Erving Goffman has always seen as somewhat of an enigma by sociologists and historians of the discipline. In his provocative new book Erving Goffman and the Cold War (2023, Lexington) Gary Jaworski suggests a ‘marginal man’ trope has grown up around him, whereby Goffman is seen as an outsider, unconnected to broader debates in sociology and to the events happening around him as he wrote. Seeking to overcome this trope, Jaworski presents him instead as a sociologist ‘in, and of’ the cold war. Thi...
Feb 22, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 405
Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism (SUNY Press, 2024) argues that capitalism fosters sadism and masochism--not as individual psychological proclivities but as widespread institutionalized patterns of behavior. The book is divided into two parts: one historical and the other theoretical. In the first, Eugene W. Holland shows how, as capital becomes global in scale and drives production and consumption farther and farther apart, it perverts otherwise free m...
Feb 21, 2025•1 hr 49 min•Ep. 513
Audun Kjus joins Jana Byars to talk about Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum (Utah State Press, 2025), eds. Audun Kjus, Jakob Löfgren, Cliona O’Carroll, Simon Poole & Ida Tolgensbakk. Utah State Press, 2025). The junctions between play and ritual are many and complex. Play is for fun and joy, but it also demands a total commitment and serious respect for rules. Rituals involve nearly endless varieties of social arrangements and can truly transform people, but they also include improvisa...
Feb 21, 2025•51 min•Ep. 343
The Hare Krishnas have long been associated with American hippie culture and New Age religious movements. But they have developed deeply rooted communities in India and throughout the world over the past 50 years. Known officially as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), this once-marginal religious community now wields vast economic assets, political influence, and a posh identity endorsed by Indian business tycoons and Bollywood celebrities. Bringing Krishna Back to Ind...
Feb 20, 2025•49 min•Ep. 577
In this episode of Madison's Notes, Jonathan Haidt, renowned social psychologist and author, dives deep into the impact of digital saturation on today's youth, drawing insights from his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Allen Lane, 2024). The discussion explores how growing up immersed in social media, video games, and smart technology is reshaping young people’s sense of self and influencing their political engagem...
Feb 19, 2025•57 min•Ep. 138
In Political Voice: Protest, Democracy, and Marginalised Groups (Oxford UP, 2024), Aidan McGarry examines the agency of marginalised people, emphasizing the processes through which different communities around the world articulate their political voices. McGarry develops an innovative concept of political voice around three elements: autonomy, representation, and constitution. This conceptualization is illustrated through contemporary case studies of two persecuted and silenced groups: LGBTIQ ac...
Feb 18, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 404
Today I spoke to Dr. Carl Waitz about his new book Youth Mental Health Crises and the Broken Social Link: A Freudian-Lacanian Perspective (Routledge, 2024). “The kids are not ok” blurbs Patricia Gherovici in her endorsement of Dr. Waitz’ necessary new book. We know this. On the weekend we recorded this interview (February 9, 2025) the New York Times published research[1] showing national trendlines from 1990-2024. Rates of depression and suicide; up. Life expectancy and satisfaction; down. Dr. W...
Feb 17, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 256
The relationship between fear people experience in their lives and the government often informs key questions about the rule of law and justice. In nations where the rule of law is unevenly applied, interpreting the people involved in its enforcement allows for contextualized understanding about why that unevenness occurs and is perpetuated. Joshua Barker’s State of Fear: Policing a Postcolonial City published by Duke University Press (2024) examines policing in Bandung, the capital city of the ...
Feb 16, 2025•57 min•Ep. 154
What is the connection between fan culture and feminism? In Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury, 2023), Briony Hannell, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester, explores the intersection of fandom, in a variety of forms, and feminist discourses on social media. Using an in-depth case study of Tumblr, the book charts the creation of a community of feminist fans, showing how the sense of being a feminist and belonging to a digital community are created and maint...
Feb 15, 2025•42 min•Ep. 512
The pernicious social impact of social media platforms is a matter of global concern, as this digital technology has become a breeding ground for the proliferation of various forms of online harassment and abuse.However, the majority of studies exploring this phenomenon have been conducted in Anglophone social contexts (particularly the US and UK). In light of this imbalance, in Hate speech and abusive behaviour on social media: A cross-cultural perspective (Vernon Press, 2024), Luiz Valério Tri...
Feb 15, 2025•49 min•Ep. 230
Cultural Narratives of Old Age in the Lives, Work, and Reception of Old Musicians (Routledge, 2024) discusses the creative work of old musicians—composers, performers, listeners, and scholars—and how those forms of music- making are received and understood. Joseph Straus argues that composing oldly, performing oldly, and listening oldly are distinctive and valuable ways of making music—a difference, not a deficit; to be celebrated, not ignored or condemned. This book follows Age Studies in seein...
Feb 15, 2025•44 min•Ep. 269
An ethnographic exploration of anthropological failures through the Mapuche archetypes of witch, clown, and usurper, Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) invites readers to consider concepts of failure, knowing, and being in the world within a rural Mapuche community. How do we learn what failure looks like? During the years anthropologist Magnus Course spent living with Indigenous Mapuche people in southern Chile, he came to understand failure - both h...
Feb 13, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 348
Dr. Seungsook Moon’s Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism was published by Columbia University Press in July 2024. She provides in-depth qualitative studies of three different types of organizations to show how civic organizations that emerged from the democratization movement with a conscious emphasis on social change have sought to address socioeconomic and political problems caused or aggravated by South Korea’s neoliberal transformation. Examining ho...
Feb 12, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 12
On the podcast today I am joined by Presidential Scholar and Professor Emerita of Anthropology at John Jay College, City University of New York, Alisse Waterston to talk about her award-winning book, My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of A Century (Routledge, 2024). The book was first published in the Innovative Ethnographies series by Routledge Books in 2014. Its acclaim has led to the Tenth Anniversary edition which has just come out in 2024. My Father’s Wars is a story abou...
Feb 11, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 347
Examining the social response to the mounting impacts of climate change, Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency (Routledge, 2024) illuminates what the pathways from emotions to social change look like--and how they work--so we can recognize and inform our collective attempts to avert further climate catastrophe. Debra J. Davidson engages with how our actions are governed by a complex of rules, norms, and predispositions, central among which operates ou...
Feb 11, 2025•32 min•Ep. 201
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, interview Gabriella Coleman, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, about her long career studying hacker cultures. Topics include how hacking has changed over time, the different colored “hats” used to describe different hacker ethoses, the aesthetic dimensions of hacking including how poorly written code leads to m...
Feb 10, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 90
What makes sounds “religious”? How are communities shaped by the things they hear, play, or listen to? This book foregrounds connections between sounds, bodies, and media in the private and public life of communities beyond the Global North, analyzing diverse configurations of the category of sound and various sonic ontologies to usher in a more inclusive global anthro-history of religious sounds. Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) implements a “sonic tur...
Feb 09, 2025•48 min•Ep. 12
Municipalities around the world have increasingly used inclusionary housing programs to address their housing shortages. Inclusionary Housing and Urban Inequality in London and New York City: Gentrification Through the Back Door (Routledge, 2024) problematizes those programs in London and New York City by offering an empirical, research-based perspective on the socio-spatial dimensions of inclusionary housing approaches in both cities. The aim of those programs is to produce affordable housing a...
Feb 07, 2025•55 min•Ep. 42
From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Zai Liang explores the recent history of Chinese immigration within the United States and the fundamental changes in spatial settlement that have relocated many low-skilled Chinese immigrants from New York City's Chinatown to new immigrant destinations. Using a mixed-method approach over a decade in Chinatown and six destination states, soc...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 34
Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship has overlooked the severity, persistence, and harmful consequences of the social-welfare crises affecting the region. Dr. Arvid J. Lukauskas and Dr. Yumiko Shimabukuro fill this gap and put a major asterisk on East Asia's economic record. Combining big-picture analysis, abundant data, a dynamic interdisciplinary framework, and powerful huma...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 554
Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenience, see ourselves reflected in them, and treat them as something entirely new. But when we overestimate the automation of these tools, award-winning au...
Jan 31, 2025•56 min•Ep. 402
In An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo (Duke UP, 2024), anthropologist and surgeon Rachel Marie Niehuus explores possibilities of healing and repair in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo against a backdrop of 250 years of Black displacement, enslavement, death, and chronic war. Niehuus argues that in a context in which violence characterizes everyday life, Congolese have developed innovative and imaginative ways to live amid and mend from repetit...
Jan 28, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 344
Accurate information is at the heart of democratic functioning. For decades, researchers interested in how information is disseminated have focused on mass media, but the reality is that many Americans today do not learn about politics from direct engagement with the news. Rather, about one-third of Americans learn chiefly from information shared by their peers in conversation or on social media. How does this socially transmitted information differ from that communicated by traditional media? W...
Jan 26, 2025•53 min•Ep. 20
Critical Approaches to Death, Dying and Bereavement (Routledge, 2025) by Professor Erica Borgstrom & Dr. Renske Visser is the first of its kind to examine key topics in death, dying, and bereavement through a critical lens, highlighting how the understanding and experience of death can vary considerably, based on social, cultural, historical, political, and medical contexts. It looks at the complex ways in which death and dying are managed, from the political level down to end- of- life care...
Jan 26, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 19
Philosophical Presentations of Raising Children: The Grammar of Upbringing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) uses contemporary film to articulate a philosophical account of raising children. It forms part of a revaluation of the parent as a pedagogical figure, which stands in contrast to the instrumental accounts dominant in contemporary ‘parenting’ culture. Hodgson and Ramaekers use film to offer an affirmative account of the experience of raising children, as a presentation of those inevitable aspect...
Jan 25, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 247
Sociologists have had surprisingly little to say about poetry as a topic while sometimes also making grandiose claims that sociology is/should be like poetry. These are the prompts which begin Andrew Smith’s Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures (2024, Palgrave Macmillan). Drawing upon discussions with working class readers of poetry, and interviews with unpublished poets, Smith draws our attention to the ways in which poetry has been enclosed, or fenced off, from working class reade...
Jan 24, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 402
How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making more broadly? Answer these questions by delving into the groundbreaking ethnographic fieldwork conducted by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in a martial law era Taiwanese village (1958-60), marking the first-ever study of ethnic Han children. Jing Xu skillfully reinterprets the Wolfs’ extensive fieldnotes, employing a unique blend of humanistic...
Jan 22, 2025•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 341
Can older racists change their tune, or will they haunt us further once they're gone? Rich in mystery and life's lessons, God's Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life's End (Rutgers University Press, 2024) considers what matters in the end for older white adults and the younger Black nurses who care for them. An innovation in creative nonfiction, Casey Golomski's story of his years of immersive research at a nursing home in South Africa, thirty years after the end of apartheid, is narrated as a ...
Jan 22, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 342
Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents a novel ethnographic examination of archaeological practice within postcolonial India, focusing on the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as a site where scientific knowledge production intersects with state bureaucracy. Through granular analysis of ASI's quotidian operations, this monograph demonstrates how archaeological micro-practices materially influence the construction of political and ...
Jan 21, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 251
Why are women's friendships so deep yet so fragile? Friendship coach and educator Danielle Bayard Jackson unpacks the latest research about women's cooperation and communication, while sharing practical strategies to preserve and strengthen these relationships. Fighting for Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women's Relationships (Hachette, 2024) is one part textbook, one part handbook. Readers will not only learn what the latest research has to say about the mech...
Jan 21, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 401
