Yesterday

Biko Koenig, "Worker Centered: Allyship & Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Worker Centered: Allyship & Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement (Oxford UP, 2024) is a close-to-the-ground, ethnographic narrative of a workplace organizing campaign at a company whose workforce was primarily low wage and immigrant. The book details the overall strategy ... Show More

1h 1m

Mar 10

Jacob Stegenga, "Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

In Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2026), philosopher Jacob Stegenga breaks with the most dominant epistemologies of science to argue that in judging scientific activity, we should focus on its justification, not the achievement ... Show More

48m 20s

Mar 10

Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress

Fifty years of changemaking and reform haven't fixed Congress—what does that reveal about American democracy? In Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress, Maya Kornberg chronicles the efforts of congressional reformers over the last fifty years and document ... Show More

54m 54s

Apr 2024

Bruce O'Neill, "Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Bruce O'Neill's Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) gets to the bottom of the twenty-first-century city, literally. Underground moves beneath Romania’s capital, Bucharest, to examine how the demands of global accumulation have extended u ... Show More

41m 57s

Apr 2024

Philipp Demgenski, "Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

In Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City (U Michigan Press, 2024), Philipp Demgenski examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the ... Show More

1h 20m

Jul 2023

António Tomás, "In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda" (Duke UP, 2022)

In his book, In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda (Duke UP, 2022), António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nation’s capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hem ... Show More

39m 44s

Sep 2023

Moisés Kopper, "Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil's Public Housing" (U Michigan Press, 2022)

Moisés Kopper's Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil's Public Housing (U Michigan Press, 2022) examines how communal idealism, electoral politics, and low-income consumer markets made first-time homeownership a reality for millions of lo ... Show More

50m 53s

Oct 2024

Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga, "A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Neighborhoods have the power to form significant parts of our worlds and identities. A neighborhood's reputation, however, doesn't always match up to how residents see themselves or wish to be seen. The distance between residents' desires and their environment can profoundly shap ... Show More

59m 21s

Oct 2023

Özge Yaka, "Fighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles" (U California Press, 2023)

Fighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles (U California Press, 2023) portrays women's intimate, embodied relationships with river waters and explores how those relationships embolden local communities' resistance to private run-of-the-river hydro ... Show More

54m 32s

Oct 2024

Lisa-Jo K. Van den Scott, "Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls" (Lexington Book, 2024)

Walls profoundly shape the spaces we live in and the places we move through, impinge on our everyday lives, and entangle power relations, identity, and hierarchies. Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls (Lexington Books, 2024) explores these effects in the context of ... Show More

53m 30s

Sep 2025

Jovana Diković, "The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia" (UCL Press, 2025)

What if rural progress isn’t about government intervention but about the self-reliance and ingenuity of peasants themselves? The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia (UCL Press, 2025) subverts conventional wisdom on rural development by shifting th ... Show More

55m 5s

Dec 2024

Carrie M. Lane, "More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

This study of organizing and decluttering professionals helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our time and energy. For a widely dreaded, often mundane task, organizing one’s possessions has taken a surprising hold on our cultural ima ... Show More

38m 43s

Apr 2025

Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ... Show More

1h 7m

Bruce O'Neill, "Underground: Dreams and ...