The Sociology of Everything Podcast

In this episode, Eric Hsu and Louis Everuss launch season 5 of their podcast by examining a trailblazing feminist text in classical sociology, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics. By centring gender in her social analysis, Gilman not only observes but critiques how women are forced to be economically dependent on men, on account of their largely being confined to the domestic sphere at least during the time of her writing. In the course of providing a condensed summary and appraisa...

In this episode, Eric Hsu and Louis Everuss introduce listeners to a noteworthy work in early classical sociology that often gets oversimplified for what it argues and observes about a key aspect of the process of modernisation. Georg Simmel’s noted essay on The Metropolis and Mental Life, originally published in 1903, provides varied insights about what effect living in an urban/metropolitan environment has on individuals and their psychologies, which includes the blasé attitude exhibited by...

In the second part of their series on Gaza, Genocide, and Social Theory, Eric Hsu and Louis Everuss welcome Ernesto Verdeja onto their podcast to talk around an article Ernesto has written in the Journal of Genocide Research, titled ‘The Gaza Genocide in Five Crises’. In this wide-ranging discussion, Ernesto makes some very powerful points about why it is meaningful and apt to categorise the recent major loss of life in Gaza as a genocide, while also unpacking what the broader ramifications o...

In this episode, Eric Hsu and Louis Everuss look to social theory to try to make better sense of the tremendous loss of life in Gaza since October 2023. They appeal to an article written by Bradley Campbell, titled ‘Genocide and Social Control’, which was published in 2009 in Sociological Theory. If indeed developments in Gaza constitute a genocide, as bodies like the International Association of Genocide Scholars have asserted, then Campbell’s account of genocide is useful because it s...

In this episode, Eric Hsu and Louis Everuss celebrate their podcast reaching a quarter million downloads by spotlighting a work that has significantly developed the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS): Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcman’s influential introductory chapter in their anthology on The Social Shaping of Technology, first published in 1985, and later updated in 1999. This text develops an oft cited critique of technological determinism, which posits that technology is an au...