New Books in Sociology

An unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US—and why even affluent Black women are imperiled by substandard care.From a leading expert on race, class, maternal health, and reproductive rights.Racism in maternal healthcare is not reserved for the poor. An unsparing picture of inequities in prenatal care and childbirth in the United States, Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans (MIT Press, 2026) reveals that not only are black people three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause, but racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels. That is, wealthier black people are much more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period than their white counterparts. Focusing on a San Francisco obstetrics clinic that caters to the affluent, Khiara Bridges looks at the choices around prenatal care and childbirth that class-privileged, pregnant black people are making in order to survive what has been called the “black maternal health crisis.”Bridges, whose previous work exposed how race and racism are embedded in maternal healthcare for the poor, draws on two years of participant-observation to show how wealthier black people try to leverage their class privilege to avoid some of the negative effects of their blackness—only to discover that in a country that has never reckoned with its horrific racial past, there is no escaping racism’s reach. Throughout the book, engaging, heartbreaking, infuriating stories of women’s experiences with pregnancy and prenatal care illustrate how race and racism matter regardless of wealth or status.
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Sustainability has become a touchstone for development worldwide,
promising an antidote to environmental degradation and capitalism's
excess: waste. Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe (Stanford University Press, 2025)
presents a fundamentally different account of sustainability and waste
itself by uncovering the intersections of international environmental
reforms and racialized labor. In Bulgaria, Roma comprise the bulk of the
country's waste workers, while anti-Roma racism casts them as socially
disposable. Without their labor, however, the country cannot meet the
sustainability targets required by the European Union. Drawing on
fieldwork that spans twenty years, including eleven months working
alongside Romani women street sweepers, and years embedded in waste
organizations, political campaigns, Roma NGOs, and activist groups,
Elana Resnick examines the power hierarchies that shape both waste
management and European geopolitics.

Instead of focusing on only environmental harms or toxic distributions, Refusing Sustainability approaches
Romani life-worlds as spaces of creative production, and also tells
several larger stories: of postsocialist racial capitalism,
environmental progressivism, democratic failures, mutual aid, and the
power of women's friendships. Through these stories, Resnick illuminates
how ordinary people, racialized as discardable, resist systems that
simultaneously rely on and exclude them.
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We use avatars to play video games. We use pseudonyms on social
media. We use VPNs to mask our identities and activities. In the digital
realm, anonymity is everywhere, a persistent option for those who wish
to hide, experiment, and deceive. But we are anonymous in more contexts
than the digital. In urban settings, we routinely experience the
anonymity of the crowd, and routinely use anonymity to participate in
political life and social protests. Anonymity matters. This book is a
wager that we can learn much about society, humanity, and power by
analyzing the structural tensions and possibilities of anonymity, and by
analyzing how the economy of anonymity is changing in a modernity
defined by computation.

While many have explored the connections between surveillance,
datafication, and privacy, relatively little has been done to theorize
anonymity and its critical role in our lives. The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification (Stanford University Press, 2026) rebalances
our intellectual investments by expanding our understandings of
anonymity. Putting the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Bernhard Siegert into
conversation, Hector Amaya examines the contours of anonymity in
different social domains—in relationship to individuals, institutions,
and contexts; to epistemology and ontology; and to history and society.
As the book shows, anonymity entails paradoxical possibilities—sometimes
anonymity is experienced as freedom and other times as powerlessness,
or subjugation.
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In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's natality principle (that new things are always and should always be being born, each one unique and endowed with limitless potential) we at RTB love it when a new podcast appears. Especially one as thoughtful and original as The Caste Pod, which assembles scholars and activists to make sense of what caste is, how it's experienced and how it has travelled globally.

Join us to discuss and share an extended excerpt is its widely published (check out her earlier books!) founder Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, and producer (with Lori Allen) of the “Violent Majorities” series here at RTB.

John and Ajantha delve into the founding of the podcast, and then enter into the business end of the series, which is to explore the complex interplay between caste, race and class as organizing features of economic inequality and its corresponding features of cultural discrimination and oppression.

Ajantha's extended conversation with Prachi and Ram of Savera, a multiracial, interfaith, anti-caste coalition of Indian Americans from The Caste Pod episode 10 lays bare its premise: to put scholars and activists into conversation and opens a space engineered for each to learn form the other.

Before introducing the Savera excerpt, Ajantha frames the topic by way of Isabel Wilkerson's influential (if problematic) book Caste and its neglect of class and economic issues, and also the case against Cisco for caste discrimination in California that in significant ways internationalized the fight around caste's role in perpetuating economic and political inequity.

Listen and Read Here.
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NB: This episode contains a discussion of suicide and
may not be appropriate for all listeners. If you are thinking about
hurting yourself, help is always available at 988 in the United States.

Suicide in Popular Media and Culture: Studies in Framing a Social Catastrophe
(Bristol University Press, 2026) brings together scholars from across
disciplines to examine how suicide is mythologized, politicized, and
challenged across film, TV, young adult literature, digital platforms,
online communities, and more. From news coverage of celebrity suicide to
social media interventions with at-risk youth, this wide-ranging
collection explores suicide’s intersections with class, gender, chronic
illness, and cultural identity.

The book is co-edited by Mike F. Alvarez (Assistant
Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire), Warren
J. Bareiss (Professor of Communication at the University of South
Carolina Upstate), and Jolane Flanigan (Professor of Communication
Studies at Rocky Mountain College and a licensed mental health
counselor).

Some Crisis Resources

*Note: some of these may utilize emergency services or law
enforcement to conduct wellness/welfare checks or active rescues. Ask if
these are possibilities at any point during your conversation.

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline

Website

Dial 988

The Trevor Project

Website

Provides support for LGBTQ+ youth facing crisis

1-866-488-7386

Text: 678678

Chat: Here

Crisis Text Line

Text HOME to 741-741

Trans Lifeline

1-877-565-8860 (U.S.)

1-877-330-6366 (Canada)

Warmline.org

Website

Contains links to warmlines in every state

Provides peer support

Find a Helpline

Website

For those not in the U.S. Search for links to crisis centers worldwide
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