María Angélica Thumala Olave, "The Love of Books: Attachment to a Changing Cultural Object" (Manchester UP, 2026)

During the eventful summer of 2019 in Hong Kong, the Be Water Revolution formed to resist the proposed extradition of fugitives to mainland China’s courts. With its name derived from martial arts master Bruce Lee’s adage “formless and shapeless like water,” the incident turned out to be the city’s largest episode of contentious politics and was unique for using impromptu communication among participants and the absence of central leadership.  In Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Protests (Temple University Press, 2025), Dr. Ming-sho Ho examines the dynamics of the city-wide uprising from the perspective of agency power. He seeks to understand how numerous and anonymous Hongkongers contributed to this epoch-making campaign as well as how they responded to the full-scale state repression that enveloped them. Dr. Ho praises and questions the durability of the inventive Be Water Revolution and how the activists encouraged protests spontaneously, through interpersonal networks and by voluntarily collaborating with strangers at great personal risk.  Dr. Ho posits a new concept of “collective improvisation” to make sense of such a decentralized yet creative way of protesting. Be Water seeks to understand the rise and long afterlife of this movement and illustrate its efficacy. As Dr. Ho shows, these dynamics of collective improvisation have implications for contemporary protest movements around the world.  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. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

What would a postcarbon future look like? What would it take to build and maintain a more just, regenerative world? How would it feel to live—and to thrive—in that world? In Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026), Billy Fleming and a wide set of contributors critically engage with the above questions and more. Around the globe, people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems in response to the climate crisis. This book guides readers through 29 of these exemplary works, which span 43 nations and 6 continents. From Cuba to Kiribati, Iceland to the Andes, the prairies of North America to the expanding Gobi Desert, these case studies foreground the tactics and modes of practice being employed, often by marginalized peoples, to create more humane, hospitable places. With dispatches from more than a dozen leading scholars working on the front lines of the climate justice movement, Building Postcarbon Futures is both a celebration of action underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers, and activists who are pushing this planet toward a future of collective flourishing. Billy Fleming is a leading voice on the role of design in responding to the climate crisis in our cities, communities, and landscapes. He is founding codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate and political economy, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.  This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo. He is an urbanist and housing policy researcher at the Climate and Community Institute. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing but also in decisions about content and production. In Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming (Princeton UP, 2026), Violaine Roussel examines the emergence of this new category of professionals at the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. Roussel shows how the rise of data and algorithm specialists has transformed organizations and rearranged power relationships within them. Drawing on extensive interviews and in situ observations, she describes the ways that technical “data work” carried out by professionals at streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ has had a significant effect on creative decisions.Rather than fetishizing data and algorithmic models, Roussel explores the practices of the professionals who shape them, manipulate them, and give them power. She examines the relationships of these workers with traditional producers, describing legitimacy struggles and the eventual stabilization of new professional arrangements. Roussel’s account of the ways that data specialists deploy algorithmic models to reinvent their industry’s approach to content, artists, and the market—the first in-depth sociological study of the rise of this new profession—reveals the new forms of power and knowledge at play in today’s Hollywood. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice (Temple University Press, 2026) investigates how communities in Central Valley, California deal with Valley Fever, a painful illness caused by a soil fungus. The airborne disease’s symptoms can last from two months to a patient’s lifetime and may be fatal. Nearly a third of the national cases are reported in California, where those infected are disproportionately farmworkers and people incarcerated in the region. Poverty, pollution, and prison expose these groups to cumulative environmental and health risks that deny Valley Fever patients adequate medical treatment. Dr. Sarah M. Rios examines how these populations face racial health disparities and develop strategies of care. She connects environmental justice activists as well as prison advocates and abolitionists who mobilize protests and issue calls to action to the past and ongoing efforts for medical autonomy and healthy communities. Diseases Have No Eyes emphasizes that vulnerable groups have developed an expertise and understanding of Valley Fever out of necessity. In the process, these community members offer an alternative public health response that extends beyond the individual body. 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.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Why do people read? In The Love of Books: Attachment to a Changing Cultural Object (Manchester University Press, 2026)  María Angélica Thumala Olave, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science, explores people’s relationship to books and to reading, demonstrating the pleasure and importance books provide in contemporary life. Moving beyond a narrow focus on the social status offered by books and reading, the analysis shows the role of material objects, along with the emotional engagements and social bonds forged by the practices associated with books and reading. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Unwelcome Shores: Black Refugees in America (Rutgers University Press, 2025) is an ethnographic study of the Liberian refugee community in Staten Island, New York, home to the largest per capita concentration of Liberians in the U.S., that sheds light on the racialization of Black refugees and the racism they have experienced at every step of their migration journey. In this pioneering study, sociologist Bernadette Ludwig explores how Liberians have responded to such racist exclusions, noting how members of this community reject the informal refugee label once they are resettled in the United States. Liberian migrants often view the label as a liability since the larger general public, the media, and the U.S. government tend to regard Black refugees as an economic and social burden unworthy of assistance. Indeed, Black refugees’ humanity is often ignored, Ludwig contends, in favor of overemphasizing presumed barbaric violence, endemic wars, cultural backwardness, and diseases. By detailing the lack of aid and support for Black refugees and describing how Liberian refugees in particular have had to overcome various struggles and barriers in coming to the U.S. and while living here, Unwelcome Shores highlights the overarching role of race and anti-Black racism in American society. Dr. Bernadette Ludwig is a Sociologist and the Assistant Dean of the Macricostas School of Arts and Sciences at Western Connecticut State University. She is also an Affiliated Faculty with The New School's Zolberg Institute on Migration & Mobility.  Host: Michael L. Rosino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Molloy University, studying racial politics, media, and democracy. His most recent book, Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism Inside Grassroots Political Organizing, is now available with the University of North Carolina Press. In this episode, Dr. Ludwig mentioned an opportunity to get involved in asylum and deportation cases. Here is the link for scholars to submit their information or attend trainings to become country conditions experts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In our recent conversation about Protecting Workers? Crisis, COVID-19 and South Asia, the editors Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Wilfried Swenden reflect on the need to move beyond treating the pandemic as a singular, isolated shock. Our discussion reflected on the deeper mechanics of knowledge production, how we reflect on crisis beyond its immediate occurrence, how we conceptualize South Asia today, and the process of bringing such a dynamic volume together. A central theme was the necessity of examining crisis as a revealing, prolonged condition rather than a temporary disruption. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed pre-existing structural vulnerabilities across Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Theorizing through this moment meant examining how state strategies and worker realities collided when formal safety nets faltered, forcing us to rethink South Asia not merely as a fixed geographic region, but as a shared space of cascading socio-economic pressures and labor struggles. While this volume traces state policy and institutional shifts, the core strength of the volume lies in highlighting the resourcefulness and claim-making capacities of workers fighting for justice. Assembling these regional perspectives provides a critical blueprint for rethinking state-society relations, labor rights, and collective action in post-pandemic South Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Our recent conversation about Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2026), with author Niharika Pandit, covers the journey of how critical methodology meets the weight of lived experience. This book examines the everyday politics of militarized control in Kashmir following the Indian government’s August 5, 2019, decision to de-operationalize Jammu and Kashmir’s nominal autonomy. The core of our reflection centered on how one theorizes through such an intense archive. The book avoids abstract distance, relying instead on a rigorous post-2019 archive built from ethnographic fieldwork and rooted in interdisciplinary feminist studies. It demonstrates that theorizing is not a passive intellectual exercise, instead, it is an active, grounded practice of mapping power where it is felt most directly. Through intersectional analyses of space, home, time, and storytelling, the text reveals how militarized control operates via spatial, embodied, affective, temporal, and discursive capture. Reflecting on this book serves as a vital reminder that critical theorizing must remain tethered to the grounded realities of resistance. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center (Cornell UP, 2026) traces the extraordinary journey of the twisted remnants of the World Trade Center. When the Towers fell on September 11, 2001, nearly all that remained was pulverized concrete and contorted steel. Dr. Samuel and Dr. Max Holleran investigate how fragments of these skyscrapers became modern relics, scattered across all fifty states and beyond, built into hundreds of local memorials in firehouses, parks, and plazas, providing new and creative ways to grieve and remember. Drawing on years of research and interviews with artists, city officials, and first responders, the authors reveal a semi-improvised process that transformed industrial debris into sacred objects. They explore the aesthetics of rust and ruin, the rituals of transport and dedication, and the cultural tensions between grief, patriotism, and public art. From a quiet town square in Wyoming to a monumental glass "book" in Padua, Italy, these memorials tell a story not only of loss but of how communities far from Ground Zero took a piece of the tragedy—and made it their own. At once deeply human and sharply analytical, Scattered Steel asks urgent questions: What does it mean to sanctify matter? How do memorials shape collective memory in an age of global, and highly visual, trauma? And what happens when the symbols of tragedy become part of everyday landscapes? 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. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Nineteenth-century Germany invented the way we eat. Women experimenting in households, French chefs fleeing guillotines, and one of the most rapidly evolving food industries in the world forged recognizably modern eating practices between 1780 and 1910. While central Europeans merely aimed to survive long winters, experiment with translated recipes and curious ingredients from abroad, and embrace the conveniences of industrial life, their consumption habits and cooking practices created a new product landscape. Throughout this transitional era of history, individuals visibly communicated their self-understandings through food. The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780–1910 (Berghahn, 2026) by Dr. Claudia Kreklau provides a study of central European food modernity and middle-class identity aims to provide fresh footing for discussions in our own changing global era. 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.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology