New Books in Sociology

A powerful exposé of the American public education system's indifference toward marginalized children and the "slow violence" that fashions schools into hostile work and learning environments.In 2017, sociologist Ranita Ray stepped inside a fourth-grade classroom in one of the nation’s largest majority-minority districts in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was there to conduct research on the lack of resources and budget cuts that regularly face public schools. However, a few months into her immersion, a disturbed Ray recognized that that greatest impediment to students was the “slow violence” that preys on their minds, bodies, and spirits at the hands of teachers and administrators who are charged with their care.Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom (St. Martin's Press, 2025) lays bare the routine indifference, racism, and verbal and emotional abuse and harassment that teachers and administrators perpetrate routinely against the most vulnerable children in our schools. We meet Nazli, a bright, funny Black girl, and math wiz, who loses her baby brother, and is told that “grit” will enable her to rise above her grief. Reggie is a devoted student and curious scholar, but his path to success is derailed when teachers fashion him as a predator after they find him looking at two inappropriate photos on his iPad. There’s Nalin, a shy and determined Filipina who has just arrived in the US, but is ignored based on her educator’s assumption that “Asians” are “good at math.” Her entire journey through school is darkened by this stereotype. And there’s Miguel, a sharp, distracted Latino boy who can’t overcome his teachers’ urge to incorrectly diagnose him with autism.Bolstered by an empathetic and passionate voice as well as the latest breaking research in the social sciences, Ray goes beyond timeworn discussions about the school-to-prison pipeline, funding, and achievement gaps to directly address what happens behind the closed doors of classrooms, introducing a compelling—and crucial—new perspective into the conversation about our education system.In the warm, luminous spirit of character-driven books like Invisible Child, Slow Violence allows us to see that the way we’ve tried to make a start in education reform is wrong. To forge new approaches that foster young minds and flourishing generations we have to start with how children experience the classroom. Unflinchingly, Slow Violence tells us—and shows us where to begin.
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In Straighten Up, Girls and Boys: How Schools Have Shaped Sexuality and Gender (Harvard Education Press, 2026), acclaimed historian and educator Jackie M. Blount exposes the hidden history of how American schools have carefully shaped and policed gender and sexuality--affecting every student and educator, past and present. With clarity and compassion, she invites readers not only to understand these forces, but to take action for positive change in their own school communities.

Drawing on centuries of school design, hiring practices, and classroom curriculum, Blount uncovers how seemingly neutral decisions--from the layout of restrooms to textbooks and teacher roles--have been used to enforce binary gender norms and rigid expectations around sexuality. She explores the implications for both students and educators, highlighting moments of resistance and progress, but also the persistence of exclusion and harm. Through vivid historical storytelling and fresh analysis, Blount connects the dots between age-old anxieties and today's most pressing debates around LGBTQ+ issues in schools.

This book empowers educators with the knowledge and historical context needed to question entrenched practices and build more supportive school cultures. Encouraging both critical reflection and practical action, Blount's work is a vital resource for anyone committed to fostering respect and opportunity for every member of the school community.

Jackie M. Blount is professor emeritus of educational studies at the Ohio State University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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There is no alternative. The End of History. Climate Apocalypse. It
seems that our contemporary moment is defined by the idea that things
can only get worse or, in the most optimistic reading, perhaps stay as
they are. Ideas for things getting better, utopian ideas, seem in short
supply. It is this which Joe Davidson confronts in his book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026).
Davidson links this apparent decline in utopian thinking to a change in
‘time consciousness’, the ways in which our sense of the future seems
less open to possibility than it once was. Despite this he notes the
persistence of utopianism in a new form, the ‘postdystopian utopia’
which takes account of the assumption the future will be worse and uses
this as a spur to utopian thinking. He then explores how this manifests
itself in various utopian works in different traditions, from Black
utopianism considering the tragedy of the slave trade, feminism mining
the nostalgia of previous battles to consider how things could be
different and climate change utopianism confronting catastrophe.

In our discussion we explore the changing fortunes and forms of
utopianism over time, the value of ‘utopian studies’, why Silicon Valley
tech-bros might be as utopian (or dystopian) as they make out and think
about why it is important we all imagine the possibility of different
worlds. Joe also makes a number of reading recommendations for
postdystopian utopian novels.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts.
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What
does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit
cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the
question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only
to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but
to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered
radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism
itself.

These
ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking
internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city
from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists
to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country’s
Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a
science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to
rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical
South, The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026)
explores the material and immaterial legacies of
socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To
this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban
sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing
visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using
varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the
book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity,
polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the
social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political
center
in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and
linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness
within the regional dynamics of the Global South.

David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin. 

This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee,
PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of
postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and
environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia. 
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The 21st Century in 100 Games (Routledge India, 2024) is an interactive public history of the contemporary world. It creates a ludological retelling of the 21st century through 100 games that were announced, launched and played from the turn of the century.

Aditya Deshbandhu is Senior Lecturer of Communications, Digital Media Sociology at the University of Exeter, UK. A researcher of video game studies, new media, and the digital divide, he examines how people engage with digital artefacts and seeks to understand how these interactions shape everyday lives. As someone who actively examines digital acts of leisure, his research in the last decade has examined social media and streaming platforms alongside video games and digital cultures. He is also the author of Gaming Culture(s) in India: Digital Play in Everyday Life and also serves as an editor for this book series.

Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore, Singapore.
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