Episodes

  • Melissa Osborne, "Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Melissa Osborne, "Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Sep 11 2024
    Why do people go to college? In Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility (U Chicago Press, 2024), Melissa Osborne, an associate professor at Western Washington University, explores the experiences of students from low income and first-generation backgrounds who attend elite universities in the USA. The book offers a vital intervention for our understanding of the role of higher education and its connection to a range of social inequalities. It captures the sometimes difficult and ambivalent experiences of students from outside the traditional demographics for elite institutions. The analysis offers a nuanced understanding of the process of social mobility, showing the struggles of students and institutions, and the limits of individually-focused approaches to social change. Rich with ethnographic and qualitative data, as well as a powerful set of ideas for elite institutional change, the book is essential reading for educators everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    48 mins
  • Morgane Cadieu, "On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Morgane Cadieu, "On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Sep 10 2024
    An analysis of social mobility in contemporary French literature that offers a new perspective on figures who move between social classes. Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them touchstones for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu's study looks at a certain kind of social climber in contemporary French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may become part of a new social class but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed idea of social affiliation. Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature (U Chicago Press, 2024) speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh critical look at tales of social mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, shedding fascinating light on upward mobility today as a formal, literary problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    55 mins
  • Sharon M. Quinsaat, "Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Sharon M. Quinsaat, "Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Sep 9 2024
    When people migrate and settle in other countries, do they automatically form a diaspora? In Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora (U Chicago Press, 2024), Sharon M. Quinsaat explains the dynamic process through which a diaspora is strategically constructed. Quinsaat looks to Filipinos in the United States and the Netherlands—examining their resistance against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, their mobilization for migrants’ rights, and the construction of a collective memory of the Marcos regime—to argue that diasporas emerge through political activism. Social movements provide an essential space for addressing migrants’ diverse experiences and relationships with their homeland and its history. A significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of migration and social movements studies, Insurgent Communities illuminates how people develop collective identities in times of social upheaval. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on the relationship between identity and place in the construction of neighborhood development. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    58 mins
  • Mariana Craciun, "From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Mariana Craciun, "From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Sep 8 2024
    From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers an examination of how novice psychiatrists come to understand the workings of the mind - and the nature of medical expertise - as they are trained in psychotherapy. While many medical professionals can physically examine the body to identify and understand its troubles - a cardiologist can take a scan of the heart, an endocrinologist can measure hormone levels, an oncologist can locate a tumor - psychiatrists have a much harder time unlocking the inner workings of the brain or its metaphysical counterpart, the mind. In From Skepticism to Competence, sociologist Mariana Craciun delves into the radical uncertainty of psychiatric work by following medical residents in the field as they learn about psychotherapeutic methods. Most are skeptical at the start. While they are well equipped to treat brain diseases through prescription drugs, they must set their expectations aside and learn how to navigate their patients’ minds. Their instructors, experienced psychotherapists, help the budding psychiatrists navigate this new professional terrain by revealing the inner workings of talk and behavioral interventions and stressing their utility in a world dominated by pharmaceutical treatments. In the process, the residents examine their own doctoring assumptions and develop new competencies in psychotherapy. Exploring the world of contemporary psychiatric training, Craciun illustrates novice physicians’ struggles to understand the nature and meaning of mental illness and, with it, their own growing medical expertise. Mariana Craciun is Associate Professor in Sociology at Tulane University. As a cultural sociologist, she is interested in the issues of expertise, professions, science, and technology. Her writings on psychotherapeutic expertise and authority and was published in top peer reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, and the Sociology of Health and Illness. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental anthropology, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 48 mins
  • Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

    Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
    Sep 2 2024
    Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science. Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself. Elizabeth A. Williams is professor emerita of history at Oklahoma State University. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    53 mins
  • Susan Greenhalgh, "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Susan Greenhalgh, "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Aug 31 2024
    Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola (U Chicago Press, 2024) takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mould research to meet industry needs. The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies. Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives. Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally. By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today. Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    20 mins
  • Regina G. Kunzel, "In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Regina G. Kunzel, "In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Aug 25 2024
    In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (U Chicago Press, 2024) explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    53 mins
  • Le Lin, "The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China's Supplemental Education Industry" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

    Le Lin, "The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China's Supplemental Education Industry" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
    Aug 21 2024
    An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s supplemental education industry. Like many parents in the United States, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children’s academic performance, are turning to for-profit tutoring businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China’s supplemental education industry is now the world’s largest and most vibrant for-profit education market, and we can see its influence on the US higher education system: more than 70% of Chinese students studying in American universities have taken test preparation classes for overseas standardized tests. The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China's Supplemental Education Industry (U Chicago Press, 2022) offers a much-needed thorough investigation into this industry. This book examines how opportunistic organizations thrived in an ambiguous policy environment and how they catalyzed organizational and institutional changes in this industry. A former insider in China’s Education Industry, sociologist Le Lin shows how and why this industry evolved to become a for-profit one dominated by private, formal, nationally operating, and globally financed corporations, despite restrictions the Chinese state placed on the industry. Looking closely at the opportunistic organizations that were founded by marginal entrepreneurs and quickly came to dominate the market, Lin finds that as their non-compliant practices spread across the industry, these opportunistic organizations pushed privatization and marketization from below. The case of China’s Education Industry laid out in The Fruits of Opportunism illustrates that while opportunism leaves destruction in its wake, it can also drive the formation and evolution of a market. Professor Le Lin’s research centers on organizations, political economy, economic sociology and social stratification, especially where these areas intersect with education and healthcare in China, the U.S. and in a transnational context. His most recent book The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China’s Supplemental Education Industry, was published by the University of Chicago Press won the Honorable Mention of the Asia/Transnational Book Award, American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2023. His articles and research have also appeared in journals such as Socio-Economic Review, Higher Education and Global Perspectives, and has won awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. Gene-George Earle is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 42 mins