Digital Commons Network^™

Faculty Senate Yearbook, 2020-21, Wmu Faculty Senate

WMU Faculty Senate Yearbooks

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Neighborhood: Defining Membership In Diverse Community Contexts, Brad Forenza, Brian Dashew, Diana Cedeño, David T. Lardier

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The purpose of this research is to form an overarching definition of community membership that encompasses all community contexts. Utilizing qualitative interviews with 102 members of five known community contexts (communities of action, circumstance, interest, place, and practice), the authors use cross-case analysis to explore common, transcendent themes of membership. Three takeaways emerge: first, that individuals identify with communities to address personal needs but come to see social benefits; second, that individuals join communities to deepen existing relationships, but develop new ones; and third, that through engagement, individuals strengthen a sense of self that is unique to community context. Through …

Learning To Teach Reading Responsively Through Tutoring, Jodi Nickel, Scott Frederick Hughes

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

This article describes a community service learning collaboration between a teacher education program and a nonprofit literacy society. Seventeen teacher candidates (TCs) tutored young readers weekly for seven months as part of their course-related field experience and completed reflective assignments analyzing their own learning and the learning of their tutees. The study demonstrates how the tutoring experience enhanced the pedagogical competence of TCs (kid-watching, assessment, instruction, responsiveness, professional conversations, and affirmation of impact). These findings align with contemporary research in literacy teacher preparation, which identifies that the combination of coursework and tutoring is effective in promoting the integration of TC …

Physical Activity In Two Low-Income Detroit Neighborhoods: Disentangling Human Agency From Social Structure, Daniel J. Rose

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article explores strategies developed by African American residents in response to barriers to physical activity in two low-income Detroit neighborhoods. Using 47 in-depth, qualitative interviews, a grounded theory approach allowed the analysis to be reframed around the ways in which structural factors conditioned, but did not determine the human agency of residents seeking physical activity. Interviews revealed numerous responses to structural barriers such as devising home routines, cognitive mapping to avoid perceived threats, and leaving the neighborhood to access resources. Differences in neighborhood contexts, along with unique individual concerns, showed that agency was neither a constant nor independent force, …

Review Of Living Well, Dying Well: A Practical Guide To Choices, Costs, And Consequence By Judy Stevens-Long And Dohrea Bardell, Jewel Woodard

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Review of Living Well, Dying Well: A Practical Guide to Choices, Costs, and Consequence by Judy Stevens-Long and Dohrea Bardell, Field University Press (2018)

Introductory Pages, Christopher W. Tremblay, Laura Owen, Patrick O'Connor

Journal of College Access

No abstract provided.

Communication Pedagogy: The Coronavirus Pandemic, Ron C. Arnett

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

In this historical moment defined by the coronavirus, the global community struggles with and against a seemingly invisible foe. Students, faculty, and administrators open the blinds on windows in the morning, witnessing the brightness of the sun and seemingly the clarity of a morning welcome. Yet, there lurks, not in the shadows, but in the brightness of the everyday sunshine, the possibility of sickness and death. This responsive essay weaves together my communicative rejoinders to the coronavirus and its implications for this challenging time in human history. I turn to the autoethnographic insights of Art Bochner and Carolyn Ellis (2016) …

Rebuilding Lives Post-Disaster, By Julie L. Drolet, Lucas Prieto

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Julie L. Drolet, Rebuilding Lives Post-Disaster. Oxford University Press (2019). 258 pages, $39.95 (Paperback).

Editor’S Note To Volume 3 Of The Journal Of Communication Pedagogy: Where Do We Go From Here?, Deanna D. Sellnow

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Editor’s Note to Volume 3 of the Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Intrusive Teaching: The Strain Of Care Labor, Identity And The Emerging Majority In Higher Education, Jayne R. Goode, Katherine J. Denker, Daniel Cortese, Lisa Carslon, Kerri Morris

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

United States publicly-funded higher education systems are experiencing increasing pressures. In response, higher education institutions have broadened their appeal to students less likely to attend college as part of their fiscal strategies. This growing student population consists of first-generation students and individuals from marginalized backgrounds who often enter college underprepared, and higher education must retain these emerging-majority students to ensure fiscal stability. When enrollment and retention are viewed from a business model, faculty duties expand into triage care and student emotional support. This qualitative investigation of faculty in a publicly-funded state university explores intrusive teaching practices marked by monitoring and …

Confronting Students’ Personal And Interpersonal Communication Anxieties And Needs Through Constitutive, Experiential Communication Pedagogy, Lawrence R. Frey, Emily Loker

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Today’s college students are experiencing unprecedented high levels of anxiety, resulting in devastating effects. This essay challenges communication educators to respond directly to this significant issue by employing an experiential pedagogy that offers students constitutive opportunities to initiate, experiment with, and receive feedback about new communicative behaviors that will enable them to interact well and achieve positive outcomes in high anxiety-inducing interactions. The essay explicates how that constitutive, experiential pedagogy informs the course “Communication and Human Relations,” enabling students to acquire communication competencies to reduce their anxiety about and to manage effectively their personal and interpersonal communication difficulties.

Training And Development: Communication And The Multigenerational Workplace, Michael G. Strawser

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Communication practitioners, especially those who facilitate training and development workshops, should focus on generational differences as a subset of their communication training efforts. This article positions the multigenerational workplace and generational differences as a relevant topic for communication trainers and provides cursory information related to different generations. Ultimately, 10 best practices to address generational differences in business contexts are discussed.

Review Of Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents By Isabel Wilkerson, Edward U. Murphy

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

No abstract provided.

Applying Transformative Organizing Theory To White Antiracist Organizing, Josal Diebold

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

White antiracist organizing is a type of community organizing that works to build a movement that challenges the political, social, economic, and cultural manifestations of white supremacy, especially in white communities. In striving to harness strategic white antiracist organizing, an applicable theoretical lens is needed to guide both scholarship and practice. Transformative organizing theory, predicated on the need to organize and work for change on multiple levels at once, is particularly salient. This paper highlights how transformative organizing theory can anchor and cultivate white antiracist organizing through the application of key theoretical concepts, such as suffering and oppression; self-awareness and …

Journal Of Sociology And Social Welfare Vol. 47 No. 1

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

No abstract provided.

A Legal Analysis: The Transgender Bathroom Debate, Josselyn Sheer

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article examines the current legal battles over transgender bathroom, locker room, and employment rights. In the recent years, there has been a major uproar surrounding the rights of transgender individuals; concurrently, our country is witnessing a shift in the ways in which individuals understand their gender outside of the binary male and female classification. While the word transgender can serve as an “umbrella term encompassing a wide array of identifies,” transgender rights have steadily grown across numerous areas (Buck, 2016, p. 465). However, there have been contentious legal issues that have put transgender individuals rights in the spotlight.

The …

"We're Not The Enemy And We're Not Asking For The World": Low-Wage Hospital Service Workers' Advocacy For Fair Wages, Sandra Wexler, Rafael J. Engel, Tal Laufer, Elizabeth Steiner

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

A number of states and localities have increased the minimum wage beyond that set by the federal government in recognition of the material and health challenges faced by low-wage earners. Academics, economists, and activists have offered microeconomic, economic justice, and moral rationales to support increasing the minimum wage. These justifications can be understood from the vantage of claims-making, that is, the ways individuals and groups attempt to define and shape a social problem to influence policy. This paper examines the wage-related claims-making of low-wage hospital service workers. These workers (N=156) testified to a City Council-created Wage Review Committee, which posted …

System Of Structural Dependency In The Sudanese Refugee Women Of Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya, Jessica Gladden

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Many countries facing an influx of refugees have established refugee camps to provide temporary housing. Lacking a solution for the refugee crisis, these temporary facilities become long-term housing for many refugees. As a result, many refugees spend years or even decades in refugee camps. The refugees often are legally prohibited from obtaining employment. They must rely on aid from the United Nations and other organizations for their survival. This study considers some of the impacts of living in a refugee camp and surviving solely on humanitarian aid. In particular, this study examines the structural dependency observed in the Sudanese refugee …

No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos And Heartbreak Of Mental Health In America, By Ron Powers, Christopher Giesfield

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America. Hachette Book Group (2018), 384 pages, $16.99 (paperback).

The Impossible Imperative: Navigating The Competing Principles Of Child Protection, By Jill Duerr Berrick, Kalah M. Villagrana

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Jill Duerr Berrick, The Impossible Imperative: Navigating the Competing Principles of Child Protection. Oxford University Press (2018), 244 pages, $36.95 (hardcover).

Journal Of Sociology And Social Welfare Vol. 47, No. 2

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Complete issue of Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Volume 47, Number 2

Psychometric Properties Of The Job Burnout Scale Among Social Service Workers: A Pilot Study, Madhavappallil Thomas, Yong Li

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Job Burnout Scale among Social Service Workers (JBSSW). The JBSSW was administered among 248 social service workers employed in governmental and nonprofit social service agencies. Findings show that that this scale has three independent dimensions: person-related burnout, work-related burnout, and agency-related burnout. All three dimensions have good reliability and construct validity. Work-related burnout and agencyrelated burnout also have good concurrent validity. This scale may be used by social service agencies, researchers, and practitioners to gauge staff burnout and alleviate it by changing the interactions between individuals, the nature of their work, and …

The Social Construction Of Arab Identity In The U.S.: The Historical Complicity And The Modern Responsibility Of Social Work, Suhad Tabahi, Jacob Bucher

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This paper presents the sociopolitical experiences of early Arab migrants in the United States (U.S.) and the process of contradictory and socially constructed racial categorizations favoring white supremacy. While there is much discourse of the racial formation of Arab immigrants since 9-11, the actual racial project started in the early twentieth century, through varies entities including the social work profession where the “othering” process of early Arabs Americans existed in social welfare practice. Examples of the pejorative attitudes towards Arab immigrants from the early social work discourse are examined through proceedings from the National Conference on Social Welfare (NCSW) in …

Children And The Welfare State: The Need For A Child-Centered Analysis, Colleen Henry

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Variation in child well-being across rich Western nations suggests that the welfare state may play a role in shaping child well-being. However, welfare scholars have largely overlooked children in their analyses. This paper seeks to bring children to the center of welfare state analysis by examining how comparative welfare state theory can consider child well-being. The paper begins with an examination of Esping- Andersen’s seminal work, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, which has come to frame welfare state analysis for nearly three decades. Next, the paper explores the main critiques of Esping-Andersen’s work, with special attention paid to the …

Deconstructing The Racialized Cannabis User: Cannabis Criminalization And Intersections With The Social Work Profession, Amar Ghelani

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Cannabis users have been historically stigmatized and criminalized for non-violent behaviors such as consuming, producing, and distributing cannabis. Racialized cannabis users in particular have been constructed as fundamentally different, dangerous, and mentally unstable, while state actors have benefited from the subjugation of this group. The following article reviews the history of cannabis prohibition with an emphasis on the social construction of racialized cannabis users and role of social workers in the treatment of this group. As laws liberalizing cannabis use and trade are passed across North America, an emergent legal framework is maintaining racial divides and marginalizing non- White cannabis …

Illiberalism: A Primer And Call To Action For Social Workers, Loring P. Jones, David Engstrom

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Liberal democracies had been ascendant in the post-World War II era. President Trump is part of a wave of nationalist, anti-immigrant politicians with autocratic tendencies who are challenging liberal democracy. The term given to the governing philosophy of these leaders is illiberalism. This paper is meant to be a primer on illiberalism for social workers, describing this ideology and the threat illiberalism poses for democracy, our social welfare system, and the interests of social work clients. We conclude with a discussion on what social workers can do to defend democracy in light of the historic mission to advance social …

School Lunch Participation And Youth School Failure: A Multi-Racial Perspective, Shiyou Wu, Kalah M. Villagrana, Siobhan M. Lawler, Renee Garbe

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

In the United States, students from low-socioeconomic status and minority ethnic groups graduate from high school at lower rates than their peers. Limited studies exist about the risk and protective factors that affect the disproportionate graduation rates by income and ethnicity. Using the 2016 Arizona Youth Survey data (N = 32,178), this study aims to explore the relationship between the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) participation and school failure, and other risk and protective factors from a multi-racial perspective. Logistic regressions were conducted on the total sample and the six ethnic subsamples (i.e., White, Latino, Black, American Indian, Asian/Pacific Islander, …

A Framework For Analyzing, Developing, And Applying Community Practice Interventions, Jason M. Sawyer, Shane R. Brady

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Due to multiple factors, the community practice field struggles with incongruent community practice language and activities. In this article, authors unpack various challenges associated with community practice and explore implications for analysis, development, and application of effective interventions. Grounded in applied social science paradigms, authors offer a framework incorporating multi-paradigmatic approaches to inform intervention development and application. Principally centered in praxis—that is, reflection and action—this article builds on the work of foundational scholars to cultivate contextual interventions in planned change work. The authors aim to further develop the community practice knowledge base, expand what constitutes relevant evidence, and aid practitioners …

Childhood Snap Receipt As A Protective Factor Against Adult Obesity: Examining The Interaction Of Snap Participation And Neighborhood Disadvantage, Thomas Vartanian, Linda Houser

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) with family fixed-effects (FE) models, we explore how neighborhood conditions and time receiving SNAP benefits during childhood interact to relate to time spent obese in adulthood. Results suggest that, for those growing up in less advantaged neighborhoods, SNAP receipt between the ages of 9–13 and 14–18 was associated with subsequently shorter periods of time obese in adulthood. Conversely, for those growing up in more advantaged neighborhoods, SNAP receipt during these same late childhood/ adolescent time periods was associated with relatively high proportions of time in adulthood spent obese. SNAP participation during early …

Does Internet Access Create Or Destroy Social Capital? The Case Of West Java Province, Bayu Kharisma, Sutyastie Soemitro Remi

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Bonding social capital is within a group or community, whereas bridging social capital is between social groups, social class, race, religion, or other important sociodemographic or socioeconomic characteristics. This paper aims to investigate the determinants of household involvement and the effect of internet access on bridging and bonding social capital in West Java, Indonesia. The data used in this study were sourced from the results of a survey conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) of West Java Province in 2014, The National Socio-Economic Survey (Survei Sosial Ekonomi Nasional) on Socio-Cultural and Educational Module (Modul Sosial Budaya dan Pendidikan) …