In this episode, we talk with Lucia Trimbur about her excellent new book Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym. Lucia is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at John Jay College, the City University of New York (CUNY) and Doctoral Faculty in Criminal Justice at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Her work has been featured in journals such as Qualitative Sociology, Ethnography, and the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. During our conversation, Lucia takes us inside the gym, discussing the shifting political economy of the boxing gym, the growing number of women practicing the sweet science, and the rise of white collar clients.
Sociological Images has achieved remarkable success by virtually any metric. Not only is it the most viewed Community Page on The Society Pages, but the website also receives around 500,000 visits every month, is ‘liked’ by almost 30,000 people on Facebook, followed by over 15,000 on Twitter, and has had work appear in notable news sites including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, TIME, the Guardian, Mother Jones, the National Review, and the Atlantic,. In this episode, Lisa Wade, Associate Professor at Occidental College and editor of Sociological Images, stops by to talk about her work. We discuss some of her favorite and most popular posts on the site, her work writing sociologically for other popular outlets, and finding time to produce research and write recently completed Sociology of Gender textbook all while managing the site.
In this episode, Dr. Abigail C. Saguy joins us to talk about her excellent new book What’s Wrong with Fat? Abigail is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Chair of the ASA Section on the Sociology of the Body and Embodiment. We discuss the difficulty of talking about fatness, the way being fat is framed as a problem, the potential for removing the stigma, and what can be learned from coverage of Chris Christie’s lap band surgery.
In this episode, we talk with Holly Thorpe about her excellent book Snowboarding Bodies in Theory and Practice. We discuss the use of theory to study physical practice, the rapid growth of the sport, gender relations, marketing, the snowboarding body, and writing about sports for different audiences.
This episode we talk with Colin Jerolmack about his new book, The Global Pigeon. We discuss the social meaning attached to animals, how nature shapes our lives, efforts to control the wild, and the professionalization of pigeon racing.
This episode we talk with Jessica Holden Sherwood about her book, Wealth, Whiteness, and the Matrix of Privilege: The View from the Country Club. We learn about how country clubs work, the various mechanisms of exclusion utilized by members, and how this relates to larger discourses of privilege.
This week we are joined by David J. Leonard, professor of Critical Culture, Gender, & Race Studies at Washington State University and author of After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness. We discuss the significance of Jason Collins’s article in Sports Illustrated announcing that he is gay, the media’s reaction to him coming out, and sport as a site key site for the performance of gender and sexuality.
This episode we talk with Shai Dromi about his recent article, Penny for your Thoughts: Beggars and the Exercise of Morality in Daily Life. Dromi argues that past studies of the city have mischaracterized interactions between people passing by and people asking for money due to the focus on risk, fear, and crime. Instead, for many people in Shai’s study, homeless people’s requests for money provided a dimension of moral reflection to the urban landscape.
In this episode, we have a conversation with William Alexander. He is slightly different type of social theorist than we normally have on the podcast. Will teaches in the English Department at the Minnesota College of Arts and Design and last November he won the prestigious national book award for his first novel Goblin Secrets and the Earphones Award for narrating his book. Today Will is joining us to discuss the powers and politics of fantasy, and the relationship between fiction and the social world.
This week we continue our investigation into the world of online politics by talking with Mary Joyce about digital activism. We discuss what qualifies as digital activism, the value of research that focuses on the big picture, and the relationship between these new technologies and more traditional forms of social organizing.