Melissa Osborne, "Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Melissa Osborne, "Polished: College, Class, a...

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Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ...  Show more

Kalpana Karunakaran, "A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras" (Context, 2026)

In this intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of her maternal grandmother Pankajam (1911–2007), Kalpana Karunakaran achieves the remarkable: capturing the singularity of an exceptional woman, even as it situates her in a social universe shaped by t ...  Show more

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Melissa Osborne, "Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
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Why do people go to college? In Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility (U Chicago Press, 2024), Melissa Osborne, an associate professor at Western Washington University, explores the experiences of students from low income and first-generation backgrounds wh ...  Show more

Pauwke Berkers and Yosha Wijngaarden, "A Sociology of Awkwardness: On Social Interactions Going Wrong" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)
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How does sociology help to explain modern life? In A Sociology of Awkwardness: On Social Interactions Going Wrong (Routledge, 2025)Pauwke Berkers, a full professor Sociology of Popular Music at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Yosha Wijngaarden, an assistant professor of Med ...  Show more

Michael D. Smith, "The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World" (MIT Press, 2023)
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For too long, our system of higher education has been defined by scarcity: scarcity in enrollment, scarcity in instruction, and scarcity in credentials. In addition to failing students professionally, this system has exacerbated social injustice and socioeconomic stratification a ...  Show more

Anthony Abraham Jack, "Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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Elite colleges are boasting unprecedented numbers with respect to diversity, with some schools admitting their first majority-minority classes. But when the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial unrest gripped the world, schools scrambled to figure out what to do with the diversi ...  Show more