New Books in Sociology

Sociology of Gender in India brings together feminist and queer scholarship to chart the changing landscape of gender debates in Indian sociology. Spanning over five decades of disciplinary evolution, this volume interrogates how gender, caste, sexuality, class, and digitalisation intersect in shaping contemporary social life. With chapters by a new generation of scholars, it critically engages with foundational debates in kinship, marriage, labour, media, nationalism, and pedagogy, while foregrounding neglected areas such as femtech, queer infrastructures, and digital precarity. The volume not only reanimates classic concerns of Indian feminist sociology but also aims to intervene in global conversations on intersectionality, decolonial knowledge, and the sociology of everyday life.
Pushpesh Kumar teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad. He has written extensively on gender and sexuality issues.
Rituparna Patgiri teaches Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research explores questions of culture, food, media, gender, and pedagogy.
Deepali Aparajita Dungdung teaches in the Department of Sociology, Ranchi University. Her research examines the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and care work within contemporary capitalism, with her more recent work focusing on language, education, and development.
Priyam Sinha is an Early-Career Fellow at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, where her work sits at the intersection of critical media industry studies, production cultures, disability studies, gender studies, and digital media development in Asia. She previously held a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, and her doctoral research was awarded by the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Her articles appear in the European Journal of Cultural Studies; Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; and South Asian Diaspora, among others. Committed to public scholarship, she is a regular host on the New Books Network and has written for the Economic and Political Weekly, the Asian Film Archive, and FemAsia. Her work can be found at here and you can follow her on X here

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With his riveting chronicle of the New York Mets baseball team, AM Gittlitz is emerging as a rising star in the field of popular social history. Writing with what the Wall Street Journal calls “the lunatic panache of a utopian manifesto,” Gittlitz weaves together the genealogies of American’s Pastime and the complex histories of race, class, ethnicity, and politics in the nation’s largest city. In this conversation, he recounts the many occasions when the tortuous trajectory of the Mets (and its precursors) collides with the major events of the metropolis and the nation. Civil rights workers, labor organizers, urban master-builders, corrupt politicians, and titans of finance and industry all make cameo appearances in his fascinating account, alongside legendary players from Jackie Robinson to Cleon Jones, Tom Seaver, and Francisco Lindor.
Read the book, Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team, and read the transcript of the interview here.
AM Gittlitz is an organizer and writer living in Ridgewood Queens. He is the author of I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism and co-host of The Wreckage podcast.
A former journalist and editor, Stephen Hubbell directs the Seven Cities Fellowship Program, part of the Ideas Workshop at the Open Society Foundations.

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An invitation to K-12 educators to reimagine their roles through the transformative lens of design In Educators as Designers, Jim Gaona Ellis draws on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the latest UDL guidelines to position teachers as creators, innovators, and problem-solvers, empowering them to craft classroom experiences that are not only accessible, but also inspiring, inclusive, and responsive to every student's unique needs. This timely and original book challenges readers to see themselves not just as implementers, but as architects capable of reshaping learning cultures and opportunities for all students. At the heart of this work is a practical toolkit that seamlessly bridges powerful design concepts--such as affordances, choice architecture, hostile design, and the design cycle--with everyday classroom realities. Gaona Ellis offers engaging vignettes, actionable strategies, and a concrete change management framework that honor teachers' expertise while guiding them to collaborate, ideate, and iterate solutions. The book doesn't shy away from addressing systemic inequities, instead arming educators with the language, habits, and mindset to foster learner agency, equity, and belonging--regardless of external constraints or shifting DEI mandates. More than a guide, this is an invitation to innovate, co-create, and lead. With storytelling at its core and a focus on practical impact, this book will inspire educators and school leaders to bring fresh clarity, delight, and possibility to their practice--one designed solution at a time.
Jim Gaona Ellis is an educator, consultant, and storyteller exploring the intersections of culture, belonging, and instructional design.
Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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During the eventful summer of 2019 in Hong Kong, the Be Water Revolution formed to resist the proposed extradition of fugitives to mainland China’s courts. With its name derived from martial arts master Bruce Lee’s adage “formless and shapeless like water,” the incident turned out to be the city’s largest episode of contentious politics and was unique for using impromptu communication among participants and the absence of central leadership.

In Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Protests (Temple University Press, 2025), Dr. Ming-sho Ho examines the dynamics of the city-wide uprising from the perspective of agency power. He seeks to understand how numerous and anonymous Hongkongers contributed to this epoch-making campaign as well as how they responded to the full-scale state repression that enveloped them. Dr. Ho praises and questions the durability of the inventive Be Water Revolution and how the activists encouraged protests spontaneously, through interpersonal networks and by voluntarily collaborating with strangers at great personal risk.

Dr. Ho posits a new concept of “collective improvisation” to make sense of such a decentralized yet creative way of protesting. Be Water seeks to understand the rise and long afterlife of this movement and illustrate its efficacy. As Dr. Ho shows, these dynamics of collective improvisation have implications for contemporary protest movements around the world.

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 would a postcarbon future look like? What would it take to build and maintain a more just, regenerative world? How would it feel to live—and to thrive—in that world? In Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026), Billy Fleming and a wide set of contributors critically engage with the above questions and more.

Around the globe, people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems in response to the climate crisis. This book guides readers through 29 of these exemplary works, which span 43 nations and 6 continents. From Cuba to Kiribati, Iceland to the Andes, the prairies of North America to the expanding Gobi Desert, these case studies foreground the tactics and modes of practice being employed, often by marginalized peoples, to create more humane, hospitable places. With dispatches from more than a dozen leading scholars working on the front lines of the climate justice movement, Building Postcarbon Futures is both a celebration of action underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers, and activists who are pushing this planet toward a future of collective flourishing.

Billy Fleming is a leading voice on the role of design in responding to the climate crisis in our cities, communities, and landscapes. He is founding codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate and political economy, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.

This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo. He is an urbanist and housing policy researcher at the Climate and Community Institute.
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