What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms and libraries reify-or subvert-dominant social structures like caste and gender? These are the questions that Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala (Routledge, 2023) explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation and personal interviews, this book traces the transforma...
Nov 20, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 249
Cosplay, born from the fusion of ‘costume’ and ‘play’, transcends mere dress-up by transforming enthusiasts of TV shows, movies, books or video games into living embodiments of their cherished characters. Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Vivian Asimos is a close exploration of the vibrant world of cosplay, showing what makes it so captivating for so many. The book frames cosplay as an enactment and embodiment of mythology, revealing its inherent complexity, and provid...
Nov 20, 2024•51 min•Ep. 202
Around the world, millions are forcibly displaced by conflict, climate change, and persecution. Some cross international borders, while others are displaced within their own countries. In We Wait for a Miracle: Health Care and the Forcibly Displaced (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Muhammad H. Zaman shares poignant stories across continents to highlight the health care experiences of refugees and forced migrants. For many of these people, health risks unfortunately become part of the fabric of everyday...
Nov 19, 2024•50 min•Ep. 225
In this incisive critique of the ways performances of allyship can further entrench white privilege, author Carrie J. Preston analyses her own complicit participation and that of other audience members and theater professionals, deftly examining the prevailing framework through which white liberals participate in antiracist theater and institutional “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice (Oxford UP, 2024) addres...
Nov 19, 2024•53 min•Ep. 136
How do street-level bureaucrats in Austria’s public service deal with linguistic diversity? In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit meg...
Nov 15, 2024•43 min•Ep. 36
Life 24x a Second: Cinema, Selfhood, and Society (Oxford UP, 2023) highlights the life-sustaining and life-affirming power of cinema. Author Elsie Walker pays particular attention to pedagogical practice and students' reflections on what the study of cinema has given to their lives. This book provides multiple perspectives on cinema that matters for the deepest personal and social reasons-from films that represent psychological healing in the face of individual losses to films that represent hum...
Nov 14, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 214
Tribe-state relations are a foundational element of authoritarian bargains in the Middle East, and in particular in the Gulf States. However, the structures of governance built upon that foundation exhibit wide differences. What explains this variation in the salience of kinship authority? Through a case comparison of Kuwait, Qatar and Oman, in Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) Dr. Scott Weiner shows that variation in tribal access...
Nov 13, 2024•46 min•Ep. 285
In this episode, Dr. Uzma Jamil introduces Tariq Modood on his new book “Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Nov 13, 2024•25 min•Season 2Ep. 23
What good is a good sense of humour especially when the humour may be ethically questionable? Although humour seems a valuable part of a good conversation and indeed a good life, jokes have never seemed more morally problematic than they do now. How can we then evaluate quips, gibes, pranks, teasing, light mockery, sarcasm when they can all too often be mean, deceitful, disrespectful, humiliating, cruel? And how is a moral philosopher to evaluate such dilemmas without taking himself and morality...
Nov 13, 2024•54 min•Ep. 122
The Burning Forest: India's War Against the Maoists (Verso, 2019) by Nandini Sundar is an empathetic, moving account of what drives indigenous peasants to support armed struggle despite severe state repression, including lives lost, homes and communities destroyed. Over the past decade, the heavily forested,mineral-rich region of Bastar in central India has emerged as one of the most militarized sites in the country. The government calls the Maoist insurgency the “biggest security threat” to Ind...
Nov 12, 2024•53 min•Ep. 248
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman's book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice (St. Martin's Press, 2024) presents a modern argument, grounded in philosophy and cultural criticism, about childbearing ambivalence and how to overcome it. Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside t...
Nov 12, 2024•40 min•Ep. 131
From The Wire to Intervention to Girls, postmillennial American television has dazzled audiences with novelistic seriality and cinematic aesthetics. Yet this television is also more perverse: it bombards audiences with misogynistic and racialized violence, graphic sex, substance abuse, unlikeable protagonists, and the extraordinary exploitation of ordinary people. In Uncomfortable Television (Duke UP, 2024), Hunter Hargraves examines how television makes its audiences find pleasure through feeli...
Nov 12, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 141
Each of us is endowed with an inheritance--a set of evolved biases and cultural tools that shape every facet of our behavior. For countless generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights: driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organized religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it's failing us. We find ourselves hurtling toward a future of unprecedented political polarization, deadlier war, and irreparable environmental destruction. In...
Nov 10, 2024•44 min•Ep. 1
How did the Algerian war of independence shape contemporary sociology? In Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire: Forging Sociology in Anticolonial Struggle (Polity Press, 2023), Amin Perez, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Quebec in Montreal, explores the sociological practice and friendship of Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad. Using a range of archival and contemporary methods, the book shows the impact of anticolonialism on these key figures in sociology and demonstrates th...
Nov 09, 2024•39 min•Ep. 493
In 1966 Benedict Anderson published 'The Languages of Indonesian Politics', a seminal paper exploring the development of Indonesian as a new language for talking about national politics. In that paper Anderson underlined the contrast between the formal/official style of Indonesian news reports and the colloquial, playful speech style of ordinary Jakartans as depicted through comics. Nearly six decades on, how do we understand the 'languages' of Indonesian politics? How are figures of politics co...
Nov 08, 2024•38 min•Ep. 101
Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care (U Illinois Press, 2023) challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning pow...
Nov 07, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 331
In this deeply researched and compelling narrative, journalist Mara Kardas-Nelson examines the complex history and impact of microfinance - the practice of giving small loans to poor people, particularly women, that was once hailed as a revolutionary solution to global poverty. Through intimate portraits of borrowers in Sierra Leone and extensive interviews with key figures in the microfinance movement, Kardas-Nelson reveals how an idea that began with noble intentions became a multi-billion dol...
Nov 05, 2024•46 min•Ep. 6
In A Boy Broken: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Mental Ilness, Loss, and a Search for Meaning (2023), Dr. Douglas J. Engelman takes us through an often painful, sometimes uplifting story, where he recalls and describes the moment his relationship with his son changed forever - the moment that his son revealed his mental illness to him - and the journey that followed. Dr. Engelman allows the reader to accompany him as he learns about his son’s first psychotic break, witnesses his terrifying...
Nov 04, 2024•45 min•Ep. 393
Freelance curator Joanne Rosenthal joins Jana Byars to talk about Sex: Jewish Positions (Hirmer, 2024) and its concomitant exhibition at the Jewish museums in Berlin and Amsterdam. This book is also available in German with the same publisher as Sex. Judisches Positionen. An exploration of sexuality in Judaism, from ultra-Orthodox to secular. Sensuous, bold, and topical, this volume studies the entire spectrum of Jewish attitudes to sexuality. In doing so it examines widely held and contradictor...
Nov 04, 2024•43 min•Ep. 564
Who deserves public assistance from the government? This age-old question has been revived by policymakers, pundits, and activists following the massive economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anne Whitesell takes up this timely debate, showing us how our welfare system, in its current state, fails the people it is designed to serve. From debates over stimulus check eligibility to the uncertain future of unemployment benefits, Living Off the Government?: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfa...
Nov 03, 2024•32 min•Ep. 193
Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self (Lexington Books, 2023) explores the interrelation between carceral conditions and substance use by considering the intersections between drug markets, sidewalks, households, and prisons in Baltimore. Sanaullah Khan argues that while housing, medicalization, and incarceration fundamentally create the conditions for substance use, individuals are increasingly experiencing the paradoxes of care and punishment by being propel...
Nov 03, 2024•54 min•Ep. 64
What happens when the elitist space of 'Western' classical music seeks to diversify itself? And what are the social effects worked through diversity discourses in classical music institutions? The Sound of Difference: Race, Class and the Politics of 'Diversity' in Classical Music (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Kristina Kolbe addresses these concerns by critically examining how diversity work takes shape in a cultural sector so deeply implicated in hierarchies of class, structures of whiteness, and...
Nov 02, 2024•53 min•Ep. 255
Queer men's cultures of intimacy have long been sites of fierce contestation. Indeed, debates have raged for decades over issues such as monogamy, safer sex, sexual racism and gay marriage. The introduction of the smartphone in 2008 only intensified these debates whilst also raising a further set of questions which are explored in this open access book. Through interviews with a diverse group of 43 queer men about their smartphone mediated intimacies, Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphone...
Oct 31, 2024•56 min•Ep. 29
Today’s book is: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton University Press, 2024), by Dr. Allison Pugh, which explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other is valuable and worth preserving. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Dr. Pugh develops the concept of “c...
Oct 31, 2024•55 min•Ep. 238
Poverty, Gender and Health in the Slums of Bangladesh: Children of Crows (Routledge, 2024) provides comprehensive ethnographic accounts that depict the daily life experiences and health hardships encountered by young women and their families living in the slums of Dhaka city and the injustices they face. The analysis focuses on two specific historical eras: 2002-2003 and 2020-2022 and shows that despite recent improvements in employment opportunities and greater mobility for young women, their l...
Oct 29, 2024•55 min•Ep. 293
Are financial markets lawless and irrational? It may seem that way from the outside, but for market insiders there are multiples sets of rules that they break at their peril. Official rules set by law or by the exchanges exist alongside unofficial rules, or floor rules. Between these, it is the floor rules -- the norms followed by other insiders -- that matter most. Breaking an official rule might lead to a fine or even jail. Breaking floor rules can lead to being ostracized from markets as well...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 58
Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital ma...
Oct 29, 2024•57 min•Ep. 69
As the 2024 American presidential election approaches, it is common to hear scholars and journalists discuss the role of particular groups such as Latino men or suburban white women might play in a razor tight race. Less attention is paid to the nation’s youngest voters: Gen Z. Born between 1997 and 2012, these voters have experienced a decade of upheaval including, the murder of George Floyd, changing political norms with the election of Donald Trump, an insurrection after the election of Joe B...
Oct 28, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 744
What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine's Remains: Empire’s Medicine and the Life Thereafter (U California Press, 2024) chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantation...
Oct 28, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 332
In The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, 2024), Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential challenge to one of America's favorite pastimes: college football. Drawing on twenty-five in-depth interviews with former players from some of the country's most prominent college football teams, Kalman-Lamb and Silva explore how football is both predicated on a foundation of coercion and suffused with racialized harm and exploitation. Through the s...
Oct 27, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 278
