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Race, The Condition Of Neo-Liberalism, Vikash Singh Aug 2017

Race, The Condition Of Neo-Liberalism, Vikash Singh

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault’s seminars, Society Must be Defended, and Birth of Bio-politics. Insofar as “race” cannot be understood as a discrete category outside its social, economic, moral, and political embeddedness in liberalism, I argue that methodological individualism and expectations of high-specialization constrain the theorization of race in U.S. scholarship. …


Race, The Condition Of Neo-Liberalism, Vikash Singh Jul 2017

Race, The Condition Of Neo-Liberalism, Vikash Singh

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault’s seminars, Society Must be Defended, and Birth of Bio-politics. Insofar as “race” cannot be understood as a discrete category outside its social, economic, moral, and political embeddedness in liberalism, I argue that methodological individualism and expectations of high-specialization constrain the theorization of race in U.S. scholarship. …


From Land Grab To Agrarian Transition? Hybrid Trajectories Of Accumulation And Environmental Change On The Cambodia–Vietnam Border, Timothy Gorman, Alice Beban Dec 2016

From Land Grab To Agrarian Transition? Hybrid Trajectories Of Accumulation And Environmental Change On The Cambodia–Vietnam Border, Timothy Gorman, Alice Beban

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In recent years, thousands of Vietnamese migrant farmers have crossed the border into Cambodia and leased land for export-oriented rice and shrimp production. Based on case studies in two Cambodian border provinces, we argue that these land transfers represent an intersection of broader processes of agrarian change that is re-shaping the Cambodian borderlands into a hybrid socio-ecological zone. Cambodian landlords and intermediaries use unequal access to politico-legal authority and the exclusionary power of the border to leverage control over their migrant tenants, thereby capturing a significant portion of the surplus from the migrants’ high-value commodity production systems and potentially creating …


Of Migrants And Middlemen: Cultivating Access And Challenging Exclusion Along The Vietnam–Cambodia Border, Timothy Gorman, Alice Beban Jul 2016

Of Migrants And Middlemen: Cultivating Access And Challenging Exclusion Along The Vietnam–Cambodia Border, Timothy Gorman, Alice Beban

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In a possible sign of a new trend in Southeast Asia, economic pressures are driving smallholder shrimp farmers from Vietnam's Mekong Delta across the Cambodian border in search of new land. Building from ethnographic research with Vietnamese shrimp farmers in Kampot province, Cambodia, this paper explores the structures, mechanisms, and relations that facilitate and impede the ability of Vietnamese migrants to gain and maintain access to land in Cambodia. The Vietnamese migrants in our study bring capital and farming skills, but their ambiguous legal status and their lack of social networks and experience with the terms of access in Cambodia …


Moral Economy And The Upper Peasant: The Dynamics Of Land Privatization In The Mekong Delta, Timothy Gorman Oct 2013

Moral Economy And The Upper Peasant: The Dynamics Of Land Privatization In The Mekong Delta, Timothy Gorman

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper examines how people mobilize around notions of distributive justice, or ‘moral economies’, to make claims to resources, using the process of post‐socialist land privatization in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam as a case study. First, I argue that the region's history of settlement, production, and political struggle helped to entrench certain normative beliefs around landownership, most notably in its population of semi‐commercial upper peasants. I then detail the ways in which these upper peasants mobilized around notions of distributive justice to successfully press demands for land restitution in the late 1980s, drawing on Vietnamese newspapers and …


A Multicultural Grassroots Effort To Reduce Ethnic And Racial Social Distance Among Middle School Students, Christopher Donoghue, David Brandwein Sep 2011

A Multicultural Grassroots Effort To Reduce Ethnic And Racial Social Distance Among Middle School Students, Christopher Donoghue, David Brandwein

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Raising tolerance for people of different ethnic and racial groups is the goal of the Multicultural Mosaic program, a grass-roots multicultural education effort initiated by a small group of middle school teachers in a private school in the northeast. After years of enjoying the comforts of a modern, but European-based, curriculum, these teachers took the initiative to pursue an ambitious transformation of their entire school's approach to pedagogy. Not only would the English teachers introduce new texts by foreign authors and the social studies teachers introduce new materials on the history of non-Western cultures, but also the teachers of mathematics …


Traitor In Our Midst: Cultural Variations In Japanese Vs. Oklahoman Public Discourse On Domestic Terrorism In The Spring Of 1995, Carl W. Roberts, Yong Wang Jan 2010

Traitor In Our Midst: Cultural Variations In Japanese Vs. Oklahoman Public Discourse On Domestic Terrorism In The Spring Of 1995, Carl W. Roberts, Yong Wang

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

When “one of our own” commits mass murder, mechanisms that sustain our social order are opened to question. Based on two samples of newspaper editorials written in 1995 ‐ either after the poison gas attack in the Tokyo subway or after the Oklahoma City bombing ‐ evidence is provided that Japanese editorialists advised strategies for retaining order, whereas Oklahoman authors endorsed ones for reestablishing it. In accordance with Simmel’s distinction between faithfulness and gratitude as social forms, Japanese advised faithful continuation of wholesome interactions with their terrorists, whereas Oklahomans expressed gratitude for rescue workers’ assistance. We apply modality analysis to …


Marginalized By Race And Place: Occupational Sex Segregation In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Sangeeta Parashar Jul 2008

Marginalized By Race And Place: Occupational Sex Segregation In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Sangeeta Parashar

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Racial and gender disparities found in most other societies are particularly magnified in South Africa where the marginalized social group constitutes a numerical majority of the population. These factors, along with region, are dominant axes of inequality in the country. However, empirical knowledge of the interplay between these systems of social inequality in determining employment outcomes remains somewhat scant. This dissertation addresses that gap by studying occupational sex segregation across various racial groups using multilevel modeling techniques. Individual-level data from the 2001 Census and magisterial-level data from survey data aggregations and published sources are used. I first study the influence …


Marginalized By Race And Place: Occupational Sex Segregation In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Sangeeta Parashar Jul 2008

Marginalized By Race And Place: Occupational Sex Segregation In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Sangeeta Parashar

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose: Given South Africa’s apartheid history, studies have primarily focused on racial discrimination in employment outcomes, with lesser attention paid to gender and context. This paper fills an important gap by examining the combined effect of macro-and micro-level factors on occupational sex segregation in post-apartheid South Africa. Intersections by race are also explored. Design/methodology/approach A multilevel multinomial logistic regression is used to examine the influence of various supply and demand variables on women’s placement in white- and blue-collar male-dominated occupations. Data from the 2001 Census and other published sources are used, with women nested in magisterial districts. Findings Demand-side results …


Exploitation Or Fun?: The Lived Experience Of Teenage Employment In Suburban America, Yasemin Besen-Cassino Jun 2006

Exploitation Or Fun?: The Lived Experience Of Teenage Employment In Suburban America, Yasemin Besen-Cassino

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Objectivist scholars characterize typical teenage jobs as “exploitive”: highly routinized service sector jobs with low pay, no benefits, minimum skill requirements, and little time off. This view assumes exploitive characteristics are inherent in the jobs, ignoring the lived experience of the teenage workers. This article focuses on the lived work experience of particularly affluent, suburban teenagers who work in these jobs and explores the meaning they create during their everyday work experience. Based on a large ethnographic study conducted with the teenage workers at a national coffee franchise, this article unravels the ways in which objectivist views of these “bad …


Moving Beyond The Mother-Child Dyad: Women's Education, Child Immunization, And The Importance Of Context In Rural India, Sangeeta Parashar Feb 2005

Moving Beyond The Mother-Child Dyad: Women's Education, Child Immunization, And The Importance Of Context In Rural India, Sangeeta Parashar

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The argument that maternal education is critical for child health is commonplace in academic and policy discourse, although significant facets of the relationship remain empirically and theoretically challenged. While individual-level analyses consistently suggest that maternal education enhances child health outcomes, another body of literature argues that the observed causality at the individual-level may, in fact, be spurious. This study contributes to the debate by examining the contextual effects of women's education on children's immunization in rural districts of India. Multilevel analyses of data from the 1994 Human Development Profile Index and the 1991 district-level Indian Census demonstrate that a positive …