Tiffany D. Joseph, "Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

Are financial markets lawless and irrational? It may seem that way from the outside, but for market insiders there are multiples sets of rules that they break at their peril.  Official rules set by law or by the exchanges exist alongside unofficial rules, or floor rules. Between these, it is the floor rules -- the norms followed by other insiders -- that matter most. Breaking an official rule might lead to a fine or even jail. Breaking floor rules can lead to being ostracized from markets as well as social and financial ruin. In Floor Rules: Insider Culture in Financial Markets (Yale UP, 2024), Mark W. Geiger tells compelling stories of market disturbances in which insider rules played a key role. He examines the norms, customs, values, and operating modes of insiders at the center of financial markets that trade money, stocks, bonds, futures, and other financial derivatives. These core insiders are a relatively small group who govern the markets.  The book tells the riveting story of Benjamin Hutchinson, who made national news for his dramatic 1888 wheat market corner in Chicago, in which he outsmarted four powerful traders who had joined to force him out of the market, survived a life-threatening physical assault on the trading floor, and almost brought down the Chicago wheat market.  It also unpacks the LIBOR scandal of 2008 in which bankers in major international firms manipulated interbank loan rates to inflate their own profits at the expense of investors and at tremendous risk to the industry.  Geiger analyzes the cultural history of market trading, describes the role of insiders, and suggests where this peculiar, ingrown culture is heading in an era of technological change. The book releases on October 29, the 95th anniversary of the Black Tuesday crash of 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression.  Related resources: Mark Geiger's personal website and portfolio of generative AI artwork Author recommended reading: Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller Hosted by Meghan Cochran  NOTE: Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress should have been pronounced with a hard "g" as in kloo-ghee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

29 Okt 20241h 13min

Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights. Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disruptive of and conditioned by state censorship, technological affordances, and dominant social norms. Jia Tan is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

29 Okt 202454min

Poverty, Gender and Health in the Slums of Bangladesh: Children of Crows (Routledge, 2024) provides comprehensive ethnographic accounts that depict the daily life experiences and health hardships encountered by young women and their families living in the slums of Dhaka city and the injustices they face.  The analysis focuses on two specific historical eras: 2002-2003 and 2020-2022 and shows that despite recent improvements in employment opportunities and greater mobility for young women, their lives reflect ongoing challenges reminiscent of those faced two decades earlier. While national and global organizations acknowledge the nation's economic and social progress, those on the outskirts of society continue to grapple with enduring poverty. They are excluded from the advantages of economic growth, oppressed by unjust local, national, and global systems, discriminatory laws, and policies. Their struggles go unnoticed as they confront a slew of challenges, including slum evictions, enforced lockdowns, income losses, food insecurity, and ongoing crises related to health, injuries, fatalities, and exploitation and harassment by law enforcement and influential individuals within the slum and the city. After two decades, these obstacles persist, and life remains tenuous, with health severely compromised. This book will appeal to students, academics, and researchers in the fields of Public Health, Medical Anthropology, Gender Studies, Urban Studies, Development Studies, Social Sciences, as well as professionals engaged in urban health and poverty-related work. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

29 Okt 202453min

As the 2024 American presidential election approaches, it is common to hear scholars and journalists discuss the role of particular groups such as Latino men or suburban white women might play in a razor tight race. Less attention is paid to the nation’s youngest voters: Gen Z. Born between 1997 and 2012, these voters have experienced a decade of upheaval including, the murder of George Floyd, changing political norms with the election of Donald Trump, an insurrection after the election of Joe Biden, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Gen Z voters have lived under the constant threats of mass shootings and climate change. In response, these voters are mobilizing -- and left-leaning Zoomers, particularly women and LGBTQ people, have the potential to move U.S. politics to the left. Dr. Melissa Deckman uses original data – including nearly one hundred interviews with Gen Z activists and several national surveys – to highlight the increasing role of Zoomers. She argues that women and LGBTQ Zoomers are participating in politics at higher levels than their straight male peers, creating a historic "reverse gender gap." Dr. Deckman explores Gen Z’s activism using mixed methods data and compelling personal narratives of how Gen Z activists have mobilized to defend reproductive rights, prevent gun violence, stem climate change, and win political office. A deep dive into the politics of Gen Z, The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy (Columbia UP, 2024) sheds new light on how young voters view politics and why their commitment to progressive values may transform the country in the years ahead. Dr. Melissa Deckman is the CEO of PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute. She is a political scientist who studies the impact of gender, religion, and age on public opinion and political behavior. She was previously the Louis L. Goldstein Professor of Public Affairs at Washington College. Her previous books include the Tea Party Women: Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Leaders, and the Changing Face of the American Right (2016) which examines the role of women in conservative politics. Melissa mentions Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings, 2024) and the New Books Network’s Dan Hill interviewed with Richard Reeves about the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

28 Okt 20241h 3min

What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine's Remains: Empire’s Medicine and the Life Thereafter (U California Press, 2024) chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire. Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores questions of caste, religiosities, sacred infrastructures, and performance in the interstices of the colonial and postcolonial state, as well as mobilities and circulations across South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific interests, my disciplinary interests revolve around anthropology, literature, and public history, and the digital humanities. When not reading or writing in the university library, Rounak can be found running along Newark's hiking trails and petting the dogs he meets along the way. Link to twitter page Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

28 Okt 20241h 5min

In The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, 2024), Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential challenge to one of America's favorite pastimes: college football. Drawing on twenty-five in-depth interviews with former players from some of the country's most prominent college football teams, Kalman-Lamb and Silva explore how football is both predicated on a foundation of coercion and suffused with racialized harm and exploitation. Through the stories of those who lived it, the authors examine the ways in which college football must be understood as a site of harm, revealing how players are systematically denied the economic value they produce for universities and offered only a devalued education in return. By illuminating the plantation dynamics that make college football a particularly racialized form of exploitation, the book makes legible the forms of physical sacrifice that are required, the ultimate cost in health and well-being, and the coercion that drives players into the sport and compels them to endure such abusive conditions. Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won. His next book, a biography of Moses Malone will be published in 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

27 Okt 20241h 8min

Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing unease, as their honeybees weather the ground effects of climate change. Beekeeping in the End Times (Indiana UP, 2024) relates extreme weather events and quieter disasters that have been altering honey ecologies across Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2014. While world-wide endangerment of pollinators, and bees in particular, has been the subject of much global concern, effects of climate change on the indispensable honeybees, remain understudied. Drawing on a five-year long study, the book suggests that local apiarists' field observations resonate with many climate biologists' concerns and speculations about the future of plant-bee relations on the warming planet. Local practice also adds to the record complex and puzzling trends that make honey scarce in otherwise lush, biodiverse landscapes. To Bosnian Muslims, honeybees are more than pollinators. They are inspired beings whose honey is another form of divinely revelation. To appreciate the meaning of honeybees and to grasp the dire ecological catastrophe underway, Jašarević reads contemporary environmental writings and Sufi texts, she listens to the seasoned beekeepers and collects local wisdom tales. From start to finish, Jašarević pores over key Islamic texts, the Quran and the Hadith, and their popular retellings. The Islamic end-times lore, the book proposes, holds surprising lessons on how to live and strive in the 'not yet,' stalling the apocalypse. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, 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

26 Okt 20241h 1min

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Rizwan Ahmad, Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences at Qatar University in Doha. We discuss aspects of the Linguistic Landscape, focusing on Rizwan’s research into how Arabic is used on public signs and street names in Qatar, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. The conversation delves into the use of Arabic in both Arabic-speaking and non-Arabic-speaking contexts for different purposes. Rizwan explains how variations in grammar, font, and script combined with the distinct social contexts of different countries produces distinctive meanings in relation to culture and identity. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

26 Okt 202440min