In today's episode of The Annex, we discuss the inner world of political campaigns with Daniel Laurison (Swarthmore). Daniel is the author of Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us (Penguin).

In today's episode of The Annex, we explore the relationship between money and science with David Reinecke (Princeton University), whose work examines what happens to large scientific projects when funding runs out. David is the author of "When Funding Fails: Planetary Exploration at NASA in an Era of Austerity, 1967 - 1976" in Social Studies of Science and "Moonshots to Nowhere? The Metroliner and Failed High-Speed Rail in the United States, 1962- 1977" in Journal of Transport History,

In today's episode of The Annex, Daniel Morrison (Abilene Christian University) sits down with Seth Abrutyn (University of British Columbia) and Omar Lizardo (UCLA) to discuss classical sociological theory and their Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory (Springer).

In today's episode of The Annex, we discuss how Americans misunderstand China and its political system. We imagine a society in which the government controls what people know and what they say.  We hear about government filters and censorship, and how democracy activists are punished for their speech.  But is it all so simple?

In this episode of The Annex Live, we will sit down to learn the details of China's political and government system with two experts.  Ya-Wen Lei (Harvard University) is is the author of The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China (Princeton University Press), a book that examines the development of the Chinese public sphere through during the Internet revolution.  Emily Chua (National University of Singapore) is the author of the upcoming The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era (University of Michigan Press), a book about the detailed inner workings of the Chinese media and how these relationships shape journalism and governance in that country.

Some manifestations of racism are easily identifiable.  Practices that do things like promoting racial residential segregation, facilitating race-based job discrimination, or the unequal application of criminal law across races are clear examples of social behaviors that harm people of color and perpetuate white supremacy.  Others are difficult to see, even when looking directly at them.  In this episode, we will discuss how white supremacy subtly suffuses culture through a look at Raul Perez's new book, The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (2022, Stanford University Press), and related work being done in the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Minorities.

Our panelists include:

• Raul Perez (University of La Verne)
• Ann Morning (New York University)
• Victor Ray (University of Iowa)

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It is easy to profess a commitment to human rights.  Making those rights a reality can be an arduous and complicated process.  What can sociologists tell us about the process by which governments are forced to respect human rights, if they are forced to do so at all?  Our discussion will be anchored by Lisa Hajjar's (UC Santa Barbara) new book, The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight Against Torture (2022, University of California Press), which tells the story of the long, arduous battle by human rights lawyers to stop the government practice of torture during the War on Terror.  We will discuss how this study and similar recent work in this space can help inform our efforts to establish and enforce basic human rights, and other currents of sociology that inform our struggles with war and conflict.

Our panelists include:

• Lisa Hajjar (University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Christopher NJ Roberts (University of Minnesota)
• Hedi Viterbo (Queen Mary University of London)

In this episode, Daniel Morrison interviews Elizabeth Popp-Berman from the University of Michigan Organization Studies. Her new book,  Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, discusses how economic styles of thinking have come to dominate economic policy discussions.

Today's episode of The Annex discusses the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology, with a focus on J.P Pardo-Guerra's new book, The Quantified Scholar (2022, Columbia University Press).  This book examines modern British efforts to improve research through the development of quantitative metrics and metric-related incentive systems, and how this scheme altered the behavior of scientists and academic departments.  The study stands as one example of modern sociology’s efforts to understand how the organization and incentivization of scientists affect the character of how scientists do their work and what kind of information gets produced.

Our banter discusses America's largest sociology departments.

Panelists include:

• JP Pardo-Guerra (UC San Diego)
• Charles J. Gomez (Arizona)
• Joseph N. Cohen (CUNY Queens College)
• Daniel R. Morrison (Abilene Christian)