James K. Beggan, "How Our Love of Dogs Creates Social Conflict" (Lexington Books, 2022)

An accessible and engaging introductory text on homelessness and housing policy, this timely book uses a sociopolitical framework for understanding issues of homelessness in the United States. The authors, leading sociologists in their field, use data from over 250 interviews and field notes to demonstrate that homelessness is rooted in the structure of our society. They identify and describe the structural barriers faced by people who become homeless including the lack of affordable housing, the stigmatization and criminalization of homelessness, inadequate access to healthcare, employment that does not pay a living wage, and difficulty accessing social services. Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, most of the people included in this book believe strongly in the American Dream.  Stephanie Southworth and Sara Brallier's book Homelessness in the 21st Century: Living the Impossible American Dream (Routledge, 2023) examines how the belief in the American Dream affects people experiencing homelessness. It also highlights individuals' experiences within the social institutions of the economy, the criminal justice system, and the health care system. Furthermore, this book explores how stereotypes of people experiencing homelessness affects individuals and guides social policy. The authors examine policy changes at the local, state, and national levels that can be made to eradicate homelessness, but argue that there must be a political will to shift the narrative from blaming the victim to supporting the common good. Expertly combining history, theory and ethnography, this book is an invaluable resource for those with an interest in housing policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

8 Okt 20231h 6min

What can collaborative research with Colombian campesino leaders teach us about building peace? In this episode, I talk with Angie Lederach, author of Feel the Grass Grow: Ecologies of Slow Peace in Colombia (Stanford UP, 2023). Angie describes how a background in international peacebuilding led her to work with grassroots Colombian peacebuilders and how they co-constructed a research design drawing on the principles of Participatory Action Research. She explains how engaging in PAR affected her theoretical findings, as the concept of “slow peace” came out of social leaders’ frustrating engagements with a hurried state. Finally, she describes how both her ethnography and grassroots peacebuilding changed with the signing of a 2016 peace agreement, before sharing the ethnographic parable of the dying donkey. Alex Diamond is Assistant Professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

6 Okt 20231h 17min

In Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey (Duke UP, 2023), Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortunetelling cafés where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life. Criminalized by long-standing secularist laws and disdained by contemporary Islamist government, fortunetelling cafés proliferate in part because they offer shelter from the conservative secularist, Islamist, neoliberal, and gender pressures of the public sphere. Korkman shows how fortunetelling is a form of affective labor through which its participants build intimate feminized publics in which they share and address their hopes and fears. Korkman uses feeling—which is how her interlocutors describe the divination process—as an analytic to view the shifting landscape of gendered vulnerability in Turkey. In so doing, Korkman foregrounds “feeling” as a feminist lens to explore how those who are pushed to the margins feel their way through oppressive landscapes to create new futures. Zeynep K. Korkman is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

5 Okt 202345min

The year 1972 is often hailed as an inflection point in the evolution of women's rights. Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law that outlawed sex-based discrimination in education. Many Americans celebrate Title IX for having ushered in an era of expanded opportunity for women's athletics; yet fifty years after its passage, sex-based inequalities in college athletics remain the reality. James N. Druckman and Elizabeth A. Sharrow's book Equality Unfulfilled: How Title IX's Policy Design Undermines Change to College Sports (Cambridge UP, 2023) explains why.  The book identifies institutional roadblocks - including sex-based segregation, androcentric organizational cultures, and overbearing market incentives - that undermine efforts to achieve systemic change. Drawing on surveys with student-athletes, athletic administrators, college coaches, members of the public, and fans of college sports, it highlights how institutions shape attitudes toward gender equity policy. It offers novel lessons not only for those interested in college sports but for everyone seeking to understand the barriers that any marginalized group faces in their quest for equality. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

5 Okt 20231h 28min

In contemporary Japan, death isn’t what it used to be. Anne Allison’s Being Dead Otherwise (Duke UP, 2023) examines the changing realities of death as a personal and social phenomenon and an opportunity for business innovation and “self-death making.” Factors including the world’s oldest population, declining childbirth rates, and a growing number of single households mean that more Japanese are living and dying alone. Changed social and familial structures have upended some of the foundational bonds that previously defined what it meant to live, die, care for the dead, and be cared for in your own turn. Allison explores both the proliferation of new industries, services, initiatives, voluntary communities, and businesses that have popped up in response to these changes; and also the ways in which individuals faced with uncertainty about their own deaths have begun to create and plan new ways of dying for themselves. From the massive ENDEX mortuary services industry bonanza held annually in Japan’s largest exhibition venue to automated just-in-time columbaria with robotic priests on the one hand and from “ending notes”― antemortem expressions of postmortem wishes and goodbyes―to the crematorium and the bone crusher on the other, this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and ultimately affirming look at Japan’s shifting ecology of death and its radical future potential. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

4 Okt 20231h 11min

Acclaimed Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz presents a groundbreaking social history of the internet—revealing how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world, online and off. For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online.  In her debut book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 2023), she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism. By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century. Taylor Lorenz is a columnist at The Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Previously she was a technology reporter for the New York Times' business section and a technology reporter at the Atlantic and the Daily Beast. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where her research focused on Instagram and news consumption. She is a former affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and serves on the board of the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. And for the purposes of this conversation, I’ll note she has 344.7 thousand followers on Twitter or X or whatever that guy calls his website these days and some 500,000 followers on TikTok. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

3 Okt 202359min

In Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (Duke UP, 2023), Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Through ethnographic fieldwork with animal healers, animal activists, farmers, laborers, transporters, and animals themselves, and moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, Davé shows how human-animal relations often manifest through care and violence. More surprisingly, what Davé also finds animating interspecies relationality in India is an ethic of indifference---that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. For Davé, indifference is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Indifference, then, becomes the basis for an interspecies ethics and a method of care and practice in everyday life. With indifference, Davé describes both a mode of relationality in the world and a scholarly approach: seeking what is possible when we approach ethico-political concepts with indifference rather than commitment or antagonism. Moments of indifference, Davé contends, offer the promise of otherwise worlds. Shraddha Chatterjee is a postdoctoral Visiting Scholar at University of Houston, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

3 Okt 20231h 12min

In Life without God: An Outsider's Look at Atheism (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rik Peels explores atheism from a new perspective that aims to go beyond the highly polarized debate about arguments for and against God's existence. Since our beliefs about the most important things in life are not usually based on arguments, we should look beyond atheistic arguments and explore what truly motivates the atheist. Are there certain ideals or experiences that explain the turn to atheism? Could atheism be the default position for us, not requiring any arguments whatsoever? And what about the often-discussed arguments against belief in God-is there something that religious and nonreligious people alike can learn from them? This book explores how a novel understanding of atheism is possible - and how it effectively moves the God debate further. Believers and nonbelievers can learn much from Peels's assessment of arguments for and against atheism. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. His academic pursuits center on the fields of Anthropology and the Philosophy 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

2 Okt 202343min