Recent Books

Publication year: 2025
Laura Garbes

National Public Radio was established in 1970 with a mission to provide programming for all Americans, yet the gap between public radio’s pluralistic mandate and its failure to serve marginalized communities has plagued the industry from the start. Listeners Like Who? takes readers inside the public radio industry, revealing how the network’s sound and listenership are reflections of its inherent whiteness, and describing the experiences of the nonwhite journalists who are fighting for change.

Drawing on institutional archives, oral histories, and original in-depth interviews with journalists of color in public radio, Laura Garbes shows that when NPR and its affiliate stations first began their appeals for donations from “listeners like you,” it was appealing to white, well-educated donors. She discusses how this initial focus created a sustainable financial model in the face of government underfunding, but how these same factors have alienated broad swaths of nonwhite and working-class audiences and limited the creative freedoms of nonwhite public radio workers. Garbes tells the stories of the employees of color who are disrupting the aesthetic norms and narrative practices embedded in the industry.

Centering sound in how we think about the workplace and organizational life, Listeners Like Who? provides insights into the media’s role in upholding racial inequality and the complex creative labor by nonwhite journalists to expand who and what gets heard on public radio.

Publication year: 2025
Josh Page and Joe Soss

Alongside the rise of mass incarceration, a second profound development has transpired. Since the 1980s, U.S. policing and punishment have been remade into tools for stripping resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and turning them into public and private revenues. Legal Plunder explores this development’s origins, operations, consequences, and the political struggles that surround it. Leveraging historical and contemporary evidence and original ethnographic research, Joshua Page and Joe Soss analyze what they call the predatory dimensions of criminal legal governance. Readers will learn how, as tax burdens have declined for the affluent, practices that criminalize, police, and punish have been retrofitted to siphon resources from subordinated groups, subsidize governments, and generate corporate profits. Financial extraction, now a core function of the country’s sprawling criminal legal apparatus, compounds race, class, and gender inequalities and injustices. Legal Plunder compellingly dissects how and why we can no longer afford to overlook legal plunder nor the efforts to dismantle it.

Publication year: 2025
David Knoke

Collective action asks a fundamental question in social science: How do sets of actors choose courses of action and work together to achieve desired outcomes, often in opposition to other coalitions? Psychological and economic rationality explanations are incomplete in emphasizing the mental decision processes of individuals. Collective action must be understood at the level of analysis of interpersonal and interorganizational relations. Social network theories and methods provide optimal frameworks for explaining collective action in a variety of settings. This book reviews theories and empirical research on collective action in several substantive areas, demonstrates how agent-based models can analyze collective action networks (pandemics, riots, social movements, insurrections, insurgencies), and concludes with speculations about future research directions.

Publication year: 2025
Carolyn A. Liebler and Miri Song

How do racially mixed people navigate racial boundaries as they choose spouses and raise families? Mixed Heritage in the Family draws on census data and interviews with Asian-White, Black-White, and American Indian/Alaska Native-White mixed people, showing how complicated racial identification can be and how it can impact family life.

Publication year: 2024
Gidwani, Vinay, Michael Goldman, and Carol Upadhya, eds.

Over the past two decades, Bengaluru’s exploding real estate sector and massive infrastructure investments have led to land speculation targeting working-class neighborhoods and agricultural land for development. Chronicles of a Global City turns Bengaluru inside out to examine its “world-city” transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth.

Publication year: 2024
Michael Goldman, Nancy Lee Peluso, Wendy Wolford, eds. 

From the shaping of new homelands in the Cherokee Nation to the export of sand from Cambodia to shore up urban expansion in Singapore, The Social Lives of Land reveals the dynamics of contemporary social and political change. The editors of this volume bring together contributions from across multiple disciplines and geographic locations.

Publication year: 2024
Michelle S. Phelps

The eruption of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence in 2014 spurred a wave of police reform. One of the places to embrace this reform was Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city long known for its liberal politics. Yet in May 2020, four of its officers murdered George Floyd. Fiery protests followed, making the city a national emblem for the failures of police reform. In response, members of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to “end” the Minneapolis Police Department. In The Minneapolis Reckoning, Michelle Phelps describes how Minneapolis arrived at the brink of police abolition.