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Over the past half century, immigration from Latin America has transformed the public landscape in the United States, and numerous communities are witnessing one of the hallmarks of this transformation: the emergence of park soccer. Fútbol in the Park takes us into the world of Latino soccer players who regularly play in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood. Together on the soccer field, sharing beers after the games, and occasionally exchanging taunts or blows, the men forge new identities, friendships, and job opportunities, giving themselves a renewed sense of self-worth and community. As the US becomes increasingly polarized over issues of immigration and culture, Fútbol in the Park offers a close look at the individual lives and experiences of immigrants. It traces the history and organization of the midday pickup soccer games and examines how the affluent white neighbors react to the presence of the working-class Latino players. It then goes beyond the park to follow fourteen men who did “off-the-books” construction, painting, and gardening jobs in private homes to explore how informal arrangements and social relations organize immigrant labor in this burgeoning, often precarious sector of the economy. The park’s significance for the men’s work proved all the more striking given the hostility they sometimes faced there from local residents, who nevertheless often depend on immigrant labor. Against this backdrop, Fútbol in the Park argues for the importance of in-depth, multilayered accounts of the people and processes we study and outlines policy implications regarding the use of public space.

At a time of sharp economic inequalities and political polarization, Inventing the Ties that Bind explores how Americans cooperate in workplaces, grassroots social movements, unions, churches, humanitarian initiatives, and civic forums. It focuses on people’s ideas about what joins them, and it shows how they use those ideas—those imagined relationships—to deal with standard challenges of solidarity. The variety of relationship schemas on which people routinely draw suggests that contemporary civic efforts to build solidarity by way of experiences of egalitarian intimacy may be unduly narrow. In such efforts—in public deliberative forums, intergroup dialogues, civility initiatives, and advocacy efforts—people are taught to voice their values and experiences to strangers, who in turn should relate their own stories, with the promise that that mutual self-disclosure will bridge gulfs of political opinion, build citizens’ trust in their political institutions, and mobilize the powerful on behalf of the powerless. The book’s close examination of such efforts suggests that they often discourage the negotiation and outright challenge that democratic relationships require. But this is not to say that civic reformers should give up on the task of building solidarity, only that they should capitalize more fully on Americans’ rich vernacular of cooperation. Combining a theoretical investigation of the power of imagined communities with an empirical portrait of how Americans envision that which joins them, Inventing the Ties that Bind aims to rethink the bases of solidarity.

The Problem with Feeding Cities is a sociological and historical examination of the US food system. It explains how the food system transformed from feeding cities to feeding regions to feeding an entire nation, and in turn, why that process shifted the system’s underlying logic from fulfilling basic needs to satisfying profit margins. The book also explains how and why this system has failed communities. Food-access issues are the result of infrastructural disruptions stemming from how markets and cities developed, how distribution systems arose, and how organizations coordinated the movement, quantity, and quality of food. Building on archival research, 190 interviews with food industry stakeholders, and observations and tours of distribution facilities, The Problem with Feeding Cities profiles a wide variety of people connected to the food chain, including farmers, supermarket executives, logistics experts, food bank employees, and public health advocates.

How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still. As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion

The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood intergenerational sex can be seen with startling clarity in the life of British novelist and travel writer Norman Douglas (1868–1952), who was both a beloved and popular author, a friend of luminaries like Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence—as well as an unrepentant and uncloseted pederast. Rachel Hope Cleves’s careful study opens a window onto the social history of intergenerational sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing how charisma, celebrity, and contemporary standards protected Douglas from punishment—until they didn’t. Unspeakable approaches Douglas as neither monster nor literary hero, but as a man who participated in an exploitative sexual subculture that was tolerated in ways we may find hard to understand. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, police records, novels, and photographs—including sources by the children Douglas encountered—Cleves identifies the cultural practices that structured pedophilic behaviors in England, Italy, and other places Douglas favored. The resulting biography delineates just how approaches to adult-child sex have changed over time, even as it offers insight into how society can confront today’s scandals, celebrity and otherwise.

This book is the first multi-level analysis of real estate agents and their effects. Drawing on ethnographic, interview, and administrative data, it promises three main contributions. First, it documents how real estate agents are key actors in creating the demographic makeup and cultural identity of particular neighborhoods, as well as in translating the value and meaning of different places to prospective homebuyers. Agents upsell very wealthy buyers, which increases income segregation and contributes to place stratification by reifying some neighborhoods as elite and exclusive residential environments and others as undesirable and less valuable. The upselling analyzed in the book helps explain how and why prices rose so dramatically in places like New York City in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Second, the book argues that sociologists of markets have been too timid in tackling fundamental economic concepts like price. Indeed, the book reveals how prices are not just the outcomes of structural or cultural forces, but are also the products of interaction. It provides evidence that homebuyers’ preferences about how much to spend are highly malleable and subject to particular patterns of interaction with real estate agents. Third, by uncovering how interactions between buyers and agents matter for outcomes like neighborhood value and housing prices, the book offers a novel perspective on markets. It demonstrates that the work of intermediaries is central to sustaining any market and creating inequalities within it.