New Books in Sociology

The Political Economy of Oil in Venezuela: Class Conflict, the State, and the World Market (Brill, 2026) is the latest book from Dr. Kristin Ciupa, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Regina. Published with Brill, this book provides a detailed and engaging account of the historical development of Venezuela’s political economy and interrelated oil industry. The book takes us from Venezuela prior to the advent of oil discovery where the economy was dependent on a limited range of export-oriented agricultural crops, all the way up to the Bolivarian government project instituted by Hugo Chavez. Of course, Venezuela has been at the centre of political turmoil at present, and it is crucial to get a strong, historical understanding of Venezuela’s political economy, connected as it is with broader regional and global developments, to more concretely comprehend the current moment. Ciupa situates Venezuela within not only the broader ‘Pink Tide’ that swept different parts of Latin America since the1990s, but also within the dynamics and tendencies of oil extraction and class politics at a local and international scale. Much of the literature has seen Venezuela as trapped in the classic ‘resource curse’, where oil-exporting developing countries earn windfall revenues but have been unable to translate that to sustainable growth and development, which is usually deemed to be due to poor economic planning, weak institutions, and a lack of incentives for governments to invest. Ciupa’s book argues, instead, that the interplay between national and international structures and relations of power, in Venezuela and in the global market, serve to perpetuate oil dependence. In making this argument, Ciupa presents a detailed, historical analysis of the ways in which the country was subsumed into the global economy as an oil exporter, tracing Venezuela’s development and political economy through its prior dictatorships, the crises of the twentieth century, and then finally through the revolutionary Bolivarian government led by Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro. Kristin Ciupa’s new book is a detailed, theoretically invigorated, and careful examination of Venezuela and its oil industry, which is still at the centre of geopolitical struggles more broadly today. Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In recent decades, self-proclaimed “independent bookstores” have arisen across China. In the West, such retailers represent an alternative to corporations and chains. In China, by contrast, they differentiate themselves from not only the state-owned Xinhua Bookstore but also other privately owned shops through an emphasis on intellectual independence and the free exchange of ideas. Cultural Mavericks: The Business and Politics of Independent Bookselling in China (Columbia UP, 2026) by Dr. Zheng Liu takes readers inside the world of independent bookselling in China, showing how a wide range of figures navigate the challenges of book retailing in the digital age amid rapidly shifting social, political, and economic dynamics. Drawing on more than a decade of immersive research—including interviews, observations, and extensive documentary analysis—Dr. Liu unveils how these bookstores carve out a unique identity and market position. She develops the concept of “culturally adapted strategy” to explain how independent bookstores—as both dedicated cultural institutions and resilient business enterprises—balance economic imperatives with a deep commitment to intellectual autonomy. Dr. Liu challenges the tendency to understand nonstate cultural institutions in China in terms of resistance, arguing that independent bookstores engage with politics as a strategic means of differentiation from the competition. Richly detailed and compellingly written, Cultural Mavericks sheds new light on the interplay among culture, commerce, and politics in China, offering timely insights into the evolving dynamics of China’s book industry and wider cultural economy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Time spent and words spent—what does each signal? Deceptive mimicry—the manipulation of individual or group identity—includes passing off as a different individual, as a member of a group to which one does not belong, or, for a group, to ‘sign’ its action as another group. Mimicry exploits the reputation of the model it mimics to avoid capture (flight), to strike undetected at the enemy (fight), or to hide behind or besmirch the reputation of the model group (‘false-flag’ operations).  Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a theory and game-theoretic model of mimicry, an overview of its use through history, and a deep empirical exploration of its modern manifestations through several case studies by leading social scientists. The chapters cover mimicry in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict, terrorism campaigns in 1970s Italy, the height of the Iraq insurgency, the Rwandan genocide, the Naxalite rebellion in India, and jihadi discussion forums on the Internet. Thomas Hegghammer is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Most employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convictions—and thus denying opportunities to those who need them most. In The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America (Princeton UP, 2025), Melissa Burch sheds light on one of the most significant forces of social and economic marginalization of our time—discrimination on the basis of criminal records. Chronicling the daily interactions of hiring managers, workforce development professionals, and job-seekers with felony convictions in Southern California, Dr. Burch shows that this discrimination is not simply a matter of employer bias. Hiring is shaped by a set of institutions, organizations, and industries that promote the erroneous idea that people with criminal records are dangerous to employ. This “criminal record complex,” as Dr. Burch names it, encourages exclusion and undermines employers’ common-sense ways of assessing candidates. In vivid and intimate detail, Dr. Burch reveals both the futility and devastating human consequences of discriminatory policies.Dr. Burch places today’s routine practice of background screening within racialized notions of risk originating in early capitalist development, tracing how, over decades, criminal background checks became a convenient catch-all, leveraged by entities with a direct interest in growing the practice. Despite this reach, however, Dr. Burch discovers that small business owners tend to put less value on background checks, trusting their own judgment. Approaching the issue from both personal and policy perspectives, The Criminal Record Complex upends what we thought we knew about the causes of criminal record discrimination. It suggests that our best hope for creating safe workplaces lies not in the false promise of background screening, but in building the kinds of economies and communities that support true safety. Our guest is: Dr. Melissa Burch, who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and Director of the Afterlives of Conviction Project. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine Carceral Apartheid Freemans Challenge Hands Up Don't Shoot The Names of all the Flowers The Journal of Higher Education in Prison Black Boy Out of Time Secrets of the Killing State Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone (Bold Type Books, 2021), Sarah Jaffe argues that modern culture encourages workers to see their jobs as a “labor of love.” This idea tells people that passion and dedication should motivate them more than pay or working conditions. Jaffe shows that this belief often allows employers to justify low wages, long hours, and poor treatment. Through stories of workers across many fields, such as teachers, domestic workers, nonprofit employees, artists, athletes, and tech workers, the book demonstrates how devotion to work is used to normalize exploitation. Jaffe calls for a reevaluation of the relationship between work, identity, and personal fulfillment, suggesting that workers should organize collectively and demand fair compensation and conditions instead of relying on passion alone. Sarah Jaffe is a journalist and labor reporter who writes about work, inequality, and social movements. Her work has appeared in major publications such as The Nation, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Jaffe has long reported on labor struggles and worker organizing, including movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for $15 campaign. She is also the author of Necessary Trouble and most recently From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in A World on Fire. She is co-host of the labor podcast Belabored. Her writing focuses on how economic systems shape everyday life and workers’ experiences. My co-producer on this episode is Kelly Knight, a graduate student in the MA program in Communication at Oakland University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Ken Chitwood's Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam (University of Texas Press, 2025), uses rich ethnographic fieldwork across multiple cities and the digital space to capture the complex lived realities of Puerto Rican Muslims both on the island and in the United States. The study is attuned to the archipelago’s context that accents Puerto Rican Islam, such as through histories that link it to Andalusian Spain, and culture, especially through foodscapes. Puerto Rico also has a diverse Arab Muslim diasporic population, especially Palestinians. Due to this diversity of Muslim experiences, throughout the book there emerge conversations about the boundaries of Islam in relation to culture, ethnicity, and theology. At times, when these varied communities share ritual and communal space together, questions of authenticity unfold, such as over language or notions of piety. Despite moments of tension around tribalism and questions of legitimacy, we learn that often Islam for both these communities is understood through their experiences of colonialism, and so anti-colonial registers of Islam influence the solidarity building and social justice organizing that unites Puerto Rican and Palestinian Muslims. The book also has an accompanying Spotify playlist that you definitely should check out. This book will be of interest to anyone working on Islam in South America and/or North America, and Arab and Palestinian diasporic studies, and food studies. Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Irish Digital Cultures: Identity, Contexts, Space (Routledge, 2025) explores how questions of Ireland and Irishness are represented in online environments, and what these phenomena say about contemporary Irish identities both within the country and globally. It will interest Irish Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Race, Gender, Identity, and New Media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In today’s world, it is almost impossible to go through the day without interacting with a bank—whether through a salary payment, a debit card, a credit card, or a digital ID used to access public services online. Yet this intimate relationship between households and banks is relatively recent. In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Orsi Husz, Professor at Uppsala University, about her book Bankminded: Banks as Intimate Agents of Everyday Life in Welfare State Sweden. The book traces how, from the late 1950s onwards, banks gradually became embedded in the everyday routines of ordinary people. Through wage accounts, credit cards, financial advice, and identity documents, financial institutions reshaped how households handled money—and how they thought about finance itself. Drawing on rich archival research, Husz shows that this transformation was not simply a story of technology or markets. It involved cultural shifts around class, gender, morality, and identity, as well as the surprising role of the welfare state in expanding everyday banking. The result was what she calls the “bankification” of everyday life—a process that laid the groundwork for the financialised world we inhabit today. If you are interested in the history of banking, the culture of finance, or how modern financial habits emerged, this conversation offers a fascinating perspective on a transformation that most of us now take for granted. You can download the book for free (Open Access) here Listen to the episode to learn how banks became an intimate part of everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Gabrielle Oliveira, a Harvard Graduate School of Education scholar who studies family migration and schooling. She discusses immigrant families’ search for dignity through education. Short scenes cover parental sacrifice, classroom silence around migration, COVID’s disruption, and the push for child-centered education and policy changes.

What happens when theories of racial hierarchies interact with reality? How are they contested, refuted and changed in light of that encounter? What role do experts, most notably social scientists, play here? And, what can these historical encounters tell us about how we should think of race and migration today? These are the questions which animate Sunmin Kim’s The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate (U Chicago Press, 2026). Taking as his focus the Dillingham Commission, a US government investigation into migrant groups established in 1907, Kim shows how theories of racial essentialism, which increasing were moving across the, at the time blurry, boundary between biology and society were used and contested in a moment when prominent political figures were eager to separate out the valued, long-established migrants from Western and Central Europe from those coming from Eastern and Southern Europe who all, on the face of it, were ‘white’. In doing so ideas such as ethnicity and the possibility of assimilation come to be mobilised. In turn Japanese migrants on the Pacific coast were placed beyond the pale of this possibility of assimilation and continued to be excluded. As Kim shows, not only did the commission report introduce some new vocabulary for thinking of race, but also played a key role in the development of US immigration quotas and a form of racial liberalism. This perspective, while accepting the possibility of a diverse body politic, rested on an assumption of a ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ element, including the possibility that some of the latter simply could never be ‘American’. In our discussion we discuss the formation and activity of the Dillingham Commission. This includes discussing a number of key figures, such as Franz Boas who measures skulls for the commission and in so doing uses the same tools of the eugenicists and positivists to undercut their racist claims and Yamato Ichihashi who, while vociferously making the case that Japanese migrants such as himself are the ideal ‘Americans’ ends up being an example of the ‘insurmountable difference’ placed in front of such groups. We end by discussing how Zora Neale Hurston, once Boas’s student, provides a different way of conceiving of race and its place in immigration debates. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology