Yingyi Ma, "Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education" (Columbia UP, 2020)
In Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education (Columbia UP, 2020), sociologist Yingyi Ma offers a multifaceted analysis of a new wave of inte...
15 Apr 55min
Larry M. Bartels and Katherine J. Cramer, "The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Few time periods have been as defined by waves of monumental social change as the United States during the 1960s. Even today, almost sixty years later, the era is often depicted as a triumph of social...
15 Apr 48min
Beans Velocci, "Sex Isn't Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary" (Duke UP, 2026)
In Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary (Duke UP, 2026), Beans Velocci traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define sex and to create a world devoid of trans life. D...
11 Apr 1h 21min
Cedric de Leon, "Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity" (U California Press, 2025)
Our guest today is Cedric de Leon, author of Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity (U California Press, 2025). In this book, de Leon explores the complex and of...
9 Apr 46min
Melissa Butcher, "The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future" (Manchester UP, 2026)
As Melissa Butcher puts it in her book The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future (Manchester UP, 2026) when asked to rank the importance of freedom to them most Americans would put it ...
7 Apr 1h 14min
Ho-fung Hung, "The China Question: Eight Centuries of Fantasy and Fear" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
"The contempt and naive idealization of China are two sides of the same coin. The latter cannot be an antidote to the former." So argues Ho-Fung Hung in the conclusion of The China Question: Eight Ce...
6 Apr 1h 12min
Alex Diamond, "Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
The Colombian village of Briceño might, at first glimpse, look like many communities in the rural Global South. Many of the people living there rely on small-scale farming, even as a newly constructed...
6 Apr 1h 4min
Kristina Jonutytė, "Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia" (Cornell UP, 2026)
Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia (Cornell UP, 2026) by Dr. Kristina Jonutytė is an ethnography of contemporary urban Buddhis...
1 Apr 1h 2min
