categories have become organisationally embedded in everyday practices and why nationalism has become the dominant form of modern subjectivity.  The book is aimed at readers interested in understanding how nation-states and nationalisms have attained such influence in contemporary world. Siniša Malešević is Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology at the University College, Dublin, and Senior Fellow at CNAM, Paris. He is the author of the award winning books Grounded Nationalisms (Cambridge, 2019) and Why Humans Fight (Cambridge, 2022). His work has been translated into fourteen languages.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

First published in 1997, Manufacturing Religion was a controversial book because it critiqued a widely adopted style of scholarship that presumes that religion is utterly unique, inexplicable, and therefore able only to be interpreted by privileged scholars. Claiming religion to be sui generis (or self-caused), this approach has undisclosed practical effects--institutional and geo-political--at a variety of sites, from the types of textbooks commonly used in introductory classes to the way that political events are often represented in the mass media. Russell McCutcheon documented the ubiquity of this approach and showed how harmful it was Updating its wide-ranging evidence and adding new chapters, this new edition demonstrates the impact of this critique while showing how little the field has generally moved in the past thirty years. Russell T. McCutcheon earned his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and is now an honorary life member of the International Association for the History of Religions. Beginning in 2001, he was the Department Chair at the University of Alabama, a role that he played for 18 years. His many publications on the history of the field and the practical effects of the category religion in liberal democracies, along with a number of resources created specifically for teachers and students, are widely used in the field today. This episode's host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com00:00 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (Cambridge UP, 2025) is the most recent book from Professor William Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This title is the latest in excellent and ground-breaking titles from Professor Robinson in a distinguished career, where he began writing books on United States intervention into Nicaragua in the late 1980s and early 1990s, expanding this focus on United States hegemony more broadly in the ground-breaking book Promoting Polyarchy in 1996, up to then grappling with the totality of the capitalist world system more recently in titles such as The Global Police State in 2020, Can Global Capitalism Endure in 2022, and War, Global Capitalism and Resistance in 2024, alongside many other books. Professor Robinson's latest instalment we discuss in this episode, Epochal Crisis, tracks the multifactorial crises that are impacting the global capitalist system today, across economic, social, ecological, political and other dimensions, and how these intersecting and overlapping crises are degrading or exhausting the ability for capitalism to renew itself. This contemporaneous epochal crisis, as Professor Robinson carefully details, is catalysing morbid symptoms that express themselves as wars, unprecedented violence, ecological emergencies, rock-bottom political legitimacy and a host of other dangerous and cataclysmic effects. Epochal Crisis is both a wide-ranging and extensive investigation into the current, overlapping and intersecting crises that are plaguing the world capitalist system, as it appears in its final, violent death throes, and also a highly engaging work that is easy to digest and will help you understand the very naked reality of capital crisis that is so obvious to us all today. Thankfully, Professor Robinson also addresses what we can do in this latest, perhaps final, epochal breakdown of the capitalist system, to find some revolutionary hope in these dark times. Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

A Volatile Picture: War and the Political Work of Photography in Sri Lanka (U Washington Press, 2026) by Dr. Vindhya Buthpitiya is a groundbreaking ethnography that explores how, in the context of Sri Lanka's protracted civil war and its turbulent aftermath, photography has become bound to the Tamil political imagination. From state-commissioned images meant to surveil and rebel documentation of armed resistance, to the fragile memorials created from identity photographs of the disappeared, A Volatile Picture traces the making and moving of images across borders, communities, and generations. Studio portraits, passport pictures, family albums, atrocity photography, social media posts, and more act not only as records of loss and horror but also as vital tools for protest, solidarity, and the realization of alternate political futures. Drawing on transnational archival and ethnographic encounters and long-term fieldwork in northern Sri Lanka, Dr. Buthpitiya situates photography as both a volatile medium and a political practice. Photographs emerge here as incendiary agents—simultaneously evidencing and triggering violence, sustaining memory, and inciting new visions of liberation.This is the first in-depth study of Tamil photographic practices in Sri Lanka, offering a major contribution to the anthropology of war, visual culture, and South Asian studies. Richly researched and deeply humane, A Volatile Picture demonstrates how, amid devastation and displacement, photographs continue to generate truths, solidarities, and hopes that resist erasure. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

How can lives and things that are rendered invisible be crucial to identity, politics, and the future? Drawing on experimental ethnographic research in northeastern Estonia, this book offers vivid answers. The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia (Cornell UP, 2025) analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment occurs in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in eastern Estonia. It shows that secrets and hiding places are intrinsic to human affairs, while reconsidering the possibilities of relating ethnographically to what appears to be the extraneous. Francisco Martínez highlights how basements, garages, bunkers, holes, and cottages favor alternative forms of sociality, allowing local residents to redesign the terms of their public selves. Shadow spaces in this liminal region, at the border with Russia, are created against the institutional demand to be knowable. People engage in ordinary forms of ambivalence and refusal to negotiate a sense of loss and the consequences of a century of extractive activities. The Future of Hiding invites cross-disciplinary dialogue on topics like mining, transparency, belonging and cultural landscapes, offering insights into infrastructure's reproduction and destruction, recolonizations, and the ecological memory of a sacrificed area. Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic research. His work is known for its critical insights and experimental style. He was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and currently works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain. His email address is francisco.martinez14@um.es. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Identity Building Among Role-Playing Gamers: Slaying Goblins in the Real World (Bloomsbury 2025), Heather Shay draws from 19 months of participant-observation and 20 in-depth interviews with players. She found that gamers derive significant social and psychological benefits from table-top role-playing games-not least in that players often feel the hobby makes them better people. Playing these games allow players to depict themselves as good, moral actors through their in-game actions as well as by making the game enjoyable for their fellow players in real life. Table-top role-playing games also serve a psychological function by allowing participants to take imaginary risks with their characters, which in turn make them feel more alive than their everyday experiences allow them to. As they pretend to be fictional characters in fictional worlds, players use these games to create identities that make their lives more meaningful. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he focuses on the cultural and interpretive analysis of space, behavior, and identity. His work examines how built and designed environments shape social interaction, networks, and morality in everyday life across a range of settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023), Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022), and his most recent book Smalltown Urban: Performing the City in Rural America (Bloomsbury, under contract). His current research advances several interconnected projects, including the study of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, the production of temporary urbanism in rural historic towns, and the ways students experience “hanging out” and feeling at home in higher education. He is also developing new work on the social organization and cultural meaning of rodeo. More broadly, his scholarship is united by an interest in how people actively produce meaning, attachment, and identity within specific spatial and temporal contexts. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website or Google Scholar, connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or X (@ProfessorJohnst), or reach out directly via email (johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Written under the shadow of growing authoritarianism in the United States and Europe, this book is an effort to understand resistance movements of the twenty-first century. It foregrounds the Yellow Vests to present an accurate and timely picture of a protest movement that baffled analysts and blurred the boundaries of left and right. Comprehensively exploring the meaning of “les Gilets Jaunes triompheront” (the yellow vests will win), written on the Arc de Triomphe in 2018, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy details how people of all ages, many from the provinces and the urban periphery, rushed through the Paris streets, breaking windows and braving tear gas, challenging the ruling class in extraordinary and unpredictable ways. Avoiding hierarchy and stable organization, and claiming a right to a territory or space that is between the private and the public, these protests imagined a different form of collectivity that is not commodified but established by the social practice of “commoning”—of momentarily linking protests in the streets and other spaces. An essential book for activists and researchers on contemporary protest movements, this book offers crucial insight into the formation of protests and popular resistance and how social movements generate their own political and ideological character. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In a society undergoing rapid transformation, how do people engage in debates around a foreign concept and in doing so, pursue contested political futures? The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society examines how a group of Chinese intellectual elites referred to as the liberals or ziyou pai edified the civil society project beginning in the 1990s to build an independent space to constrain state power, increase political participation, and promote China's democratization. In the early 2000s, activists in movements such as the environmental and the AIDS movements identified with the liberals and regarded their activism as part of the project of building civil society. However, since the late 2000s the liberals' influence has gradually declined. In prominent social movements in the 2010s such as the labor and feminist movements, activists have openly criticized the liberal interpretation of civil society and regarded liberals' civil society agenda as irrelevant. In the book, Mujun Zhou employs the concept of interstitial space, or the space where the exercise of power has not been fully institutionalized, to examine the history of the civil society project over the past three decades and its changing relationship with other social movements. Zhou suggests that by advocating for civil society the liberals gained allies and thematized many social problems rising during China's economic reform; however, liberals' activism also produced new forms of power inequalities. Mujun Zhou is a cultural-political sociologist. She is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University. Her major research interests lie in issues in political culture and social change. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Where Saints Show Respect: Mafia, Modernity, and Rituals of Power is an anthropological exploration of how authority is produced not only through violence or secrecy but also through public ritual. Drawing on more than thirty years of ethnographic research in Sicily, Professor Berardino Palumbo turns our attention to saints' festivals, processions, fireworks, ritual gestures and moments when power becomes visible, tangible, and socially negotiated. At the centre of the book is the now well-known practice of saints “showing respect”: statues pausing or bowing during processions in front of particular homes or streets. Palumbo treats these not as traditional leftovers, but as modern political acts through which hierarchy, recognition, and moral worth are publicly visible. Power, he argues, is learned not only through fear or coercion, but through piety, celebration, play, and spectacle. The English edition is translated and edited by Cornelia Mayer Herzfeld. The book opens with a foreword by Michael Herzfeld, who situates it within broader debates on modernity, Europe, and anthropological critique. It closes with an afterword by Jane and Peter Schneider, placing Palumbo's work in dialogue with the long tradition of anthropological research on Sicily and the mafia, while highlighting what is novel in his approach. Rather than treating the mafia as a hidden or external force, Where Saints Show Respect shows how it is woven into everyday social relations, religious life, and shared moral worlds. In doing so, the book challenges readers to rethink modernity, not as the disappearance of ritual, but as its reconfiguration. This is an invitation to look more closely at how power operates wherever it appears festive, familiar, or “traditional” and to ask what makes us see some rituals as political and others not. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

It is no secret that marriage rates in the United States are at an all-time low. Despite this significant decline, the institution of marriage endures in our society amid historic changes to its meaning and practice. How does the continuing strength of marriage impact the relationships of same-sex couples after the legalization of same-sex marriage? Drawing on over one hundred interviews with LGBTQ+ people, Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships (University of Chicago Press, 2024) reveals the transformative impact marriage equality has had on same-sex relationships. Sociologist Dr. Abigail Ocobock looks to same-sex couples across a wide age range to illuminate the complex ways institutional mechanisms work in tandem to govern the choices and behaviors of individuals with different marriage experiences. Dr. Ocobock examines both the influence of marriage on the dynamics of same-sex relationships and how LGBTQ+ people challenge heteronormative assumptions about marriage, highlighting the complex interplay between institutional constraint and individual agency. Marriage Material presents a bold challenge to dominant scholarly and popular ideas about the decline of marriage, making clear that gaining access to legal marriage has transformed same-sex relationships, both for better and for worse. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste (U Wisconsin Press, 2024). In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation's victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them. With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—up to a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste's dead have real, significant power in the country's efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Using the analytical framework of reproductive justice, Borders, Citizenship, and Pregnancy: Migrant Women's Experiences of Pregnancy and Maternity Care in the UK (Bristol UP, 2025) by Dr. Gwyneth Lonergan examines migrant women's experiences of pregnancy and maternity care within the broader context of gendered and racialised discourses and policies around health, reproduction and citizenship, austerity and an expanding border regime. Based on interviews and focus groups with migrant mothers, third sector workers and NHS staff, this open-access book explores how immigration policies impact reproductive practices and unevenly distribute access to essential resources and support. The book provides valuable insights into the underlying social causes behind migrant women's relatively poor maternal outcomes and contributes significantly to scholarship on the intersections of citizenship, reproduction and expanding border controls. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education (Columbia UP, 2020), sociologist Yingyi Ma offers a multifaceted analysis of a new wave of international Chinese students—mostly self-funded—who have transformed American higher education over the past decade. This privileged yet diverse group of young people, emerging from a rapidly changing China, must navigate the complications and confusions of their formative years while bridging the world's two most powerful countries. How do these students come to study in the United States? What does that experience mean to them? And what does American higher education need to know—and do—in order to continue attracting these students and supporting them adequately? Drawing on research conducted in both Chinese high schools and American colleges and universities, Ma's book offers illuminating insights into the experiences that define this new wave of students: above all, a duality of ambition and anxiety rooted in the transformative social changes of contemporary China. These students and their families are ambitious in seeking to navigate two very different educational systems and societies. Yet, at the same time, the complexity and pressure of these systems generate profound anxiety—from the challenges of applying to colleges, to studying and socializing on campus, to deciding what comes next after graduation. Ambitious and Anxious also offers valuable policy implications for American colleges and universities, touching on recruitment, student life, faculty support, and career services. About the Author Yingyi Ma is Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, where she also serves as Director of the Asian/Asian American Studies Program. She is a Fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on United States–China Relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Few time periods have been as defined by waves of monumental social change as the United States during the 1960s. Even today, almost sixty years later, the era is often depicted as a triumph of social progress. Yet, as Dr. Larry M. Bartels and Dr. Katherine J. Cramer show in The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation (U Chicago Press, 2026), it was Americans' diverse reactions to the milestone events of the time—from the welcoming, to the fiercely resistant, to the largely oblivious—that planted the seeds of our current political turmoil. Their masterful analysis draws on a unique historical resource: the longest-running systematic tracking of individual Americans' political attitudes and behavior ever attempted. The study began in 1965 when researchers interviewed hundreds of high school students across the country and then periodically reinterviewed them over the next three decades. Bartels and Cramer supplement this historical record with in-depth interviews with dozens of the original students, painting a detailed picture of the generation's individual and collective political development. By tracing the responses of the Class of '65 to major events of their political lifetimes—including the Civil Rights and Women's Rights movements, the Vietnam War, the shifting role of religion, escalating economic inequality, immigration, and the rise of Donald Trump—Dr. Bartels and Dr. Cramer shed new light on the evolution of public opinion and the unsteady progress of American democracy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Sex Isn't Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary (Duke UP, 2026), Beans Velocci traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define sex and to create a world devoid of trans life. Drawing on lab notes, family genealogies, medical case studies, and more, Velocci follows scientists and clinicians from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century and across five disciplines—zoology, eugenics, gynecology, statistical sexology, and transsexual medicine—as their ideas and practices created a definitional tangle. They demonstrate how the sorting of bodies into male and female persists not despite but because of sex's incoherence: the defining features of these categories shift to contain various understandings of anatomy and physiology, theories of race, developments in research and medical methodologies, and bodies that cannot be accounted for in a binary framework. Exposing the endless work required to produce a world in which most people have a binary gender identity that neatly fits their binarily sexed body, Velocci demonstrates that it is not cis people who fit the categories; it's the categories that flex to make them fit. Beans Velocci is Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Our guest today is Cedric de Leon, author of Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity (U California Press, 2025). In this book, de Leon explores the complex and often overlooked history of Black political organizing within the U.S. labor movement. Rather than presenting a simple story of unity, he highlights the tensions, debates, and internal conflicts within Black civil society that ultimately strengthened movements for interracial labor solidarity. The book traces key organizations, leaders, and events from early socialist influences in Harlem to the rise of labor coalitions and the Memphis sanitation strike; demonstrating how Black workers and leaders actively shaped strategies for liberation. By focusing on both cooperation and disagreement, de Leon argues that Black political agency is best understood through this dynamic interplay. Freedom Train ultimately reframes labor history by centering Black voices and showing how their activism was crucial in pushing forward both civil rights and workers' rights in America. Our guest, Cedric de Leon, is a Professor of Sociology and Labor studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2018 to 2022, Cedric directed the UMass Amherst Labor Center, the country's premier worker-side graduate program in Labor Studies. He was the first person of color to do so. Before de Leon became an academic, he worked as a staff organizer and elected leader in the U.S. labor movement. His research focuses on race, labor, social movements, and political sociology, and he has published several books examining labor history and organizing. He has written extensively about how social movements organize and how political identities are formed, particularly within Black communities and labor struggles. His research combines historical analysis with sociological theory to better understand power, resistance, and collective action. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

As Melissa Butcher puts it in her book The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America's Future (Manchester UP, 2026) when asked to rank the importance of freedom to them most Americans would put it as an 11 out of 10. So, what happens when the idea of freedom becomes not something that unites Americans but rather, through its different interpretations, ideals and priorities becomes something that polarises Americans? Based upon extensive fieldwork and interviews with Americans across the states, Butcher is able to explore not just the different conceptions of freedom of America across realms such as justice, COVID, the rural/urban divide and religion, but also gives us an insight into how Americans think about America and how, especially at the local level, there are areas of hope which confound the claims we hear at the national level. In our conversation we discuss issues such as how she identified her places to visit and people to speak to, the daily experiences of crossing the US/Mexico border at El Paso, Texas, the important conversations that can come from speaking to people as people rather than labels and why, precisely, so many Americans bring up postmodernism at the same time that Universities no longer teach it. 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 (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) 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