New Books in Sociology

Housing is more than bricks and mortar. The home is where our hopes and dreams play out, and it lies at the heart of our lives. This is where we rest, eat, and relax. The home we enjoy can determine our health, life expectancy, and day-to-day well-being. In contrast, the lack of a stable residence can lead to mental and physical illness and often premature death. This is central to how we conceive of a good and dignified life. In Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing (Verso, 2025), Alva Gotby grapples with the practical and emotional questions of housing – domestic labour, privacy, security, ownership, and health. Is it possible to imagine success without home ownership? Gotby makes clear that solving the housing crisis is about much more than housing stock. It is about revolutionising our everyday lives and labours. Louisa Hann has a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. Her recent book, HIV/AIDS and the Stage, is out with Liverpool University Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Gerald Roche, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia and head of research for the Linguistic Justice Foundation. Tazin and Gerald discuss his research into language oppression and focus on his recent book The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet (Cornell UP, 2024). In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world's languages disappear this century. Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People's Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future. The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Why some cities are more effective than others at reducing inequalities in the built environment. For the first time in history, most people live in cities. One in seven are living in slums, the most excluded parts of cities, in which the basics of urban life—including adequate housing, accessible sanitation, and reliable transportation—are largely unavailable. Why are some cities more successful than others in reducing inequalities in the built environment?  In Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg (Princeton UP, 2024), Benjamin Bradlow explores this question, examining the effectiveness of urban governance in two “megacities” in young democracies: São Paulo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa. Both cities came out of periods of authoritarian rule with similarly high inequalities and similar policy priorities to lower them. And yet São Paulo has been far more successful than Johannesburg in improving access to basic urban goods. Bradlow examines the relationships between local government bureaucracies and urban social movements that have shaped these outcomes. Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork in both cities, including interviews with informants from government agencies, political leadership, social movements, private developers, bus companies, and water and sanitation companies, Bradlow details the political and professional conflicts between and within movements, governments, private corporations, and political parties. He proposes a bold theoretical approach for a new global urban sociology that focuses on variations in the coordination of local governing power, arguing that the concepts of “embeddedness” and “cohesion” explain processes of change that bridge external social mobilization and the internal coordinating capacity of local government to implement policy changes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

A heartbreaking account of grief, Black boyhood, and how we can support young people as they navigate loss. JahSun, a dependable, much-loved senior at Boys' Prep was just hitting his stride in the fall of 2017. He had finally earned a starting position on the varsity football team and was already weighing two college acceptances. Then, over Thanksgiving, tragedy struck. An altercation at his older sister's home escalated into violence, killing the unarmed teenager in a hail of bullets. JahSun's untimely death overwhelmed his entire community, sending his family, friends, and school into seemingly insurmountable grief. Worse yet, that spring two additional Boys' Prep students would be shot to death in their neighborhood. JahSun and his peers are not alone in suffering the toll of gun violence, as every year in the United States teenagers die by gunfire in epidemic numbers, with Black boys most deeply affected. Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools (U Chicago Press, 2024) closely attends to the neglected victims of youth gun violence: the suffering friends and classmates who must cope, mostly out of public view, with lasting grief and hidden anguish. Set at an ambitious urban high school for boys during the heartbreaking year following the death of JahSun, the book chronicles the consequences of untimely death on Black teen boys and on a school community struggling to recover. Sociologist Nora Gross tells the story of students attempting to grapple with unthinkable loss, inviting readers in to observe how they move through their days at school and on social media in the aftermath of their friends' and classmates' deaths. Gross highlights the discrepancy between their school's educational mission and teachers' and administrators' fraught attempts to care for students' emotional wellbeing. In the end, the school did not provide adequate space for grief, making it more difficult for students to heal, reengage with school, and imagine hopeful futures. Even so, supportive relationships deepened among students and formed across generations, offering promising examples of productive efforts to channel student grief into positive community change. A searing testimony of our collective failure to understand the inner lives of our children in crisis, Brothers in Grief invites us all to wrestle with the hidden costs of gun violence on racial and educational inequity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology