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Conversations with top social scientists about their research and the social world. Produced by The Society Pages.
100 Episodes
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In this episode, guest host Amber Joy chats with Courtney Bell, a high school teacher in North Minneapolis who was a candidate for the 2018 Minnesota Teacher of the Year Award. In a recent article by the Star Tribune, Bell talks about her work teaching sociology to high school students in North Minneapolis. Bell discusses […]
In this episode, guest host Allison Nobles talks to Tulane professor Mimi Schippers about her book Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities. The book interrogates “compulsory monogamy”, or our cultural disposition towards being in a relationship with only one other person at a time. Schippers argues that this compulsory disposition towards monogamy limits […]
In this episode, guest hosts Amber Powell and Allison Nobles talk to Associate Professor of Sociology at Occidental College Lisa Wade about her book American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. The conversation focuses on interrogating what ‘hookup culture’ really is— and how college students make sense of themselves and their positions within […]
In this episode, guest host Caty Taborda-Whitt sits down with Trevor Hoppe to discuss his new book, Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness, which looks at the public health response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The conversation focuses on how this infectious disease became a target for criminalization through policies and laws that punished […]
In this episode, guest host Wahutu talks to Professor of Journalism at Columbia University Michael Schudson about his new book The News Media: What Everyone Needs to Know. The conversation focuses on the history of news as well as how the public makes sense of news today. Of particular interest is the legacy of the Watergate […]
Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper is a leading expert in the field of gender and family dynamics. Her latest book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, details her efforts to understand how families representing an array of social classes perceive and manage contemporary economic anxieties. She and guest-host Sarah Catherine Billups discuss the many ways that […]
Our guest today is Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, and the director of the Scholar Strategy Network, a network of professors that seeks to improve public policy and strengthen democracy by organizing scholars working in America’s colleges and universities, and connecting them and their research to […]
With the election of Donald Trump, much has been made about the construction of barriers to entry along the US border with Mexico. But while Trump has placed particular emphasis on the image of a wall designed to limit illegal movement across this border, thousands of workers travel lawfully from cities like Tijuana into the US — and […]
In this episode, guest host Neeraj Rajasekar talks to Harvard professor Natasha Warikoo about her book The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities. The book centers on conversations with white students and students of color at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford around their understandings of diversity and diversity programs. […]
In his new book, To Care for Creation: the Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement, Professor Stephen Ellingson explores new — and often localized — environmental activism among mainstream religious groups in the United States. Through interviews with over 60 organizations, he tells the story of how activists overcome the institutional, political, and cultural barriers that […]
Prior to the 1990s, the sociology of immigration focused mainly on just a handful of major cities where most new arrivals had settled throughout the 20th century. But more recently, immigrants have been moving to new destinations in the rural South and Midwest, drawing scholars like today’s guest, Vanesa Ribas, to closely monitor how race […]
In this episode, I talk to University of Minnesota Professor and Editor-In-Chief of TheSocietyPages Douglas Hartmann about his book Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy. This conversation focuses on a 1990s crime initiative, known as midnight basketball, which aimed to curb crime by setting up late night basketball leagues in inner cities. While […]
Across the country, sightings of people dressed as “creepy clowns” standing in forests, on roads, in doorways has exploded and captured part of the national imagination. A lot of people were unsure what to make of this odd development. Some call it a clown “invasion”, some call it a clown “uprising”, and some call it […]
In this episode, I talk to University of Toronto professor Jooyoung Lee, author of Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in South Central. This conversation focuses on the book as well as Professor Lee’s experiences writing the book. For some context, set in South Central Los Angeles, Professor Lee worked in and around Project Blowed, an open mic […]
Northwestern University professor Aldon Morris discusses W.E.B. Du Bois and the status of his work in the sociological canon. In this special hour-long episode, we explore the ongoing tension between social justice activism and the scientific features of contemporary sociology, especially as it is experienced by many black scholars today. Morris’ new book is called The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois […]
Office Hours is back for fall semester! We welcome new producer Matthew Aguilar-Champeau, whose soundscaping includes a musical refresh courtesy of The Custodian of Records. Hosts Sarah Catherine-Billups and Caty Taborda kick things off with Princeton professor Dalton Conley, author of Being Black, Living in the Red and the popular sociology textbook You May Ask Yourself. Their conversation pries into the sometimes controversial, but always […]
In this episode, host Jack Delehanty speaks with Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam, whose 2014 co-authored book Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America traces the roots of polarization in today’s politics back to the national struggle over civil rights in the 1960s. In their conversation, Jack and Doug focus particularly on tensions […]
New host Allison Nobles interviews Jane Ward, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California Riverside. Dr Ward’s most recent book, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, explores the relationship between whiteness, masculinity, and sexuality. She explains how sex between straight, white men actually reaffirms their straightness, rather than calling […]
While religious rhetoric pervades everyday American culture and politics, the population of Americans who identify with no organized religion has actually quadrupled in just the last 25 years. Worldwide, the non-religious now make up the third largest “religious” category, following Christianity and Islam. In this episode, guest host Jacqui Frost interviews Dr. Lois Lee, whose new […]
This week, David Naguib Pellow drops in for a chat about his latest book, Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement. In it, Dr Pellow explores how environmental and animal rights movements raise important questions about the criteria for membership in society. He explains how these questions inform crucial ethical debates […]
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