Our guest today is Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, and the director of the Scholar Strategy Network, a network of professors that seeks to improve public policy and strengthen democracy by organizing scholars working in America’s colleges and universities, and connecting them and their research to […]

Office Hours

Theda Skocpol on the Koch Network

In this episode, guest host Amber Joy chats with Courtney Bell, a high school teacher in North Minneapolis who was a candidate for the 2018 Minnesota Teacher of the Year Award. In a recent article by the Star Tribune, Bell talks about her work teaching sociology to high school students in North Minneapolis. Bell discusses […]

Teacher Spotlight: Courtney Bell

In this episode, guest host Allison Nobles talks to Tulane professor Mimi Schippers about her book Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities. The book interrogates “compulsory monogamy”, or our cultural disposition towards being in a relationship with only one other person at a time. Schippers argues that this compulsory disposition towards monogamy limits […]

Best of 2017: Mimi Schippers on Polyamory and Polyqueer Sexualities

In this episode, guest hosts Amber Powell and Allison Nobles talk to Associate Professor of Sociology at Occidental College Lisa Wade about her book American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. The conversation focuses on interrogating what ‘hookup culture’ really is— and how college students make sense of themselves and their positions within […]

Best of 2017: Lisa Wade on American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus

In this episode, guest host Caty Taborda-Whitt sits down with Trevor Hoppe to discuss his new book, Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness, which looks at the public health response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The conversation focuses on how this infectious disease became a target for criminalization through policies and laws that punished […]

Trevor Hoppe on Punishing Disease

In this episode, guest host Wahutu talks to Professor of Journalism at Columbia University Michael Schudson about his new book The News Media: What Everyone Needs to Know. The conversation focuses on the history of news as well as how the public makes sense of news today. Of particular interest is the legacy of the Watergate […]

Michael Schudson on The News Media

Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper is a leading expert in the field of gender and family dynamics. Her latest book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, details her efforts to understand how families representing an array of social classes perceive and manage contemporary economic anxieties. She and guest-host Sarah Catherine Billups discuss the many ways that […]

Marianne Cooper on Families in Insecure Times

With the election of Donald Trump, much has been made about the construction of barriers to entry along the US border with Mexico. But while Trump has placed particular emphasis on the image of a wall designed to limit illegal movement across this border, thousands of workers travel lawfully from cities like Tijuana into the US — and […]

Sergio Chávez on Border Lives and Transnationalism

In this episode, guest host Neeraj Rajasekar talks to Harvard professor Natasha Warikoo about her book The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities. The book centers on conversations with white students and students of color at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford around their understandings of diversity and diversity programs. […]

Natasha Warikoo on The Diversity Bargain

In his new book, To Care for Creation: the Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement, Professor Stephen Ellingson explores new — and often localized — environmental activism among mainstream religious groups in the United States. Through interviews with over 60 organizations, he tells the story of how activists overcome the institutional, political, and cultural barriers that […]

Stephen Ellingson on Religious Environmentalism

Prior to the 1990s, the sociology of immigration focused mainly on just a handful of major cities where most new arrivals had settled throughout the 20th century. But more recently, immigrants have been moving to new destinations in the rural South and Midwest, drawing scholars like today’s guest, Vanesa Ribas, to closely monitor how race […]

Vanesa Ribas on Immigration to the New South

In this episode, I talk to University of Minnesota Professor and Editor-In-Chief of TheSocietyPages Douglas Hartmann about his book Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy. This conversation focuses on a 1990s crime initiative, known as midnight basketball, which aimed to curb crime by setting up late night basketball leagues in inner cities. While […]

Douglas Hartmann on Midnight Basketball

Across the country, sightings of people dressed as “creepy clowns” standing in forests, on roads, in doorways has exploded and captured part of the national imagination. A lot of people were unsure what to make of this odd development. Some call it a clown “invasion”, some call it a clown “uprising”, and some call it […]

Joel Best on the Creepy Clown Craze

In this episode, I talk to University of Toronto professor Jooyoung Lee, author of Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in South Central. This conversation focuses on the book as well as Professor Lee’s experiences writing the book. For some context, set in South Central Los Angeles, Professor Lee worked in and around Project Blowed, an open mic […]

Jooyoung Lee on Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in South Central

Northwestern University professor Aldon Morris discusses W.E.B. Du Bois and the status of his work in the sociological canon. In this special hour-long episode, we explore the ongoing tension between social justice activism and the scientific features of contemporary sociology, especially as it is experienced by many black scholars today. Morris’ new book is called The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois […]