Social Media Sociology

Waffle House has long been touted as an icon of the American South. The restaurant's consistent foregrounding as a resonant symbol of regional character proves relevant for understanding much about the people, events, and foodways. Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary is the first book to socioculturally assess the chain within the field of contemporary food studies. In this groundbreaking work, Ty Matejowsky argues that Waffle House's often beleaguered public persona is informed by various complexities and contradictions.

In Plenitude, economist and bestselling author Juliet B. Schor offers a groundbreaking intellectual statement about the economics and sociology of ecological decline, suggesting a radical change in how we think about consumer goods, value, and ways to live. Based on recent developments in economic theory, social analysis, and ecological design, as well as evidence from the cutting-edge people and places putting these ideas into practice, Plenitude is a road map for the future.

In their new audiobook, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges.

Sex is cheap. Coupled sexual activity has become more widely available than ever. Cheap sex has been made possible by two technologies that have little to do with each other - the Pill and high-quality pornography - and its distribution made more efficient by a third technological innovation, online dating. Together, they drive down the cost of real sex, and in turn slow the development of love, make fidelity more challenging, sexual malleability more common, and have even taken a toll on men's marriageability. Cheap Sex takes listeners on an extended tour inside the American mating market.

The concept of identity has become widespread within the social and behavioral sciences, cutting across disciplines from psychiatry and psychology to political science and sociology. Introduced more than fifty years ago, identity theory is a social psychological theory that attempts to understand person's identities, their sources in interaction and society, their processes of operation, and their consequences for interaction and society from a sociological perspective.

Although they are often misunderstood, the chakras are important facets of health and spirituality and when properly attuned can lead to happier and healthier lives. In The Big Book of Chakras and Chakra Healing, Dr. Susan Shumsky delves into the ancient Tantric and Vedic literature to uncover the veiled mysteries of the ages, where the most authentic information about the seven chakras, seven subchakras, and the subtle energy system can be found.

This thought-provoking work traces the origins of voucher-based education reform to mid-twentieth-century fears over school desegregation. It shows how, in the intervening decades, a cabal of billionaire conservatives supporting a host of special political interests-including economic libertarianism, religious choice, and parental rights-have converged around the issue of education freedom in an ongoing culture war. Through deliberate policymaking, legislation, and litigation, Cowen reveals, an insular advocacy network has enacted a flawed system for education finance driven largely by dogma.

Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?

From one of Mexico's most exciting young writers, a cosmopolitan and candid essay collection exploring life in cities across the world and reflecting on the transformative importance of literature in understanding ourselves.

From a dysfunctional family who turn their mother's wake into a full-blown riot, to funeral crashers looking for free meals, to a horse-drawn hearse taking the dearly departed for the ride of their afterlife, these accounts from actual undertakers will have you laughing, thinking, and gasping in disbelief. A literal graveyard of wild coincidences, slapstick humor, and touching moments, Over Our Dead Bodies explores the lighter side of the dead, the living, and the lone undertaker who has to make it all go as planned - even if it doesn't.

Cities define the lives of all those who call them home: where we go, how we get there, how we spend our time. But what if we rethink the ways we plan, live in, and move around our cities? What if we didn't need a car to reach the grocery store? What if we could get back the time we would have spent commuting and put it to other uses?

Over the past 10 years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places?

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own.

In The Racial Wealth Gap, Baradaran outlines two tectonic forces that have driven apart the economic fortunes of white and Black families: wealth creation for white Americans, who have been systematically receiving financial subsidies in the century and a half since emancipation, and wealth destruction for Black Americans—either by vigilante violence or by official means, such as allowing Black banks to collapse or building highways through segregated Black communities.

In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over 100 individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability.

This book embarks on a journey that is as much sociological and psychological as it is deeply personal. It seeks to unravel the complex dynamics between adolescence and the screens that surround them, uncovering the echoes of this digital world that reverberate through their thoughts, emotions, and relationships. Through the stories, experiences, and insights of adolescents themselves, I will traverse the realms of self-discovery, connection, addiction, and empowerment that social media brings to the forefront of youthful existence.

Empire of Sin re-creates the remarkable story of New Orleans' 30-years war against itself, pitting the city's elite "better half" against its powerful and long-entrenched underworld of vice, perversity, and crime. This early-20th-century battle centers on one man: Tom Anderson, the undisputed czar of the city's Storyville vice district, who fights desperately to keep his empire intact as it faces onslaughts from all sides.

Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification in the 1960s to mark the displacement of working-class residents in London neighborhoods by the professional classes. The Death and Life of Gentrification traces how the word has far outgrown Glass's meaning, becoming a socially charged metaphor for cultural appropriation, upscaling, and the loss of authenticity.

Elevator Rides Are Awkward is a book about the effects of social media in the the millennial age. The millennial era is a time for innovative discoveries. This includes the evolution of phones, which led to the introduction of social media. Social media, the internet, and other mobile applications have changed the way that humans interact with one another.

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.