New Books in Sociology

Anthropologist Laurence Ralph discusses his book 'Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him,' exploring urban violence, justice systems, and personal grief. He shares insights on the impact of violence on marginalized youth, his experiences in anthropology, and the challenges of researching a victim's life post-tragedy. Ralph also talks about navigating the publishing world and his future projects focusing on black survival stories.

Journalist Kunal Purohit discusses Hindutva Pop culture, exploring its impact, symbolism, and creators. He uncovers how music, poetry, and social media drive this vast propaganda machine, normalizing bigotry and shaping political narratives. The podcast delves into the motives behind H-Pop's popularity, its influence on BJP, and the societal implications of this hidden world.

Rebecca Roache explores the power of swearing in communication, discussing its multivalent nature, taboo meanings, humor, and judgments. The podcast delves into the philosophy, parenting approaches, ethics, controversy of the word 'c*nt,' sanitization of swear words, bias, empowerment, bonding, and trust associated with swearing.

Adam Jaworski, a researcher in language and mobility, discusses 'linguascaping' - how languages stylize places. He focuses on privileged mobilities like European tourists in Africa and upmarket shopping malls. The podcast explores the intersection of language and inequality, showcasing the importance of understanding language in shaping social hierarchies.

Addressing practice-oriented questions, this handbook engages with both theoretical and political dimensions, unpacking the multidimensional nature of social movement research for new and established scholars alike and for movement-based as well as academic researchers across many disciplines. Divided into three thematic sections, this stimulating Handbook dives deep into discussions relating to the methodological challenges raised by researching social movements, the technical questions of how such research is conducted, and then to more practical considerations about the uses and applications of movement research. Expert contributors and established researchers utilise real-world examples to explore the methodological challenges from a range of perspectives including classical, engaged, feminist, Black, Indigenous and global Southern viewpoints. Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements (Edward Elgar, 2024) will not only appeal to experienced researchers, but also to activists who have started to think about researching their own movements and to politically engaged students. It speaks to new and established scholars in relevant disciplines such as sociology, political science, anthropology, geography, development studies, gender studies, and race and ethnic studies, and particularly those looking to better appreciate the different research methods for understanding social movements. You can download a copy of the Introduction for free HERE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Ethnographic research has long been cloaked in mystery around what fieldwork is really like for researchers, how they collect data, and how it is analyzed within the social sciences. Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing (U Minnesota Press, 2024), a unique compendium of actual fieldnotes from contemporary ethnographic researchers from various modalities and research traditions, unpacks how this research works, its challenges and its possibilities.In this volume, Denielle Elliott and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer pair fieldnotes based on observations, interviews, drawings, photographs, soundscapes, and other contemporary modes of recording research encounters with short, reflective essays, offering rich examples of how fieldnotes are composed and shaped by research experiences. These essays unlock the experience of conducting qualitative research in the social sciences, providing clear examples of the benefits and difficulties of ethnographic research and how it differs from other forms of writing such as reporting and travelogue. By granting access to these personal archives, Naked Fieldnotes unsettles taboos about the privacy of ethnographic writing and gives scholars a diverse, multimodal approach to conceptualizing and doing ethnographic fieldwork.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 about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Mumbai is generally recognized as an environment of extraordinary religious diversity. The city is known at one and the same time for a habitual cosmopolitanism and a series of violent religion-related conflicts and clashes. While there is much academic scholarship on various aspects of urban history and realities, Michael Stausberg's edited volume Religions, Mumbai Style: Events-Media-Spaces (Oxford UP, 2023) is the first international academic publication focusing on religion(s) in Mumbai. An extended introductory essay provides a scenario of the religious history of the city from the earliest colonial periods to the present; it also discusses such topics as public celebration and landmark religious places. By taking a thematic approach, the contributions highlight the dynamics of religious life in the city. Chapters discuss spatial settings such as so-called slums (Dharavi) and ghettos (Mumbra), but also roadside shrines and taxis. Other chapters focus on class and civil society organizations. Contributions discuss the crossing of religious boundaries, e.g., in dealing with intermarriage and conversion, and challenges faced by religious groups as to how to reconcile the religious diversity of the city with their own desire for recognition. Lines of tension and conflict often run within, and not so much between, communities.The two final chapters of the volume address the reflection of religion in fiction set in Mumbai and in the work of the Bombay poet Arun Kolatkar.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Screens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s surroundings, this unsettling prompts re.examination of how screen boundaries demarcate.Through readings of three media forms – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (University of Amsterdam Press, 2021) by Dr. Jenna Ng develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed. Interrogating contemporary contestations of reality against illusion, this open-access book argues that the disappearance of difference reflects shifted conditions of actuality and virtuality in understanding the human condition. These shifts further connect to the current state of politics by way of their distorted truth values, corrupted terms of information, and internalizations of difference.The Post.Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections thus thinks anew the image’s borders and delineations, evoking the screen boundary as an instrumentation of today’s intense virtualizations which do not tell the truth. In the process, a new imagination for images emerges for a gluttony of the virtual; for new conceptualizations of object and representation, materiality and energies, media and histories, real and unreal; for new understandings of appearances, dis-appearances, replacement and re.placement – the post-screen.This book is available open access here.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Amira Mittermaier, Associate Professor of Religion and Anthropology at the University of Toronto, discusses the Islamic economy of giving in Egypt, challenging dominant ideas of humanitarian charity. They explore the intersection of revolutionary politics and everyday acts of giving, competing visions of poverty and justice, the relationship between social and divine justice, and the disruptive nature of giving in the context of Egypt's neoliberal authoritarianism.

Richard Detweiler discusses his book on the benefits of liberal arts education, including interviews with over 1,000 college graduates. He explores the challenges of defining and gathering data on the liberal arts and highlights the importance of individual institutions in the context of liberal arts education. The podcast also covers the speaker's personal journey with a liberal arts education and their advocacy for technology adoption.