New Books in Sociology

NB: This episode contains a discussion of suicide and
may not be appropriate for all listeners. If you are thinking about
hurting yourself, help is always available at 988 in the United States.

Suicide in Popular Media and Culture: Studies in Framing a Social Catastrophe
(Bristol University Press, 2026) brings together scholars from across
disciplines to examine how suicide is mythologized, politicized, and
challenged across film, TV, young adult literature, digital platforms,
online communities, and more. From news coverage of celebrity suicide to
social media interventions with at-risk youth, this wide-ranging
collection explores suicide’s intersections with class, gender, chronic
illness, and cultural identity.

The book is co-edited by Mike F. Alvarez (Assistant
Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire), Warren
J. Bareiss (Professor of Communication at the University of South
Carolina Upstate), and Jolane Flanigan (Professor of Communication
Studies at Rocky Mountain College and a licensed mental health
counselor).

Some Crisis Resources

*Note: some of these may utilize emergency services or law
enforcement to conduct wellness/welfare checks or active rescues. Ask if
these are possibilities at any point during your conversation.

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline

Website

Dial 988

The Trevor Project

Website

Provides support for LGBTQ+ youth facing crisis

1-866-488-7386

Text: 678678

Chat: Here

Crisis Text Line

Text HOME to 741-741

Trans Lifeline

1-877-565-8860 (U.S.)

1-877-330-6366 (Canada)

Warmline.org

Website

Contains links to warmlines in every state

Provides peer support

Find a Helpline

Website

For those not in the U.S. Search for links to crisis centers worldwide
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More than eleven million children in the US live in doubled-up households, sharing space with extended family or friends. These households are even more common among low-income families, families of color, and single-parent families, functioning as a private safety net for many in a country with extremely limited public support for families. Despite their prevalence, we know little about how shared households form and how they shape family life. Doubled Up is an in-depth look at the experiences of families with children living in doubled-up households.

Drawing on extensive interviews with sixty parents living in doubled-up households, Dr. Hope Harvey examines what circumstances and motivations lead families to form doubled-up households, how living in shared households affects daily routines, and how families fare after these arrangements dissolve.Dr. Harvey shows that although families rely on doubling up to get by in the face of rapidly rising housing costs, precarious labor markets, and unaffordable childcare, these private arrangements are rarely sufficient to overcome such structural barriers. And doubling up incurs its own costs for both host and guest families. For doubled-up families, negotiating household relationships and navigating shared space reshapes family life. Understanding the dynamics of doubled-up households extends scholarship on family life beyond the nuclear family and points the way toward better policies that will serve all families.

Guest: Dr. Hope Harvey is an assistant professor at the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Kentucky and a research affiliate at the Center for Poverty Research. She is the author of the award-winning book Doubled Up.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

What's On Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life

The Fight To Save The Town

You're Doing It Wrong

Raising Them

What Do You Want Out Of Life

How Girls Achieve

What Might Be

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the CUNY School of Public Health. We are discussing his book, Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since the 1960s (Columbia University Press, 2026). In March 2020, during one of the first major US outbreaks of Covid, New York became an epicenter of the spread. New York's connective tissue, like the walkable city streets, subways, and taxi cabs, became pathways of transmission. In places where ideas and cultures can spread, diseases can, too. As the hospitals began to fill, essential workers from doctors and nurses to ambulance drivers and social workers stepped up to help heal the city in a time of crisis. For a brief moment, health workers became highly visible in our public consciousness. For many, the pandemic came as a shock. It had been more than 100 years since the last pandemic of comparable magnitude hit the five boroughs. We soon discovered that there already existed a network of public health workers and activists waiting to spring into action to blunt the virus's spread. Many wished that this network had been more robust, better developed, and better funded. Fighting for New York looks at the long sweep of public health activism in New York City from the 1960s to now. Covid was not the first public health crisis the city faced, and it certainly won't be the last. Nicholas details various initiatives to mobilize support for public health projects in the city. How have activists identified problems in their communities? How have they gained institutional support in addressing these problems? And how do they discover and implement workable solutions to the identified problems? Though primarily a work of history, Fighting for New York also serves as a road map for public health workers and activists seeking to navigate contemporary issues.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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Who gets to be a creative worker? In Blame the Intern: On (Not) Breaking Into the Creative Economy, (Princeton University Press, 2026) Alexandre Frenette, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University,
examines the relationship between work and education in the difficult
moment of the early career transition from university to industry.
Drawing on a detailed case study of the music industry, the book
explains and critiques the way internships have come to dominate routes
into many careers in contemporary society. An accessible yet
theoretically rich read, the book will be of interest to creative
workers at any point in their career, as well as sociologists and
humanities scholars, along with any reader interested in how and why our
workplaces are so unequal.
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Once
dominant and institutionalised, the Yakuza, one of Japan's best known
criminal organisations, is now shrinking under the combined pressure of
legal exclusion, social stigmatisation, and market regulation. Their
membership has dropped from more than 80,000 in 2009 to fewer than
20,000 in 2025. Yet their disappearance is far from complete. Based on
extensive fieldwork with active and former members, police officers,
lawyers, and journalists, in 21st Century Yakuza: Death of Japanese Organised Crime
(Oxford University Press, 2026), Dr. Martina Baradel examines how these
organisations adapt to repression and explores what happens when a
mafia begins to die.

21st Century Yakuza
illuminates how Japan's model of regulatory saturation has dismantled
the Yakuza's organisational capacity but left behind governance vacuums
in markets the state struggles to control. This book demonstrates
how the Yakuza persist through symbolic and residual forms of authority
even as their formal power erodes, and how their decline has fragmented
the criminal underworld. It traces the transformation of the Yakuza
from territorially embedded brokers of governance to marginal actors in a
more decentralised criminal landscape, including the delegation of
trading activities to non-affiliated networks.

Through a sharp lens on criminal decline and adaptation, 21st Century Yakuza offers a compelling portrait of a fading underworld and the new forms of disorder emerging
in its wake. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the
shifting boundaries of law, authority, and illicit power in contemporary
Japan.

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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