New Books in Sociology

Kevin Vallier is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University. His most recent book is titled Trust in a Polarized Age. You can follow him on Twitter @kvallier. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

This episode looks at the main types and categories of nomads, how they live, and the similarities and differences between them. Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. All other sounds courtesy of the BBC Sound Effects Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Dr. Tim Hutchings is a sociologist of digital religion. His Ph.D. (Durham University, 2010) was an ethnographic study of five online Christian churches. Dr. Hutchings is interested in the relationship between religion, media and culture, with particular attention to digital forms of Christianity. His research has included studies of online worship; digital evangelism and formation; online community; digital publishing and e-reading; apps and games; and death and dying. His research led to the publication of his book Creating Church Online: Ritual, Community and New Media (Routledge, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Jason Josephson-Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science and Technology Studies at Williams College in Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2006 and has held visiting positions in the US, France, and Germany. He has three primary research foci: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Dr. Duane Bidwell works to reduce suffering and promote abundant life in all of his teaching, writing, and research. Experiences as chaplain, pastor, spiritual director, pastoral counselor, HIV/AIDS professional, and non-profit director inform his work as teacher-scholar-clinician. CST students have given him teaching and mentoring awards three times since 2014. He is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and practitioner of Vipassana (insight meditation) in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. His most recent book, When One Religion Isn’t Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People (Beacon, 2018), examines complex religious bonds–the experience of being formed by more than one religious tradition at the same time. The book builds on his work in transreligious pastoral theology and in Buddhist-Christian studies. Library Journal named it a Best Book 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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

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

Over three years have passed since a military coup of February 2021 in Myanmar precipitated a popular uprising that has since transformed into a revolutionary situation. While researchers and writers have cobbled together edited books trying to come to terms with all that has happened and how we might interpret it in relation to Myanmar’s recent past, Elliott Prasse Freeman’s Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar (Stanford University Press, 2023) is the first authoritative monographic study of the transitional 2010s and early revolutionary 2020s. Freeman spent the decade prior to the coup living and working with activists in Myanmar, and after it he did further digital ethnographic research and interviews. He combines a trove of data generated over these years with a sharp appreciation of social scientific theory to produce an account of the state in Myanmar as bluntly biopolitical. Mark Goodale writes in the book's foreword that Rights Refused is noteworthy for its stunning ambition, both intellectual and political; its synthesis of debates, theories and methodology from across a range of disciplines; and, its movements across multiple registers, scales and temporalities. That makes it both a demanding and rewarding book — and so too is this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies! Elliott manages the Burma Studies Group online, which features weekly updates of new publications on Burma aka Myanmar, like those forthcoming books he mentions at the end of this episode. Looking for things to read? Elliott recommends Elsa Dorlin's Self Defense, and Neferti Tadiar's Remaindered Life. Like this interview? You might also be interested in Gerard McCarthy’s Outsourcing the Polity; and, The Politics of Love in Myanmar by Lynette Chua. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico. An expert work of narrative nonfiction, Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence across the Border (University of California Press, 2024) provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking and urges us to understand the effects of lax US gun laws abroad. Jusionyte masterfully weaves together the gripping stories of people who live and work with guns north and south of the border: a Mexican businessman who smuggles guns for protection, a teenage girl turned trained assassin, two US federal agents trying to stop gun traffickers, and a journalist who risks his life to report on organized crime. Based on years of fieldwork, Exit Wounds expands current debates about guns in America, grappling with US complicity in violence on both sides of the border. Ieva Jusionyte is an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University. A former paramedic and Harvard Radcliffe and Fulbright fellow, she is the author of the award-winning Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

A hybrid lab functions in the space between institutions and infrastructure, creating new opportunities for understanding their interconnection. However, their legitimacy remains fuzzy without formal and methodological critique. The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (U of Minnesota Press, 2021) proposes the "extended lab model" to describe the relationship of various facets of a lab and uses a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies. This conversation covers the role of collection in academic labs, the influence of universities on labs and infrastructure negotiations, the acknowledgment of people and imaginaries in knowledge production, and transparency and accessibility.  Find the Open Access version of the book here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

How embedded are the dignity and personhood of the elderly in the collective memory of their nation? In Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood (Rutgers University Press, 2021) anthropologist Jessica C. Robbins-Panko dissects the Polish version of this story, in which the meanings and ideals both of “active aging” programs and of institutions devoted to medium- or long-term care have become caught up in the cultural, political, and economic changes that have occurred during the lifetimes of the oldest generations—most visibly, the transition from socialism to capitalism. Many older Poles come to live valued, meaningful lives in old age despite the threats to respect and dignity posed by illness and debility. Through intimate portrayals of a wide range of experiences of aging in Poland—from adult education to in-patient rehab to Alzheimer’s support centers—Robbins-Panko shows that everyday practices of remembering and relatedness shape how older Poles come to be seen by themselves and by others as living worthy, valued lives. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Why and how local coffee bars in Italy--those distinctively Italian social and cultural spaces--have been increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since the Great Recession of 2008? Italians regard espresso as a quintessentially Italian cultural product--so much so that Italy has applied to add Italian espresso to UNESCO's official list of intangible heritages of humanity. The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these local businesses throughout the country. And yet, despite its nationalist bona fides, espresso in Italy is increasingly prepared by Chinese baristas in Chinese-managed coffee bars. In Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy (Princeton UP, 2024), Grazia Ting Deng explores the paradox of "Chinese espresso"--the fact that this most distinctive Italian social and cultural tradition is being preserved by Chinese immigrants and their racially diverse clientele. Deng investigates the conditions, mechanisms, and implications of the rapid spread of Chinese-owned coffee bars in Italy since the Great Recession of 2008. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic research in Bologna, Deng describes an immigrant group that relies on reciprocal and flexible family labor to make coffee, deploying local knowledge gleaned from longtime residents who have come, sometimes resentfully, to regard this arrangement as a new normal. The existence of Chinese espresso represents new features of postmodern and postcolonial urban life in a pluralistic society where immigrants assume traditional roles even as they are regarded as racial others. The story of Chinese baristas and their patrons, Deng argues, transcends the dominant Eurocentric narrative of immigrant-host relations, complicating our understanding of cultural dynamics and racial formation within the shifting demographic realities of the Global North. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The neighborhoods we live in impact our lives in so many ways: they determine who we know, what resources and opportunities we have access to, the quality of schools our kids go to, our sense of security and belonging, and even how long we live. Yet too many of us live in neighborhoods plagued by rising crime, school violence, family disintegration, addiction, alienation, and despair. Even the wealthiest neighborhoods are not immune; while poverty exacerbates these challenges, they exist in zip codes rich and poor, rural and urban, and everything in between. In Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time (Little, Brown Spark, 2023), fragile states expert Seth D. Kaplan offers a bold new vision for addressing social decline in America, one zip code at a time. By revitalizing our local institutions—and the social ties that knit them together—we can all turn our neighborhoods into places where people and families can thrive. Readers will meet the innovative individuals and organizations pioneering new approaches to everything from youth mentoring to affordable housing: people like Dreama, a former lawyer whose organization works with local leaders and educators in rural Appalachia to equip young people with the social support they need to succeed in school; and Chris, whose Detroit-based non-profit turns vacant school buildings into community resource hubs. Along the way, Kaplan offers a set of practical lessons to inspire similar work, reminding us that when change is hyperlocal, everyone has the opportunity to contribute. Seth D. Kaplan, Ph.D. is a leading expert on fragile states. He is a Professorial Lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and consultant to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and OECD as well as developing country governments and NGOs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion: An Introduction to Theories and Method (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines the analytic tools of scholars in religious studies, as well as in related disciplines that have shaped the field including cultural approaches from anthropology, history, literature, and critical studies in race, sexuality, and gender. Each chapter is written by a leading scholar and includes: the biographical and historical context of each theorist; their approaches and key writings; analysis and evaluation of each theory; a list of key terms; and suggested further reading. M. Cooper Minister is Associate Professor of Religion at Shenandoah University, where they teach courses on death, medicine, sex, gender, and theories of religion. Sarah J. Bloesch is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her teaching and research interests focus on Christianity, race, and sexuality in the United States. 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

What does living “precariously” mean in Casablanca? In 2014 it meant being labeled tcharmil (seeming to endanger public order) and swept up by the police, if you were an unemployed young man sporting a banda haircut and gathering with your mates on a street corner. Cristiana Strava witnessed this and other neglected aspects of urban vulnerability while conducting extensive fieldwork in Hay Mohammedi, a renowned working-class neighborhood on the margins of modern Morocco’s economic mecca, Casablanca.  In Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco (Bloomsbury, 2021), Strava shares what she learned about how its residents create a sense of place and belonging, despite the manifold insecurities of living in a quarter that is losing both industries and social services. Focusing on the everyday lives and spaces of a mythicized community, and its interaction with heritage activists, international development agendas and technocratic planning regimes, Precarious Modernities documents how the depoliticization of the urban margins aids the consolidation of deeply unequal social, spatial, and economic orders. Cristiana Strava is University Lecturer at Leiden University. Her research focuses on urban spaces, economic inequality, and the politics of planning and development regimes. She has experience living and carrying out research in North and West Africa. From 2020-2025, she serves as a member of the Young Academy Leiden. 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

What does the Miss Tibet beauty pageant tell us about what it means to be Tibetan in a globalized world? And what understandings of Tibetan culture does it convey? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Pema Choedon about representations of Tibet and Tibetan culture on the global stage from the vantage point of the Miss Tibet beauty pageant. While such pageants are often thought of as an example of “low-brow culture” and a site of women’s objectification by the male gaze, Choedon shows how one can also see them as arenas where cultural meanings are produced, consumed, and rejected, and where local and global, and ethnic and national cultural forms are engaged and showcased. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. Pema Choedon holds a PhD degree from the University of Tartu in Estonia, with a thesis on the construction of Tibet in the diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Brynn Quick speaks with Dr Elizabeth Peterson about language ideologies and what we think when we hear different varieties of English. The conversation centers around Dr Peterson’s 2020 book Making Sense of 'Bad English': An Introduction to Language Attitudes and Ideologies (Routledge, 2019). The book discusses how the notions of “good” versus “bad” English came about, and some of the consequences of these views of language. The book is a must-use for teachers and professors who introduce their students to sociolinguistics as it contains discussion questions at the end of each chapter as well as recommendations for further reading. However, you don’t have to be a Linguistics student to enjoy this book. Making Sense of “Bad English” is for anyone who has ever wondered how it’s possible to have so many different varieties of one language, what the Standard Language Ideology has to do with Santa Clause, and why English spelling is so chaotic. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Bringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024) by Dr. Brooke Larson maps the moral dilemmas and political stakes involved in the protracted struggle over Indian literacy and schooling in the Bolivian Andes. Dr. Larson traces Bolivia’s major state efforts to educate its unruly Indigenous masses at key junctures in the twentieth century. While much scholarship has focused on “the Indian boarding school” and other Western schemes of racial assimilation, Dr. Larson interweaves state-centred and imperial episodes of Indigenous education reform with vivid ethnographies of Aymara peasant protagonists and their extraordinary pro-school initiatives. Exploring the field of vernacular literacy practices and peasant political activism, she examines the transformation of the rural “alphabet school” from an instrument of the civilising state into a tool of Aymara cultural power, collective representation, and rebel activism. From the metaphorical threshold of the rural school, Dr. Larson rethinks the politics of race and indigeneity, nation and empire, in postcolonial Bolivia and beyond. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, who eventually taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences. Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contribution to our social thought” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., this landmark in the field of social psychology is completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today. It delivers a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one. When it was first published in 1951. the New Yorker wrote, “Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, calling The True Believer the famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology