Sociological Theory

City of Chicago officials adopted a “racial equity” approach to mitigate the disproportionate racial impact of COVID-19, yet according to interviews with racially and socioeconomically marginalized Chicagoans, this approach failed to address core vulnerabilities associated with health, housing, mental health, and welfare. This article argues that COVID-19 represents and reifies the convergence of three sets of emergencies. First, federal and local governments governed through emergency, enacting temporally bounded governmental strategies that presumed scarcity, triaged care, and naturalized structural inequality by delinking the effects of racism from its causes. This response was spectacular and anticipatory—designed to safeguard the status quo until “normalcy” could be restored. This approach exacerbated two existing endemic emergencies: (1) the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced for decades due to neoliberal restructuring and fragmented care infrastructure and (2) the sacrifice of lower-income frontline workers to premature death to safeguard the economy and protect the middle class.

This article develops an alternative vision of public sociology. Whereas public sociology is often defined through the actions of professional sociologists, this article calls for a recognition of reverse tutelage in public sociology. Here, publics are seen as sociological interlocutors who can, and often do, produce sociological theories and analyses that can inform professional sociology. I demonstrate this reverse tutelage by focusing on anticolonial and anti-racist social movements, including the Zapatistas, Black Lives Matter, Palestine Action, and Cops Are Flops. I highlight how they produce sociological theories of power, neoliberalism, race, bordering, and violence that can orient professional sociology toward relational forms of analysis that build connections between different sites of resistance. In doing so, I highlight how the boundary between what Burawoy terms “professional” and “critical” sociology is much more porous than initially theorized and that critical sociology—from wider publics—can significantly shape professional sociology.

Erving Goffman is one of sociology’s most influential thinkers. Scholars debate the extent to which he worked in competing theoretical traditions (e.g., interactionist or structuralist), yet few acknowledge his intellectual indebtedness to animal ethology. This article traces how naturalistic studies of paralinguistic animal communication influenced Goffman’s corpus and specifies the ideas he built on from that field, especially territoriality and ritualized display. Goffman’s comparative approach to animal and human interaction reveals the shortcomings of sociologists’ lingua-centric approach to interaction; elevates animals to social actors, capable of metacommunication, reading others’ intentions, and adjusting their behavior accordingly; and humbles humans, who he finds enacting rituals of civility for the same reason animals engage in ritualized display: to manage threats and facilitate bonding. Goffman’s thesis on the similarities between animal and human social behavior compels sociology to consider animal studies, and his use of ethology helps reconcile his interactionist and Durkheimian tendencies.

How do groups reckon with differences in members’ identities and beliefs? A tension exists between groups, whose identities are singular and stably positioned, and their members, whose identities are intertwined and constituted in interaction. Existing work shows how this tension is addressed through downplaying difference, but we know less about how differences are played up in group life. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 56 interviews with a racially and politically diverse religious group, I examine how members play up identities and beliefs that are not shared by all and how comembers respond. This analysis reveals two pathways that playing up difference takes: an engagement pathway and an avoidance pathway. The engagement pathway depends on the activation of shared structural, relational, and epistemic foundations. I conclude with a broader consideration of how playing up difference relates to the pursuit of plurality and wholeness in contemporary organizations and communities.

This study explores the centrality of the senses for the maintenance or disruption of people’s commonsensical familiarity with the world. Drawing from in-depth interviews with people affected by depersonalization/derealization, which the American Psychiatric Association defines as a dissociative condition in which people perceive the world as dream-like, I conceptualize what I term somatic defamiliarization. I define somatic defamiliarization as a process whereby people experience previously unquestioned sensory phenomena, such as mundane objects or their bodies, as unfamiliar. Building on Berger and Luckmann’s work, I contend that somatic defamiliarization is a perpetual, albeit latent, condition of social life that threatens reality maintenance. I discuss how the concept of somatic defamiliarization can be applied to explore the somatic qualities of experiential ruptures that people may undergo in various circumstances, such as immigration or war.