Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association
Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization among New Americans
Kurien, Prema A. 2025. Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization among New Americans. Oxford University Press.
Claiming Citizenship focuses on Indian American civic and political activism in the U.S. public sphere around U.S.-based and India-based issues. Indian Americans are a rising political force whose patterns of activism do not follow the unified model of mobilization of other powerful American ethnic groups. They have multiple types of advocacy organizations: those mobilizing around an Indian American identity; a South Asian American identity; organizations for Indian Americans of Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist backgrounds; organizations representing Indian American Democrats and Republicans; and even combinations of these such as the Republican Hindu Coalition that mobilized around Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016. There are also generational differences between second-generation members and the immigrant generation. Unified ethnic mobilization is rare and does not take place through a single professional advocacy organization, or even through well-coordinated campaigns.
The book examines the dialectical process through which immigrants conform to the structures and cultures of the society they have immigrated to, but also work to transform it to accommodate their unique needs. It shows the relative roles played by domestic and international influences on the political mobilization of immigrant groups in the United States as well as the importance of social media in shaping these mobilizations. Claiming Citizenship presents an excellent template to understand how religion, national identity, race, and pan-ethnicity interact in ethnic politics, in addition to examining the role that generational status plays in determining some of these patterns.
The Academic Trumpists: Radicals Against Liberal Diversity
Swartz, David L. 2025. The Academic Trumpists: Radicals Against Liberal Diversity. Routledge Press.
There has been an outpouring of research on populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and extreme right movements in Europe. Much less studied, however, is the growing political conservatism in the American academy and how it relates to populist sentiment. The Academic Trumpists addresses a gap in the research literature by looking at the impact of Trumpism on conservative faculty. It compares 109 professors who publicly support Trump to 89 conservative professors who oppose Trump. All 198 function as public intellectuals who advocated publicly their views.
Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized
Noy, Shiri 2024. Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized. University of Michigan Press.
Learning how to organize and manage research is important for both the researcher and for advancing research. However, graduate students are often trained in theories, methods, and disciplines, but rarely in the organizational, administrative, and metacognitive skills required to manage research projects. Moreover, several disciplines are decrying a reproducibility crisis, with a concerted academic push toward open-access approaches. By clearly organizing research, graduate students and researchers can ensure that they are able to account for their methodological, theoretical, and other research decisions: to reviewers, to funding agencies, and to support the development of new ideas and exciting offshoots of projects.
Defenders of the Status Quo? Energy Protests and Policy (In)Action in Sweden
Uba, Katrin and Cassandra Engeman. 2024. Defenders of the Status Quo? Energy Protests and Policy (In)Action in Sweden. Social Forces, soae166. DOI:10.1093/sf/soae166
The spread of democracy across the Global South has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country’s citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the policies they put forth? In Indicators of Democracy Diana Graizbord exposes the complex, often-hidden world of the institutions that are meant to ensure democratic accountability and transparency. Taking the case of Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), Graizbord provides a deep theory of what happens when democratic aspirations intersect with technocratic ambitions. Analyzing what it takes to establish and sustain monitoring and evaluation as a form of official state expertise, Graizbord is able to put forward the contours of technodemocracy—a democratic political project that hinges on the power of experts to shape politics in unexpected but profound ways.
Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies
Kim, Nadia Y. and Pawan Dhingra. 2023. Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies. NYU Press.
There is a growing consensus that the discipline of sociology and the social sciences broadly need to engage more thoroughly with the legacy and the present day of colonialism, Indigenous/settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism in the United States and globally. In Disciplinary Futures, a cross-section of scholars comes together to engage sociology and the social sciences by way of these paradigms, particularly from the influence of disciplines of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies.