Review of “In This Place Called Prison: Women’s Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment” By Rachel Ellis University of California Press, 2023, 280 pages price: $95:00 (cloth) / $29.95 (paper) / $29.95 (eBook). https://www.ucpress.edu/books/in-this-place-called-prison/paper

So much of research on first generation college students is about the experience of being first. In Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility, Melissa Osborne takes us deep into what it means to identify as such. And also what it means to do so in places that invite you in but aren’t ready for you. The story is not a simple or easy one to tell. And yet Osborne does so masterfully.

Review of “Crisis by Design: Emergency Powers and Colonial Legality in Puerto Rico” By José Atiles Stanford University Press, 2024, 330 pages, price:$130.00 (cloth) / $32.00 (paper). https://www.sup.org/books/law/crisis-design

Mary Bosworth’s timely book, Supply Chain Justice, takes readers for the first time inside Britain’s border control operations and details the logistics and labor of deportation. What we learn from this organizational perspective contrasts sharply with the smash and grab detentions making headlines in the US. Supply Chain Justice is compelling because Bosworth documents the ordinary. She writes about the messy reality of border control, the day-to-day work of removal that is organized around car-parks, managers in half-zip fleece, break rooms stocked with crisps, and carried out by low paid workers driving long hours on the motorways across the country. Based on four years of ethnographic field work, her access, observations, insights, and persistence have produced a new standard for researching how rich and democratic societies remove people from their countries and the human cost of doing so. Border control is intrinsically violent even when it is glossed over by bureaucratic procedures and corporate metrics. But what Bosworth captures is the humanness of it all—the hope and dreams of the low paid staff, the survival and grief of the people subject to controls, the professional competence of the office managers sorting paper and people, the distancing and coping strategies, the indifference and compassion. Supply Chain Justice is about the factory-like character of deportation and the corporate demands that de-humanize all of those who make it work and are worked by it. Yet, despite foregrounding the grind of border control, Bosworth holds on to the threads of humanity of those she encounters and her own, exposing a crack in the system to do things another way. Supply Chain Justice is an instant classic and unexpected page turner.

Do queer people getting married challenge or reinforce traditional notions of marriage? In other words, do queer people affect marriage or does marriage affect queer people? One of the cultural scripts of the momentous marriage equality victory has been “Love Wins.” In Marriage Material, Ocobock argues that “marriage remains firmly institutionalized” (p. 7). Not only that but marriage has some magical power. It is too strong to fight, and so marriage is transforming same-sex relationships rather than the other way around. In this “battle”, it appears that marriage wins!

Review of “Language Brokers: Children of Immigrants Translating Inequality and Belonging for their Families” By Hyeyoung Kwon Stanford University Press, 2024, 256 pages, price: $105.00 (cloth) / $26.00 (paper). https://www.sup.org/books/precart/?id=37107

Review of “Distancing the Past: Racism as History in South African schools” By Chana Teeger Columbia University Press, 2024, 216 pages, price: $120.00 (cloth) / $30.00 (paper) / $29.99 (ebook). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/distancing-the-past/9780231213417

Review of “The Habitation Society: Creating Sustainable Prosperity” By Fred Block Columbia University Press, 2025, 192 pages, prices: $99.00 (cloth) / $30.00 (paper). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-habitation-society/9781788217507

Review of “Natural: Black Beauty and the Politics of Hair” By Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson New York University Press, 2024, 296 pages, Price: $30.00 (cloth) / $30.00 (ebook). https://nyupress.org/9781479814732/natural/

Review of “Moving from the Margins: Life Histories on Transforming the Study of Racism” By Margaret L. Anderson and Maxine Baca Zinn Stanford University Press, 2024, 224 pages, price: $105.00 (cloth) / $26.00 (paper). https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35134

Review of “The Labour Market Myth: How the Market Metaphor Hinders Our Understanding of Work” By Paul de Beer Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024, 154 pages, price: $110.00 (cloth) / $40.00 (ebook). https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/the-labour-market-myth-9781035334445.html

Review of “Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline” By Mark R. Warren Oxford university press, 2021, 352 pages, price: $120.00 (cloth); $25.99 (paper). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/willful-defiance-9780197611517?cc=us&lang=en&

Review of “Catholics in America: A Social Portrait” By Lisa A. Keister Oxford University Press, 2024, 264 pages, price: $99.00 (cloth) / $29.95 (paper). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/catholics-in-america-9780197753675?cc=us&lang=en&

This review explores Anna Gjika’s When Rape Goes Viral (2023), a sociological study of how digital technologies transform the dynamics of sexual violence among youth. Through detailed analysis of high-profile cases like Steubenville and Maryville, Gjika argues that social media not only amplifies rape culture but also shifts how consent, victimhood, and justice are perceived. The book examines the dual role of digital evidence—supporting survivors while sometimes retraumatizing them—and critiques the legal system’s limitations in addressing online forms of harm. The review highlights Gjika’s valuable contributions, including her call for restorative justice and consent education, while noting some limitations regarding intersectionality and global legal perspectives. Overall, the book is praised for its clarity, urgency, and relevance in the digital age.

Review of “We Are Each Other's Business: Black Women's Intersectional Political Consumerism During the Chicago Welfare Rights Movement” By Nicole M. Brown Columbia University Press, 2024, 240 pages, price: $130.00 (cloth) / $32.00 (paper) / $31.99 (eBook). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/we-are-each-others-business/9780231205238

Review of “Regression Inside Out” By Eric W. Schoon, David Melamed, Ronald L. Breiger Cambridge University Press, 2024, 282 pages, price: $99.99 (cloth) / $34.99 (paper) / $34.99 (ebook). https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/social-science-research-methods/quantitative-methods/regression-inside-out?format=PB

Review of “Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology, and the Renewal of Interpretive Social Science” By Besnik Pula Routledge, 2024, 230 pages, price: $190.00 (cloth) / $35.99 (eBook). https://www.routledge.com/Alfred-Schutz-Phenomenology-and-the-Renewal-of-Interpretive-Social-Science/Pula/p/book/9781032609164?srsltid=AfmBOorVbXfZl_z74f_8j4eRT5DrLlDNOM1DQ5uWwixiWsYWZ86ZQWUq

Review of “A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio” By Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga The University of Chicago Press, 2024, 208 pages, price: $115.00 (cloth) / $27.50 (paper) / $26.99 (eBook). https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo215860324.html

After rising for almost two centuries, global income inequality declined substantially after 2000. While past scholarship on global inequality has explored several causes for this recent decline in inequality, these studies take for granted the official GDP figures released by national governments. A parallel social science literature has documented the manipulation of official data to exaggerate economic performance in autocratic countries, but this work has stopped short of examining the broader implications of this phenomenon. In this study, I explore the overstatement of GDP growth figures in autocracies as another contributor to the recent decline in estimates of global inequality based on officially reported GDP figures. Drawing on satellite-based night-time lights data and an empirical strategy from recent research, I compute model-based estimates of GDP overstatement in autocracies. I then combine this information with data on within-country income inequality to arrive at adjusted estimates of global income inequality in a sample of 109 countries constituting 92 percent of the world’s population. I find that between 1995 and 2014, ~20 percent of the decline in global inequality can be explained by the overstatement of GDP growth in less democratic countries. I conclude by discussing the broader implications of these findings for our understanding of global inequality and its political economy.

Felony conviction carries lifelong consequences that impact civic, economic, and social rights and opportunities, yet not everyone who is found guilty of a felony will bear the mark of conviction. Deferred adjudication is an increasingly popular intervention that offers legally guilty defendants protection from the mark of conviction conditional on the completion of community supervision. By conditioning conviction on discretionary assessments of compliance, rather than legal establishment of guilt, deferral and similar interventions may exacerbate inequality and further concentrate the mark of conviction among marginalized groups. However, relatively few studies examine disparities in the decision to defer conviction and dismiss charges. In this study, we draw on twenty years of court records to ask “for whom is the mark of conviction and formal punishment dependent on compliance rather than the legal establishment of guilt, and who passes the test of compliance?” Findings reveal that, even when accounting for features of the offense, both race and socioeconomic status condition who gets a “second chance” at a clean record. These findings have implications for how we study inequality in criminal courts and understand the production and meaning of conviction.