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New Books in Sociology
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
New Books in SociologyKatherine Eva Maich, "Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights" (Stanford UP, 2025)
The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable…
New Books in SociologyKevin Passmore, "The Maginot Line: A New History of the Fall of France" (Yale UP, 2025)
The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges…
New Books in SociologySimon James Copland, "The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online" (Polity, 2025)
Inspired by leaders such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, the online Manosphere has exploded in recent years. Dedicated to anti-feminism, these communities…
New Books in SociologyChelsi West Ohueri, "Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife (Cornell University Press, 2025) is the first book to interrogate race and racial…
New Books in SociologyAnna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe, "Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England" (Princeton UP, 2025)
What do children believe in? In Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England (Princeton UP, 2025) Anna Strhan, a Reader in the…
New Books in SociologyMay Friedman, "Fat Studies: The Basics" (Routledge, 2025)
Fat Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2025) introduces the reading of fat bodies and the ways that Fat Studies, as a field, has responded to waves of ideas about…
New Books in SociologyStephanie K. Kim, "Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul" (MIT Press, 2023)
Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul (MIT Press, 2023) challenges the popular image…
New Books in SociologyRuth E. Toulson, "Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore" (U Washington Press, 2024)
Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high…
New Books in SociologySantiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy of Warnings" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press…
New Books in SociologyHelen C. Epstein, "Why Live: An Anatomy of Suicide Epidemics" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025)
What causes suicide epidemics—and how can we prevent them? Many suicides are caused by biological mental illness, but sometimes the suicide rate of a…
New Books in SociologyMaddalena Cerrato, "Michel Foucault's Practical Philosophy: A Critique of Subjectivation Processes" (SUNY Press, 2025)
Michel Foucault's thought, Maddalena Cerrato writes, may be understood as practical philosophy. In this perspective, political analysis, philosophy of history…
New Books in SociologyPauwke Berkers and Yosha Wijngaarden, "A Sociology of Awkwardness: On Social Interactions Going Wrong" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)
How does sociology help to explain modern life? In A Sociology of Awkwardness: On Social Interactions Going Wrong (Routledge, 2025)Pauwke Berkers, a full…
New Books in SociologyTackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football
Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality…
New Books in SociologySteven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as…
New Books in SociologyBarbara Vinick and Shulamit Reinharz, "100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World" (Indiana UP, 2024)
100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World (Indiana UP, 2024), is the result of a collaboration between two sociologists, Professor Shulamit Reinharz and…
New Books in SociologyUzma Quraishi, "Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War" (UNC Press, 2020)
In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi (Sam…
New Books in SociologyErased Voices and Unspoken Heritage
In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Dr Zozan Balci about Zozan’s new book, Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage…
New Books in SociologyTodd Mcgowan, "Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Todd McGowan forges a new theory of capitalism as a system based on the production of more than what we need: pure excess. He argues that the promise of…
New Books in SociologyThomas Kemple, “Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Thomas Kemple‘s new book is an extraordinarily thoughtful invitation to approach Max Weber (1864-1920) as a performer, and to experience Weber’s work by…
New Books in SociologyEnrique Dussel, "The Theological Metaphors of Marx" (Duke UP, 2024)–A Conversation with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Eduardo Mendieta
The Theological Metaphors of Marx (Duke UP, 2024) by Enrique Dussel – A Conversation with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Eduardo Mendieta In The Theological…
New Books in SociologyKate Herrity, "Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown" (Bristol UP, 2024)
The soundscape of prison life is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and work with…
New Books in SociologyChristopher R. Matthews, "Doing Good Social Science: Lessons from Immersion, Understanding Social Life and Exploring the In-Between" (Routledge, 2025)
Doing Good Social Science: Lessons from Immersion, Understanding Social Life and Exploring the In-Between (Routledge, 2025) takes readers on a personal and…
New Books in SociologyPeter Hart-Brinson, "The Gay Marriage Generation: How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture" (NYU Press, 2018)
How and why did public opinions about gay marriage shift? In his new book, The Gay Marriage Generation: How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture…
New Books in SociologyDavid Theo Goldberg, "The War on Critical Race Theory: Or, The Remaking of Racism" (Polity Press, 2023)
The War on Critical Race Theory: Or, The Remaking of Racism (Polity Press, 2023) by David Theo Goldberg discusses how “Critical Race Theory” is consuming…
New Books in SociologyMatthew Facciani, "Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How It Spreads, and What to Do about It" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Why are people inclined to believe misinformation? Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How It Spreads, and What to Do about It (Columbia UP, 2025) is a…
New Books in SociologyEdward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia" (Yale UP, 2025)
The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity. Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American…
New Books in SociologyBryon L. Garner, "Black Veteranality: Military Service and the Illusion of Inclusive Patriotism" (Routledge, 2025)
Military service in the United States has long been associated with patriotism. But for Black veterans, this association with patriotism, love for country, is…
New Books in SociologyAlexandra Freidus, "Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City" (NYU Press, 2025)
Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City (NYU Press, 2025) argues that diversity and racial integration efforts are not…
New Books in SociologyMeredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film" (U Georgia Press, 2018)
If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example of how…
New Books in SociologyAyo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)
From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive…
New Books in SociologyNezar AlSayyad and Heba Safey Eldeen, "Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real" (American U in Cairo Press, 2022)
The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many people…
New Books in SociologyStuck at Home: Pandemic Immobilities in the Nation of Emigration
In this episode, we are joined by Dr Yasmin Ortiga, Associate Professor of Sociology at Singapore Management University, to speak to us about her latest book…
New Books in SociologyZack Cooper, "Tides of Fortune: The Rise and Decline of Great Militaries" (Yale UP, 2025)
An ambitious look at how the twentieth century's great powers devised their military strategies and what their implications mean for military competition…
New Books in Sociology"Age, Creativity and Culture: Reconsideration of how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation"
“Age, Creativity and Culture: Reconsidering how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation” by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera appeared in Nuevos…
New Books in SociologyAnand Pandian, "Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down" (Stanford UP, 2025)
In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump's harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States, the appeal of that politics of anger and fear. In the…
New Books in SociologyThe Social Impact of Automating Translation
In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Esther Monzó-Nebot, Associate Professor in Translation and Interpreting…
New Books in SociologyHannah Charnock, "Teenage intimacies: Young Women, Sex and Social Life in England, 1950-80" (Manchester UP, 2025)
Teenage Intimacies offers a new account of the ‘sexual revolution’ in mid-twentieth century England. Rather than focusing on ‘Swinging London’, the book…
New Books in SociologyY. Kokosalakis and F. J. Leira-Castiñeira, "Violence and Propaganda in European Civil Wars" (Routledge, 2025)
Violence and Propaganda in European Civil Wars explores the complex interplay between violence and propaganda during the continent's major civil conflicts in…
New Books in SociologyYuki Kato, "Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City" (NYU Press, 2025)
Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been a…
New Books in SociologyThomas M. Kemple, "Marx's Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
Marx’s Capital looms large today, a century and a half after first publication, a massive tome that attempts to document and map out the dynamics of a society…
New Books in SociologyChrista Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine…
New Books in SociologyJess Reia, "Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities" (Intellect, 2025)
What happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have been part of our cities…
New Books in SociologyShani Adia Evans, "We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast…
New Books in SociologyFrank Jacob, "Japanese War Crimes during World War II: Atrocity and the Psychology of Collective Violence" (Praeger, 2018)
When you mention Japanese War crimes in World War Two, you’ll often get different responses from different generations. The oldest among us will talk about the…
New Books in SociologyJoseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health…
New Books in SociologyMark R. Rank, "Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the…
New Books in SociologyTeo Ballvé, "The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia" (Cornell UP, 2020)
In The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia (Cornell UP, 2020), Teo Ballvé challenges the notion that in Urabá, Colombia, the cause of the…
New Books in SociologyJoseph O. Jewell, "White Man’s Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era" (UNC Press, 2023)
In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time…
New Books in SociologyRene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, Brian T. Nguyen eds., "Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics" (NYU Press, 2025)
In Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics, Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Brian T. Nguyen come together across disciplines to offer a kaleidoscopic…
New Books in SociologyDayna Bowen Matthew, "Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America" (NYU Press, 2022)
In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the…
New Books in SociologySabrina L. Hom, "Critical Mixed Race Philosophy: Rethinking Kinship and Identity" (Lexington Books, 2025)
What are dominant narratives of mixed race identity? What are those narratives doing, in everyday life and within philosophical discourse? How can attending to…
New Books in SociologyUnveiling Entrepreneurial Identities: Perspectives from Women Entrepreneurs in the Global South, (JESB, 2025)
"Unveiling Entrepreneurial Identities: Perspectives from Women Entrepreneurs in the Global South" by Manesha Peiris explores the lived experiences of 44 women…
New Books in SociologyAditi Sahasrabuddhe, "Bankers' Trust: How Social Relations Avert Global Financial Collapse" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Central bank cooperation during global financial crises has been anything but consistent. While some crises are arrested with extensive cooperation, others are…
New Books in SociologyLaurie Denyer Willis, "Go with God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil" (U California Press, 2023)
Through deep attention to sense and feeling, Go with God grapples with the centrality of Evangelical faith in Rio de Janeiro's subúrbios, the city's expansive…
New Books in SociologyTom Waidzunas et al., "Out Doing Science: LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times" (UMass Press, 2025)
Over the past 50 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer professionals have organized to achieve greater inclusion into the fields of science…
New Books in SociologyEdward Tenner, "Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences" (APS Press, 2025)
How did the addition of lifeboats after the Titanic shipwreck contribute to another tragedy in Chicago harbor three years later? How efficient are wild animals…
New Books in SociologyMatthew Hongoltz-Hetling, "The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science" (PublicAffairs, 2025)
In this episode, New Books Network host Nina Bo Wagner talks to Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling about his recently published book The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters…
New Books in SociologyMyles Lennon, "Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2025)
In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both…
New Books in SociologyGreetings from Asbury Park, NJ
Bruce Springsteen was keenly aware and excited by the sounds of the CBGBs scene during the Seventies. With his own bands, the Boss performed in the same venues…
New Books in SociologyJoseph Darda, "Gift and Grit: Race, Sports, and the Construction of Social Debt" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
In 1998, Bill Clinton hosted a town hall on race and sports. 'If you've got a special gift,' the president said of athletes, 'you owe more back.' Gift and Grit…