Suchergebnisse

A brief reflection of the past five years as Book Review Editor of Contexts and a list of books that spark editorial team members' sociological imaginations.

An introduction to a mini symposium on Jennifer Hirsch's and Shamus Khan's Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

Leading up to and since the 2016 presidential election, a recurring theme focusing on poor whites' role in carrying the Republican nominee to victory gained further credence with the popularity and wide readership of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Peddling stereotypes of Appalachia as a white dystopia with a backward mountain culture, the memoir seemingly turned the use of culture-of-poverty arguments on whites themselves. Through an examination of Hillbilly Elegy, its arguments, and its context, the author offers an initial answer to the question of how a memoir perpetuating culture-of-poverty arguments resonates across the political spectrum among whites when a segment of their group is the target of such arguments. The successful repackaging of cultural pathology within color-blindness allows a subversive use of genetic determinism and racial essentialism, selling inequality as a natural phenomenon embedded within inferior bodies. Building on stereotypes of poor white Appalachians as unevolved and "not quite white," Vance's memoir provides a cautionary tale of how narratives conforming to the reproductive practices of white ignorance gain popularity through absolving whiteness from complicity in racism and systemic inequalities, while also performing boundary work for whiteness as an identity and structure.

College diversity programs are designed to improve white students' experiences, ignoring the benefits of cross-cultural interactions for all.

Recent studies on political attitude formations have developed the ethnoracialization framework, which emphasizes the roles of racial hierarchies and ethnic identities interconnected with national origins. However, existing research has not established analytical strategies to incorporate this framework, leaving a gap between theory and practice. We propose an alternative analytical model to examine ethnoracialized political attitudes using the case of Asian Americans' support for race-conscious college admissions. Using data from the 2016 National Asian American Survey, our effect coding reveals how Asian Americans' race-conscious admissions attitudes vary by ethnicity. Then, we investigate whether this variation can be attributed to theoretical predictors of such attitudes, including the mention of previously supportive Supreme Court decisions on race-conscious admissions, through regression modeling. Most ethnic groups' mean support scores significantly vary from the grand mean of Asian Americans, and those gaps remain significant even after controlling for socioeconomic backgrounds and general predictors. As an exception, redistributionism accounted for some ethnic variations. Certain predictors such as individual experiences of the U.S. opportunity structure and the racial justice frame shaped overall race-conscious admissions attitudes but did not reduce ethnic variations. These findings highlight the need for increased attention to the analysis of ethnic communities when studying ethnoracialized political attitudes, as our current theories appear insufficient in explaining variations observed between ethnic groups. Thus, conducting research that explores the interplay between Asian Americans, racialization, and ethnic communities will provide a more comprehensive understanding of Asian Americans and potentially other ethnoracialized groups.

In this introduction to the special issue on "Foodways and Inequality: Toward a Sociology of Food Culture and Movements," we describe our path to the sociological study inequality through food, and how the articles included in this special issue fit this framework. The overarching goal of this issue is to present a multifaceted approach to studying food from more cultural and structural perspectives. In particular, the authors take varied approaches to understanding how inequalities shape individual's experiences with food while also offering possible solutions through a more humanist sociological project around food and foodways. The articles and reviews included in this special issue offer much needed sociological insights into current social problems centering on food such as hunger and exploitation.

AbstractSince the early 1960s, there has been a movement among activists, scholars, and policymakers to redefine racism as a psychopathological condition, identifiable and treatable through psychotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions. This development reflects, and is reflected by, the popular framing among mass media and ordinary social actors of racism and racist events as individual pathology rather than as a social problem. This shifting perspective on racism, from a social problem and a system to an individual pathology, has increasingly become a part of academic and psychiatric discourse since Jim Crow. In this article, we have two aims: first, to trace the emergence of "psychopathological racism"; second, to illustrate the relationship between "psychopathological racism" and "colorblind racism" in the post-Civil Rights era. We argue that the psychopathological view of racism compliments colorblindness in that larger structural issues are dismissed in favor of individual pathos. Furthermore, psychopathological explanations for racism dismiss socio-political contexts, eschewing the contributions of well over fifty years of social scientific research in the process.