New Books in Sociology

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Jackie M. Blount, "Straighten Up, Girls and Boys: How Schools Have Shaped Sexuality and Gender" (Harvard Education Press, 2026)

June 21, 2026

In Straighten Up, Girls and Boys: How Schools Have Shaped Sexuality and Gender (Harvard Education Press, 2026), acclaimed historian and educator Jackie M. Blount exposes the hidden history of how American schools have carefully shaped and policed gender and sexuality--affecting every student and educator, past and present. With clarity and compassion, she invites readers not only to understand these forces, but to take action for positive change in their own school communities. Drawing on ce...

Joe P. L. Davidson, "Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times" (MIT Press, 2026)

June 17, 2026

There is no alternative. The End of History. Climate Apocalypse. It seems that our contemporary moment is defined by the idea that things can only get worse or, in the most optimistic reading, perhaps stay as they are. Ideas for things getting better, utopian ideas, seem in short supply. It is this which Joe Davidson confronts in his book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026). Davidson links this apparent decline in utopian thinking to a change in ...

David Leupold, "The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives" (Routledge, 2026)

June 15, 2026

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself. These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaki...