New Books in Sociology

Corey Brettschneider is Professor of Political Science at Brown University, and Visiting Professor of Law at Fordham University. His work is focused in democratic theory and constitutional law. His most recent book is titled The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

According to Dr. Justin O’Connor, culture is at the heart of what it means to be human. But twenty-five years ago, the British government rebranded art and culture as 'creative industries', valued for their economic contribution, and set out to launch the UK as the creative workshop of a globalised world. Where does that leave art and culture now? Facing exhausted workers and a lack of funding and vision, culture finds itself in the grip of accountancy firms, creativity gurus and Ted Talkers. At a time of sweeping geo-political turmoil, culture has been de-politicised, its radical energies reduced to factors of industrial production. Culture is Not an Industry: Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common (Manchester UP, 2024) is about what happens when an essential part of our democratic citizenship, fundamental to our human rights, is reduced to an industry. Culture is not an industry argues that art and culture need to renew their social contract and re-align with the radical agenda for a more equitable future. Bold and uncompromising, the book offers a powerful vision for change. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The Indian state of Kerala is one of the largest blocs of migrants in the oil economies of the Arab Gulf.  Looking closely at the cultural archives produced by and on the Gulf migrants in Malayalam -- the predominant language of Kerala -- The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford UP, 2024) takes stock of circular migration beyond its economics. It combines formal and thematic analyses of photographs, films, and literature with anthropological and historical details to offer a nuanced understanding of the construction of the Gulf and its translation to the cultural imaginary of Kerala. It explores the dissonance between the private and public discourses on the Gulf among migrants and non-migrants, and demonstrates the role of this disjuncture in the continued fascination for Gulf migrant lives. An enquiry into the various dimensions of the Gulf in Kerala, as an acknowledged means of living, as a rumour, an object of gossip, a public secret, or even a private thrill, this book debunks the idea of language as a common entity and studies the tentative borders built within. Finally, it explores the resources, possibilities, and perils of affiliative communities constructed along and across those borders. Dr. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is Associate Professor at Manipal Centre for Humanities, a constituent unit of Manipal Academy of Higher Education. His PhD was in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. He has numerous publications in academic and popular publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

What is a classic in historical writing? How do we explain the continued interest in certain historical texts, even when their accounts and interpretations of particular periods have been displaced or revised by newer generations of historians? How do these texts help to maintain the historiographical canon? Dr. Jaume Aurell's innovative study What Is a Classic in History?: The Making of a Historical Canon (Cambridge University Press, 2024) ranges from the heroic writings of ancient Greek historians such as Herodotus to the twentieth century microhistories of Carlo Ginzburg. The book explores how certain texts have been able to stand the test of time, gain their status as historiographical classics, and capture the imaginations of readers across generations. Investigating the processes of permanence and change in both historiography and history, Dr. Aurell further examines the creation of historical genres and canons. Taking influence from methodologies including sociology, literary criticism, theology, and postcolonial studies, What Is a Classic in History? encourages readers to re-evaluate their ideas of history and historiography alike. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public pledges to honor and achieve “diversity,” inequities persist through what Dr. Adia Harvey Wingfield calls the “gray areas:” the relationships, networks, and cultural dynamics integral to companies that are now more important than ever. The reality is that Black employees are less likely to be hired, stall out at middle levels, and rarely progress to senior leadership positions. Dr. Wingfield has spent a decade examining inequality in the workplace, interviewing over two hundred Black subjects across professions about their work lives. In Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It (Amistad Press, 2023), she introduces seven of them: Alex, a worker in the gig economy Max, an emergency medicine doctor; Constance, a chemical engineer; Brian, a filmmaker; Amalia, a journalist; Darren, a corporate vice president; and Kevin, who works for a nonprofit. In this accessible and important antiracist work, Dr. Wingfield chronicles their experiences and blends them with history and surprising data that starkly show how old models of work are outdated and detrimental. She demonstrates the scope and breadth of gray areas and offers key insights and suggestions for how they can be fixed, including shifting hiring practices to include Black workers; rethinking organizational cultures to centralize Black employees’ experience; and establishing pathways that move capable Black candidates into leadership roles. These reforms would create workplaces that reflect America’s increasingly diverse population—professionals whose needs organizations today are ill-prepared to meet. It’s time to prepare for a truly equitable, multiracial future and move our culture forward. To do so, we must address the gray areas in our workspaces today. This definitive work shows us how. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Is alcohol a universal feature of human society? Why is problematic in some countries and not others? How was alcohol helped build the modern state? These are just a few of the questions that sociologist John O'Brien addresses in States of Intoxication: The Place of Alcohol in Civilisation(Routledge, 2018). His book offers a broad and diverse perspective on alcohol use and suggests that booze has been an important element in developing communities and building up tax bases. In the era of "superpubs" and microbreweries, O'Brien lends insight into contemporary discussions around alcohol. Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Free time, one of life’s most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty minutes? Today, despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it. Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal (NYU Press, 2024) by Dr. Gary Cross offers a broad historical explanation of why our affluent society does not afford more time away from work and why that time is often unsatisfying. Dr. Cross explores the cultural, social, economic, and political history, especially of the past 250 years to understand the roots of our conceptions of free time and its use. By the end of the nineteenth century, a common expectation was that industrial innovations would lead to a progressive reduction of work time and a subsequent rise in free time devoted to self-development and social engagement. However, despite significant changes in the early twentieth century, both goals were frustrated, thus leading to the contemporary dilemma. Dr. Cross touches on leisure of all kinds, from peasant festivals and aristocratic pleasure gardens to amusement parks, movie theatres and organised sports to internet surfing, and even the use of alcohol and drugs. This wide-ranging cultural and social history explores the industrial-era origins of our modern obsession with work and productivity, but also the historical efforts to liberate time from work and cultivate free time for culture. Insightful and informative, this book is sure to help you make sense of your own relationship to free time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City (U Michigan Press, 2024), Philipp Demgenski examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao - an area in the city’s former colonial center - from a place of common homes occupied by the urban poor into a showcase of architectural heritage and site for tourism and consumption. The ethnography provides a nuanced account of the diverse experiences and views of a range of groups involved in shaping, and being shaped, by the urban renewal process - local residents, migrant workers, preservationists, planners, and government officials - foregrounding the voices and experiences of marginal groups, such as migrants in the city. Unpacking structural reasons for urban developmental impasses, it paints a nuanced local picture of urban governance and political practice in contemporary urban China. The book also weighs the positives and negatives of heritage preservation and scrutinizes the meanings and effects of “preservation” on diverse social actors. By zeroing in on the seemingly contradictory yet coexisting processes of urban stagnation and urban destruction, Seeking a Future for the Past reveals the multifaceted challenges that China faces in reforming its urbanization practices and, ultimately, in managing its urban future. Philipp Demgenski is Assistant Professor in Anthropology within the Department of Sociology at Zhejiang University, China, and a Senior Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany. His research interests include intangible cultural heritage, the politics of space and place, memory, and urban redevelopment. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

As the U.S. population ages and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increased. This book draws attention to the reserve of immigrant labour that is called on to meet this need.  Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Fumilayo Showers tells the little-known story of a group of English-speaking West African immigrants who have become central to the U.S. health and long-term care systems. With high human capital and middle-class pre-migration backgrounds, these immigrants - hailing from countries as diverse as Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, and Liberia - encounter blocked opportunities in the U.S. labour market. They then work in the United States, as home health aides, certified nursing assistants, qualified disability support professionals, and licensed practical and registered nurses. This book reveals the global, political, social, and economic factors that have facilitated the entry of West African women and men into the health care labour force (home and institutional care for older adults and individuals with physical and intellectual disabilities; and skilled nursing). It highlights these immigrants’ role as labour brokers who tap into their local ethnic and immigrant communities to channel co-ethnics to meet this labour demand. It illustrates how West African care workers understand their work across various occupational settings and segments in the healthcare industry. This book reveals the transformative processes migrants undergo as they become produced, repackaged, and deployed as health care workers after migration. Ultimately, this book tells the very real and human story of an immigrant group surmounting tremendous obstacles to carve out a labour market niche in health care, providing some of the most essential and intimate aspects of care labour to the most vulnerable members of society. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists (Bloomsbury, 2023) introduces students to the so-called classics of the field from the 19th and 20th centuries, whilst challenging readers to apply a critical lens. Instead of representing scholars and their works as virtually timeless, each contributor provides sufficient background on the classic work in question so that readers not only understand its novelty and place in its own time, but are able to arrive at a critical understanding of whether its approach to studying religion continues to be useful to them today. Scholars discussed include Muller, James, Freud and Eliade. This volume therefore offers a novel way into writing both a history and ethnography of the discipline, helping readers to see how it has changed and inviting them to consider what-if anything-endures and thereby unites these diverse authors into a common field. Richard Newton is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures (Equinox 2020) and serves as editor of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. Vaia Touna is Associate Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Fabrications of the Greek Past: Religion, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Identities (Brill 2017). This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Cambodia, the government and civil society organisations have paid significant attention to Gender-based Violence and Harassment, within both the domestic sphere and, increasingly, in the workplace context. A major driver behind this increased scrutiny of GBVH issues is the presence of international donors in Cambodia, and an expectation that international norms will be implemented in-country through policies and actions. Whilst greater attention of GBVH in Cambodia is both needed and welcome, there is also the question of how to address these issues effectively. Guests Professor Michele Ford and Vichhra Mouyly argue, to effectively eliminate GBVH from the workplace, we need to closely examine the way work is organised and controlled – to look at the day-to-day interactions on the production floor, and how the way in which work is managed contributes to the incidence of GBVH. They’re thinking about these issues in the context of Cambodia’s construction industry, and share their research on women’s experiences of GBVH in this sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Ahmed M. Abozaid’s Undesired Revolution: The Arab Uprising in Egypt--A Three Level Analysis (Brill, 2023) introduces new non-Western perspectives on the Arab Uprisings, decentering and decolonizing International Relations, and Middle Eastern Studies. Drawing on over ten years of fieldwork, ethnography, over 250 interviews, and empirical research, it is one of the first books to evaluate the position of International Relations theorists towards studying the Arab Uprisings. It relies on local IR scholarship from the region, which is rarely considered. It provides a critical account of why democratic revolutions have failed, how counterrevolutions and authoritarianism have fortified, and why revolutions will once again experience a resurgence in this part of the world. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and academic based in Egypt. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, and disability studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Arsalan Khan is an incisive ethnographic study of Pakistan’s Tablighi movement. This piety movement attracts Pakistani Muslim men across class, caste, and social contexts and as such Khan is particularly attuned and reflexive as he navigates the boundaries of this community.  Khan theorizes the various modalities of relationality that mark this movement from its sonic and ritual dimensions, especially as it relates to dawat or preaching, to its kinship and ethical ones. Dawat is an analytical tool to map some of the ways in which piety and morality are cultivated in public, private, and domestic spheres by the men of the Tablighi movement. In the end, Tablighi’s ethical worldviews unsettle liberal sensibilities and approaches to Islam (religion) and secularism (non-religion), modernity, sovereignty and much more. This book will be of interest to those think about South Asia, piety movements, anthropology of Islam, Islamic reformism, secularism, and politics and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lorenza B. Fontana is a pioneering work that explores a new wave of widely overlooked conflicts that have emerged across the Andean region, coinciding with the implementation of internationally acclaimed indigenous rights. Why are groups that have peacefully cohabited for decades suddenly engaging in hostile and, at times, violent behaviours? What is the link between these conflicts and changes in collective self-identification, claim-making, and rent-seeking dynamics? And how, in turn, are these changes driven by broader institutional, legal and policy reforms? By shifting the focus to the 'post-recognition,' this unique study sets the agenda for a new generation of research on the practical consequences of the employment of ethnic-based rights. To develop the core argument on the links between recognition reforms and 'recognition conflicts', Lorenza Fontana draws on extensive empirical material and case studies from three Andean countries – Bolivia, Colombia and Peru – which have been global forerunners in the implementation of recognition politics. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Bruce O'Neill's Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) gets to the bottom of the twenty-first-century city, literally. Underground moves beneath Romania’s capital, Bucharest, to examine how the demands of global accumulation have extended urban life not just upward into higher skylines, and outward to ever more distant peripheries, but also downward beneath city sidewalks. Underground details how developers and municipal officials have invested tremendous sums of money to gentrify and expand Bucharest’s constellation of subterranean Metro stations and pedestrian pathways, basements and cellars, bunkers and crypts to provide upwardly mobile residents with space to live, work, and play in an overcrowded and increasingly unaffordable city center. In this sense, the repurposed underground facilitates dreams of middle-class ascendancy.  This sense of optimism, the book shows, invariably gives way to ambivalence as the middle classes confront the indignities of being incorporated into the city from below. O’Neill argues that these loosely coordinated efforts have not only introduced novel forms of social fragmentation but also a new aesthetics of inequality that are fundamentally shaping where and how the middle classes fit in the city. Pushing urban studies beyond a cartographic perspective—with its horizontal focus upon centers and peripheries, walls and gates—O’Neill brings into focus the vertical dynamics of gentrification that place some “on the bottom” and others “on top” of the city. As cities around the world extend further downward in the name of development and sustainability, Underground makes clear that scholars and practitioners of the twenty-first-century city will need to become ever more attuned to the cultural politics of urban verticality, asking not just who is included in the city and who has been pressed outside of it, but also who is on top and who is placed on the bottom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology