Across the global South, poor women’s lives are embedded in their social relationships and governed not just by formal institutions – rules that exist on paper – but by informal norms and practices. Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh (Rutgers UP, 2021) takes the reader to Bangladesh, a country that has risen from the ashes of war, natural disaster, and decades of resource drain to become a development miracle. The book argues that grassroots women’s mobilization programs can empower women to challenge informal institutions when such programs are anti-oppression, deliberative, and embedded in their communities. Qayum dives into the work of Polli Shomaj (PS), a program of the development organization BRAC to show how the women of PS negotiate with state and society to alter the rules of the game, changing how poor people access resources including safety nets, the law, and governing spaces. These women create a complex and rapidly transforming world where multiple overlapping institutions exist – formal and informal, old and new, desirable and undesirable. In actively challenging power structures around them, these women defy stereotypes of poor Muslim women as backward, subservient, oppressed, and in need of saving. Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (University of Mass. Press, 2024), Dr. Jason Higgins examines the connections between the military and carceral system through the stories of those most knowledgeable about it: veterans who were incarcerated after their military service. Combining a thorough historical narrative with the oral histories of veterans who had been imprisoned after their return to civilian society, Dr. Higgins shows how the so-called war on drugs and war on crime intersect with the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Through this history he shows how government policies built on racism, ableism, and patriarchy contributed to many young Americans being pushed into the military, punished during their service, and then being kicked out with no access to any type of support which then leads them into the carceral system. Dr. Higgins also tells the story of how incarcerated veterans helped organize amongst themselves leading to Veterans Treatment Courts which have helped reduce the number of veterans going into prison and also show a model for non-punitive responses to crime. Prisoners after War has been awarded the Oral History Association's book award for 2025. It is available open access: https://uplopen.com/books/m/35... Jason Higgins is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing and Press and an Assistant Professor affiliated with the Virginia Tech University Library and the Department of History. You can find a transcript of this interview here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age (Southern Illinois UP, 2021) focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members. This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community’s material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women’s lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor. An impressive and diverse array of archival and material research grounds each chapter’s examination of women’s professional, domestic, or reproductive labor in a particular community. Fleeting though they may seem, the practices and lives of those intentional women, Smith argues, pattern contemporary divisions of work along the vibrant and contentious lines of gender, race, and class and stage the continued search for what is possible. Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implemented, explores business models for broadband providers, surveys the technologies of rural broadband, and offers case studies of broadband use in the rural Midwest. Ali argues that rural broadband policy is both broken and incomplete: broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and incomplete because it fails to recognize the important roles of communities, cooperatives, and local providers in broadband access. For example, existing policies favor large telecommunication companies, crowding out smaller, nimbler providers. Lack of competition drives prices up—rural broadband can cost 37 percent more than urban broadband. The federal government subsidizes rural broadband by approximately $6 billion. Where does the money go? Ali proposes democratizing policy architecture for rural broadband, modeling it after the wiring of rural America for electricity and telephony. Subsidies should be equalized, not just going to big companies. The result would be a multi-stakeholder system, guided by thoughtful public policy and funded by public and private support. Dr. Christopher Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is also the author of Media Localism: The Policies of Place. He is a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and former Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

How do we know through atmospheres? How can being affected by an atmosphere give rise to knowledge? What role does somatic, nonverbal knowledge play in how we belong to places? Atmospheric Knowledge takes up these questions through detailed analyses of practices that generate atmospheres and in which knowledge emerges through visceral intermingling with atmospheres. From combined musicological and anthropological perspectives, Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr investigate atmospheres as a compelling alternative to better-known analytics of affect by way of performative and sonic practices across a range of ethnographic settings. With particular focus on oceanic relations and sonic affectedness, Atmospheric Knowledge centers the rich affordances of sonic connections for knowing our environments. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Our Primary Expertise argues counter to the longstanding trend in the field by seeing religion as mundane and not unique, which means that the field's research and teaching can have relevance all across human culture, and well beyond academia. Russell McCutcheon offers a timely argument by taking seriously threats to the humanities now happening all across higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Haunted by the past, ordinary Okinawans struggle to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism. They are caught up in a web of people and practices--living and dead, visible and immaterial--that exert powerful forces often beyond their control. In When the Bones Speak, Christopher T. Nelson examines the myriad ways contemporary Okinawans experience, remember, and contest sacrifice. He attends to the voices of those who find their vocation in service to others, from shamans, fortune tellers, laborers, and artists to dead soldiers, war survivors, antiwar activists, and Christian missionaries. Nelson shows how the memories of past sacrifices, atrocities, and exploitation as well as residual trauma shape modern life in Okinawa and the possibility and hope for creative action grounded in the everyday. Offering new understandings of colonial transformation, wartime violence, and military occupation, Nelson writes from the intersection of temporalities and possibilities, where the hard finality of the past may be broken open to reveal a "not yet" that has always remained just beyond reach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola’s three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reimagine the Luanda cityscape. Awash with petrodollars cultivated through strategic foreign relationships, President José Eduardo dos Santos rolled out a national reconstruction program that sought to transform Angola’s capital into what he considered to be a modern, world-class metropolis. Until funds dried up in 2014, the program—in conjunction with sweeping private investments in real estate—involved mass demolitions of vernacular architecture to make way for high-rise buildings, large-scale housing projects, and commercial centers. The program thus underestimated the values enshrined in the materials and designs of Luanda’s existing “informally” constructed neighborhoods, or musseques. The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) explores the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of the city. Dr. Claudia Gastrow’s archival and ethnographic work, which includes interviews with city planners, architects, nonprofit leaders, and urban dwellers, shows how government infrastructure projects and foreign-inspired designs came to embody displacement and exclusion for many. This, Dr. Gastrow argues, catalyzed a countermovement, an aesthetic dissent rooted in critically reframing informal urbanism as Indigenous—a move that enabled the possibility of recognizing the political potential of informal settlements as spaces that produce belonging. 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

Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America examines intervention initiatives in informal settlements in Latin American cities as social, spatial, architectural, and cultural processes. From the mid-20th century to the present, Latin America and other regions in the Global South have experienced a remarkable demographic trend, with millions of people moving from rural areas to cities in search of work, healthcare, and education. Without other options, these migrants have created self-built settlements mostly located on the periphery of large metropolitan areas. While the initial reaction of governments was to eliminate these communities, since the 1990s, several Latin American cities began to advance new urban intervention approaches for improving quality of life. This book examines informal settlement interventions in five Latin American cities: Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Tijuana. It explores the Favela-Bairro Program in Rio de Janeiro during the 1990s which sought to improve living conditions and infrastructure in favelas. It investigates projects propelled by Social Urbanism in Medellín at the beginning of the 2000s, aimed at revitalizing marginalized areas by creating a public transportation network, constructing civic buildings, and creating public spaces. Furthermore, the book examines the long-term initiatives led by SEHAB in São Paulo, which simultaneously addresses favela upgrading works, water pollution remediation strategies, and environmental stewardship. It discusses current intervention initiatives being developed in informal settlements in Buenos Aires and Tijuana, exploring the urban design strategies that address complex challenges faced by these communities. Taken together, the Latin American architects, planners, landscape architects, researchers, and stakeholders involved in these projects confirm that urbanism, architecture, and landscape design can produce positive urban and social transformations for the most underprivileged. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and professionals in planning, urbanism, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, urban geography, public policy, as well as other spatial design disciplines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the fight against terrorism and extremism. Yet despite mass content takedowns, account suspensions, and mounting pressure on technology companies to do more, hate thrives online. Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism (Princeton University Press, 2025) looks at how content moderation shapes the tactics of harmful content producers on a wide range of social media platforms.Drawing on a wealth of original data on more than a hundred militant and hate organizations around the world, Dr. Tamar Mitts shows how differing moderation standards across platforms create safe havens that allow these actors to organize, launch campaigns, and mobilize supporters. She reveals how the structure of the information environment shapes the cross-platform activity of extremist organizations and movements such as the Islamic State, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and QAnon, and highlights the need to consider the online ecosystem, not just individual platforms, when developing strategies to combat extremism.Taking readers to the frontlines of the digital battleground where dangerous organizations operate, Safe Havens for Hate sheds critical light on how governments and technology companies grapple with the tension between censorship and free speech when faced with violence, hate, and extremism. 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

What does it mean to be a political subject? This is one of the key questions asked by Massimo Modonesi in ​The Antagonistic Principle: Marxism and Political Action (2019)​, published as part of the Historical Materialism book series from Brill and Haymarket books. The book takes on the theories of Marx and Gramsci to develop a philosophical triad of subalternity-antagonism-autonomy as a way of studying political subjectification under oppressive conditions and the potential for resistance. The book then looks at political developments in South and Latin America, trying to understand the underlying dynamics of both where it’s coming from, and what its possibilities are for anticapitalist resistance. Massimo Modonesi is professor and chair of the Political and Social Sciences Faculty at the Autonomous National University in Mexico, and is the author of numerous books on political theory and history in Latin America, his most recent in English being ​Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject.​ He is a member of the coordinating committee of the International Gramsci Society. Maria Vignau served as a research assistant under Modonesi, and now teaches while working on her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Upstate New York's Anti-Rent Movement is considered the last struggle over feudalism in the United States. Tenant farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk region engaged in organized protest throughout the 1840s to contest monopoly ownership of the land they worked. Arguing their cause in newspapers, on broadsides, and at rallies, their aspirations also took shape in poetry and song. More than twenty sets of lyrics (and one instrumental composition) were written at various stages of the conflict. Some of their musical sources, such as "Old Dan Tucker" and "Bruce's Address," are still well known. Each fully contextualized song offers insight into the role vernacular music played in one of the nineteenth century's major social reform movements. Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York: Including Twenty-Two New Settings of Period Tunes (SUNY Press, 2025) by Dr. Nancy Newman is the first book to gather the poetry and corresponding tunes into one publication (you can find recordings of some of the songs here). It provides detailed analysis of the repertory, followed by new musical scores of the songs, reconstructed from contemporary historical sources for study and performance. It also examines the movement's later dramatization in novels, film, and public commemorations as successive generations grapple with its meaning. 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

In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (MIT Press, 2023) is an absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstrates the singular power of the photographic image to command attention, resist closure, and complicate the meaning of the past. A faded image of a family gathered at a festively served dinner table, raising their glasses in unison. A group of small children, sitting in orderly rows, with stuffed toys at their feet and a portrait of Lenin looming over their heads. A pensive older woman against a snowy landscape, her gaze directed lovingly at a tombstone. These are a few of the evocative images in In Visible Presence by Dr. Oksana Sarkisova and Dr. Olga Shevchenko, an exquisitely researched book that brings together photographs from Soviet-era family photo archives and investigates their afterlives in Russia.In Visible Presence explores the photographic images' singular power to capture a fleeting moment by approaching them as points of contestation and possibility. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork and interviews, as well as internet ethnography, media analysis, and case studies, In Visible Presence offers a rich account of the role of family photography in creating communities of affect, enabling nostalgic longings, and processing memories of suffering, violence, and hardship. Together these photos evoke youthful aspirations, dashed hopes, and moral compromises, as well as the long legacy of silence that was passed down from grandparents to parents to children.With more than 250 black and white photos, In Visible Presence is an astonishing journey into domestic photography, family memory, and the ongoing debate over the meaning of the Soviet past that is as timely and powerful today as it has ever been. 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

Prof Mukul Sharma is a professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University. His formal training is in Political Science and has worked as a special correspondent with a leading news outlet in India and received 12 national and international awards for his environmental, rural and human rights journalism. additionally he has also been the Director Amnesty International and South Asia of Climate Parliament. His scholarly has focused on environmental politics and discourses in India and explored crucial intersections of ecology, caste, political ideology and the development rhetoric.  Abhilasha Jain is an anthropologist with an MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an MPhil in Gender Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is currently working as an independent researcher focusing on climate justice, digital infrastructure and digital rights for children/youth.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Naomi R Williams is associate professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University. Their primary research interests include labor and working-class history, urban history and politics, gender and women, race and politics, and more broadly, social and economic movements of working people. Naomi focuses on worker voice and late-capitalism at the end of the 20th century. Naomi’s research also examines the ways working people impact local and national political economies and the ways workers participate in collaborative social justice movements. Naomi engages working-class history in urban settings, looking at low-wage service work, industrial employment, and workers in higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Popular music history collides with data analytics, charts, and numbers in this insightful and surprising look at the greatest hits and musicians, fads, forgotten artists, and much more. Data analyst and musician Chris Dalla Riva reframes everything you thought you knew about music. Did you know that hit songs in the late 1950s were regularly about gruesome death? That a US vice president wrote a number one hit? That while TikTok has spawned countless hits, it's made artists more anonymous than ever before? That pop songs have shaped race relations in the United States? That the key change died around 2003? And that's just the beginning. Coupling hard data with engaging anecdotes, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves (Bloomsbury, 2025) is both a takedown and celebration of popular music and provides new ways to think about your favorite songs, genres, and artists from the last 6 decades using unexpected statistics and playful visualizations. This entertaining history is filled with the most popular musicians of all time from The Beatles and The Bee Gees to Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, and beyond. Whether you danced the twist or the dougie at your senior prom, you're sure to never listen to music again in the same way. Chris Dalla Riva lives at the intersection of music and data. Playing in bands and recording music since his teenage years, Dalla Riva is currently a Senior Product Manager at Audiomack where he focuses on data analytics and personalization. Gregory McNiff is a Managing Director in the New York office of the Blueshirt Group, an IR firm focused on technology. Greg holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, an M. Litt. in Shakespeare Studies from the University of St. Andrews and a B.A. in Classical Languages from Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In “[M]y ‘case’ to work up’: William Carlos Williams’s Paterson” (William Carlos Williams Review, Volume 41, Number 2, 2024), Walter Scott Peterson argues that as a physician-poet Dr. Williams approaches his poetic material very much as he approaches his patients, and that the form of Paterson in particular is intentionally and actually reminiscent of the various forms taken by the medical case narrative, or “work-up.” This episode concerns the poet and physician William Carlos Williams, whose mother, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams, was born and raised in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. This conversation is part of the STEM to STEAM initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, that links medicine, science, technology and engineering to the sensibilities honed in the humanities—rethinking ways to blend and combine studies in literature, poetry, history, philosophy, and the arts as more central dimensions of technical preparation. The discussion explores the profound connection between medical humanities and poetry, highlighting how their combination enriches our understanding of patient care, fosters empathy, and humanizes the medical experience. Medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field combining arts, literature, philosophy and cultural approaches to the human condition—considering each of these as insights into the emotional and ethical dimensions of healthcare. Poetry can serve as a powerful tool for expressing the complex feelings and narratives that often go unspoken in clinical settings. Blending poetry and the science of healthcare reminds us that medicine is not just a science but also an art, emphasizing compassion, understanding, and the shared human experience at the heart of healing. In this episode are: Walter Scott Peterson is a retired ophthalmologist and William Carlos Williams scholar; he is the author of the first book-length study of William Carlos Williams’s epic poem Paterson, titled An Approach to Paterson (Yale, 1967). Vamsi Koneru is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Few places are more notorious for civil rights–era violence than Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. Yet in a striking turn of events, Philadelphia has become a beacon in Mississippi’s racial reckoning in the decades since. In Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi (UNC Press, 2020) Claire Whitlinger investigates how this community came to acknowledge its past, offering significant insight into the social impacts of commemoration. Examining two commemorations around key anniversaries of the murders held in 1989 and 2004, Whitlinger shows the differences in how those events unfolded. She also charts how the 2004 commemoration offered a springboard for the trial of former Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen for his role in the 1964 murders, the 2006 passage of Mississippi’s Civil Rights/Human Rights education bill, and the initiation of the Mississippi Truth Project. In doing so, Whitlinger provides the first comprehensive account of these high profile events and expands our understanding of how commemorations both emerge out of and catalyze associated memory movements.Threading a compelling story with theoretical insights, Whitlinger delivers a study that will help scholars, students, and activists alike better understand the dynamics of commemorating difficult pasts, commemorative practices in general, and the links between memory, race, and social change. Claire Whitlinger is Associate Professor of Sociology at Furman University. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

To seek asylum, people often have to cross borders undocumented, embarking on perilous trajectories. Due to the war in Afghanistan, the rule of the Taliban, and severe human rights violations, over the past decades thousands of people have risked their lives to seek safety. By what means do they make these journeys, especially when they lack money and passports?Over the course of three years, Hannah Pool accompanied a group of Afghan friends and families as they attempted "The Game" - Game zadan: the route to Europe to seek asylum. The resulting ethnography follows them across their entire trajectories: through Iran, Turkey, Greece, and along the so-called Balkan route. In each place, Pool details the economic interactions and social relationships essential for acquiring, saving, borrowing, spending, and exchanging money to facilitate their undocumented migration routes.The Game: The Economy of Undocumented Migration from Afghanistan to Europe (Oxford UP, 2025) bridges economic sociology and migration studies to illustrate how migrants decide to trust people to facilitate their movement along these routes, focusing particularly on debt, special monies, bribes, donations, and gift-giving. Throughout the migration trajectory, relationships with family, fellow migrants, smugglers, humanitarian actors, and border control officials shape and are shaped by access to financial resources.Ultimately, the book highlights the dangers in undocumented border-crossing and delves into the core of what it means to flee: Who has the means to escape dangerous conditions to seek asylum? Hannah Pool is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Selfies are more than fleeting images—across India, they shape how people imagine themselves, connect with others, and inhabit spaces. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Xenia Zeiler from the University of Helsinki talks to Prof. Avishek Ray about his co-authored book Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India. This book explores how the digital selfie, unlike traditional photography, turns the lens inward while reconfiguring social identities, gender norms, power relations, and everyday interactions. Drawing on rich, situated examples, it shows how selfies operate as acts of self-making and place-making in contemporary India. At once playful and political, intimate and public, selfies offer a fascinating entry point into the fast-changing cultures of digital media and visual expression. Avishek Ray is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Technology Silchar, India. His research spans mobility, marginality, and digital culture, with a focus on South Asia. He is the author of The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination (Routledge, 2022) and co-author of Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India (Routledge, 2024). A Fulbright-Nehru Fellow (2021), he has held visiting fellowships at institutions across Europe, North America, and Asia. Xenia Zeiler is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research and teaching are situated at the intersection of digital media, culture, and society, specifically as related to India and global Indian communities. Her focus within this wider field of digital culture is video games and gaming research, in India and beyond. She also researches and teaches digital religion, popular culture, cultural heritage, and mediatization processes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology