Sociological Perspectives

As institutional reckonings move from the margins to the mainstream, an increasing number of colleges and universities have sponsered efforts to examine their institutions’ involvement with enslavement. Despite this trend, little is known about how key constituencies, including students, receive these projects. We examine students’ responses to universities’ efforts to engage its history with enslavement and its effects. Qualitative, thematic analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 111 undergraduate students at a private, selective, southern U.S. university reveals that students overwhelmingly understand university motivations for this work as reputation management. While students of color were overtly cynical, frequently associating a university’s reputation-management efforts with student recruitment and financial gain, White students balanced both cynicism and hope, differentiating between altruistic individuals and insincere institutions. We offer the concept of “racial cynicism” to theorize these responses, illuminating the interpretive processes sustaining the well-documented gap between diversity programming and racial justice.

In recent decades, U.S. cities have experienced an increasing prevalence of gentrification, especially in Black urban neighborhoods, and the growth and dispersal of new immigrants. Although scholarship suggests links between immigrant settlement and gentrification, few quantitative studies examine this relationship and consider differences across neighborhood ethnoracial contexts and city-level contexts of immigrant reception. This study draws on U.S. Census and American Community Survey data from 1990 to 2019 to examine this relationship across the United States. We find that higher shares of recent immigrants lower the likelihood that neighborhoods gentrify, except in Black neighborhoods. In Black neighborhoods, the share of recent immigrants is positively associated with gentrification, particularly since the 2000s and in newer immigrant destination cities. Findings suggest that new immigrants serve as pioneers of gentrification and buffers in Black neighborhoods but that this pathway is contingent on the broader context of immigrant reception.

This paper aims to identify the challenges Asian Americans face when struggling for political representation in the new immigration destinations. I interviewed 95 Asian American elected officials, political candidates, and organizers in Houston, Texas. I found that, while respondents aim to mobilize Asian voters based on the shared panethnic status, they often fail due to the racial lumping of Asian Americans, which creates a group of heterogeneous voters who do not prioritize the Asian American identity. Meanwhile, they confront the forever foreigner discourse from non-Asian voters who question their Americanness. They are thus trapped in what I term the Asian American unelectability paradox, where their identity is seen as a liability that could neither attract Asian nor non-Asian votes. As a result, candidates either deracialize their campaigns or spend extra effort proving their Americanness. This article expands our understanding of how Asian Americans’ racialization in electoral politics reinforces their marginalization, particularly in a minority context.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) people in the United States have achieved several important legal and social gains in the recent past. These achievements can be seen in the legalizing of same-sex marriage, nationwide access to adoption, and more Gay–Straight Alliances. It is also the case that more LGBTQ+ people are maintaining relationships with their parents after coming out. However, these advances often obscure the reality of greater discrimination and violence against queer people compared to heterosexuals. This has led some commentators to suggest that the contemporary U.S. queer rights movement is incomplete. In this paper, we show how heterosexism and homophobia continue to operate in relationships between parents and their lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) children in the United States. We argue that preserving parent–LGB child relationships involves managing the meaning attached to time. More specifically, LGBs and their parents use “remedial emotion work,” a form of emotion work that involves diminishing, transforming, and thwarting noxious feelings—on behalf of oneself and others—by envisioning a future where the strained relationship is improved. Through remedial emotion work, LGBs and their parents are able to preserve their familial relationships, but at a cost: placing the emotional well-being of parents above those of LGBs and bolstering heterosexism.

While many explanations in the literature propose socioeconomic and structural explanations for the rise of protest activity, historical dimensions are often overlooked. Less work undertakes quantitative analysis of these explanations in relation to what has been described by some as the biggest U.S. movement in history, Black Lives Matter (BLM). First, we determine whether socioeconomic and organizational factors, which researchers have used to study the sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement, are useful for predicting BLM protests. Second, we examine whether counties that had sit-ins in 1960 were more likely to participate in BLM protests. We analyze 1386 BLM demonstrations between July 2014 and January 2017 alongside data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our findings show that several factors that predicted sit-ins predict BLM protests. We also find evidence of an enduring legacy of sit-ins on BLM protests above and beyond socioeconomic predictors.

The birth doula movement highlights a fundamental conflict between biomedicine’s relationship with time and the uncertain processes of birth, demonstrating how speed at which interventions are offered and the timetables within which choices are made can interrupt and undermine patient autonomy, health, and safety. Drawing on 25 interviews with birth doulas in 2022–23, we present a theory of sociotemporal brokerage, arguing that doulas represent themselves as temporally attuned social brokers situated between hospitals and birthing people. We highlight various ways they claim to flow with the unpredictable rhythms of reproductive time and against harmful intrusions of biomedical time. In minimizing clocks and schedules and prioritizing emotions, informed consent, and relationships, doula narratives highlight the role the doula movement can play in humanizing reproductive care. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research on reproductive justice and sociotemporal brokerage.

The growing disenchantment with working careers – commonly referred to as the ‘anti-work’ sentiment – has emerged as a form of critique of the current economic system. However, this phenomenon remains under-explored, particularly with regard to the subjective meaning of hostility towards work. This article proposes a conceptual map of the themes related to anti-work from the workers’ perspective, drawing on an empirical study of content posted within the most prominent virtual community discussing anti-work. The findings reveal that a complex network of themes underpins the idea of anti-work. They also highlight that a significant portion of these themes reflects workers’ perceived need for recognition – not only through a fair wage but also through meaningful acknowledgement in the workplace – rather than an idealistic notion of being ‘liberated’ from work.

Recent scholarship has highlighted how the history of “gender” as an analytic concept within the English-speaking academy originated in the treatment of intersex and transsexual patients in the mid-twentieth-century United States. When faced with the instability of “sex” embodied by intersex and later trans patients, “gender” was used as a means to stabilize the binary through racialized logics. In this article I trace sociology’s part in moving “gender” from the intersex clinic to feminist scholarship. I begin with a discussion of gender’s origins, focusing on the work of John Money and the Hampsons at Johns Hopkins, Robert Stoller at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and early feminist sociologists who drew upon their work. I then turn to Garfinkel’s Agnes Case Study and its application by West and Zimmerman in their “Doing Gender” paradigm to illustrate how the racialized logics of trans/intersex medicine continue to impact how we study gender within sociology today.

This article explores market-oriented activism in a branch of the alternative food movement called the Young Farmers Movement. Using archival and in-depth interview data from young beginning farmers across the United States, I explore how these individuals conceptualize farming as lifestyle activism and engage in a movement tactic called politicized production: the growing and selling of politicized goods for political consumers. Because politicized production places young farmers into competition with one another, this tactic fractures the identity fields into which activists typically organize themselves and others. I explore how they employ identity work techniques to strategically reframe other young farmers, as well as food system adversaries, in ways that repair and reorganize the movement’s identity fields. These findings connect literature on social movements and agrifood studies by exploring the overlap of movements and markets, and the limits and consequences of using identity work to facilitate market-oriented activism.

Aesthetics are cultural practices through which people and institutions reproduce or contest inequalities. The aesthetics (clothing, makeup, hairstyle, accessories, and nail designs) of urban girls of color signaling racial and class differences are often conflated as evidence of their alleged hypersexuality, lack of aspirations to become upwardly mobile, and criminality. This paper utilizes a discourse analysis of 78 “Hot Cheeto Girl” TikTok Videos as well as 53 interviews and ethnographic observations with college-going Latinas to examine how aesthetics reproduce or contest heteronormativity. I contend that “Hot Cheeto Girl,” “Chola,” and “Ghetto Girl,” narratives participants utilized to describe dominant portrayals of them, are discourses of heteronormativity since they frame particular aesthetics as visual markers of immoral sexuality. In addition, I describe how low-income Latinas engage in respectability politics, avoiding behaviors and styles of dress associated with the “Hot Cheeto Girl” to refute discourses of heteronormativity and gain access to mobility via college.

For colonial domination, reflexive practices within qualitative methodologies encompass autoethnography and researchers using static identity categories to reflect how researchers’ social positions shape their practice and field site experiences. Yet, such approaches can maintain researchers’ position as the subjects doing colonial research rather than as researchers negotiating their positions as subject-object of research. Taking the case of a queer, trans, non-binary researcher who had to cisify themselves for an ethnography, this paper conducts an autoethnography in relation to gender conformity. The paper does so by bringing together ideas of relationality and subjectivity formation to consider faith embodiment. It offers negotiating utopia as a three-part affective, autoethnographic framework for analyzing researcher subjectivity formation, enabling researchers to account for the colonial roots of ethnography. Using the case of a trans, non-binary Sikh, negotiating utopia shows how they confronted a U.S. settler veil and developed a type of ethnographic double consciousness.

Building upon theories of capital conversion, we examine relationships between one form of social capital (intergenerational closure, defined as the number of connections among parents in a school) and both simple and complex forms of cultural capital (school-oriented home activities and concerted cultivation) across socioeconomic status (SES). Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 2010 to 2011, the results show that intergenerational closure is significantly and positively associated with both home activities and concerted cultivation, having a stronger association with the latter. Families with lower SES report higher rates of engaging in everyday home activities, whereas families with higher SES concentrate more of their efforts into concerted cultivation. Furthermore, network size positively affects home activities across socioeconomic contexts but has stronger associations with concerted cultivation in socioeconomically disadvantaged families. We interpret these findings as suggesting that parental networks can be key mechanisms for converting forms of capital in socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts.

This article highlights main themes that emerged from our panel featuring youth organizers and scholars of youth social movements in California. We focus on how organizations uplift youth leadership, foster queer inclusivity, build across racial difference, and cultivate “beloved community,” a concept popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our organizations address the root causes of inequities that threaten low-income communities of color, while adapting to contemporary challenges by proposing new modes of social change. For example, youth-centered leadership has long been at the crux of youth organizing; meanwhile, “healing” has increasingly emerged as a prominent aspect of youth organizations devoted to social change. This article thus summarizes our panel’s insights about youth organizing across California.

Latinos and Asian-Americans constitute the largest recent immigrant groups in the United States. Upon arrival, immigrants from these groups generally identify with their national origin despite being categorized as “Asian” or “Latino” for state enumeration. While both are racialized and excluded from mainstream identities, they differ in their internal linguistic and religious diversities, socioeconomic status, and immigration experiences. Sociologists theorized that Asian-American panethnicity is based on structural commonalities while Latino panethnicity is built upon cultural commonalities. We elaborate the theoretical understanding of contexts associated with this identification and find alternative underpinnings that shape both groups’ panethnic identification. We find generation since immigration is a common basis for elevated likelihood of panethnic identification for both groups. However, among Asian-Americans, we find English proficiency and age increase people’s odds of identifying with a panethnic identity over a national origin term, whereas for Latinos, political affiliation and religiosity increase these odds.