Sociology for Dark Times

Over the last few months, students on college campuses all over the world have been protesting the mass slaughter in Gaza . I was one of the majority of faculty at UMass Amherst who supported our students’ encampment, and then opposed our administration’s violent assault on it. In this episode I talk with Amy Binder, whose book with Jeffrey Kidder, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left an...

A few weeks ago, Hamas murdered hundreds of unarmed people in Israel, including many children and elderly. The sadism and depravity of this killing spree was remarkable even by the standards of the long history of violence against Jews. Israel has responded with characteristic savagery, killing more than 10,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children. This orgy of collective punishment has a...

Our conversation previews a few themes from Prudence’s presidential address at the ASA annual meeting in Philadelphia this weekend. Prudence identifies key deficiencies of liberal democracies like the U.S. that have allowed the social and political regression we’re witnessing now. She has some pointed suggestions for what we sociologists should be doing in this regressive moment. Specifically, we...

Is organized labor in the U.S. making a comeback? Over the last few years, unionization efforts have proliferated across the service sector, in Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, just to name a few. The movie and TV industry is facing rare, simultaneous strikes by writers and actors. By early August, more than 300,000 UPS workers may be on strike, which would be the largest private sector strike in...

Within the next week or so, the US Supreme Court may end affirmative action as we know it. The path to this began in 1997, when the University of Michigan was sued for its affirmative action programs. My guest this month is Nadia Kim, who like me was a sociology graduate student in Michigan at the time of those lawsuits. We were both organizers for Academics for Affirmative Action and Social Justi...

This month I spoke with Anna Branch, sociologist and senior Vice President of equity at Rutgers University. Of all the sociologists I’ve talked with so far, Anna was the first to question my starting point that these are especially dark times. She asked, dark compared to when, and for whom? We discussed this in the context of Anna and Catherine Hanley’s new book Work in Black and White: Striving f...

For this episode I talked with Leslie McCall of the City University of New York. Leslie wonders if we should be asking different kinds of research questions, focusing on the possibilities for solidarity among the majority of people in the U.S. She’s particularly critical of how we, as social scientists, frame our research about political polarization. Instead of focusing so intensely on divisions...

Everything all at once: Wars. Pandemics. Climate change. Neoliberalism. Authoritarianism. White supremacy...I ask my fellow sociologists the following questions: How can we, as sociologists, intervene in this moment, individually or collectively? How has their work changed over the last few years in response to the times? What are their sources of hope for change? Cedric de Leon tells us, among ot...

Everything all at once: Wars. Pandemics. Climate change. Neoliberalism. Authoritarianism. White supremacy...I ask my fellow sociologists the following questions: How can we, as sociologists, intervene in this moment, individually or collectively? How has their work changed over the last few years in response to the times? What are their sources of hope for change? My inaugural guest is Joya Misra,...