New Books in Sociology

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

Olivier Esteves, an academic researcher on race and immigration, discusses his book about why many French Muslims choose to live abroad. He describes the study's methods and the scale of interviews and surveys. He highlights discrimination in hiring, school experiences, destinations like London or Montreal, and the mixed feelings of gratitude and bitterness toward France.

Rural students are unlikely to pursue degrees from private, selective schools. Why? And what happens to the handful of rural students who do attend elite colleges, colleges that may feel worlds away from home? Educated Out shows how geography shapes rural, first-generation students’ access to college, their college experiences, and their postgraduation plans and opportunities. These students discover that home and college are very different worlds—and, over time, they start to question both. As they near graduation and navigate a job market in which the highest-paying and most prestigious opportunities are located in urban centers, they begin to feel the complicated burden of their schooling: they’ve been “educated out.”  In addition to advocating for a higher education landscape that truly includes rural students, Dr. Tieken critiques a system that requires people to leave their rural homes in search of opportunities. Without meaningful change, some students will have to make the impossible decision to leave home—and far more will remain there, undereducated and overlooked. Both engaging and accessible, Educated Out presents important and timely questions about rurality, identity, education, and inequality. Our guest is: Dr. Mara Casey Tieken, who is associate professor of education at Bates College. She is the author of Educated Out; and Why Rural Schools Matter. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: The Cornell Sweatshirt Tweet Show Them You're Good Where Is Home The Two Keys To Student Retention The Good- Enough Life How to Get In to the College of Your Dreams Imposter Syndrome Who Needs College? How to College A Meaningful Life Try To Love The Questions Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. 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

Parents are exhausted. When did raising children become such all-consuming, never-ending, incredibly expensive, and emotionally absorbing effort? In this eye-opening book, Nina Bandelj explains how we got to this point--how we turned children into financial and emotional investments and child-rearing into laborious work. At the turn of the twentieth century, children went from being economically useful, often working to support families, to being seen by their parents as vulnerable and emotionally priceless. In the new millennium, however, parents have become overinvested in the emotional economy of parenting. Analyzing in-depth interviews with parents, national financial datasets, and decades of child-rearing books, Bandelj reveals how parents today spend, save, and even go into debt for the sake of children. They take on parenting as the hardest but most important job, and commit their entire selves to being a good parent. The economization and emotionalization of society work together to drive parental overinvestment, offering a dizzying array of products and platforms to turn children into human capital--from financial instruments to extracurricular programs to therapeutic parenting advice. And yet, Bandelj warns, the privatization of child-rearing and devotion of parents' monies, emotions, and souls ultimately hurt the well-being of children, parents, and society. Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting (Princeton UP, 2026) offers a compelling argument that we should reimagine children and what it means to raise them. Nina Bandelj is Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and past president of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Why Muslims in South India observe hierarchical intra-communal relationships despite the egalitarianism of their religionIn Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025), P. C. Saidalavi provides an ethnographic study of a Muslim barber community in South India, unraveling how these barbers negotiated concepts of hierarchy through Islamic values of piety, genealogy, morality, and wealth. Through this close-drawn study, Saidalavi argues that Muslim hierarchy exists and it works on its own terms. It both draws upon Islamic jurisprudential and moral discourses and is shaped by the larger economic, cultural, and political environment, including that of Hinduism. Yet ultimately, Muslim hierarchy is neither a replica nor a watered-down version of caste in Hinduism.Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy contends that the Islamization process in South Asia cannot be reduced to conceptual schemas or patterns dictating religious practice. Instead, this process works within a “lived tradition,” in which Muslims attempt to infuse and rationalize their practices using their interpretations of Islamic values, meanings, and purpose. In this case, barbers challenged other Muslims’ perception of them as hierarchically inferior by emphasizing their religious piety. Yet those same Muslims also drew on Islam to provide a rationale for categorizing barbers’ work as morally obligatory but undignified, thus rendering the barbers “lower.”P. C. Saidalavi is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR. Khadeeja Amenda is a doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Scotland is a nation that has undergone significant changes over the last 50 years or so. This is, of course, true of much of the Western world but, as David McCrone shows in his Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity (Edinburgh UP, 2025), these change have had particular impacts and been understood in particular ways in Scotland. Using a sociological approach in which politics, identity and culture need to be understood as impacted by broader process of social, structural change, McCrone discusses how following the fracturing of the ‘warfare/welfare nexus’ which, until the 1980s tied the nations of the United Kingdom together, Scotland is transformed. The country which in the postwar period had seen the most outward migration begins to welcome more people, the class structure changes after deindustrialisation, yet a strong sense of working-class identity remains, opportunities for women improve significantly, Scots increasingly come to think of themselves as Scots and ‘the referendum decade’ of 2011-2021 sees changes in political allegiance and formations. In our discussion David discusses what led him to a career producing the sociology of Scotland, how the country should be understood via its civil society, the importance of adopting a sociological approach to social change and what Émile Durkheim has to say about the number of Saltires flying from lampposts across the land. 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), 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

An ethnography of indigenous lives amidst subsistence labor, large-scale logging, and unrealized schemes, We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea (U Arizona Press, 2024) traces how hopes for development in New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, are cultivated, frustrated, and yet continually renewed. On New Hanover Island in Papua New Guinea, Lavongai communities have long pursued transformative development through logging and large-scale agroforestry projects, only to see forests disappear and livelihoods deteriorate. In We Stay the Same, Jason S. Roberts follows the various Lavongai encounters with multinational special agricultural and business leases that promised sustainable growth but instead deepened inequality and risk. Blending ethnographic and ecological research, Roberts traces how Lavongai people navigate subsistence, dispossession, and what he calls a “political ecology of hope,” showing how aspirations for a better life are continually cultivated, disappointed, and yet never fully abandoned. Jason S. Roberts is a practicing anthropologist who currently works on subsistence policy and natural resource management issues in Alaska. He completed his PhD at the University of Texas at San Antonio and previously served as a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Drew University. His work and research engages interests in development, sustainability, climate change, hope, and environmental justice. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

TCP’s inaugural episode features Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao, two scholars whose academic work and activism have helped to set the parameters of the contemporary debate on caste. In our conversation, we addressed the challenge of defining caste, their individual pathways into researching and writing on the caste question, and the virtues and limitations of comparing caste and race as two enduring forms of social stratification. We ended with a discussion of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the runaway bestseller that made caste and its relationship to race a topic of mainstream debate in the United States. Guests: Suraj Yengde: scholar, public intellectual, and anti-caste activist. Anupama Rao: Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University Mentioned in the episode: B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology IIMs: the Indian Institutes of Management Reserved candidates: beneficiaries of India’s system of affirmative action B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India” Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Anupama Rao, The Caste Question Suraj Yengde, Caste Matters Suraj Yengde, Caste: A Global Story Shaadi.com: an Indian matrimonial website Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra. Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement. Begumpura, or “city without sorrow” expresses the notion of a casteless, classless utopia and was first formulated by Sant Ravidas (c. 1450-1520). Dalit Panthers was a revolutionary, anti-caste organization founded in 1972. It was based in Maharashtra and drew inspiration from the American Black Panther Party. Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948) Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue Meet the Savarnas: 2025 book by Ravikant Kisana Ramesh Bairy, Being Brahmin, Being Modern Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste of Colony?” Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center and host of The Caste Pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico (U California Press, 2020), based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magaña considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, young people remake urban space and construct new identities in ways that directly challenge elite visions of their city and essentialist notions of what it means to be indigenous in the contemporary era. Cartographies of Youth Resistance is essential reading for students and scholars interested in youth politics and culture in Mexico, social movements, urban studies, and migration.Dr. Magaña is sociocultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Mexican American studies at the university of Arizona.Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In both the United States and France, each side of the legal battle over same-sex marriage and parenthood relied heavily on experts. Despite the similarity of issues, however, lawmakers in each country turned to different sets of authorities: from economists and psychoanalysts to priests and ordinary people. They even prized different types of expertise—empirical research in the United States versus abstract theory in France.Exploring the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States and France, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer sheds new light on the power of experts to influence high-stakes democratic debates. Drawing on extensive interviews and ethnographic observation, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer traces the divergences between the two countries, showing why some experts are ubiquitous in one but absent in the other. He argues that lawmakers, judges, lawyers, journalists, and activists covet something only experts can provide: the credibility and aura of authority, or “expert capital,” which they deploy to advance their agendas. Expert capital is not derived from scientific or technical merit alone but is produced through cultural norms, material resources, and social relationships, which vary greatly across national contexts.Through the story of the fight over gay rights, By the Power Vested in Me: How Experts Shape Same-Sex Marriage Debates (Columbia UP, 2025) reveals how and why certain experts—but not others—obtain the authority to shape public opinion and policy. At a time of soaring public distrust in experts, this book offers new ways to understand the contested political role of expertise and its consequences. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. 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 current research projects include the study of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, temporal urban environments in rural historical towns, student experiences of hanging out and being at home while at college and university, and a more recent study on the making of rodeo. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology