Episodi

  • Utku Balaban, "Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers" (U California Press, 2025)

    Utku Balaban, "Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers" (U California Press, 2025)
    May 20 2026
    What explains the rise of religious populism in contemporary Turkish politics and society? How does industrialization help to explain change and continuity in social and religious life in Muslim majority countries? In his new book Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers (University of California Press, 2025), Utku Balaban examines Turkey’s rapid post-Cold War industrialization and argues that the answers to these questions lie in a class analysis centered on the relationships between employers and employees situated within larger contexts of globalization and historical Islamization. Political and religious transformations occurring in the 1980s and 1990s are not the result of a cultural backlash to or rejection of “Westernization,” or a nostalgia for an idealistic past. Rather, Balaban argues they are related to the rise of a socio-economic-political class he calls the “faubourgeosie” that strategically employ Islamic populism as a method of protecting their interests against other primary class actors. These changes are internal to the mechanics and logics of capitalism as shifts in the traditional relations of production produced new alliances and networks based on small-scale capital accumulation. Balaban’s Turkish case study can be applied to other Muslim-majority countries in which small-scale industrialists similarly dealt with economic anxiety and aspirations through recourse to popular Islamist rhetoric not as a specifically moral strategy, but as a political one. Industrial Islamism recently received the best new book in the category of international political economy from the International Studies Association. Dr. Utku Balaban is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Xavier University. He is the author of A Conveyor Belt of Flesh: Urban Space and the Proliferation of Industrial Labor Practices in Istanbul’s Garment Industry (2011) and Social Inclusion Practices in Turkey (2015). Dr. Jaclyn Michael is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
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    1 ora e 21 min
  • George Baylon Radics, "Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the 'Lazy Native' and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines" (U Georgia Press, 2026)

    George Baylon Radics, "Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the 'Lazy Native' and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines" (U Georgia Press, 2026)
    May 20 2026
    In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. These imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. More recently, we have seen a menacing rise of Islamic "terrorism," political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a "failed state" or economic insecurity and cultural backlash. In ⁠Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the "Lazy Native" and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines⁠ (University of Georgia Press, 2026), however, Dr. George Baylon Radics explains this forgotten part of U.S. history with emotions as a driving force behind social action. The Philippines is currently experiencing the longest-running Muslim-Christian conflict in the modern world and an increasingly anti-Western populist government. By unpacking the role of emotions from the American colonial period to the present, Emotional Filipinos blurs the line between American colonizer and Muslim-Filipino "terrorist," highlighting the lasting effects of America's footprint in Southeast Asia. Radics humanizes this fraught history and reveals unexplored connections between past and present. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
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    46 min
  • Mengqi Wang, "Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market" (Cornell UP, 2026)

    Mengqi Wang, "Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market" (Cornell UP, 2026)
    May 19 2026
    Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market (Cornell UP, 2026) is a study of the power that shapes the forms of the homes Chinese citizens strive for and the possible paths they may take to realize their home ownership dreams. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Mengqi Wang discusses how the Chinese real estate industry functions in the everyday, welding aspirational middle-class families, especially migrant families, to the property-owning class and the urban growth machine. Urban housing was a socialist benefit in China until the market reforms and privatization in the 1990s. Today, most Chinese citizens consider homeownership a necessity rather than an economic privilege. Wang analyzes the making of homeownership ideologies through "inflexible demand" (gangxu)—a concept that real estate brokers, developers, homebuyers, and the government in China use to craft homeownership as indispensable for fulfilling dreams of urban citizenship. The ethnography shows that gangxu helps to articulate diverse attempts to accumulate value through housing at China's urbanizing city periphery, while giving shape to a housing-based, postsocialist right to the city. Anxious Homes argues that homeownership does not necessarily engender independence but suggests further inclusion of citizens within the dominant regime of accumulation. Mengqi Wang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research interests include economic anthropology, urban anthropology, political economy, gender studies, and science and technology studies. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
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    1 ora e 7 min
  • Robert Rouphail, "Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius" (Ohio UP, 2026)

    Robert Rouphail, "Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius" (Ohio UP, 2026)
    May 18 2026
    In a world marked by increasingly destructive ecological and meteorological upheavals, Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius (Ohio UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Rouphail offers a historical analysis of how these catastrophes shape people’s understanding of themselves, their collective history, and their relationship to the institutions that govern them. An examination of cyclonic disasters in the multiethnic Indian Ocean island of Mauritius throws into stark relief how deep histories of diasporic identity formation, of imperial governance, and of the informal practices of racial difference making graft onto how everyday people interpret these moments of loss and the futures that emerge in their wake.Cyclonic Lives shows that disasters are not only events; they are also processes through which people evaluate and rethink the most elemental social and cultural categories that give meaning to their lives. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing until the early postcolonial era, this book tracks, for example, how Mauritians of African descent integrated these disasters into broader collective histories and memories of the Indian Ocean slave trade, how Hindu Indo-Mauritians understood cyclones’ ecological effects as material elements to be accounted for in a broader Hindu diasporic space, and how the late colonial and early postcolonial state built infrastructures—material, conceptual, and financial—to mitigate the threats posed by these storms and ensure their own long-term durability.The increasing political, social, and economic instability that climate change has already triggered demands that humanists develop analytical geographies and methodologies that shed light on how power can modulate in asymmetrical ways at moments of crisis. If there is one central takeaway from this historical study of this small island in a big ocean, it is that catastrophic events are not things that merely happen to people; they are processes that remake them. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
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    56 min
  • Evan N. Dawley, "Taiwan: A People′s History" (Reaktion Books, 2026)

    Evan N. Dawley, "Taiwan: A People′s History" (Reaktion Books, 2026)
    May 18 2026
    While most English-language histories of Taiwan focus on its geopolitical role, Taiwan: A People’s History (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Evan N. Dawley centres on the people of Taiwan themselves and explores how they have formed a unique polity, telling the story of the Indigenous Taiwanese, the Hoklo and Hakka who came from China before the twentieth century, Japanese colonialism and the Chinese who arrived after 1945. Dr. Dawley describes how successive waves of immigration changed Taiwan and how these diverse groups of Indigenous tribes and settlers interacted economically and culturally, creating new Taiwanese identities in the process. Over the last century Taiwan has developed from an authoritarian state to one of the world’s most vibrant democracies and advanced economies. It is a successful independent society, albeit one whose existence remains under a shadow. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
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    1 ora e 11 min
  • Eloise Moss, "The Secret Life of the Hotel: Sex, Crime and Protest in British Guesthouses Since 1918" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

    Eloise Moss, "The Secret Life of the Hotel: Sex, Crime and Protest in British Guesthouses Since 1918" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
    May 17 2026
    Hotels represent nations, hosting visiting monarchs, politicians, and diplomats. Hotels underpin global networks of travel and communication, on which national and international prosperity have increasingly depended since the end of the First World War. Yet hotels are also places where people can be anonymous; where murderers and thieves mix with adulterers and con artists; and where prejudice finds expression in who is refused access, and in the forms of 'service' provided by staff in the lowest-paid roles. The Secret Life of the Hotel: Sex, Crime and Protest in British Guesthouses Since 1918 (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Professor Eloise Moss is the first book to uncover how hotels entrenched inequality, prejudice, and exploitation in Britain's tourist sector, and in wider society and culture, during the 20th century.Professor Moss delves into hotel murders, swindles, and scandals, including the history of Agatha Christie's disappearance in 1926, the 'Margate Hotel Murder', and the divorce of Wallis Simpson in 1936 so she could marry King Edward VIII. Professor Moss's exploration of the hotel also shines a light on the fight against the colour bar, the formation of the British civil rights movement, and the visit to London of Martin Luther King Jr.The Secret Life of the Hotel uniquely tells the story of Britain's relationship with the world during the 20th century through the prism of its hotels, showing how their infrastructure and 'welcome' had profound consequences for women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ citizens, and people with disabilities. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
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    44 min
  • Radio ReOrient S14:7: Surveilling Muslimness in Denmark, with Amani Hassani, hosted by Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas

    Radio ReOrient S14:7: Surveilling Muslimness in Denmark, with Amani Hassani, hosted by Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas
    May 15 2026
    In this episode hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Amani Hassani, to discuss her most recent work around Islamophobia and Muslimness in Denmark. Hassani discussed Danish colonial histories and the surveilling nature of the Danish welfare state, and how these are employed to construct a narrative of Danish benevolence while simultaneously marking Muslims in Denmark as ‘other’ and deserving of intolerance in an otherwise tolerant nation. Amani Hassani is a lecturer at Brunel University and her work spans urban ethnography, sociology, anthropology and human geography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
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    56 min
  • Rina Bliss, "What's Real About Race: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society" (W.W. Norton, 2025)

    Rina Bliss, "What's Real About Race: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society" (W.W. Norton, 2025)
    May 13 2026
    Professor Rina Bliss teaches in the sociology department at Rutgers University, and has written on the social significance of genetic studies on intelligence, race, and social factors. In What's Real About Race: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society (W.W. Norton, 2025) Bliss explores the history of race as a genetic category, its haphazardness across research, medical, and social contexts, and its implications for knowledge production. In this work, Bliss sheds light on the real impacts of racism on bodies and lives, and on how these myths structure modern science and industries. This interview is a conversation between Rina Bliss and a group of Princeton graduate students/visiting faculty involved in an interdisciplinary (IHUM) STS Reading group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
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    53 min