New Books in Sociology

Samuel Kassow, historian of Eastern European Jewry and YIVO research historian, examines the real and imagined shtetl. He contrasts nostalgic portrayals with critical perspectives. He traces origins, social institutions, markets, and economic life. He explores modern changes: migration, politics, and cultural renewal in interwar towns.

A conversation about making higher education both rigorous and radically supportive of mental health. It spotlights ableism on campus, masking and late neurodivergent diagnoses, and rampant anxiety among students and faculty. Concrete classroom changes are described, like ditching punitive attendance rules, offering accessible design, easier accommodations, and funding neurodivergent-led initiatives.

Zalman Newfield, Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies who left Lubavitch Hasidism, tells a personal memoir of growing up in Crown Heights. He recounts messianic fervor, secret learning and worldwide outreach. He describes doubt, the symbolic act of shaving his beard, pursuing secular education, and building a life that bridges tradition and the wider world.

Jessica Martin, Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds and author of Feminisms and Domesticity in Times of Crisis, explores how postfeminist celebrities shaped domestic politics during covid and the cost-of-living crisis. She discusses nostalgia for domestic femininity, performative thrift, platforms like Mumsnet, and how activism gets reframed by media. The conversation flags limits and future research directions.

Michelle Jackson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Stanford and author of The Division of Rationalized Labor, studies how occupations changed over 150 years. She traces how science and probabilistic knowledge expanded tasks across medicine, policing, education, and manufacturing. She explores the paradox where task specialization and occupational boundaries diverge and reflects on complexity and possible roles for AI in work.

Dr. Eunji Kim, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia who studies media effects, explores how reality TV molds beliefs about success. She discusses news avoidance, how rags-to-riches shows promote meritocracy, links to lower support for redistribution, and surprising field experiments like hometown effects from American Idol.

Alexis Lerner, assistant professor and author of Post-Soviet Graffiti (based on a decade of regional ethnography). She traces how graffiti and street art bypass censorship, the politics of location and state-sponsored murals, and how artists navigate festivals, corporate work, and survival in authoritarian spaces. The conversation highlights fieldwork methods and a vast photo archive across the post-Soviet region.

Agustín Santella, sociologist and U. of Buenos Aires professor who researches Marxist theory and social movements. He discusses building a Marxist theory that links class antagonism to diverse protests. Short takes cover gaps in classical Marxism, the New Left shift, neoliberal individualization, and rethinking labor, reproduction, informal and care work.

Sourit Bhattacharya, a Lecturer in global anglophone literatures at the University of Edinburgh, studies colonial and postcolonial writings. He discusses a new decolonial method of close, comparative reading. Conversations cover migration, ecology, trauma, minorities and futurity across novels, poetry, film and graphic novels. The talk links classroom practice to social movements and publishing realities.

Peer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022). Schouten mapped more than 1000 roadblocks in both the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In so doing, he illuminates the relationship between road blocks and what he calls “frictions of terrain” (p 262). These frictions demonstrate how rebels, locals and state security forces interact in the making, or unmaking, of state authority and legitimacy. Looking at roadblocks as a kind of infrastructural empire that existed before the Europeans first arrived in Africa, Schouten develops a new framework to understand the ways in which supply chain capitalism thrives in places of non-conventional logistical capacity, to reframe how state theory fails to capture the nature of statehood and local authority in Central Africa. Schouten calls out governments, the UN and other international actors, to highlight how control of roadblocks translates into control over mineral, territory or people. No analysis of the drivers of conflict anywhere in the world is complete without consideration of Peer Schouten’s groundbreaking book, Roadblock Politics.At the end of the interview, Schouten recommends two books: Mintz’s (1986) Sweetness of Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and Labatut’s (2021) When We Cease to Understand the World. Thomson recommends the CBC podcast Nothing is Foreign.Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology