• Arlie Russell Hochschild (Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley) appeared on Next Question with Katie Couric, discussing her book Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. The book describes how residents of Pikeville, KY, a small city where 80% of 2016 voters supported Donald Trump, felt a pervasive sense of economic loss and why Trump’s messages resonated with them. In response to the 2024 election, Hochschild comments: “I feel like America is now living with two denials. There’s the denial of the Democratic side of America that is [] really denying what a big sector of America that has faced tremendous loss and has lost faith in the government’s response to that… But there’s a denial on the Right side of the aisle. Republicans that may have voted for a man for one reason—the border, the price of gas. But we are facing, I think, a danger to democracy and I think there is a discounting and a denial of that on the Right side of America.” Stolen Pride was recently recognized by the New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2024.
  • On Dec. 3rd, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, prompting widespread protests. He rescinded the decision six hours later. Gi-Wook Shin (Professor of Sociology and Director of the Asia-Pacific Research Center and Korean Studies Program at Stanford University) described the decision as a “surprising last-ditch move by Yoon to grab political power” amid low approval ratings. Shin appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered, discussing the future of democracy in Korea: “I think for a short term, there will be a lot of uncertainties and maybe instability in politics and society, maybe even in the economy. But in the long run, I think Korea has strong democratic institutions… And I remain optimistic, especially that such a move like martial law, you know, failed, you know, quite badly and very quickly.”
  • The New York Times ran an opinion piece featuring Allison Pugh’s (Professor of Sociology at John Hopkins University) new book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World. Pugh’s work reveals how technology––particularly artificial intelligence–has permeated work that requires “connective labor” and how “being able to have a human attend to your needs has become a luxury good.” However, Pugh commented that a dystopian future is not inevitable despite advances in interactive AI, because “humans lose interest in interacting with machines after a while, partly because of machine predictability.”
  • The Ink ran an article featuring Musa Al-Gharbi’s (Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University) new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. “One of the key arguments of the book,” Al-Gharbi explains, “is that in many respects — and somewhat troublingly, from my perspective – social justice discourse is increasingly used by symbolic capitalists [elites who are committed to social justice], by the winners and the prevailing order of people who have been succeeding and flourishing, to justify inequalities. People who are losing, and suffering, and getting left behind, who feel like their values and interests are not reflected in our institutions, we [symbolic capitalists] point to those people and say, Good. They deserve to be marginalized. They deserve to be ignored. And we do this in the name of social justice. We use social justice, in many cases, to legitimize inequalities.”
  • Danielle Lindemann (Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University) was quoted in an Epic Stream article about what reality television reveals about our culture. Lindemann argues that reality TV provides a reflection of real-life people and social problems (like inequalities based on race, class, gender, or sexuality): “For all of its extreme personalities and outlandish premises, reality TV reflects how regressive we truly are.”