New Books in Sociology

Latest Episodes:

Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, "Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics" (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025) Sep 17, 2025

Show notes

Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) by Dr. Dominic Davies & Dr. Candida Rifkind is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas.

Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced to bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Beyond simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as “citizen” and “refugee” through systems of empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. The comics medium allows readers not only to visualize the lives of refugees but also refocuses the lens on citizen non-refugees—“we who can sleep under warm cover at night”, as Vinh Nguyen writes in his foreword—and interrogates their perceptions, aspirations, and beliefs.

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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Katherine Eva Maich, "Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights" (Stanford UP, 2025) Sep 15, 2025

Show notes

The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging.

In Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights (Stanford University Press, 2025), Dr. Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Dr. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace.

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Kevin Passmore, "The Maginot Line: A New History of the Fall of France" (Yale UP, 2025) Sep 13, 2025

Show notes

The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges, and even electric trains. Kilometres of underground galleries led to casements hidden in the terrain, and turrets that rose from the ground to fire upon the enemy. The fortifications were invulnerable to the heaviest artillery and to chemical warfare.

Despite this extensive preparation, France fell to Germany in a little under six weeks. Eight decades on, the Maginot Line is still remembered as an expensively misguided response to obvious danger.

In The Maginot Line: A New History (Yale University Press, 2025), Dr. Kevin Passmore presents a groundbreaking account reevaluating the Maginot Line. He traces the controversies surrounding construction, the lives of the men who manned the forts, the impact on German-speaking inhabitants of the frontier, and the fight against espionage from within. Far from a backward step, the Maginot Line was an ambitious project of modernisation—one that was let down by strategic error and growing dissatisfaction with fortification.

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Simon James Copland, "The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online" (Polity, 2025) Sep 12, 2025

Show notes

Inspired by leaders such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, the online Manosphere has exploded in recent years. Dedicated to anti-feminism, these communities have orchestrated online campaigns of misogynistic harassment, with some individuals going as far as committing violent terrorist attacks.

Although the Manosphere has become a focus point of the media, researchers and governments alike, discussions tend to either over-sensationalize the community or offer simplistic explanations for their existence. This book uses a mixture of historical and economic analysis, alongside actual Manosphere content, to delve deeper. With The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online (Polity, 2025), Simon James Copland explains how the Manosphere has developed and why it appeals to so many men. He argues that the Manosphere is not an aberration, but is deeply embedded within mainstream, neoliberal, social structures. For a cohort of alienated men, the promise of community provides a space of understanding, connection and purpose.

This insightful book dares to dig into the corners of incel communities and online spaces where misogyny thrives. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand, and do something about, this growing and worrying phenomenon.

Simon Copland is Honorary Fellow at the Australian National University.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel here

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Chelsi West Ohueri, "Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife" (Cornell UP, 2025) Sep 11, 2025

Show notes

Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife(Cornell University Press, 2025) is the first book to interrogate race and racial logics in Albania.Chelsi West Ohueri examines how race is made, remade, produced, and reproduced through constructions of whiteness, blackness, and otherness. She argues that while race is often limited to Western processes of modernity that exclude Eastern Europe, racialization processes are global, and the ethnography of everyday Albanian socialities makes visible how race operates. Historical and political science frameworks prevail in the study of post-Cold War East European societies, yet as West Ohueri shows, anthropological and ethnographic knowledge can equip scholars to ask questions that they might otherwise not consider, illustrating how racialization is ongoing and enduring in a period that she terms the communist afterlife. Encountering Race in Albania, through the unexpected optic of Albania, a small, formerly communist country in Southeast Europe, offers significant insights into into broader understandings of race in a global context.

Chelsi West Ohueri is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at University of Texas, Austin. Her work focuses on ethnographic studies of race and racialization, belonging, marginalization, and medical anthropology, primarily in Albania and Southeast Europe.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe, "Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England" (Princeton UP, 2025) Sep 10, 2025

Show notes

What do children believe in? In Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England (Princeton UP, 2025)Anna Strhan, a Reader in the Department of Sociology at the University of York and Rachael Shillitoe, a senior social scientist in the UK civil service and honorary fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of York use ethnography and interviews with young people and parents at a variety of schools in England to examine current forms of non-religiosity. The book explores how children make meaning and sense of their world, offering an account that foregrounds their sense of ethical commitments and their beliefs in key humanistic ideas. Theoretically rich, and with a wealth of fascinating empirical material, the book will be of interest across the humanities and social sciences.

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Stephanie K. Kim, "Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul" (MIT Press, 2023) Sep 08, 2025

Show notes

Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul (MIT Press, 2023) challenges the popular image of the international student in the American imagination, an image of affluence, access, and privilege. In this provocative book, higher education scholar Stephanie Kim argues that universities -- not the students -- create the paths that allow students their international mobility. Focusing on universities in the United States and South Korea that aggressively grew their student pools in the aftermath of the Great Recession, Kim shows the lengths to which universities will go to expand enrollments as they draw from the same pool of top South Korean students.

Using ethnographic research gathered over a ten-year period in which international admissions were impacted by the Great Recession, changes in US presidential administrations, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Constructing Student Mobility provides crucial insights into the purpose, effects, and future of student recruitment across the Pacific.

Constructing Student Mobility received the Best Book Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education Council on International Higher Education.

Stephanie Kim is a scholar, educator, author, and practitioner in the field of comparative and international higher education. She teaches at Georgetown University, where she is an Associate Professor of the Practice and Faculty Director of Higher Education Administration in the School of Continuing Studies. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Asian Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service.

Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University. You can follow her activities here.

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May Friedman, "Fat Studies: The Basics" (Routledge, 2025) Sep 08, 2025

Show notes

Fat Studies: The Basics(Routledge, 2025) introduces the reading of fat bodies and the ways that Fat Studies, as a field, has responded to waves of ideas about fat people, their lives, and choices.

Part civil rights discourse and part academic discipline, Fat Studies is a dynamic project that involves contradiction and discussion. In order to understand this field, the book also explores its intersections with race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability, ethnicity, migration and beyond. In addition to thinking through terminology and history, this book will aim to unpack three key myths which often guide Fat Studies, showing that:

fat is a meaningful site of oppression intersected with other forms of discrimination and hatred
to be fat is not a choice (but also that a discussion of choice is itself problematic); and
fat cannot be unambiguously correlated with a lack of health

Fat Studies: The Basics is a lively and accessible foundation for students of Gender Studies, Sociology, Psychology, and Media Studies, as well as anyone interested in learning more about this emergent field.

May Friedman is a Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada.

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Ruth E. Toulson, "Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore" (U Washington Press, 2024) Sep 07, 2025

Show notes

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members.

In Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore (University of Washington Press, 2025), an ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Dr. Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates this as part of a larger shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled "Protestant" Buddhism. Further, in a context where the dead remain central to family life, forced exhumation tears the social fabric, turning ancestors into ghosts.

Using death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, Dr. Toulson explores the scope of and resistance to state power over the dead, laying bare the legacies of colonialism and consequences of whirlwind capitalist development. In doing so, she offers a new anthropology of death, one both more personal and politicized.

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Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy of Warnings" (Columbia UP, 2025) Sep 04, 2025

Show notes

Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings(Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths. Embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt and Beauvoir but exploring contemporary issues such as gender, climate change and machine warfare, Zabala’s book is an accessible and applicable text that simultaneously tries to destabilize us in our present complacency while grounding us in an urgent need to seek alternatives.

Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of numerous books, including one previously discussed on this show, Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts.

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