New Books in Sociology

Interviews with Sociologists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

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Episodes

Michael Rosino, "Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism Inside American Grassroots Political Organizing" (UNC Press, 2025)

In uncertain times, confronting pressing problems such as racial oppression and the environmental crisis requires everyday people to come together and wield political power for the greater good. Yet, as Michael Rosino shows in Democracy Is Awkward (UNC Press, 2025), progressive political organizations in the United States have frequently failed to achieve social change. Why? Rosino posits that it is because of the unwillingness of white progressives at the grassroots level to share power with pr...

Apr 21, 2025•28 min•Ep. 202

Agnieszka Pasieka, "Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived...

Apr 20, 2025•46 min•Ep. 360

Sarah Saddler, "Performing Corporate Bodies: Multinational Theatre in Global India" (Routledge, 2025)

How do corporations use theater to reconcile the crises of late capitalism? In our latest interview on Ethnographic Marginalia, we speak with Dr. Sarah Saddler about her new book Performing Corporate Bodies (Routledge, 2024), where she describes how corporations have borrowed techniques from activist theater to manage their workers in India and beyond. Sarah explains how she came to ethnographic techniques from a theater background, before discussing how she managed the challenges and misunderst...

Apr 19, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 20

Mingwei Huang, "Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century" (Duke UP, 2024)

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke UP, 2024), Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the “China malls” that has emerged along Johannesburg’s former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate globa...

Apr 18, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 525

Aaron Kupchik, "Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice" (NYU Press, 2025)

Every year, millions of public school students are suspended. This overused punishment removes students from the classroom, but it does not improve their behavior. Instead, suspension disrupts their education, harming the students, their families, and their schools. Black students suffer most within this broken system, experiencing a far greater risk of school punishment and the significant harms that accompany it. Many activists and scholars have considered how school punishment increases racia...

Apr 17, 2025•28 min•Ep. 249

Laura Miller, "Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

In Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan (Hawaii 2024), Laura Miller examines the intersections of ludic capitalism with formal and informal religious practices and beliefs in contemporary Japan. Miller shows that women―often younger women―are the primary drivers of industries of religiously flavored entertainment that offer avenues of self-exploration and spiritual capital that are marketed to appeal first and foremost to women “hunters” engaged in supernatural play. Miller’s eclectical...

Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 169

Ysabel Gerrard, "The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life" (U California Press, 2025)

How do young people use digital platforms? In The Kids are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (U California Press, 2025), Ysabel Gerrard, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield explores the understandings and experience of young people as they navigate both the online and offline world. Drawing on a range of sociological, digital and creative methods, the book punctures many myths around young people’s digital lives, showing b...

Apr 15, 2025•41 min•Ep. 524