New Books in Sociology

How Manhattan's Koreatown functions as a new ethnic enclave

In the past decade, Korean entertainment has gained global recognition, with Korean movies and TV shows winning Oscars and Emmys, and K-Pop groups becoming wildly popular. In Manhattan, Koreatown has become a popular destination for both locals and tourists, drawing them in with its bars, restaurants, and day spas. In Koreatown, NYC: The Consumption of a Transnational Brand (NYU Press, 2026), Jinwon Kim argues that Manhattan's Koreatown has become a new type of ethnic enclave, what she dubs a "transclave." This commercialized ethnic space exists solely for consumption, leisure, and entertainment, and has been shaped by South Korea's nation-branding strategy, new economic and cultural strategies, patterns in Korean migration, and shifts in tourism and urban policies in New York City.

Kim posits that for many consumers in Koreatown, especially those who are not of Korean descent, the space has become a commercialized place where transnational culture meets the diverse racial and ethnic mosaic of New York City. Kim emphasizes how the space functions to "brand Korea" as a space to "consume ethnicity," reflecting the landscape of South Korea's consumer culture through the physical appearance of buildings and stores and the inclusion of franchise brands. Ultimately, Koreatown, NYC is a fascinating exploration of the intersection of authenticity, ethnicity, and identity in the heart of New York's midtown.

Michael O. Johnston is Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His research explores symbolic interaction, leisure, meaning, place, community, and sociology of everyday life. He is the author of the forthcoming book Smalltown Urban: Performing the City in Rural America (Bloomsbury, January 2027), The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla, and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest. Smalltown Urban explores how small towns create moments of urbanity through festivals, public gatherings, and everyday social life. Since joining the New Books Network in 2017, he has interviewed more than 100 authors across sociology and the social sciences, helping connect scholars and their work with a broad public audience.
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In Oklahoma, one out of every six residents is poor. One in five children lives in poverty and faces food insecurity. In Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity (U Oklahoma Press, 2026), native son and sociologist Robert Lee Maril follows in the tradition of the national bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Evicted to illuminate the lived experience of poverty and food insecurity in communities across the state.

Maril's account is immediately personal. He begins with "guests," as shoppers are called by volunteers, waiting in line in the sweltering heat one summer for "Thy Will Be Done," a food pantry, to open. Unable to afford air conditioning, some guests don't buy foods that would spoil on the counter. One woman, Norma, carefully places only canned vegetables in her cart. When she returns to her twenty-year-old pickup, in the truck bed are lawn chairs, blankets, and pans-everything she owns. "The landlord told us this morning we was homeless," Norma says. "I'm not thinking straight."

Drawing on interviews and participant-observation data from his volunteer work at a food pantry, as well as census and sociological data, Maril documents in rich ethnographic detail the status of poverty and low-wage workers in the state today and within historical context. He explores how institutions-such as faith-based organizations, government, and food pantries-structure and shape experiences of poverty. While Maril celebrates the nonprofit and faith-based efforts that make a difference, this book also is critical of conditions and stereotypes that have entrenched poverty in the state.

Hungry Oklahoma ultimately suggests that persistent and pervasive poverty can be eliminated. Its moving accounts of real Oklahomans and their experiences make it a clarion call for not only those interested in policy issues but all Oklahomans who want a better today and tomorrow for those who call the state home.
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Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms
(Palgrave Macillan, 2026) by Dr. Galina Bogatova unpacks the hidden
imperial logic behind Russia’s dominance over its neighbors,
revealing how the Kremlin weaponizes "familial system" myths to justify
control, including its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From the Tsarist
empire to Putin’s digital propaganda, Dr. Bogatova examines how Russia
portrays itself as a disciplining “father,” a self-sacrificing “mother,”
or an “elder brother” to post-Soviet states, protecting, subjugating,
and manipulating them in the name of unity. 

Blending
psychology, discourse analysis, and historical inquiry, this
groundbreaking book exposes how language sanitizes oppression,
legitimizes conquest, and sustains imperial ambitions. A
thought-provoking exploration of power, ideology, and resistance, it
offers a fresh perspective on Russia’s enduring influence over its
former empire.

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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The Israeli destruction of Gaza has returned the idea of genocide
to the center of world politics, with sharp conflicts between the
protesters and lawyers who invoke it and the governments and media that
deny it. The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges After Gaza (Agenda Publishing, 2025), by the foremost sociological theorist of genocide, Martin Shaw, defends
the idea against thinkers who have questioned it, and argues that it is
essential to the understanding of mass atrocities. It maintains that
Gaza has opened a new age in which the West not only fails to prevent,
but also participates in genocide.

As well as discussing the
genocide idea, the book analyses the Gaza genocide in the context of the
longer histories of the problem, both globally and in Palestine.
Further chapters deal with "forgotten genocides," the attempted Russian
elimination of Ukraine, and the history of British complicity.
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From Suzy Hansen, whose previous book, Notes on a Foreign Country, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2026) is a story for a world out of joint. An absorbing account of one
neighborhood in Istanbul that has seen profound change, it offers
lessons for all of us who feel the pressure of the disorienting global
forces remaking our lives. Karagümrük, a neighborhood once dominated
by Ottoman-era homes, is now known for petty thieves, cheap apartment
blocks, and an influx of Syrian refugees. It’s here that Hansen went
looking for the truth behind the Turkish president Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan’s authoritarian turn, a catastrophic regional war, and an
accelerating geopolitical crisis. She asks: Was Turkey a harbinger of
what would soon arise in other countries, the resurgence of
authoritarianism? Or do the lives in this neighborhood, and the
transformations of Erdoğan’s Turkey, reveal a more complex story? During
a decade spent reporting from Karagümrük, Hansen discovered the
neighborhood’s secrets and got to know some of its people: Ismail, the
longtime muhtar, or neighborhood councilman; Huseyin, a loyalist in
Erdoğan’s Islamic nationalist AK Party; and Ebru, a real estate agent
and mother with ambitions to unseat Ismail. Through these local
perspectives, Hansen connects the events unfolding in Karagümrük to the
forces roiling Turkey, the Middle East, and the world, capturing the
sweep of the last ten years in microcosm.
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