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Sociology

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Ethnography

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Ethnographic Activism And Critical Criminology, David C. Brotherton Oct 2023

Ethnographic Activism And Critical Criminology, David C. Brotherton

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Testimonio And Counterstorytelling By Immigrant-Origin Children And Youth: Insights That Amplify Immigrant Subjectivities, Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Wendy Barrales Apr 2021

Testimonio And Counterstorytelling By Immigrant-Origin Children And Youth: Insights That Amplify Immigrant Subjectivities, Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Wendy Barrales

Publications and Research

This article seeks to amplify our scholarly view of immigrant identity by centering the first-person narratives of immigrant-origin children and youth. Our theoretical and methodological framework centers on testimonio—a narrative practice popularized in Latin American social movements in which an individual recounts a lived experience that is intended to be representative of a collective struggle. Our goal is to foreground first-person narratives of childhood as told by immigrant-origin children and youth in order to gain insight into what they believe we should know about them. We argue for the power of testimonio to communicate both extraordinary hardship and everyday experiences …


The Rise Of Prepping In New York City: Community Resilience And Covid-19, Anna Bounds Jan 2021

The Rise Of Prepping In New York City: Community Resilience And Covid-19, Anna Bounds

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


The Public Library As Resistive Space In The Neoliberal City, Sofya Aptekar Jul 2019

The Public Library As Resistive Space In The Neoliberal City, Sofya Aptekar

Publications and Research

With reduced hours, decaying infrastructure, and precariously positioned staff, local public libraries provide much needed services in cities devastated by inequality and slashed safety nets. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research of a small public library in a diverse, mostly working class neighborhood in Queens, New York. I show that in addition to providing an alternative to the capitalist market by distributing resources according to people’s needs, the library serves as a moral underground space, where middle class people bend rules to help struggling city residents. Although the library occasionally replicates hegemonic ideologies about immigrant assimilation, it provides …


Studying The Gang Through Critical Ethnography, David C. Brotherton Apr 2019

Studying The Gang Through Critical Ethnography, David C. Brotherton

Publications and Research

Added to the paucity of critical lenses through which the gang has been viewed criminologically is the increasing influence of the US criminal justice system on the global gang discourse. Such a lens has increased in importance as many nation states have followed the example of US repressive gang policies in thinking about crime and deviance, essentially mirroring its adoption of neo-liberalism in thinking about the political economy. In such an approach it is assumed that a coercive social control system is required to discipline and warehouse those “problem populations” excluded by the concentration of wealth and power. Across the …


The Unbearable Lightness Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Accomplishment Of Diversity At An Urban Farmers Market, Sofya Aptekar Feb 2019

The Unbearable Lightness Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Accomplishment Of Diversity At An Urban Farmers Market, Sofya Aptekar

Publications and Research

This article provides a critique of work on urban public space that touts its potential as a haven from racial and class conflicts and inequalities. I argue that social structures and hierarchies embedded in the capitalist system and the state’s social control over the racialized poor are not suspended even in places that appear governed by civility and tolerance, such as those under Anderson’s “cosmopolitan canopy”. Durable inequality, residential segregation, nativism, and racism inevitably shape what happens in diverse public spaces. Using an ethnographic study of an urban farmers’ market in New York City, I show that appearances of everyday …


Social Banishment And The Us “Criminal Alien”: Norms Of Violence And Repression In The Deportation Regime, David C. Brotherton Apr 2018

Social Banishment And The Us “Criminal Alien”: Norms Of Violence And Repression In The Deportation Regime, David C. Brotherton

Publications and Research

I interpret data from an ongoing participant observation study of deportation hearings in the North-East United States using two analytical themes: (i) the emergence of the deportation regime and its mechanisms of structural violence, and (ii) the norms of violence in the spaces of the deportation regime. By deportation regime I am referring to the institutional systems and practices created under the emergence of an exceptional security state and the discrete and not so discrete apparatuses and rituals employed to discipline the minds and bodies of documented and undocumented immigrant labor and the collateral consequences that result. Whereas structural violence …


Critical Bifocality And Circuits Of Privilege: Expanding Critical Ethnographic Theory And Design, Lois Weis, Michelle Fine Jan 2012

Critical Bifocality And Circuits Of Privilege: Expanding Critical Ethnographic Theory And Design, Lois Weis, Michelle Fine

Publications and Research

Almost 10 years ago, in Working Method (2004), we argued for a critical theory of method for educational studies, which would analyze lives in the context of history, structure, and institutions, across the power lines of privilege and marginalization.


Policing: A Sociologist’S Response To An Anthropological Account, Peter Moskos Jan 2010

Policing: A Sociologist’S Response To An Anthropological Account, Peter Moskos

Publications and Research

Social science writing should not ape quantitative science in format, structure, or style. If we can’t explain ourselves to others in a style both illuminating and interesting, we won’t and don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Too many in the Ivory Tower cling to the belief that research and academic writing must conform to a “scientific” format. Quality writing is more art than science. To be relevant, writing need not be – indeed should not be – rooted in a limited model of “hypothesis, replicable experiment, findings, discussion.” The more jargon and sociobabble we anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers spew out, …