What does a "responsible end" to war in Afghanistan mean? As a panacea for international disengagement, the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program (APRP) was launched in 2010. After the 2001 intervention, the Bonn Agreement laid the foundations for a new Afghan state. Its exclusion of the Taliban signaled continuing conflict. The APRP is ostensibly designed to address this and other exclusions and foster an "inclusive peace." This article probes the peace process at the macro-, meso-, and micro levels within the context of ongoing war. It examines the abandonment and marginalization experienced by women, segments of the insurgency, civil society and human rights groups as well as fragile communities undergoing reintegration. I argue that these exclusions are facilitated by a coalescence of interests that have reinforced the cycle of war and deepened exclusion. Consequently, the peace process has become incapable of offering real solutions, instead functioning as a pretext for excluding already marginalized groups.
We coconstruct a series of autoethnographic reflections to offer analysis of the emotions involved in early social movement mobilization. Oil and gas extraction and production are deeply embedded in Oklahoma’s economic, political, social, and cultural milieu. Using Woods et al.’s ladder of emotions model, we consider the constraints faced by three different proenvironmental/antifracking activists in Oklahoma within the context of place-based activism. Emotion and place-based identities are central to the early stages and continuance of social movement organization. We call for greater attention to these dynamics and further study of the role of emotions in the emergence, ascendance, and abeyance of social movement activity.
In this introduction to the special issue on "The Precarious Nature of Environmental Activism", I describe my own path to environmental activism and the articles contributed to the special issue. In this special issue we look at the changing role of environmental activism. In particular, the authors focus on how the role of the activist is mediated by one’s relationship to the community or those individuals tasked with making environmental decisions. Relatedly, these papers also look at how activism and the relationship between activist and scholar roles can often be challenging and how many activist-scholars work in changing environments.
This article explores historical processes of land dispossession through an in-depth case of the Narragansett Indians of present-day Rhode Island. Using an eventful historical methodology, I uncover three primary mechanisms, each temporally situated, that dispossessed the Narragansett tribe of their land: violence, debt, and state governance. I proceed by first considering Narragansett life before the incursion of settler colonialism. Following this brief exploration, I turn to an analysis of both the historical events and processes that dispossessed the Narragansett of their land. This analysis contributes to the literature on empire and colonialism, as well as theoretical debates on primitive accumulation and settler colonialism, by exploring and identifying the mechanisms by which primitive accumulation operated within a specific settler-colonial context. In the end, I argue that sociology must expand analytically and conceptually to include indigenous experiences of ongoing dispossession in order to end the disciplines complicity in the elimination of the native.
This article focuses on narratives of the crisis in contemporary Greece and aims to understand the current context of austerity as a trope, symbolic signifier, and construct of inequality beyond austerity and in its manifestation as new social morphology in Europe. While the future recovery of Greece will require an extensive understanding of both economic and historical narratives which have sustained and fueled the Modern Greek state, a deeper analysis of structural and societal cultural codes mirrored in the public sphere is paramount in comprehending the cultural politics of inequalities in academic and public discourse. In a changing political and social environment, youth in Greece face the consequences of the debt crisis and, at the same time, reexamine their identity, values, and aspirations. Drawing from narrative, visual, and ethnographic data, this article explores stories of the crisis in grounding an account of inequality as narrated by those experiencing dispossession and austerity.
In this article, the authors use autoethnographic sketches to explore storytelling across generations. Particular attention is devoted to storytelling as a coping mechanism across life’s many learning experiences. The authors hope this article aids other authors in collaborative autoethnographic writing in communication and related fields.
The analysis starts by offering a critique of the existing social movement literature and by suggesting the integration of critical theories of knowledge with theories and wisdom of indigenous peoples in order to develop an alternative knowledge of critical thinking and scholarship in social movement studies. It also proposes ideas about the need to democratize knowledge for better accounting for social movement studies, including that of indigenous struggles, for the purposes of formulating approaches that are necessary for enhancing a greater understanding of social movement theories and actions on global level. In the current crisis of global capitalism and neoliberal globalization, there is an urgent need to develop new insights for advancing the prospects for global social transformation, which is articulated by the slogan of the World Social Forum, namely, another world is possible. The piece specifically develops possible ways of struggling against and replacing bourgeois internationalism by globalism from below through advancing the agenda of an egalitarian democracy.
This story discusses how my fieldwork with the Rainbow Family of Living Light shaped my understanding and definition of ethnographic "research" and how, if at all, my work has "fit" (or has not fit) within the institutional review board’s (IRB) definition of this concept. To explore this more fully, I situate this story within current debates surrounding ethnography and IRB oversight. By doing so, my goal is to propose a redefinition of IRB terms, offering an alternative ethical framework based on Rainbow philosophy, which positions ethnography as a type of "ethical spectacle."
In this article, I use an autoethnographic postcard to consider the enduring impact of the weather, especially weather-related disasters, in an age of technology.
Campus disciplinary systems are positioned to provide a modicum of justice for victims of sexual violence and deter predatory assaults. Yet, this will occur only if victims find them worthy of use and the broader campus community believes them to be fair to accused and accusing students. This investigation reviews the legal status of various due process and victim protection practices and determines their presence in the student disciplinary policies of four-year residential colleges and universities in Maryland. Findings establish that compliance with the Clery Act is relatively high, while due process and victim protections vary widely. Findings also show that public institutions and those adopting "trial"-like adjudication procedures promise greater due process and victim protections compared to private institutions and those following an inquisitorial model. Policies are recommended to achieve procedural fairness while encouraging victims to report abuse and use campuses systems, along with further avenues for investigation.
Autoethnographic sketching allows for examination of various elements of lived experience. This article focuses on tactile memory.
This article examines and analyzes the credibility and utility of the critique of veganism as a privileged lifestyle, both by those inside and by those outside the vegan community. Using the theory of intersectionality, I explain that the concept of vegan privilege is vague and lacks contextualization. I propose that veganism itself is not a privilege, but rather the ability to make food choices is ultimately the privilege. In addition, I argue that allegations of "vegan privilege" conceal and reinforce the cultural invisibility of speciesism and carnism. Although the ultimate mission of veganism is to eradicate animal exploitation, vegans must understand the animals are not the only ones that suffer. The structural and interactional process of "mindless eating" exploits both consumers and workers. I conclude by encouraging vegans and carnists alike to expand the circle of compassion and to understand the human costs of the capitalist industrial food complex.
Looking beyond the increasingly common trope of "slacktivism" that frames students as weakly "liking" causes or "tweeting" support through social media, our research analyzes how current students in the United States perceive and participate in action on college campuses. This action note reflects on three insights our research yields about contemporary student engagement: their ambivalence about embracing an "activist" label, their disinclination for direct action, and their thoughtful approach to digital tools. Complicating the view that college students are apathetic or disengaged, we find that students continue to be passionate and engaged, perhaps just not in ways that scholars of social movements might anticipate.
This study uses surveys and in-depth interviews to explore professors’ student loan debt experiences at a university in the Northwest United States, focusing attention on their perceptions of fellow colleagues’ experiences. Having been long-term students in higher education themselves, professors’ student loan debt has increased with the trend toward privatization and corporatization of higher education over the last several decades. Interviews reveal professors’ tendency to disassociate their colleagues’ student loan debt experiences from the public issue of rising higher education costs. We find that a university culture imbued with market ethos shapes their explanations for professors’ student loan debt, rationalizing debt as a result of poor spending habits or career choices. These explanations detract from the public issue of rising education costs being shouldered increasingly by students and their families, which we contend will result in excluding minority groups’ access to the profession and limiting diversity in higher education and research.
The objective of "sustainable development" has institutional implications that deserve to be better understood. It conveys a transformative ambition that has gradually contributed to equating change with a collective purpose ideally adopted and accompanied by the relevant institutions. Focusing on the activities of government that have begun to carry out this goal, this article analyzes how rationalities, devices, and procedural arrangements merge, making change management a renewed stake in the institutional sphere. In order to understand its logics and directions, this study gives an account of this process in the initiatives of French public authorities and European Union institutions. Considering this new interpretation of "change," it reviews the range of both programmatic and instrumental by-products that take the form of documents presented as "strategies" and the procedural bases that begin to provide support. By capturing how institutional protagonists and their potential partners have taken into consideration the issues linked with sustainable development, this article shows how this renewed form of change management contributes to an evolution in the work of public institutions and the devices they use. What is at stake is a collective relationship to change. The institutional takeover of this issue is carried out in such a way that it also induces a process of governmentalization of change.
Health literacy skills have been linked with desirable health outcomes. The pedagogical approach of Paulo Freire provides a framework for improving health literacy among underserved communities and for raising consciousness within communities about the social, material, and economic factors that affect health status. This article provides a framework for improving health literacy based on the pedagogy of Freire. The authors provide suggestions for how health literacy interventions can be based on collaboration between educators and the communities they serve. The model emphasizes reducing health disparities through raising consciousness about the contexts that affect a community’s health status and through encouraging community actions to address contextual factors.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures plans for the rebuilding of New Orleans favored the redevelopment of some communities over others. Where residents of vulnerable communities, in particular the Lower Ninth Ward, protested the erasure of their communities, they have been largely socially abandoned as a retaliatory measure for not acquiescing to the elite plan of "Katrina Cleansing." The implementation of this social abandonment as social policy and the various policies and conditions that have collectively punished residents of the Lower Ninth Ward who are trying to rebuild their community should be seen as uneven racialized capitalist development and as an important extension to what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism." In this article, I conceptualize these policies and conditions as secondary violences and through three vignettes I provide a brief description of life in the Lower Ninth Ward where these violences permeate the warp and the woof of the community.
Since the oil embargos of the 1970s, the fossil fuel industry and allied energy interests have helped manufacture a variety of discursive narratives that an alternative energy revolution is on the horizon which will someday replace conventional fuels with clean, renewable, noncarbonized sources of energy. A closer inspection of the industry’s investments and rhetoric, however, suggests that they are currently investing most of their historic profits in creating a future largely driven by unconventional fossil fuel dependence, intensive hydraulic fracking, and the continued control of the energy sector by essentially the same transnational corporations that control the market today. This article offers a critical analysis of the historical roots of our fossil fuel dependency, some of the key socioenvironmental threats associated with the emerging Third Carbon Era, and the myriad dangers associated with a future based on unconventional energy development, hydraulic fracking, and other "extreme energy" technologies. Focusing on the growing social and ecological impacts of natural gas fracking as a case in point, particularly its myth as a "bridge fuel" to a clean energy future, it is argued that these energy trends represent yet another "New Species of Trouble" in the Risk Society of late modernity.
In this article, I use an autoethnographic sketch to explore the relationship between interpersonal bonds and identity construction.
Dr. Bobby Wright underscored perdurable distal anti-African-U.S. (descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States) forces in society as the main impetus for their suicide instead of variables more proximal to the individual championed in multilevel theories. Wright’s argument is advanced as a model bearing his name. Coming again at suicide using the Wright model reveals the inadequacy of the Western conceptualization for African-United States, compels new nomenclature, and expands the gestalt of the phenomenon affording more efficacious intervention and prevention efforts.
The focus of community-based projects is participation. This idea has both an epistemological and a logistical dimension. Local knowledge is supposed to guide these investigations, while community members should participate in every phase of a project. In fact, some critics argue that they should control these undertakings. In this way, the "authorial intent" of these persons can be given serious attention, thereby improving social services. These requirements, in many ways, take the usual debate between quantitative and qualitative methodologies in a new direction.
The history of racial domination in the United States is multifaceted and therefore cannot be explained through simple reference to ideologies or institutional structures. At the microlevel, racial domination is reproduced through social interactions. In this article, I draw on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to social interaction to illuminate the development of the racialized interaction order whereby actors racialized as white impose a set of implicit rules and underlying assumptions onto interracial interactions. I examine archetypal instances of racialized social interactions in America’s history and present-day to reveal the role of social interactions in racially structuring social institutions and everyday lives. First, I discuss the development and racialization of chattel slavery and its routinization as an interaction order. Next, I explore the dramaturgical and symbolic significance of the postbellum emergence and spread of racial terrorism such as white lynch mobs. I then analyze the contemporary discursive and performative strategies of white racial dominance and aspects of the contemporary racialized interaction order such as the de facto racialization of spatial boundaries, mass media and the digital sphere, and police violence. I conclude by discussing the significance of interactional analysis for understanding the present racialized social system.
In the German camps during the Second World War, the aim was to kill from a distance, and the camps were highly efficient in their operations. Previous studies have thus analyzed the industrialized killing and the victims’ survival strategies. Researchers have emphasized the importance of narratives but they have not focused on narratives about camp rituals or analyzed postwar interviews as a continued resistance and defense of one’s self. This article tries to fill this gap by analyzing stories told by former detainees in concentration camps in the Bosnian war during the 1990s. This article aims to describe a set of recounted interaction rituals as well as to identify how these rituals are dramatized in interviews. The retold stories of humiliation and power in the camps indicate that there was little space for individuality and preservation of self. Nevertheless, the detainees seem to have been able to generate some room for resistance, and this seems to have granted them a sense of honor and self-esteem, not least after the war. Their narratives today represent a form of continued resistance.
This is a brief memorial tribute to Marshall Berman, which portrays him as a humanist chronicler of the "heroism of modern life." Berman’s four books achieve this by creative variations in three broad themes: modernism, Marxism, and the metropolis. In Berman’s work, the works of Marx are fruitfully mined for their humanistic vision (with no distinction between the early work and the later "scientific" work), but he makes use of many intellectual and artistic perspectives as well, transcending ideological or disciplinary boundaries, in search of an understanding of the promises and perils of modernism. The metropolis as the theater of the modern life is the implicit or explicit backdrop in his works, and he draws upon his own urban biography to demonstrate the everyday heroism of ordinary people. While vulnerable to criticism as eclectic and naively optimistic, Berman’s writing is critical and empathetic, and true to the spirit of a humanist Marxist understanding of both the disasters and opportunities of modernist capitalist society.
This qualitative analysis describes the parallels between Carolyn Heilbrun’s nonfiction writing, her Amanda Cross novels, and Heilbrun’s real-life experiences as the first woman tenured at Columbia University amid the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Heilbrun’s nonfiction insightfully deconstructs gender issues in society. She turned to fiction as Amanda Cross, however, to expose the unrelenting differential privilege in the academy. Conflict theory, although not identified as such, permeates her writings, both novels and nonfiction. The underlying theme, differential privilege, is examined through four manifestations: response to war, women’s perspectives on women, the attitudes of the privileged toward others, especially men toward women, and the institutionalized privilege in the highly stratified practice of higher education. These observations remain relevant and applicable for dealing with today’s issues with differential privilege.
A wide range of comedians with disabilities has recently been reclaiming the comedy stage as a space in which to contest inequality. The work of disabled comedians highlights the utility of humor as an alternative lens into social life, especially the complexity of the disability experience. Despite the rise of disability humor as a form of activism, scholars have identified disability humor as an undertheorized area. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 10 professional comedians from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we examine common conceptual ground between humor theory and disability theory—focusing on how humor can function as an epistemological and critical lens for viewing disability in everyday social context. Our analysis suggests that even types of humor that have traditionally been used to demean and disable can be (and are) wielded by people with disabilities, on and off the stage, as both a shield and a sword with which to contest the constraints imposed by an ableist world, while also countering the widespread belief that disability is only and always a personal tragedy.
The Garifuna people of Trujillo, Honduras, wryly call it la maldición—the curse. Despite the expansive resources of the area and the sheer amount of valuable commodities that have left from its shores, most of the local people remain poor, with little access to sanitation, reliable electricity, literacy, security, or employment. This study explores the ways in which private tourism development projects conspire with national and international politics and economics to perpetuate la maldición. An analysis of 40 qualitative interviews, three focus groups, and survey data from the Trujillo area is combined with secondary historical, economic, and political data regarding the national and international processes in which local dynamics are embedded. Although past research has shown it to be possible for development projects to be designed in a way that benefits indigenous populations, in the case of Trujillo, Honduras, macroimperial, mesoimperial and microimperial processes conspire to assure that such projects exploit and marginalize instead of include and benefit local people.
This article contributes to the burgeoning literatures on the sociology of diagnosis and transgender studies by examining the relationship between diagnostic processes and the legitimation of gender identity—the medicalization of transgender people. In order for trans-identified people to access medical and surgical services, they must submit to a complex mental health diagnostic process that relies on criteria set by the American Psychiatric Association and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH). By focusing on provider experiences of using the Gender Identity Disorder (GID) diagnosis in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, Fourth edition, text revision (DSM-IV-TR) to meet the requirements of WPATH’s Standards of Care (SOC-6), we show that diagnostic processes can both support and inhibit a transpatient’s abilities to access services. Participants reveal how deeply held cultural views pertaining to gender, mental health, and patient competency are entrenched in diagnostic categories. While the new DSM-5 has relabeled GID as Gender Dysphoria and the SOC-7 has somewhat lessened the requirements for accessing hormone treatments, our data suggest that these changes will not be enough to alter the underlying structure of social control and power that diagnostic categories have over transpeople and their providers.
In this study, we analyze European attitudes about the Roma. These attitudes are important because they encourage or impede the full inclusion of the Roma in European society. We articulate what we refer to as the Gypsy Threat Narrative and use it to motivate an empirical analysis of how comfortable Europeans are with Roma neighbors, as expressed in a 2008 Eurobarometer survey. We use mixed ordinary least square regression models to account for the hierarchical data structure, and account for a number of factors previously found to correlate with attitudes about the Roma while reporting new findings grounded in the logic of the Gypsy Threat Narrative. We discuss the implications of our study for research on European ethnic relations and for activists working for greater Roma inclusion.
Drawing on the experiences of 25 Salvadoran activists in the metro District of Columbia (DC) area, I examine how seasoned activists, or individuals with long-standing organizing experience, maintain critical stances toward their homeland government’s practices while using hostland resources to organize and lessen the impact it has on their compatriots. Building on Vertovec’s notion of the "transnational consciousness," I show seasoned activists use this mind-set to analyze two components of the Salvadoran experience—they see individual remittances creating unnecessary burdens and no political clout for expatriates in El Salvador and are concerned with temporary protected status putting holders in legal limbo in the metro DC area. Understanding this mind-set uncovers the experience of being both "here" and "there" but ultimately leads seasoned activists to become better activists in their evolving organizing work.
The philosophy of Richard Rorty provides a useful justification for accepting epistemological diversity in sociology. In his view, intradisciplinary debates about what constitutes sociological knowledge are irresolvable because, at root, they are cultural disputes. But Rorty’s philosophy offers more than an elaborate justification for the status quo. He also provides a compelling rationale for sociologists to write passionately. Beyond simply improving our prose, passionate language may imbue sociological research with moral relevance, at least in Rorty’s terms.
This article is based on the fieldwork with Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS), a faith-based organization headquartered in Pondicherry, India. SAS is based on the ideals of Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual consort Mirra Alfassa, the Mother. I have focused on the social philosophy and social service of SAS, particularly one of its rural development projects, Sri Aurobindo Rural and Village Action and Movement (SARVAM). I have reviewed the organizational literature, had discussions with sadhaks, the members of the order, and interviewed 396 project beneficiaries. The social philosophy of SAS focuses on transcendence and divinity of human beings. Its social and rural development projects endeavor to translate this philosophy into action. For the beneficiaries, SARVAM fulfills their material and spiritual needs, gives them a feeling of being anchored by SAS, and is thus different from other rural development projects. SAS as a faith-based organization demonstrates how faith shapes civic culture and creates a sociopolitical capital and commitment to the wider community.
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.
Revisiting Erich Fromm’s works provides a theoretical foundation for a comprehensive and normative theory of human–nature relations that contains psychical, social, economic, and ethical components. Fromm’s system of thought was rooted in understanding humanity’s effort to establish meaningful relations with the natural world and how socioeconomic systems mediate this endeavor. His normative theory maintained that society must develop a nondestructive relationship with the environment by fostering and perfecting the human potentiality of biophilia—a thorough love of living beings. He argued that biophilia will not become the prevailing character structure until society is capable of meeting three prerequisites for human flourishing: security, justice, and freedom. Because Fromm’s social–ecological and ethical insights were partially rooted in humanism and Talmudic studies, he forces environmental scholars to rethink the Judeo-Christian and humanistic traditions, two pillars of Western thought often criticized in environmental literature.
This article examines the role of anchor institutions in the urban revitalization process. We use case study analysis to understand how concerns about residential displacement are addressed by anchor institutions in the urban planning process. This analysis is designed to build upon William Worthy’s critique of anchor-based development during the 1960s and 1970s. Our analysis examines the degree to which his concept of "institutional rape" applies to contemporary urban revitalization efforts. The article focuses on university and medical campus expansion in Buffalo, NY. We describe how the planned expansion of the Buffalo-Niagara Medical Campus has raised concerns about the displacement of residents living in a neighboring subsidized housing development. We conclude that despite incremental improvements in the planning process designed to facilitate coordination between anchor institutions and grassroots interests, resident empowerment has not been fully realized. Instead, the planning process continues to be dominated by institutional interests with limited community input. Consequently, residents worked through grassroots organizations, local government, and the media to resist anchor-based development. In light of these findings, we recommend that the role of residents in the planning process for neighborhood revitalization become more institutionalized through the negotiation of community benefit agreements and other linkages.