• Dana R. Fisher (Director of the Center for Environment, Community & Equity at American University) recently published a new book: Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action. Fisher argues that we need an “AnthroShift” (a “broad-based and yet deeply ingrained change of perception and behavior”) to address climate change: “Without a sustained shock that has tangible consequences in terms of social costs to people and property, the subsequent change will be ephemeral.” The book was reviewed by Yale Climate Connections.
  • Argentinian sociologist Agustín Teglia is using chess workshops as a tool to foster socialization among young people who are vulnerable to violence and marginality. “It’s a good way to generate a mediator, a common code to form a group. There can be children of different ages and levels, and each one has a role to receive and integrate classmates or teach them rules,” Teglia describes. This story was covered by Scroll.in.
  • Tressie McMillan Cottom (Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina) wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times on how O.J. Simpson will be remembered “as a spectacle.” Cottom discusses how Simpson received “a kind of carte blanche usually reserved for powerful white men, because his public mythology erased his private abuses” and how, during his infamous murder trial, Simpson’s legal team presented him as a symbol of “Black martyrdom” following the acquittal of L.A. police officers for the beating of Rodney King. “He wanted to be above the rules not because of what he was but because of who he was,” Cottom writes. “It’s the height of karmic irony, then, that what ultimately made Simpson special was the way his Blackness — that socially constructed distance from the white acceptance he so clearly craved — will forever define his legacy.”
  • Apryl Williams (Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan) recently published a new book: Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating. The book combines technical analysis, interviews, and a historical analysis of racism and romance to discuss how the algorithms of dating sites that sort users to predict attraction are racially informed. “By matching users with others who look like them, dating platforms both reflect and reinforce racial stereotypes and biases common in American culture, which attribute attractiveness and desirability to certain groups and rank others as less attractive.” This story was covered by The Harvard Gazette.
  • Alex Kotlowitz recently reviewed The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels for The Atlantic. The book, by Pamela Prickett (Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam) and Stefan Timmermans (Professor of Sociology at UCLA), utilizes interviews to profile four individuals whose bodies were unclaimed upon their death to show how “some human deaths are valued less than others.” Matt Desmond praised the book as “[a] rare and compassionate look into the lives of Americans who go unclaimed when they die and those who dedicate their lives to burying them with dignity.” Kotlowitz’s review highlights how the book left him feeling surprisingly hopeful: “What is so remarkable about the lives of these people is how, despite their personal quirks and injuries, others took them in, embraced them, made them feel a part of a community.”