Darryl Campbell, "Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software" (W. W. Norton, 2025)

Walls profoundly shape the spaces we live in and the places we move through, impinge on our everyday lives, and entangle power relations, identity, and hierarchies. Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls (Lexington Books, 2024) explores these effects in the context of Arviat, Nunavut. Lisa-Jo Van den Scott lays out the inherent social processes, arguing that walls, in addition to concealing colonial power relations, are boundary objects, cultural objects, and technological objects. Van den Scott's ethnography of Arviammiut's (people of Arviat's) contemporary lived experiences reveals the ways in which Arviammiut are living in a foreign space, how this impacts their experiences, and how they exercise agency in navigating and reinventing these spaces in resilient and heterogenous ways. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. 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 general area of study is at the intersection of built-environment, experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on the negotiation of identity and place for residents at the neighborhood level. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

11 Okt 202453min

Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar (Cambridge UP, 2024) looks at Old Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, as a parallel location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities. The first section studies the bazaar's spatiality - its location, relocation, and spatialization. Three actors play a major role in creating and organising this spatiality: the sellers, the buyers, and the civic authorities. The second section narrativizes the biographies of the booksellers of Daryaganj to offer a map of the hidden social and material networks that support the informal modes of bookselling. Amidst order and chaos, using their specialised knowledge, Daryaganj booksellers create distinctive mechanisms to serve the diverse reading public of Delhi. Using ethnography, oral interviews, and rhythmanalysis, this Element tells a story of urban aspirations, state-citizen relations, official and unofficial cultural economies, and imaginations of other viable worlds of being and believing. Dr Kanupriya Dhingra is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at the Jindal School of Languages and Literature, O.P. Jindal Global University (India). She researches the History of the Book and Print Cultures, focusing on Delhi (India), from an ethnographic perspective. She earned her doctorate under the Felix Scholarship Fund from SOAS, University of London in 2021, on her dissertation titled “Daryaganj’s Parallel Book History”, which became this Element. She has also published in journals such as The Caravan, Himal SouthAsian and Seminar Magazine. She is also deeply interested in Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu poetry, especially that of Amrita Pritam, and continues to research and translate it. Her creative writing and translations have appeared in Indian Literature (A Sahitya Akademi imprint), Scroll, Indian Writers Forum, Guftgu, Aainanagar, and Antiserious. Currently, she is working on translations of Krishna Sobti and Amrita Pritam.  SM Khalid is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, working comparatively on postcolonial satire in South Asia in Hindi, Urdu and English. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

11 Okt 202453min

In All the Rage: Power, Pain, Pleasure: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty 1860-1960 (Pegasus Book, 2024) richly detailed account, Virginia Nicholson provides a richly detailed account to take us to the Frontline of Beauty to reveal the power, the pain and the pleasure involved in adorning the female body. At the heart of this history is the female body. The century-span between the crinoline and the bikini witnessed more mutations in the ideal western woman's body shape than at any other period. Who determines which shape is currently 'all the rage'? Looking at how custom, colour, class and sex fit into the picture, this book also charts how the advances made by feminism collided with the changing shape of desirability. Here are the 'New Women' who discovered freedom by bobbing their hair; the boyish, athletic 'Health and Beauty' ladies in black knickers; and starlets in bohemian beachwear. Among the first to experience true women's liberation were the early adopters of trousers. Encompassing two world wars and a revolution in women's rights, All the Rage tells the story of western female beauty from 1860 to 1960, chronicling its codes, its contradictions, its lies, its highs - and its underlying power struggle. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

11 Okt 20241h 7min

What skills and strategies enable civil society to be effective under authoritarian rule? Dr. Runya Qiaoan, assistant professor and senior researcher at Palacky University in the Czech Republic, explores this question in her book Civil Society in China: How Society Speaks to the State (Routledge, 2021). The book highlights the ways NGOs and activists navigate the constraints of China's authoritarian system through both cooperation and subtle resistance. Qiaoan emphasizes the concept "cultural resonance", showing how civil society aligns its goals with culturally accepted values to subtly advocate for social change. The episode is hosted by Dr. Linas Didvalis, Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Vytautas Magnus University and its Centre for Asian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

11 Okt 202434min

In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians in the United States created the nation’s first embryo adoption program to “save” the thousands of frozen human embryos remaining from assisted reproduction procedures, which they contend are unborn children. While a small part of US fertility services, embryo adoption has played an outsized role in conservative politics, from high-profile battles over public investment in human embryonic stem cell research to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Based on six years of ethnographic research with embryo adoption staff and participants, Dr. Risa Cromer uncovers how embryo adoption advances ambitious political goals for expanding the influence of conservative Christian values and power. Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics (NYU Press, 2023) is the first book on embryo adoption tracing how this powerful social movement draws on white saviorist tropes in their aims to reconceive personhood, with drastic consequences for reproductive rights and justice. Documenting the practices, narratives, and beliefs that move embryos from freezers to uteruses, this book wields anthropological wariness as a tool for confronting the multiple tactics of the Christian Right. Timely and provocative, Conceiving Christian America presents a bold and nuanced examination of a family-making process focused on conceiving a Christian nation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

9 Okt 20241h 19min

We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of Terry vs. Ohio, the US Supreme Court case that dramatically expanded the scope under which agents of the state could stop people and search them. Taking advantage of a North Carolina law that required the collection of demographic data on those detained by the police during routine traffic stops, Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues analyzed twenty million such stops from 2002-2016. They present the results of this research in Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Join us as we speak with Baumgartner about what they found—and what we can do to reduce the most discriminatory features of the practice. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).   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 202434min

This episode focuses on a cluster of issues of longstanding significance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies – plantation agriculture, global commodity chains or supply chains, exploitation of labour and environmental degradation, and resistance. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Dr. Alyssa Paredes, an environmental and economic anthropologist who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Paredes received her PhD in Anthropology (with distinction) from Yale University in 2020. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Antipode, Ethnos, Gastronomica, and the Journal of Political Ecology. She is a contributor to the edited volume Multispecies Justice and the Feral Atlas website, and she is co-editor of Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food, forthcoming with the University of Hawai’i Press in April 2025. She is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Bananapocalypse: Plantation Capitalism from Philippine Mindanao, which traces the afterlives of externalities in the making and unmaking of an industrial agricultural crop, drawing on approaches from such fields as anthropology, science and technology studies, human geography, and critical food studies. 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 202444min

In the contemporary world, political violence has been an unavoidable issue for everyone. It is therefore essential to criticize political violence in a textured way. The Iraqi Ba’th state’s Anfāl operations (1987-1991) is one of the twentieth century’s ultimate acts of destruction of the possibility of being human. It remains the first and only crime of state in the Middle East to be tried under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, and the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code and to be recognized as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Baghdad between 2006 and 2007.  Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq (Rutgers UP, 2024) offers an unprecedented pathway to the study of political violence. It is a sweeping work of anthropological hospitality, returning to the Anfāl operations as the violence of political modernity only to turn to the human survivors’ hospitality and acts of translation - testimonial narratives, law, politics, archive, poetry, artworks, museums, memorials, symbolic cemeteries, and infinite pursuit of justice in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.  Being Human gathers together social sciences, humanities, and the arts to understand modernity's violence and its living on. Fazil Moradi is Visiting Associate Professor at Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg; Associate Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences; and Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, Graduate Center—City University of New York. Apart from Being Human, his recent publications include Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation (co-ed. by Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Ralph Buchenhorst, Routledge 2017); and ‘Tele-Evidence: On the Translatability of Modernity’s Violence’ (Special Issue, co-edited by Richard Rottenburg, Critical Studies 2019); and editor of ‘In Search of Decolonised Political Futures: Engaging Mahmood Mamdani’ s Neither Settler Nor Native’ (Special Issue in Anthropological Theory, 2023). Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, hope and time 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

6 Okt 20241h 22min