Sage Sociology

Author Catherine Tan discusses her article, "'Two Opposite Ends of the World': The Management of Uncertainty in an Autism-Only School," which she and co-author Gil Eyal recently published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.

Abstract: How do individuals maintain a sense of efficacy and purpose in the face of high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty? In research on medical uncertainty, sociologists often discuss the strategies health practitioners employ to control uncertainties relating to diagnosis and treatment. Over six months of ethnographic field work at an autism-only therapy school, we observed seventy-five students and forty-seven instructors and formally interviewed ten instructors and four parents. While other studies on medical uncertainty have focused on controls over external circumstances, we demonstrate that another management strategy is for individuals to perform ethical work on themselves in order to adjust how they conduct themselves in uncertain situations. Despite the ambiguity of both the autism diagnosis and the therapeutic method employed at the school, instructors are able to maintain a sense of efficacy and to recognize themselves as “doing floortime” by transforming themselves to become “child directed.”

Read the article here.

Janet Shim, Sara Ackerman, and Katherine Weatherford Darling discuss their article, "Race and Ancestry in the Age of Inclusion: Technique and Meaning in Post-Genomic Science," published in the December 2014 issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Abstract: This article examines how race and ancestry are taken up in gene-environment interaction (GEI) research on complex diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Using 54 in-depth interviews of 33 scientists and over 200 hours of observation at scientific conferences, we explore how GEI researchers use and interpret race, ethnicity, and ancestry in their work. We find that the use of self-identified race and ethnicity (SIRE) exists alongside ancestry informative markers (AIMs) to ascertain genetic ancestry. Our participants assess the utility of these two techniques in relative terms, downplaying the accuracy and value of SIRE compared to the precision and necessity of AIMs. In doing so, we argue that post-genomic scientists seeking to understand the interactions of genetic and environmental disease determinants actually undermine their ability to do so by valorizing precise characterizations of individuals’ genetic ancestry over measurement of the social processes and relations that differentiate social groups.

Read the article here.

Author Melissa Lavin discusses her article "If You Want It, You Can Get It Right Here: Space and Drug Use in Strip Clubs" published in the May 2014 issue of Humanity & Society.

Abstract: There is a burgeoning body of sociological literature that focuses on strip clubs and the club actors therein; most notably, strippers. Most of this scholarly work has emphasized interactions between strippers and customers, the deployment of stigma management strategies in order to neutralize deviantizing interactions and identities, gender performances and hierarchies, power, inequality and social control, and socialization processes associated with becoming dancers. While scholars have paid some attention to drugs and alcohol in the locale, they have paid little attention to how drug and alcohol use relates to the spatial organization and material culture of the strip club, the relationship between stigma and where club actors use illicit drugs, and how using certain drugs contributes to discreditable identities of already stigmatized workers. By centralizing accounts of setting actors through interviewing to supplement my complete participant fieldworker role, I build ideas about context-specific drug and alcohol use, power, and the ecology of drugs.

Read the full article here.

Sociology Podcast Number 5: In this podcast interview, Sam Friedman discusses his paper on social mobility, “The Price of the Ticket: Rethinking the Experience of Social Mobility”, with Sarah Neal, Editor of Sociology. Posted March 2014

In this podcast interview, co-author Fiona Devine discusses her excellent paper: “A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment” with Sophie Watson, Editor of Sociology.

Authors Kaela Jubas and Jackie Siedel discuss their article "Knitting as a Metaphor for Work: An Institutional Autoethnography to Surface Tensions of Visibility and Invisibility in the Neoliberal Academy," which was recently published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.

Abstract: This article discusses the coauthors’ experiences as academic colleagues who took up knitting together, and the insights about contemporary complications and tensions of research and work that we developed through that practice. Adopting some of the tenets of ethnography and, more particularly, autoethnography and institutional ethnography, we ground our analysis in everyday encounters and routines in our academic workplace. Employing knitting as metaphor, we organize our discussion of findings as a series of tensions that are alternately evident and hidden in our work(place). We close by considering how our inquiry points to aspects of both similarity and uniqueness in relation to other work contexts and assists us in interpreting and understanding our academic work in the context of broader society.

Read the full article here.

Author Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott discusses her paper, written with co-authors Clare Forstie and Savina Balasubramanian, "Shining Stars, Blind Sides, and "Real" Realities: Exit Rituals, Eulogy Work, and Allegories in Reality Television," which was recently published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Abstract: Competitive reality television is a pervasive part of contemporary American culture and encompasses a range of topics and forms. We identify three categories, or spheres, of contestant-elimination reality shows: External Vote, Internal Vote, and Choosing Individual/Deity. Within each sphere, we examine the locus of blame and the structure of the show as contexts for the elimination as symbolic death. This symbolic death presents allegories of loss of fame, social isolation, and individual loss of job, career, or love across these spheres. Contestants perform eulogy work to cope publicly with their elimination at the moment of exit. Eulogy work enables departing contestants to frame their “death” as a good death and to “cool themselves out” in an attempt to save face. In this way, contestants deal with conceptions of self in the show and the transfer of that self back to a reality outside of the bracketed time and space of the show. Drawing on literature from the sociology of emotions, the sociology of death, and the sociology of ritual, we provide the concept of eulogy work to capture the performance of the self specifically in the context of loss.

Read the article here.

Authors Long Doan, Annalise Loehr, and Lisa Miller discuss their article published in the December 2014 issue of American Sociological Review.

Abstract: Attitudes toward gay rights have liberalized over the past few decades, but scholars know less about the extent to which individuals in the United States exhibit subtle forms of prejudice toward lesbians and gays. To help address this issue, we offer a conceptualization of formal rights and informal privileges. Using original data from a nationally representative survey experiment, we examine whether people distinguish between formal rights (e.g., partnership benefits) and informal privileges (e.g., public displays of affection) in their attitudes toward same-sex couples. Results show that heterosexuals are as willing to extend formal rights to same-sex couples as they are to unmarried heterosexual couples. However, they are less willing to grant informal privileges. Lesbians and gays are more willing to extend formal rights to same-sex couples, but they too are sometimes more supportive of informal privileges for heterosexual couples. We also find that heterosexuals’ attitudes toward marriage more closely align with their attitudes toward informal privileges than formal rights, whereas lesbians and gays view marriage similarly to both formal rights and informal privileges. Our findings highlight the need to examine multiple dimensions of sexual prejudice to help understand how informal types of prejudice persist as minority groups receive formal rights.

Read the article here:

http://asr.sagepub.com/content/79/6/1172.full

Author Kathleen J. Fitzgerald talks about her article in the February 2014 issue of Humanity & Society. Abstract: "While most scientists of the twentieth century argued for understanding race as a social construction, this understanding has shifted considerably in the past decade. In the current era, biological notions of race have resurfaced not only in the scientific community but in the form of direct consumer use of DNA tests for genetic ancestry testing, sometimes referred to as genetic genealogy, and the emergence of pharmacogenomics, or the marketing of race-specific pharmaceuticals. In this article, I argue that the return of race as a biological concept in the form of racial genomics can best be understood through an application of Blumer’s race as group position theory. Using that, I argue that during the past 20 years, four specific challenges to the racial hierarchy have emerged that have threatened white dominance: the original interpretation of the Human Genome Project results declaring humans to be 99.9 percent similar, thus, dispelling the idea that race has a genetic basis, the electoral wins of President Barack Obama and the ensuing rhetoric that America is a “postracial” society, and finally, the increase in interracial relationships and biracial/multiracial identities. The emergence of racial genomics, I argue, is a response to these specific threats to the racial hierarchy and to white dominance."

http://has.sagepub.com/content/38/1/49.abstract

Author Michael T. Light discusses his new article which appears in the October 2014 issue of American Sociological Review. Abstract: "When compared to research on the association between immigration and crime, far less attention has been given to the relationship between immigration, citizenship, and criminal punishment. As such, several fundamental questions about how noncitizens are sanctioned and whether citizenship is a marker of stratification in U.S. courts remain unanswered. Are citizens treated differently than noncitizens—both legal and undocumented—in U.S. federal criminal courts? Is the well-documented Hispanic-white sentencing disparity confounded by citizenship status? Has the association between citizenship and sentencing remained stable over time? And are punishment disparities contingent on the demographic context of the court? Analysis of several years of data from U.S. federal courts indicates that citizenship status is a salient predictor of sentencing outcomes—more powerful than race or ethnicity. Other notable findings include the following: accounting for citizenship substantially attenuates disparities between whites and Hispanics; the citizenship effect on sentencing has grown stronger over time; and the effect is most pronounced in districts with growing noncitizen populations. These findings suggest that as international migration increases, citizenship may be an emerging and powerful axis of sociolegal inequality."

http://asr.sagepub.com/content/79/5/825.full