Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

The Birthplace of Jesus Is in Palestine: A Memoir (Wipf and Stock, 2024) is a narrative of a Christian family in Bethlehem in the West Bank. Based on diary entries and interviews from 2000 to 2023, the Dutch author--an anthropologist and peace activist--chronicles the spontaneous reactions of his Palestinian children and wife navigating the challenges posed by curfews and checkpoints. Problems of Palestinian school life are shown from the perspective of teachers and students. Against the background of Israeli occupation and settlement building, the intricacies of Palestinian culture in its daily rhythms and domestic spaces come to life. Throughout the pages, the key Palestinian concept of sumud, or steadfastness, is explored. The memoir details acts of creative nonviolent resistance, individual protests, affirmations of cultural identity, and inspiring examples of Muslim-Christian community. The book also reveals unexpected connections between Palestinian culture in the Bethlehem area and broader Christian values and traditions. An afterword reflects upon implications of Israel's war in Gaza. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

23 Touko 1h 1min

Secularism and Islam in Bangladesh: 50 Years After Independence (Routledge, 2025) comprehensively analyses the syncretistic form of Bengali Islam and its relationship with secularism in Bangladesh from pre-British to contemporary times. It focuses on the importance of understanding the dynamics between religion and secularism within specific cultural contexts. Arguing that extremist interpretations of Islam, which aim to establish a theocratic state, have not been able to influence the pluralistic religious and cultural life of Bangladesh substantially, the book shows that religious and cultural pluralism will continue to thrive despite the apparent threat posed by increasing religiosity among Bangladeshi Muslims. This book is a timely and significant contribution to the discourse on secularism and Islam, with relevance beyond Bangladesh and the wider Islamic world. It will appeal to scholars and researchers working in the fields of South Asian Studies, Asian Religions, and the Sociology of Religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

22 Touko 37min

Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by what was known as the Radio Craze. Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home (Bodleian Library, 2025) expresses what the radio's arrival signified at a personal level. This narrative history recounts the perspective of listeners who adopted the then radical form of communication technology, invested in their first-ever gadgets, and tuned in by their firesides to outside voices, music, SOS calls, the Pips, news, sports, royalty, and innovative radiogenic comedy. Listen In also traces how radio affected family life by exploring whether it altered dynamics between children and adults, changed relationships between women and men, as well as affected class and a wider sense of nationhood. Packed with touching stories and anecdotes, Listen In comes at a timely moment when traditional linear radio is shifting, and the experience of how people consume audio is once again transforming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

19 Touko 50min

One small town, two "thousand-year floods" in the span of two years: how does a community become resilient in the face of the ever-increasing risks of climate change?Small towns across America and around the world face mounting challenges with flood risk, a result of not only climate change but also poorly adapted landscapes, sprawl, overdevelopment and poor planning. After the Floods: The Search for Resilience in Ellicott City (Oxford UP, 2024) is about Ellicott City, a small town in central Maryland that experienced two devastating flash floods just 22 months apart. Despite the town's many advantages—wealth, access to expertise, a mobilized community, and a stout identity steeped in 250 years of history—Ellicott City found itself mired in a deeply divisive argument over what to do in the aftermath. As a resident, Ken Conca bore firsthand witness to the conflict that took root when the flood waters receded.While this book is about one residential suburb, the dilemmas that it faces over how to adapt to climate change are coming soon to a small town near you. On one level a story about re-engineering a landscape, After the Floods ultimately grapples with uncertainty over local history, justice, democracy, and identity. What can we know about future risks to our communities? What is the meaning of place and history when preservation goals come into conflict with flood protection? What should we protect? Who gets to speak for the community? In Ellicott City's search for answers, we can find important lessons for other small communities that must begin preparing for future climate risks. This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

18 Touko 47min

What would a rodeo open to anyone and everyone look like? In their new book, Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo (U Washington, 2023), history professors Elyssa Ford (Northwest Missouri State) and Rebecca Scofield (University of Idaho) argue that the International Gay Rodeo Associaton (IGRA) provides a template. Founded in the 1970s as an alternative space that typically excluded LGBTQ+ individuals, gay rodeo has evolved into its present day form: a campy, raucous, and accepting spectacle of gay masculinity and gender play in all its forms. It's not a perfect space - there are still boundaries, binaries, and traditional barriers which constrain some aspects of gay rodeo as an open form of competition - but as the oral histories and deep archival research in this book show, it is an institution that has proven capable of weathering the storms of pandemics, politics, and internal debates. Slapping Leather tracks the development, growth, and dynamic present of this uniquely Western, and uniquely queer, artform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

17 Touko 1h 17min

A tech insider explains how capitalism and software development make for such a dangerous mix. Software was supposed to radically improve society. Outdated mechanical systems would be easily replaced; programs like PowerPoint would make information flow more freely; social media platforms like Facebook would bring people together; and generative AI would solve the world’s greatest ills. Yet in practice, few of the systems we looked to with such high hopes have lived up to their fundamental mandate. In fact, in too many cases they’ve made things worse, exposing us to immense risk at the societal and the individual levels. How did we get to this point? In Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software (W. W. Norton, 2025), Darryl Campbell shows that the problem is “managerial software”: programs created and overseen not by engineers but by professional managers with only the most superficial knowledge of technology itself. The managerial ethos dominates the modern tech industry, from its globe-spanning giants all the way down to its trendy startups. It demands that corporate leaders should be specialists in business rather than experts in their company’s field; that they manage their companies exclusively through the abstractions of finance; and that profit margins must take priority over developing a quality product that is safe for the consumer and beneficial for society. These corporations rush the development process and package cheap, unproven, potentially dangerous software inside sleek and shiny new devices. As Campbell demonstrates, the problem with software is distinct from that of other consumer products, because of how quickly it can scale to the dimensions of the world itself, and because its inner workings resist the efforts of many professional managers to understand it with their limited technical background. A former tech worker himself, Campbell shows how managerial software fails, and when it does what sorts of disastrous consequences ensue, from the Boeing 737 MAX crashes to a deadly self-driving car to PowerPoint propaganda, and beyond. Yet just because the tech industry is currently breaking its core promise does not mean the industry cannot change, or that the risks posed by managerial software should necessarily persist into the future. Campbell argues that the solution is tech workers with actual expertise establishing industry-wide principles of ethics and safety that corporations would be forced to follow. Fatal Abstraction is a stirring rebuke of the tech industry’s current managerial excesses, and also a hopeful glimpse of what a world shaped by good software can off. Alfred Marcus is Edson Spencer Professor at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

15 Touko 1h 6min

Since the late 1990s, the multiplex in India has emerged as a dominant site of media exhibition, almost always embedded within the shopping mall. This spatial pairing has transformed the experience of moviegoing, making it impossible to inhabit one space without also passing through the other. The rise of the mall-multiplex signals a broader shift in the spectatorial imagination: away from cinema halls built for the subaltern male viewer, toward environments curated for the aspiring, mobile, and consuming middle-class woman. Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025) tells the story of this infrastructural and cultural transformation as it unfolded across media industries, architectural design, urban planning, and popular cinema. Tracing the multiplex’s evolution in post-liberalization India, Tupur Chatterjee reveals how this new built form not only reconfigured cinematic space, but also reshaped the aesthetics, publics, and gendered politics of the contemporary Indian city. Rather than narrating a linear history of technological replacement, the book situates the multiplex within a longer genealogy of postcolonial urban design—one marked by caste- and class-based anxieties around visibility, safety, and leisure. It argues that the architectural mediation of cinema is central to how desire, modernity, and risk are organised in India’s media cities. Drawing on industrial and organisational ethnography, in-depth interviews, participant observation, discourse and textual analysis, and archival research, Projecting Desire maps the multiplex as a space where film, infrastructure, and aspiration intersect. In doing so, it offers a critical framework for understanding how gendered publics are produced through the infrastructures of cinematic experience in the Global South. Dr Tupur Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor in Global Film and Media in the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin. Her research spans global media industries, feminist media studies, urban spatial politics, and the material life of media technologies. Her work has been published in journals like Television and New Media, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, and Porn Studies among others.  Dr Priyam Sinha is a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award and is based at Humboldt University in Berlin. She earned her PhD from the National University of Singapore. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body. So far, her articles have been published in Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. More information on her research can be found on her website www.priyamsinha.com. She can also be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

14 Touko 40min

Can a student inherit time? What difference does time make to their educational journeys and outcomes? The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in China (SUNY Press, 2025) draws on nearly a decade of field research with more than one hundred youth in China to argue that intergenerational transfers of privilege or deprivation are manifested in and through time. Comparing experiences of rural-to-urban, cross-border, and transnational education, Cora Lingling Xu shows how inequalities in time inheritance help drive deeply unequal mobility. With its unique focus on time, nuanced comparative analysis, and sensitive ethnographic engagement, The Time Inheritors opens new avenues for understanding the social mechanisms shaping the future of China and the world. Dr Cora Lingling Xu (PhD Cambridge) is Associate Professor at Durham University, UK. Cora is a sociologist interested in education mobilities and social inequalities. Her research examines how the intersection of class, time, rural-urban divides, gender, ethnicity, and geopolitics can shape social agents’ educational and life trajectories. She is an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. Cora’s research on Chinese international students has been featured in BBC Radio 4's documentary 'Chinese on Campus', and on BBC News. Her email address is lingling.xu@durham.ac.uk. Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, development studies, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. 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

13 Touko 1h 6min