New Books in Sociology

Can the kindness of strangers help with the loneliness crisis? Whether you are a student, staff, or have gone alt-ac, you’ve likely had to move at least once recently for your education and career goals. It can get lonely when family and friends are far away or they just don’t understand what you are doing with your life, and you are left wondering who you can talk to, who has your back, and who will be your people. In this episode, a podcaster and a psychotherapist sit down to talk about how their respective jobs regularly place them in conversations with strangers, and the unexpectedly good things that have come of that. As Christina Gessler and Charlotte Fox Weber consider reports of a global loneliness crisis, they offer up the idea that perhaps one of the answers to dealing with loneliness is not in cultivating or stressing big relationships, but in recognizing the value of all of the smaller roles played by the people you encounter, and in re-valuing daily interactions.Along with consideration for caring for mental wellbeing, having boundaries, making a safety-plan or setting up guardrails, and having realistic expectations for the roles people can fill in our lives, this episode reflects on how we can value the cumulative effect of all the smaller conversations that make up a life, and on the surprising kindness and wisdom that might be offered by strangers.Our guest is: Charlotte Fox Weber, who is a psychotherapist and writer. She cofounded Examined Life and was the founding head of The School of Life Psychotherapy. She grew up in Connecticut and Paris and now lives in London with her family. She is the author of Tell Me What You Want. Find out more at CharlotteFoxWeber.com.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.Listeners may also be interested in: An Academic Life conversation on the good-enough life An Academic Life conversation on making a meaningful life An Academic Life conversation on community-building An Academic Life conversation about handling difficult conversations An Academic Life conversation about figuring out what you really want Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 175+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania (University of California Press, 2020) is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development support. Growing administrative pressures to document good care serve to preclude good care in practice while placing frontline healthcare workers in moral and ethical peril. Maternal health emergencies expose the precarity of hospital social relations and accountability systems, which, together, continue to lead to the deaths of pregnant women.Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. Twitter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Elise Hu, a journalist and former correspondent in South Korea, discusses her book "Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital" in this podcast. The podcast covers topics such as the rise of South Korea's cosmetics industry, the influence of K-pop in the culture of lookism, the growth of cosmetic surgery in South Korea, and the globalization and soft power of South Korea's beauty industry. Hu also shares insights on skincare routines and upcoming movie projects.

Drawing across Games Studies, Childhood Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies, Emma Reay's book The Child in Videogames: From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) redirects critical conversations away from questions of whether videogames are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for child-players and towards questions of how videogames produce childhood as a set of social roles and rules in contemporary Western contexts. It does so by cataloguing and critiquing representations of childhood across a corpus of over 500 contemporary videogames. While child-players are frequently the topic of academic debate – particularly within the fields of psychology, behavioural science, and education research - child-characters in videogames are all but invisible. This book's aim is to make these child-characters not only visible, but legible, and to demonstrate that coded kids in virtual worlds can shed light on how and why the boundaries between adults and children are shifting.Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

A decade-long study of young adulthood in Malawi demonstrates the impact of widespread HIV status uncertainty, laying bare the sociological implications of what is not known. An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi (U Chicago Press, 2023) advances a new framework for studying social life by emphasizing something social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures–what people know they don’t know. Taking Malawi’s ongoing AIDS epidemic as an entry point, Jenny Trinitapoli shows that despite admirable declines in new HIV infections and AIDS-related mortality, an epidemic of uncertainty persists; at any given point in time, fully half of Malawian young adults don’t know their HIV status. Reckoning with the impact of this uncertainty within the bustling trading town of Balaka, Trinitapoli argues that HIV-related uncertainty is measurable, pervasive, and impervious to biomedical solutions, with consequences that expand into multiple domains of life, including relationship stability, fertility, and health. Throughout a groundbreaking decade-long longitudinal study, rich survey data and poignant ethnographic vignettes vividly depict how individual lives and population patterns unfold against the backdrop of an ever-evolving epidemic. Even as HIV is transformed from a progressive, fatal disease to a chronic and manageable condition, the accompanying epidemic of uncertainty remains fundamental to understanding social life in this part of the world. Insisting that known unknowns can and should be integrated into social-scientific models of human behaviour, An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi treats uncertainty as an enduring aspect, a central feature, and a powerful force in everyday life.Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Body art, especially tattoos and piercings, has enjoyed an explosion of interest in recent years. However, the response of many health professionals and researchers to this phenomenon is often negative, as body art continues to be associated with issues ranging from ill mental health to offending behaviors.Arguing for a reappraisal of the diverse range of practices that fall under this heading, Brian Brown and Virginia (Ginger) Kuulei Berndt reconsider body art as an underappreciated yet accessible source for mental and physical wellbeing. How, they ask, does body art open up new sources of community, sociality, and aesthetics? How is it used for the reclamation of one’s body, as a marker of success or accomplishment, or for building friendships? How does participation in these practices impact the health and wellbeing of body artists themselves?Providing a radical rethink that integrates tattoos and other body modifications within health, wellbeing, and positive psychology, Body Art (Emerald Publishing, 2023) disrupts the narrative of stigmatisation that so often surrounds these practices to welcome a broader discussion of the benefits they can offer.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

June Hee Kwon, author of 'Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers', discusses the migration of Korean Chinese workers to South Korea. The podcast explores topics such as the motivations and challenges faced by migrants, dual identity and gender dynamics of Korean Chinese women, the historical overview and identity formation of Korean Chinese workers, the complexities of belonging, and the social history of tangent interest and the migration of things.

Laila Shereen Sakr's book Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford UP, 2023) explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements.Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice in form, method, and content, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance. She employs data analytics to analyze tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media, and performs the results under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. Playing with multiple voices that span across the virtual and the real, Sakr argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and embodied: both bodies and data are physically, socially, and energetically actual. Are we cyborgs or citizens—or both? This book teaches us how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems: the records they keep, the lives they impact, and how to create change from within.Laila Shereen Sakr is Assistant Professor of Media Theory and Practice at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India (Cambridge UP, 2023) examines the role of migration as a livelihood strategy in influencing food access among rural households. Migration forms a key component of livelihoods for an increasing number of rural households in many developing countries. Importantly, there is now a growing consensus among academics and policymakers on the potential positive effects of migration in promoting human development. Concurrently, the significance of food security as an important development objective has grown tremendously, and the Sustainable Development Goals agenda envisages eliminating all forms of malnutrition. However, the academic and policy discussions on these two issues have largely proceeded in silos, with little attention devoted to the relationship they bear with each other. Using the conceptual frameworks of 'entitlements' and 'sustainable livelihoods', this book seeks to fill this gap in the context of India - a country with the most food-insecure people in the world and where migration is integral to rural livelihoods.Chetan Choithani is an Assistant Professor in the Inequality and Human Development Programme at the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, India. The broad disciplinary domain of Chetan's work is development studies. Within this area, his research and teaching interests include migration and urbanisation, food and nutrition, livelihoods, gender, and social policy and how they relate to development, particularly in the Indian context. Chetan has done extensive fieldwork in remote parts of India, and his research uses primary, field-based insights to engage with and inform larger issues of development. Chetan has published two authored books and several articles in leading peer-reviewed journals. His latest book-length publication is Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania (Rutgers UP, 2022), Cristina Pop examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care, especially in the post-communist context. Cervical cancer prevention reveals the inner workings of emerging post-communist medicine, which aligns the state and the market, public and private health care providers, policy makers, and ordinary women. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women’s responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care. Cervical cancer prevention – and especially the HPV vaccination – provided Romanians a legitimate instance to express their conflicting views of post-communist medicine. What sets Romania apart is that pronatalism, patriarchy, lived religion, medical reforms, and moral contestation of preventive medicine bring into line systemic contingencies that expose the historical, social, and cultural trajectories of cervical cancer.Cristina A. Pop is an assistant professor of medical anthropology and medical humanities at Creighton University. Her research interests are reproductive health and healthcare, reproductive governance, vaccination hesitancy, post-Communism, discourse analysis, and ethnographic fiction. She has published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Medical Anthropology, Culture, Health and Sexuality, and Journal of Religion and Health. Cristina is the author of The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation and Health Care in Romania, published in 2022 with Rutgers University Press in the series “Medical Anthropology: Health, Inequality, and Social Justice.”Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology