The Institute for Public Knowledge, in collaboration with NYU’s Department of Sociology, invites you to a book launch with Arlie Hochschild for her new work, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

In Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country – a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she champions, Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground with the people she meets – among them a Tea Party activist whose town has been swallowed by a sinkhole caused by a drilling accident – people whose concerns are ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children.

Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that many on the political right have been duped into voting against their interests. In the right-wing world she explores, Hochschild discovers powerful forces – fear of cultural eclipse, economic decline, perceived government betrayal – which override self-interest, as progressives see it, and help explain the emotional appeal of a candidate like Donald Trump. Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help us understand what it feels like to live in “red” America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: why do the people who would seem to benefit most from “liberal” government intervention abhor the very idea?

Arlie Hochschild is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on the relationship between mass culture and the individual’s emotions. She is the author of several books, including The Managed Heart: the Commercialization of Human Feeling, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home and most recently Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Advanced Social Science Research and the NYU Population Center