New Books in Sociology

Every year, millions of public school students are suspended. This overused punishment removes students from the classroom, but it does not improve their behavior. Instead, suspension disrupts their education, harming the students, their families, and their schools. Black students suffer most within this broken system, experiencing a far greater risk of school punishment and the significant harms that accompany it. Many activists and scholars have considered how school punishment increases racial inequity, but few have thought to ask why. Why do we punish students the way we do, and why have we allowed this harmful practice to impact the lives of our nation’s children? In Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice (NYU Press, 2025), Aaron Kupchik takes readers to the root of the issue. Suspensions were not intended as a behavior management tool. Instead, they were designed to remove unwanted students from the classroom. Through statistical analysis and in-depth case studies of schools in Massachusetts and Delaware, Kupchik reveals how suspension rates skyrocketed after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, serving as an unofficial means of removing Black children from newly desegregated schools. His groundbreaking research traces the legacy of these segregationist movements, demonstrating that school districts with more desegregation-related legal battles from the 1950s onward suspend more Black students today. Combining expert analysis with compelling, accessible prose, Kupchik makes a powerful case for the end of suspension and other exclusionary punishments. The result is a revelatory explanation of a pressing problem facing all children, parents, and educators today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

17 Apr 27min

In Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan (Hawaii 2024), Laura Miller examines the intersections of ludic capitalism with formal and informal religious practices and beliefs in contemporary Japan. Miller shows that women―often younger women―are the primary drivers of industries of religiously flavored entertainment that offer avenues of self-exploration and spiritual capital that are marketed to appeal first and foremost to women “hunters” engaged in supernatural play. Miller’s eclectically interdisciplinary analysis reveals the ways that supernatural play, incorporated into the fabric of everyday life in contemporary Japan, can contribute to social and personal wellbeing for these seekers. The book will appeal to readers interested in religion, material culture, media, gender, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

16 Apr 1h 4min

How do young people use digital platforms? In The Kids are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (U California Press, 2025), Ysabel Gerrard, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield explores the understandings and experience of young people as they navigate both the online and offline world. Drawing on a range of sociological, digital and creative methods, the book punctures many myths around young people’s digital lives, showing both the potential as well as the problems of contemporary online spaces. Framed through the idea of the paradoxes of social media for young people, the book’s analysis is insightful and engaging, as well as deeply theoretically informed. The book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary digital life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

15 Apr 38min

How do we acquire knowledge about societies? Does how we acquire social knowledge shape what we know? How conscious must we be of our own experiences as we do our research? What does feminism add to our methods and modes of research? Now in its second edition, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) by Drs. Crista Craven and Dána-Ain Davis answers these questions. The book is at once a how-to manual for doing feminist ethnography and a compendium of contributions from influential feminist ethnographers. Designed for students, scholars, community activists, and anyone interested in social knowledge, the book is multi-vocal and interdisciplinary and promotes critical methodologies as sites for reflection, collaboration, and creativity. It is a particularly important work for this moment in which anti-DEI efforts aim to minimize the work and perspectives of minoritized groups. Dr. Christa Craven (she/her/hers) is a Professor of Anthropology and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the College of Wooster, and co-founder of the Global Queer Studies minor. She has published four books, including Feminist Ethnography. Her 2019 monograph, Reproductive Losses: Challenges to LGBTQ Family-Making was awarded the Council on Anthropology & Reproduction’s Book Prize in 2021, and selected by Women.com as a book that puts “the long, complicated history of reproductive rights into sharp focus.” Dr. Dána-Ain Davis is Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College, City University of New York and on the faculty of the PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. Davis is the author, co-author, or co-editor of five books including Feminist Ethnography. NYU Press published Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth in 2019 and the book received the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology and The Senior Book Prize from the Association of Feminist Anthropology. Dr. Davis is also a doula. Mentioned in the Podcast: Feminist Activist Ethnography:Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America, edited by Christa Craven and Dána-Ain Davis Jafari S. Allen’s The Anthropology of ‘What is Utterly Precious: Black Feminists, Black Queer Habits of Mind, and the ‘Object’ of Ethnography,” in Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures, edited by Margot Weiss Wiki Education help for faculty. Sign up for their info sessions! College of Wooster’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies’s oral histories Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

14 Apr 54min

Today I’m speaking with Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023). A highly relevant book, Engage and Evade documents the interactions between undocumented people and the agents and institutions of government. One might expect undocumented people to avoid the IRS, but as Asad demonstrates, many engage with government institutions in the hopes that positive interactions and compliance might help their immigration cases down the road. Published in 2023, immigration policy and treatment of undocumented people by the government has shifted dramatically in a short time. I’m grateful today to be able to speak with Asad about this thoughtful book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

13 Apr 51min

Have you ever noticed that in areas of everyday life, rather than being addressed like a mature adult, you're increasingly treated like an irresponsible child in constant need of instruction and protection? Noticing society's creeping descent into infantilisation is one thing, however understanding the roots and causes of the phenomenon is not quite so easy. But in this topical and vitally important new work, cultural theorist and academic, Dr Keith Hayward, exposes the deep social, psychological and political dangers of a world characterised by denuded adult autonomy. But importantly Infantilised is no one-dimensional, unsympathetic critique. Brimming with anecdotes and examples that span everything from the normalisation of infantilism on reality TV to the rise of a new class of political 'infantocrat', Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (Constable & Robinson, 2025) also offers an insightful and at times humorous account of infantilism's seductive appeal, and details some suggestions for avoiding some of the pitfalls associated with our increasingly infantilised world. Keith Hayward is Professor of Criminology at Copenhagen University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

12 Apr 40min

Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.” James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis (Yale UP, 2024) that those historic sources of national solidarity have now largely dissolved. While a deepening political polarization is the most obvious sign of this, the true problem is not polarization per se but the absence of cultural resources to work through what divides us. The destructive logic that has filled the void only makes bridging our differences more challenging. In the end, all political regimes require some level of unity. If it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed by force. Can America’s political crisis be fixed? Can an Enlightenment-era institution—liberal democracy—survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment world? If, for some, salvaging the older sources of national solidarity is neither possible sociologically, nor desirable politically or ethically, what cultural resources will support liberal democracy in the future? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

11 Apr 37min

What does the history of Liverpool tell us about the future of Britain? In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain (Bloomsbury, 2025), Sam Wetherall, a Senior Lecturer in the History of Britain and the World at the University of York, tells the story of the city through the lens of ‘obsolesce’. This powerful framework structures a narrative that sees the story of Liverpool as both one of state ineffectiveness, indifference, and brutality, and one of solidarity and alternative forms of community and organising. The analysis is rich with details, ranging widely across the city’s rich social, cultural and economic story. Offering Liverpool as a blueprint for pessimism and optimism, the book is essential reading across the humanities, social scientists, and anyone interested in politics, culture and society today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

10 Apr 51min