New Books in Sociology

This episode featured a conversation with Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and Sanal Mohan, three scholars in the burgeoning field of Dalit Studies. We began with the significance of the 1990s as a point of departure for new work in this field and segued to the interventions made by their two edited volumes published in 2016 and 2025. We discussed the paths opened up by earlier radical historiographical paradigms, such as Subaltern Studies, which nonetheless failed to address the caste question. The guests noted three key emphases of contemporary Dalit Studies: one, centering Dalit historical agency and intellectual production; two, decentering the binary of colonialism and nationalism, and illuminating the colonial period as a complex terrain of maneuver; and three, foregrounding the importance of “the Dalit social” as a field of variegated power irreducible to the state. We ended with a discussion of the heterogeneity of Dalit sociopolitical formations, what makes “Dalit” cohere as a category, and future directions for the field of Dalit Studies.

Read the transcript here

References

Ramnarayan Rawat and K. Satyanarayana eds. Dalit Studies (Duke University Press, 2016)

Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and Sanal Mohan eds. Dalit Journeys for Dignity: Religion, Freedom, and Caste (SUNY Press, 2025)

Rajni Kothari, “Rise of the Dalits and the Renewed Debate on Caste.” In State and

Politics in India, edited by Partha Chatterjee, 439–58 (New Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 1998).

Gopal Guru, “The Language of Dalit-Bahujan Political Discourse.” In Dalit Identity and

Politics, edited by Ghanshyam Shah, 96–107 (New Delhi: Sage, 2001).

Baburao Bagul, Dalit Sahitya ajache Kranti Vidynana (Nagpur: Buddhist Publishing

House, 1978).

Belcchi: village in Patna district of Bihar where eight Dalits and three Backward Caste men were killed by members of the landowning Kurmi caste in 1977.

Keezhvenmani: hamlet in Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu where upper caste landlords burnt alive 44 Dalit agricultural laborers in 1968.

Karamchedu: village in Bapatla district of Andhra Pradesh where members of the Kamma landholding caste murdered six Dalit men, raped three Dalit women, and displaced hundreds of Dalit families in 1985.

Vempenta: village in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh where, in response to the killing of a village official by the People’s War Group, landholders killed more than thirty Dalits and burned more than 100 of their houses in 1998.

Chundur: village in Bapatla district of Andhra Pradesh where members of the Reddy landholding caste killed eight Dalit men in 1991.

Mandal Commission:

Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue

B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste

Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra.

NTR: Indian actor and politician who served as the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh for four terms between 1983 and 1995.

Mahad Satyagraha: mass mobilization by B.R. Ambedkar to claim Dalit access to a public water tank in Mahad, Maharashtra.

Ayyankali: Indian social reformer and lawmaker who worked for the advancemetnt of Dalits in the princely state of Travancore.

Ad Dharm: an anticaste movement in the 1920s that claimed a distinct identity for Dalits separate from Hinduism and Sikhism.

Adi Hindu Mahasabha: sociopolitical organization founded in 1923 by Dalit leader Swami Achhutanand in Uttar Pradesh that claimed for Dalits the identity of originary Hindus.

IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology
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Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest (U Nebraska Press, 2026) centers on the tiny community of Bishop Hill, Illinois, whose marketing materials call it “Utopia on the Prairie,” home to a radical communal religious sect that emigrated from Sweden in the 1840s. Through rich textual and ethnographic analyses, Dr. Margaret E. Farrar and Dr. Adam Kaul tell the story of what happens when a small, historically significant Midwestern community negotiates the contradictory impulses of twenty-first-century place-making. At first glance, Bishop Hill is simply a small heritage tourism destination in Midwestern flyover country, but further inspection reveals it to be a complex place that mixes a deep nostalgia for the past undercut by complex origin stories of displacement and colonialism, an active historic preservation movement amid futuristic green energy technologies built by multinational corporations, and a commitment to localism in the context of omnipresent globalization.

Based on fifteen years of fieldwork, Becoming Utopia is an interdisciplinary contribution to conversations about the importance and meaning of place-making, heritage-making, and sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) in the twenty-first century.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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What role do microbes play in aquaponic farming and cultivated meat production, and how might such novel food technologies impact microbiomes? In this episode, Ishita Dey of Gastronomica hosts Lukáš Senft, Tereza Stöckelová, and Varvara Borisova in a conversation about their new article, “The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods: The Pro- and Antibiotic Implications of Cultivated Meat and Aquaponic Farming.” In a discussion that connects food futures with environment, sustainability, health, and technology, the research team shares insights from their multisited ethnography of indoor vertical farms, bioreactors, and alternative food production in Czechia. They illuminate the emergence of new food technologies and the regulatory landscape, discuss the demand for protein and alternative protein sources, and reflect on the broader implications for microbial diversity and resilience-building in food systems.

“The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods: The Pro- and Antibiotic Implications of Cultivated Meat and Aquaponic Farming” by Lukáš Senft, Tereza Stöckelová, and Varvara Borisova, appears in issue 26.1 of Gastronomica. Their article is one of eleven in a newly published special section on microbes in food and food systems. Learn more about the two-part special section and access the articles in the Spring 2026 and Summer 2026 issues of the journal.

Lukáš Senft has a PhD in sociology from Charles University and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His work on food systems has explored topics related to small-scale farming, mushroom foraging, precision agriculture, and the use of medicinal plants through multispecies ethnography and public scholarship.

Tereza Stöckelová is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and also an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Charles University. An expert in social studies of science, her current research on food and health focuses on extended metabolism in relation to bodies, ecologies, and technologies.

Varvara Borisova recently completed her PhD in anthropology at Charles University and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences where she is pursuing research on science and technology, obesity, metabolism, and alternative proteins.

Ishita Dey is an assistant professor of sociology at South Asian University and a member of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective. Her new book, a multisited ethnography of sweet-making titled Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal, was published by Routledge in 2025.

Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies is published by the University of California Press. Quarterly issues are available in print and online.

Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network. Subscribe to Gastronomica’s podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes.
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The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life
(MIT Press, 2026) explores the far-reaching influence of the Japanese
department store on modern life and our imaginations. In this gorgeously
illustrated volume, Dr. Nozomi Naoi explains how Japanese department
stores modeled
“the new modern Japanese life and identity” through print media and
design, physical and imagined space, and the new experiences that these
spaces offered. The stores created the notion of a modern subject
enjoying a “land of happiness”—and this, in turn, shaped the wider
sociological context, including emerging roles for women and perceptions of coloniality.

The
book focuses on three areas: the mediascape of proliferating department
store posters, advertisements, commercial design, promotional
magazines, and merchandise; the physical space, such as the
Western-style architecture that characterized many of these early
department stores, and the imagined “modern space” created within their
walls; and, finally, the production of a novel “dreamworld,” which
included dining spaces with children’s menus, new technology such as
elevators and escalators, and more.

Although
the research on department stores and their role in the quotidian
experience is vast, there is nothing like this study, which is uniquely
grounded in an art-historical approach that draws on the visual media
environment of early twentieth-century Japan and its impact on the
everyday.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Kazakhstan inherited the remnants of one of the world's most contaminated landscapes: the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known locally as the Polygon. Resigned to dispossession, residents have chosen to remain on the abandoned nuclear test site, despite the isolation and the radioactive environment, rather than face marginalization or the rigors of a neoliberal world. Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan (University of Toronto Press, 2025) examines this nuclear legacy through a decade-long ethnographic examination of the village of Koian, situated on the border of the test site. Facing residual radiation all around them and isolation, Koianers persist, reshaping their pastoral existence among the ruins and scientific debates surrounding genetic damage.

Drawing on first-hand accounts and archival research, this book explores the resilience and everyday survival strategies of a community left behind to fend for itself in the shadow of nuclear testing. It offers a unique perspective on life in a nuclear zone and poses fundamental questions about human resilience and the impact of historical events on a collective identity. Atomic Collective sheds light on a community overlooked in the larger Cold War histories of atomic testing.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology