In Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India (Duke UP, 2022), Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is not only a violation of the body but a language through which a range of issues—including caste and gender hierarchies, control over land and labor, and the shape of justice—are conte ... Show More
Sep 15
Tom Hulme, "Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life Before Gay Liberation" (Cornell UP, 2026)
Professor Tom Hulme's second book reconstructs the erotic and romantic lives of queer men in Belfast across roughly seventy years, from the recriminalisation of sex between men in the 1880s to the emergence of a mainstream public debate about homosexuality in the 1950s. It follow ... Show More
48m 1s
Sep 12
John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian, "Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026)
In John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian’s Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the authors put forward a comprehensive new theoretical approach to understanding laughter and the humour we use to inspire it. ... Show More
1h 7m
Mar 2023
Uddipana Goswami, "Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency" (Routledge, 2022)
Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency (Routledge, 2022) forward Assam (and Northeast India) as a specific location for studying operations of gendered power in multi-ethnic, conflict-habituated geopolitical peripheries globally. In ... Show More
56m 43s
Dec 2024
Sandhya Fuchs, "Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Stanford University Press, 2024). Against the backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement, debates around the social impact of hate crime legislation have come to the political fore. In 2019, the UN Commission on Crim ... Show More
1h 39m
Apr 2023
A Conversation About Sexual Violence
Brooke sits down with Dr. Nicole Bedera, a sociologist and leading researcher on sexual violence, to talk about the pervasiveness and danger of normalizing traumatic experiences. Brooke opens up about her own sexual assault and shares why she struggled to come forward. Then, Dr. ... Show More
33m 29s
Dec 2023
Amya Agarwal, "Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
What is the significance of gender and masculinities in understanding conflict? Through an ethnographic study conducted between 2013 and 2016, Amya Agarwal's book Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) explores the politics of competin ... Show More
36m 49s