This episode we’re reading Sociology Non-Fiction! We discuss the differences between sociology and psychology, what Karl Marx and Aziz Ansari have in common, the over-educated but kind-of-broke worker, and the difficulties of reading books that make us both sad and angry. Plus: Pandemic Monkey Brains!
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In this episode
Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Amanda Wanner
Things We Read (or tried to read)
- From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty
- Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks (this is better than Matthew implied in the episode, it is worth reading)
- Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
- Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
- The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr
- Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg
- Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell
- All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers and the Myth of Equal Partnership by Darcy Lockman
- Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen
- What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon
Other Media We Mentioned
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshona Zuboff
- Disasters: A Sociological Approach by Kathleen Tierney
- The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification by Randall Collins
- Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability by Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder
- Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity by Elizabeth Hallam, Glennys Howarth, Jenny Hockey
- The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman
- Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America by Michael Ruhlamn
- Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal by Abigail Carroll
- Death of Sandra Bland (Wikipedia)
- Food Mirages in Guelph, Ontario: The Impacts of Limited Food Accessibility and Affordability on Low-income Residents by Benjamin Reeve (not mentioned during the episode, but this is someone’s actual sociology thesis that Matthew thinks is neat)
- Body Politics: Power, Sex, and Nonverbal Communication by Nancy M. Henley (Amanda meant to mention this book but forgot!)
Links, Articles, and Things
- Where Do Librarians Come From? Examining Educational Diversity in Librarianship by Rachel Ivy Clarke (I think this is way less humanities-focussed than our program was…)
- Michel Foucault (Wikipedia)
- Dr. Thomas Kemple
- Readers’ Advisory for Library Staff (Facebook Group)
- JUMPSUIT – “Jumpsuit: how to make a personal uniform for the end of capitalism”
- Code Switch (NPR Podcast)
- Louder Than A Riot (NPR Podcast)
- According to Need (99% Invisible Podcast)
- Sabrina and Friends: Answers in Progress
- How Conspiracy Theories Work (a good example of a video showing the research process)
- Trader Joe’s (Wikipedia)
- What does it mean to be working class in Canada? (Macleans article)
15 Sociology Books by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors
Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.
- Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation by Oluwakemi M. Balogun
- W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America edited by by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert
- The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs & Scott Kurashige
- Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
- Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis
- Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
- Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims by Hussein Kesvani
- I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism by Lee Maracle
- Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and The Fight Against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson
- Finding Latinx: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity by Paola Ramos
- Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles by Rocío Rosales
- Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
- Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Venkatesh
- Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada by Chelsea Vowel
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
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Join us again on Tuesday, January 19th when we’ll be talking about our Reading Resolutions for 2021!
Then on Tuesday, February 2nd, just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’ll be doing our annual romance fiction episode and talking about the genre of Regency Romance!