Sociology Commons^™

An Interview With Sandra Harding, Stephanie Urso Spina, Mike Roberts, Patricia Ticento Clough

Publications and Research

Harding’s position has been critiqued as more postmodern than feminist, as viable without nasty entanglements in feminism, as too concerned with established Eurocentric, scientific discourses, and as appealing to foundational innocence by her concern with realism. But what seems to drive Harding’s choices more than anything is a conscious attempt to be effective in intervening in existing systems of power, whether empiricist and postmodern. By taking this position, Harding undertakes a difficult task. Its difficulty, however, is compensated for by the conversations she generates. As a voice not restricted to one intellectual school, Harding demands attention from many with opposing …

A Space For Co-Constructing Counter Stories Under Surveillance, María Elena Torre, Michelle Fine, Kathy Boudin, Iris Bowen, Judith Clark, Donna Hylton, Migdalia Martinez, 'Missy', Rosemarie A. Roberts, Pamela Smart, Debora Upegui

Publications and Research

Using our experiences as members of a participatory action research committee (from the City University of New York Graduate Center and the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility) documenting the impact of college in a maximum security prison, this essay illustrates the power of Participatory Action Research in the construction of counter stories. We raise for discussion a set of theoretical, methodological and ethical challenges that emerged from the co-production of counter stories under surveillance: the creation of a critical space for producing 'counter knowledge'; the co-mingling of counter and dominant discourses, the negotiation of power over and within research in prison, …

Disappearing Acts: The State And Violence Against Women In The Twentieth Century, Michelle Fine, Lois Weis

Publications and Research

As children we held our breath, our senses filled with the musty smells of elephants, the staccato flashes of twirling plastic flashlights, the terrors of trapeze. With mystery, moustache, and elegance, the magician waved a wand, invited a woman, usually White, seemingly working class, into a box. She disappeared or was cut in half. Applause. Our early introduction to the notion of the sponsored disappearing act. So, too, at the end of the twentieth century, we witness poor and working-class women shoved into spaces too small for human form, no elegance, no wand. And they too disappear. Disappearing from welfare …

The Politics Of Immigration Control In Britain And Germany: Subnational Politicians And Social Movements, Roger Karapin

Publications and Research

Political backlash against immigrant minorities and restrictive immigration policies have increased in western Europe. Most explanations of the adoption of restrictions on immigration have focused on ethnic competition for material resources and on national political factors. An alternative theory of political mobilization and restrictive policy changes argues that pressure from subnational politicians and social movement organizations and signals from dramatic anti-immigrant events such as riots lead national elites to infer that public interest in anti-immigration policies is intense enough to justify a break with liberal policies. This theory is tested against four cases in Britain and Germany, where the hypothesized …

Revisiting The Struggle For Integration, Michelle Fine, Bernadette Anand

Publications and Research

The project we describe in this article emerged from thinking about Fridays. While the Monday through Thursday schedule at Renaissance Middle School in Montclair, New Jersey covers the traditional distribution of curriculum, Fridays are dedicated to nine-week cycles of two hour sessions. Each session involves in-depth work focusing on five themes: Aviation, Genetics, Building Bridges, Community Service and this, the Oral History Project. Because the school is thematically organized around core notions of justice, history, social movements and "renaissances" (that is, Italian, Harlem and Montclair), we structured this project around the deeply contested history of desegregation of the Montclair public …

Building “A Home Of Our Own:” The Construction Of The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

This article traces the founding of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the context of radical archiving and lesbian institution building. It includes an outline of problems presented by "extra-legal" or outlaw material in archival settings. Discussion of the New York Public Library's Becoming Visible exhibit reflects the 1990s growth of mainstream institutional interest in gay, lesbian, and transgender archives, and the complications this interest presents.

An Activist's Guide To Lesbian History: A Companion To The Video Not Just Passing Through, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

This guide, designed to accompany the video Not Just Passing Through, contains guidelines for conducting oral history, forms for donating material to mainstream and community based archives, and lessons for engaging lesbian history with activism.

The Politics Of Racial Identity: A Pedagogy Of Invisibility, Stephanie Urso Spina, Robert H. Tai

Publications and Research

A Critical theory informed Review of Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High by Signithia Fordham. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996; Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth by Stacey J. Lee. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996, and Latinos and Education: A Critical Reader by Antonia Darder, Rodolfo D. Torres, and Henry Gutierrez (Eds.). New York: Routledge, 1997.

The Myths And Justifications Of Sex Segregation In Higher Education: Vmi And The Citadel, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein

Publications and Research

Access to higher education, particularly to the specialized and elite education that is part of the tracking system leading to prestigious and highly remunerative positions, is a measure of equality. This article argues that segregated schooling for women limits their access to the same educational and associational opportunities men have, and that arguments supporting segregation are based on unsound criteria. It further argues that whatever the intent or ideological underpinning of such arguments, they ultimately have a negative outcome for women’s equality in society.

White Supremacist Movement(S) In A White Supremacist Context, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

This chapter excerpt describes the relationship between so-called "extremist" groups of violent white supremacists and mainstream understandings of whiteness.

Three Film Reviews, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Reviews of Advertising Missionaries, directed by Chris Hilton and Gauthier Flauder; Chastie (Paradise), a film by Sergey Dvortsevoy; and Wilbert: Street Kid in Nicaragua, a video by Bent Erik Kroyer.

Demythifying Multicultural Education: Social Semiotics As A Tool Of Critical Pedagogy, Stephanie Urso Spina

Publications and Research

This article discusses the assumptions and curricular implications of a social semiotic approach to education. Semiotics refers to the meaning we make with language as well as other objects. events, and actions. Social semiotics emphasizes the social, cultural, historic, and political contexts that shape that meaning. A social semiotic approach to education can help teachers and teacher educators to deconstruct the reproduction of class, politicize the ideology of colonialism, and overcome the inequities they engender. By providing a way to challenge selectively reproduced cultural politics, social semiotics provides a way to reconstruct and democratize schools and society.

The Deculturation Of The Brunei Dusun, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

On Epistemology, Whiteness, And Sexual Politics: Personal Reflections On Standpoint And White Supremacist Discourse, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

The preface to White Lies in which the author explains her personal relationship to the work of scholarship in the book.

"The Teacher Would Call Me 'Piggy', 'Smelley', 'Dirty', Names Like That": Prying Open A Discussion Of Domestic Violence For Educators, Lois M. Weis, Michelle Fine

Publications and Research

(The Teacher) would call me "piggy", "smelly", "dirty", names like that, and the kids started following along with it. And I'd say, by the fourth grade, I started cleaning myself out. I didn't care anymore, but my father had this thing that you were allowed to take a bath once a week. He would measure the shampoo, he would measure the soap, and if he thought somebody was using the shampoo when he said you shouldn't, you'd get a beating. But I got sick of it, and the beatings almost became to be painless when hit with a belt or …

Women-Church And Egalitarianism: Revisioning "In Christ There Are No More Distinctions Between Male And Female", Susan A. Farrell

Publications and Research

This chapter from The Power of Gender in Religion (eds G.A. Weatherby and S.A. Farrell) illustrates how women in the Roman Catholic Church are expanding the roles of women and challenging the patriarchal and hierarchical Roman Catholic Church practices. They are accomplishing this through an umbrella organization of feminist groups which maintain their catholic identty while critiquing the church from within.

The Invention Of "African Rhythm", Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

"African ryhthm" was invented in the 1950s when, thanks to pioneering research by the Reverend A. M. Jones, Alan Merriam, Gilbert Rouget, Erich von Hornbostel, and John Blacking, among others, "African music" was construed as an essentially rhythmic phenomenon. Three decades and a sizable body of empirical research later, it is easy to see that an overriding ideology of difference (between "Africa" and the "West") motivated these early efforts. This essay reinvents "African rhythm" not by denying its own ideological construction but by engaging in an imaginary dialogue with earlier researchers in an effort to concretize that which was missing …

Asses And Wits: The Homoerotics Of Mastery In Satiric Comedy, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

This essay explores master-servant homoeroticism in three seventeenth-century satiric comedies: Ben Jonson's Epicoene and Volpone and George Chapman's The Gentleman Usher. Whereas "sodomy" always signifies social disorder, "homoerotic" useful for describing same-sex relations that are socially normative or orderly. Thus homoerotic master-servant relations become "sodomitical" only when they are perceived to threaten social order. In Epicoene, the character associated with the disorder of "sodomy" is neither Dauphine or Epicoene, but the "unnatural" Morose, even though he has not literally had sex with the boy he marries. The erotic master-servant relationship in Volpone is sodomitical because it transgresses against …

The Lesbian And Gay Past: An Interpretive Battleground, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

The lesbian and gay past is an interpretive battleground that mainstream archives have refused to enter, assuming few risks in collecting, naming, or identifying archival collections. At the same time, libraries offer up worlds to those who work to unearth the secrets there.

The New York Public Library's 1994 "Becoming Visible" exhibit trumpeted The Arrival of lesbian and gay history to New York's cultural mainstream. The NYPL exhibit denies the library's role in secreting lesbian and gay history, and diminished the contributions of community-based archives to the exhibit.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender, Polly Thistlethwaite, Daniel C. Tsang

Publications and Research

The proliferation of publications in the lesbian, Gay, bisexual, and transgender press has allowed the weaving of a well-informed network of previously isolated individuals and communities, empowering and unifying lesbian, gay, and other sexual minorities," Dan Tsang and Polly Thistlethwaite wrote in the introduction to the 'Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender' section of Katzes' 1995 edition of Magazines for Libraries. This title review of the queer periodicals of the day was intended to serve as a guide and justification for 'mainstream' libraries' collection building. The number and range of titles in Thistlethwaite and Tsang's collaborative entries (1989, 1992, and …

Becoming Gentlemen: Women's Experiences At One Ivy League Law School, Lani Guinier, Michelle Fine, Jane Balin, Ann Bartow, Deborah Lee Stachel

Publications and Research

In this Article we describe preliminary research by and about women law students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School—a typical, if elite, law school stratified deeply along gender lines. Our database draws from students enrolled at the Law School between 1987 and 1992, and includes academic performance data from 981 students, self-reported survey data from 366 students, written narratives from 104 students, and group-level interview data of approximately eighty female and male students.' From these data we conclude that the law school experience of women in the aggregate differs markedly from that of their male peers.

Implementation Of Congressional Intent: A Study Of Amnesty Policy And The Immigration And Naturalization Service, Sherrie Baver, William Arp Iii

Publications and Research

In 1990, the United States Border Patrol arrested approximately one million illegals (Dillin, 1990). Significant as this number may seem, it parallels the rate of arrest that existed prior to the passage of the Immigration and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). This phenomenon suggests that the Act has failed to accomplish one of its primary objectives: to control illegal immigration to the United States.

The IRCA represented the first major change in US immigration policy in twenty-two years. In seeking to prevent illegal entry and to gain control over the undocumented population already in the country, it contained two key …

Gays And Lesbians In Library History, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

Summarizes gay and lesbian activism in librarianship and the role of libraries in supporting gay and lesbian movements.

El Estado Agoniza, Viva La Sociedad, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

El Rápido Crecimiento De La Población Como Problema Ambiental En Venezuela, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Odios Ambientalistas, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Lesbian And Gay, Polly Thistlethwaite, Daniel C. Tsang

Publications and Research

"The lesbian and gay press has shaped and reflected the rise of gay and lesbian liberation," Dan Tsang and Polly Thistlethwaite wrote in the introduction to the 'Lesbian and Gay' section of Katzes' 1992 edition of Magazines for Libraries. This title review of the queer periodicals of the day was intended to serve as a guide and justification for 'mainstream' libraries' collection building. The number and range of titles in Thistlethwaite and Tsang's collaborative entries (1989, 1992, and 1995) far exceeded any mainstream library collection known to either of the authors who were nevertheless hopeful that libraries would expand …

"It's Our Church, Too!": Women's Position In The Roman Catholic Church Today, Susan A. Farrell

Publications and Research

This chapter from The Social Construction of Gender (eds J. Lorber and S. Farrell) explores the ways in which gender, particular women's roles are inscribed in the bureaucracy and institutional practices of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

An introduction to the history and radical practice of New York City's Lesbian Herstory Archives with discussion of the period-specific situation of the archive housed in, but outgrowing, private quarters.

Ecologismo: Presente Y Futuro De Una Nueva Ideología Política, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.