New Books in Sociology

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Gina Vale, "The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State" (Oxford UP, 2024) Sep 29, 2025

Show notes

The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Gina Vale explores the governance of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization through the lives and words of local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women. While the roles and activities of foreign (predominantly Western), pro-IS women have garnered significant attention, the experiences and insights of local civilian populations have been largely overlooked.

Drawing on the testimonies of 63 local Sunni Muslim and Yazidi women, Dr. Vale exposes the group's intra-gender stratified system of governance. Eligibility for the group's protection, security, 'citizenship', and entrance into the (semi-)public sphere were not universal, but required convergence with the gender norms of IS, through permanent erasure or at least temporary disguise of certain markers of difference. In some cases, this was directed by a pre-meditated 'divide and conquer' strategy, while in others, it manifested as unregulated violences at the hands of individual group members, including women.

The structure follows the trajectory of IS's increasing control over its 'citizens' and captive populations: its militarization of society; imposition of law and order; provision of goods and services; and intervention in civilians' private lives. Analysis of diverse first-hand accounts and the group's documentation reveals that the presence, exclusion, and victimization of local civilian women were necessary to the functioning and legitimation of IS's 'caliphate' project, and the supremacy of affiliated men - and women. As a fledgling proto-state, IS needed local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women. Though far from represented or protected, they were by no means forgotten.

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.

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Kolby Hanson, "Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace" (Oxford UP, 2025) Sep 28, 2025

Show notes

In Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kolby Hanson argues that these periods of state toleration do not simply change armed groups' behavior, but fundamentally transform the organizations themselves by shaping who takes up arms and which leaders they follow. This book draws on a set of innovative experimental surveys and 75 in-depth interviews tracing four armed movements over time in Northeast India and Sri Lanka. A powerful new theory of how conditions shape the trajectory of non-state armed groups, this book reshapes our understanding of why such organizations become more moderate over time.

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John L. Campbell, "Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich" (Cambridge UP, 2025) Sep 26, 2025

Show notes

Since the Reagan era, conservatives in the United States have championed cutting taxes, especially for wealthy individuals and corporations, as the best way to achieve economic prosperity. In his new book, Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich (Cambridge UP, 2025) John L. Campbell shows that while these claims are highly influential, they are also wrong. Using historical and cross-national evidence, the book challenges and refutes every justification conservatives have made for tax cuts - that American taxes are too high; they hurt the economy; they facilitate government waste; they constitute an unfair downward redistribution of income; and they threaten individual freedom - and conversely shows that countries can actually benefit from higher taxes, especially when tax increases fall most heavily on those most able to pay them. Through clear prose and a well-reasoned argument, Campbell's book provides an accessible, engaging, and much-needed perspective on the role of taxes in American society.

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Jacinto Cuvi, "The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo" (U Chicago Press, 2025) Sep 24, 2025

Show notes

How street vendors tangle with the law in São Paulo, Brazil.

With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might sell you a number of delights and conveniences familiar to city dwellers—from cold water bottles while you’re sitting in traffic to a popsicle from a cart on a summer afternoon in the park. Such vendors form a significant share of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil, but their ubiquity belies perpetual struggle. Some have the right to practice their trade; others do not. All of them strive to make it—or stay afloat.
In The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo, (U Chicago Press, 2025) Jacinto Cuvi introduces us to the world of street vendors and teases out the relationship between the construction of legality and the experience of citizenship. As São Paulo’s city government undertakes a large-scale plan to cancel street vending licenses and evict street vendors, Cuvi reveals how the rights of informal workers can be revoked or withheld and how the lines can be redrawn between work that is “legal” and work that takes place under constant fear of law enforcement. Alongside the mechanics of disenfranchisement, Cuvi captures the lived experience of criminalization, dissecting the distribution of (shallow) rights among vendors who continually reinvent strategies to eke out a living while dealing with the constraints and pressures of informal citizenship at the edge of the law.

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 at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about: escape rooms, the use of urban design in downtown historical neighborhoods of rural communities, and a study on belongingness in college and university. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social), Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email

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Robert F. Carley, "Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice" (SUNY Press, 2019) Sep 23, 2025

Show notes

While scholars of social and political movements tend to analyze tactics in terms of their effectiveness in achieving specific outcomes, Robert F. Carley argues by contrast that tactics are, above all, what social movements do. They are not mere means to an end so much as they are a public form of expression pointing out injustices and making just demands. Rooted in a highly original analysis of the tactically mediated relationship between race and mobilization in the work of Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (SUNY Press, 2019) demonstrates how tactics impact the organizational structures of social movements and expand the affinities of political communities. Carley looks at how Gramsci used innovative tactics to bridge perceptions of racial differences between factory workers and subaltern groups, the latter having been denigrated to the point of subhumanity by a complex Italian national racial economy. Newly envisioning Gramsci as a theorist of race within a broader context of social struggle, Carley connects Gramsci's insights into the political mobilizations of racialized subaltern groups to contemporary critical race theory and cultural studies of racialization and racism. Speaking across disciplines and drawing on a number of empirical examples, Carley offers a battery of original concepts to assist scholars and activists in analyzing the tactical practices of protests in which race is a central factor.

Author info - Robert F. Carley is Associate Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station.

Host info – Michael L. Rosino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Molloy University, whose work focuses on racial politics, media, and democracy. He recently published the book Democracy is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside Grassroots Political Organizing and an essay in Time on the importance of cross-racial coalitions in social movements.

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Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) Sep 22, 2025

Show notes

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was originally written and published in Chinese. The English translation has just come out with Palgrave Macmillan.

Self as Method provides a manifesto of intellectual activism that counsels China’s young people to think by themselves and for themselves. Consisting of three conversations between Xiang Biao, a social anthropologist, and Wu Qi, a rising journalist, the book probes how China has reached its current stage and how young people can make changes.

The Chinese version, 把自己作为方法, was named the “most impactful book of 2021” by Dou4ban4, China’s premier website for rating books, films, and music. The English version, which is entirely Open Access and downloadable for free, was translated by David Ownby. The book reached 157,000 downloads in just over a couple of months.

Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China.

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Tanja Petrovic, "Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army" (Duke UP, 2024) Sep 21, 2025

Show notes

The compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persisted even after the horrific violence of the 1990s, in which many of these men found themselves on opposite sides of the front lines. In Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army (Duke UP, 2024), Tanja Petrović draws on memories and material effects of dozens of JNA conscripts to show how their experience of military service points to futures, forms of collectivity, and relations between the state and the individual different from those that prevailed in the post-Yugoslav reality. Petrović argues that the power of repetitive, ritualized, and performative practices that constituted military service in the JNA provided a framework for drastically different men to live together and befriend each other. While Petrović and her interlocutors do not idealize the JNA, they acknowledge its capacity to create interpersonal relationships and affective bonds that brought the key political ideas of collectivity, solidarity, egalitarianism, education, and comradeship into being.

Dragana Prvulović is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Ottawa.

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Susan D. Stewart. "On the Rocks: Straight Talk about Women and Drinking" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) Sep 20, 2025

Show notes

Existing portrayals of women who drink typically fall into two categories: disturbing stories of women hitting “rock bottom,” resulting in ruined careers, families, and futures, or amusing stories of fun and harmless “girls’ nights out,” with women drinking and overindulging as a temporary escape from a never-ending list of work and family demands. Drawing on original research and extensive interviews with a diverse group of women, author Susan Stewart challenges these stereotypes, revealing women’s complex relationships with alcohol and factors associated with its use.

In On the Rocks: Straight Talk about Women and Drinking(Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Susan Stewart asks a question others might prefer stay buried: what about women's lives have changed such that they drink more alcohol? Stewart’s participants share stories of the many social forces that encourage women to drink: increased marketing of alcohol to women, the growing presence of alcohol in the workplace, pressure to drink from friends and family, and that drinking provides an easy “time-out” from children and housework. Stewarts' unvarnished examination of women and drinking challenges readers to think through its implications to individuals, families, and society.

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Joel Best, "Just the Facts: Untangling Contradictory Claims" (U California Press, 2025) Sep 20, 2025

Show notes

Why can’t we seem to agree on facts? In this succinct volume, sociologist Joel Best turns his inimitable eye toward the social construction of what we think is true. He evaluates how facts emerge from our social worlds—including our beliefs, values, tastes, and norms—and how they align with those worlds’ standards. He argues that by developing a sociological perspective toward what we think we know, we can better parse the use of facts and untruths around us.
Just the Facts: Untangling Contradictory Claims (U California Press, 2025) by Joel Best examines how facts are created and supported through science, government, law, and journalism, revealing that facts are actually claims. These claims are malleable and can change over time through fact-checking, revision, and sometimes rejection. Best guides us through these processes so that we can question our assumptions and understand why disputes happen in the first place. In a time of increasing social and political divide, Just the Facts urges us to resist defensiveness over our facts and approach disputes in critical new ways.

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Shakirah E. Hudani, "Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Sep 18, 2025

Show notes

Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (U of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Shakirah Hudani examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation?

Through extended ethnographic and qualitative research in Rwanda in the decades after the genocide of 1994, this book questions how repair after conflict is realized amidst large-scale urban transformation. Bridging African studies, urban studies, and human geography in its scope, this work ties Rwanda’s transformation to contexts of urban change in other post-conflict spaces, bringing to the fore critical questions about the ethics of planning in such complex geographies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

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