Naomi R. Williams, "A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore (University of Washington Press, 2025), an ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Dr. Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates this as part of a larger shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled "Protestant" Buddhism. Further, in a context where the dead remain central to family life, forced exhumation tears the social fabric, turning ancestors into ghosts. Using death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, Dr. Toulson explores the scope of and resistance to state power over the dead, laying bare the legacies of colonialism and consequences of whirlwind capitalist development. In doing so, she offers a new anthropology of death, one both more personal and politicized. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

7 Sep 58min

Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths. Embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt and Beauvoir but exploring contemporary issues such as gender, climate change and machine warfare, Zabala’s book is an accessible and applicable text that simultaneously tries to destabilize us in our present complacency while grounding us in an urgent need to seek alternatives. Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of numerous books, including one previously discussed on this show, Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

4 Sep 53min

What causes suicide epidemics—and how can we prevent them? Many suicides are caused by biological mental illness, but sometimes the suicide rate of a particular group jumps—two-, three-, or even ten-fold—in a short time, behaving like an epidemic. Suicide epidemics unfold more slowly than microbial plagues like flu or malaria, but they happen far too quickly to result from genetic changes and affect far too many people to be explained away as spontaneous cases of brain injury. These epidemics have occurred in America’s rustbelt towns, Russia’s cities, and indigenous communities from the Arctic to the Pacific Islands. They tend not to be associated with wars, poverty, or environmental disasters but with a rupture in the social environment so profound that people come to question their most intimate attachments. The mental pain that drives suicide has been likened to the flipside of love, but if so, how does love suddenly disappear—or seem to—from the lives of thousands of people at once? In Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), public health researcher Dr. Helen C. Epstein sets out to find the answer. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

3 Sep 31min

Michel Foucault's thought, Maddalena Cerrato writes, may be understood as practical philosophy. In this perspective, political analysis, philosophy of history, epistemology, and ethics appear as necessarily cast together in a philosophical project that aims to rethink freedom and emancipation from domination of all kinds. The idea of practical philosophy accounts for Foucault's specific approach to the object, as well as to the task of philosophy, and it identifies the perspective that led him to consider the question of subjectivity as the guiding thread of his work. Overall, in Michel Foucault's Practical Philosophy: A Critique of Subjectivation Processes (SUNY Press, 2025) Cerrato shows the deep consistency underlying Foucault's reflection and the substantial coherence of his philosophical itinerary, setting aside all the conventional interpretations that pivot on the idea that his thought underwent a radical "turn" from the political engagement of the question of power toward an ethical retrieval of the question of subjectivity. Maddalena Cerrato is an assistant professor in the Department of International Affairs. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

2 Sep 54min

How does sociology help to explain modern life? In A Sociology of Awkwardness: On Social Interactions Going Wrong (Routledge, 2025)Pauwke Berkers, a full professor Sociology of Popular Music at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Yosha Wijngaarden, an assistant professor of Media and Creative Industries at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, examine how people interact in settings as diverse as work, everyday life, self-help and even contemporary dating. Alongside this rich empirical research, the book outlines a uniquely sociological approach to awkwardness, displacing the idea that it is a personal characteristic and showing how both the idea of awkwardness and people’s experiences around it are closely associated with social contexts and constructions. The book will be of interest to anyone who has ever felt awkward! It is available open access here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

30 Aug 33min

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Dr. Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday lives.Tackling the Everyday shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading "football family" narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Dr. Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America's favorite game. Our guest is: Dr. Tracie Canada, who is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose ethnographic research uses sport to theorize race, kinship and care, gender, and the performing body. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the founder and director of the HEARTS Lab, and is affiliated with the Duke Sports and Race Project. Her work has been featured in public venues and outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Guardian, and Scientific American. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She works as a dissertation and grad student coach, and as a developmental editor for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. She also writes the Academic Life newsletter, found at christinagessler.substack.com. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Shoutin In The Fire College Baseball in the Off-Season How We Talk About Gender History of College Radio Leading from the Margins Black and Queer On Campus 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 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

28 Aug 58min

Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that radical efforts to transform the social and geopolitical order trigger intense counterrevolutionary conflict, which initially threatens regime survival, but ultimately fosters the unity and state-building that supports authoritarianism. Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University. Lucan Way is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he co-directs the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine. The previous book by both authors is Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Sally Sharif is Simons Foundation Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her most recent paper is “Can the Rebel Body Function without its Visible Heads? The Role of Mid-Level Commanders in Peacebuilding.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

24 Aug 57min

In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi (Sam Houston State University) follows the Cold War-era journeys of South Asian international students from U.S. Information Service reading rooms in India and Pakistan, to the halls of the University of Houston, to the suburban subdivisions of Alief and Sugar Land. This student migration between 1960 and 1980 shows how public diplomacy programs overseas catalyzed the arrival of highly educated, middle-class Asians in the U.S. before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Drawing on archival documents, GIS data, and oral interviews, Quraishi investigates how Indian and Pakistani immigrants forged an “interethnic” identity in Houston and located themselves—both socially and geographically—in the midst of a booming yet segregated Sunbelt city. She conceptualizes their mobility as “brown flight,” a process that simultaneously strengthened ethnic bonds even as it reinforced racial and class barriers. By exploring the links between international and local scales, Redefining the Immigrant South will interest scholars from many fields, including Asian American history; histories of the U.S. South, immigration, and U.S. foreign relations; and sub/urban studies. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

20 Aug 1h 10min