Community-Based Learning Commons^™

Interview With Lily Benavides, Nhatii Shoulars

Immigrant Leaders

An interview with Lily Benavides, a leader with the Green Party of New Jersey and an activist. The interview covers life before immigrating, arrival and integration, and political participation.

Interview With Luis Menendez, Katherine Sastre

Immigrant Leaders

An interview with Luis Menendez, an immigrant leader from Make the Road New Jersey. The interview covers life before immigrating, arrival and integration, and political participation.

Interview With Maribel Hernández, Melanie Ramirez

Immigrant Leaders

An interview with Maribel Hernández, an immigrant leader from Make the Road New Jersey. The interview covers life before immigrating, arrival and integration, and political participation.

Interview With Noemi Ruiz, Jessica Vasquez

Immigrant Leaders

An interview with Noemi Ruiz, an immigrant leader of Make the Road New Jersey. The interview covers life before immigrating, arrival and integration, and political participation.

Interview With Lucia Manzano, Kristen Laga

Immigrant Leaders

An interview with Lucia Manzano, a community organizer from New Jersey Communities United and Latino Action Network. The interview covers life before immigrating, arrival and integration, and political participation.

Interview With Maria Andrade, Daniel Lane

Immigrant Leaders

An interview with Maria Andrade, an immigrant leader from Latino Action Network. The interview covers life before immigrating, arrival and integration, and political participation.

Interview With Paola García, Crystal Tejada-Breton

Immigrant Leaders

An interview with Paola García, an immigrant leader from Make the Road New Jersey. The interview covers life before immigrating, arrival and integration, and political participation.

Interview With Mike Legaspi, Andrea Generalao

Immigrant Leaders

An interview with Mike Legaspi, an immigrant leader from Migrante. The interview covers life before immigrating, arrival and integration, and political participation.

Local Governance Of Immigrant Incorporation: How City-Based Organizational Fields Shape The Cases Of Undocumented Youth In New York City And Paris, Stephen P. Ruszczyk

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

City-based organizations and governments play an important role in incorporating undocumented immigrant youth. This article investigates how localities sociopolitically incorporate these immigrants by examining the governance constellations and institutional logics of the organizational field that manages undocumented youth. Comparing sets of municipal and civil society organizations in different national settings, I use the two cases of New York City and Paris to ask how the ‘city-based organizational field of immigrant incorporation’ shapes citizenship experiences of undocumented youth. Data come from multi-level longitudinal ethnography over 8 years with two dozen undocumented youth and with organizations in each city as well as …

Should Sociologists Stand Up For Science? Absolutely!, Janet M. Ruane

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Standing up for science is part of sociology's mission as a social science. Standing up is also consistent with our field's ethical obligation to identify and avoid research compromised by conflict of interests.

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

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. …

The Nonexceptionalism Thesis: How Post-9/11 Criminal Justice Measures Fit In Broader Criminal Justice, Francesca Laguardia

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Contrary to the assumption that ‘‘9/11 changed everything,’’ post-2001 criminal justice practices in the area of terrorism show a surprising consistency with pre-2001 criminal justice practices. This article relies on an analysis of over 300 terrorism prosecutions between 2001 and 2010, as well as twenty full trial transcripts, content-coding, and traditional legal analysis, to show the continuity of criminal justice over this time in regard to some of the most controversial supposed developments. This continuity belies the common assumption that current extreme policies and limitations on the due process are a panicked response to the terror attacks of 2001. On …

Apologies Of The Rich And Famous: Cultural, Cognitive, And Social Explanations Of Why We Care And Why We Forgive, Janet M. Ruane, Karen Cerulo

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In recent years, U.S. and other Western media have inundated the public with celebrity apologies. The public (measured via representative opinion polls) then expresses clear ideas about who deserves forgiveness. Is forgiveness highly individualized or tied to broader social, cultural, and cognitive factors? To answer this question, we analyzed 183 celebrity apologies offered between October 1, 2000, and October 1, 2012. Results are twofold and based in both cultural and social psychological perspectives. First, we found that public forgiveness is systematically tied to discursive characteristics of apologies—particularly sequential structures. Certain sequences appear to cognitively prime the public, creating associative links …

Religious Practice And The Phenomenology Of Everyday Violence In Contemporary India, Vikash Singh

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article focuses on ‘dread’ in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the dread of everyday existence, which is as salient in a biographical temporality as it pervades the phenomenal environment, connects and transfers between religious practices and everyday life in India for the marginalized masses. For such dread, dominant liberal discourses, such as those of the nation, economy, or ego-centric performance, have neither the patience nor the forms to represent, perform, and abreact. Formulated in dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory, this article conceives of religious practices in continuum with the economic, social, ethical, and …

Professional Deceit: Normal Lying In An Occupational Setting, Janet M. Ruane, Karen Cerulo

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Normal lies are those that social actors legitimate as appropriate means to desirable outcomes. Such lies have been acknowledged in the literature as tools for maintaining social order. Yet, little has been done to document the social structural sources of normal lying. This paper offers a first step in filling this research gap, examining aspects of occupational structure and their connection to the practice of normal lying. Specifically, we discuss four dimensions of occupational structure — occupational rewards and entry requirements, occupational loyalties, social control styles within an occupation, and an occupation's level of professionalization — and we explore the …

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 …

Between Structure And Agency: Assassination, Social Forces, And The Production Of The Criminal Subject, Cary H. Federman

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Assassins are often regarded as ahistorical figures of evil. In this article, I contest this view by analyzing the assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz in 1901. There are two purposes to this article. The first is to situate McKinley’s assassination within the history and development of the social sciences, principally sociology, rather than assume that the assassin is a trans-historical representation of willful irresponsibility. The second is to describe and critique the discourse that made Czolgosz into a rational agent once he entered history as an assassin.

Mothering As A Life Course Transition: Do Women Go Straight For Their Children?, Venezia Michalsen

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this study, qualitative, in-depth interviews were conducted with 100 formerly incarcerated mothers to explore the relationship between attachment to children and desistance from criminal behavior. Exploratory data analysis revealed that mothers do believe that children play important roles in their desistance, consistent with the tenets of life course theory. However, children were also described as sources of great stress, which may in turn promote criminal behavior. Women also related desistance to reliance on self and a higher power, and to a desire to avoid future involvement with the criminal justice system. The article concludes with a call for more …

Leadership Styles Of Nursing Home Administrators And Their Association With Staff Turnover, Christopher Donoghue, Nicholas G. Castle

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the associations between nursing home administrator (NHA) leadership style and staff turnover.

Design and Methods: We analyzed primary data from a survey of 2,900 NHAs conducted in 2005. The Online Survey Certification and Reporting database and the Area Resource File were utilized to extract organizational and local economic characteristics of the facilities. A general linear model (GLM) was used to estimate the effects of NHA leadership style, organizational characteristics, and local economic characteristics on nursing home staff turnover for registered nurses (RNs), licensed practical nurses (LPNs), and nurse’s aides (NAs).

Results: …

Deconstructing The Psychopath: A Critical Discursive Analysis, Cary H. Federman, Dave Holmes, Jean Daniel Jacob

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

She loved accidents: any mention of an animal run over, a man cut to pieces by a train, was bound to make her rush to the spot. The spectacle of the wounded body has always had its lurid attractions. Coverage of serial killings and graphic accounts of brutal murders by various media is part of our “spectacular” culture fascinated by violence and brutality. The television is often the site where private desire and public fantasy meet, and where the fascination regarding dangerous offenders is initiated and nurtured (Knox, 17–18; Lesser). The convening of the public around scenes of violence represents …

The Percentage Of Beds Designated For Medicaid In American Nursing Homes And Nurse Staffing Ratios, Christopher Donoghue

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Previous analyses of the inverse relationship between a nursing home's Medicaid census and its quality of care have been based on samples limited to specific geographic regions, for-profit entities, or only skilled care facilities. The present study uses national-level data from the 1999 National Nursing Home Survey to examine the association between the proportion of beds designated for Medicaid residents and nurse staffing ratios. The results indicate that homes which designate a higher proportion of their beds for Medicaid recipients maintain lower ratios of registered nurses and nurse's aides to residents, even when key facility characteristics are controlled. It was …

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

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 …

Agency: The Internal Split Of Structure, Yong Wang

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this article I first examine the ways in which the dual terms of structure and agency are used in sociological theories. Then, relying on Lacan’s notions of split‐subject, the formula of sexuation, and forms of discourses, and Laclau’s theory of ideological hegemony, I argue that agency in most current sociological formulations is but a posited other of the structure that dissolves if examined closely; it is similar to the Lacanian fantasmic object. To resolve the fundamental paradoxes in structure‐agency theories, I reformulate structures as paradoxical, incomplete, and contingent symbolic formations that are always partial and unstable due to their …

The Once And Future Information Society, James B. Rule, Yasemin Besen-Cassino

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In the late twentieth century, many social scientists and other social commentators came to characterize the world as evolving into an “information society.” Central to these claims was the notion that new social uses of information, and particularly application of scientific knowledge, are transforming social life in fundamental ways. Among the supposed transformations are the rise of intellectuals in social importance, growing productivity and prosperity stemming from increasingly knowledge-based economic activity, and replacement of political conflict by authoritative, knowledge-based decision-making. We trace these ideas to their origins in the Enlightenment doctrines of Saint Simon and Comte, show that empirical support …

Coming Together: New Taxonomies For The Analysis Of Social Relations, Karen Cerulo, Janet M. Ruane

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In previous work, we have noted a certain rigidity in sociology's approach to the topic of social relations (Cerulo 1997; Cerulo and Ruane 1997; Cerulo, Ruane, and Chayko 1992). With few exceptions, literature on the subject dichotomizes social relations with reference to the scope of the interaction (small group versus large group) and the mode by which social actors connect (direct connections versus mediated connections). Further, many researchers implicitly rank the social value of each relational form. Sociologists typically identify a society's primary and most valuable relations as the result of direct, physically copresent exchange, exchange involving relatively few interactants. …

Voluntary And Involuntary Nursing Home Staff Turnover, Christopher Donoghue, Nicholas G. Castle

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The goal of this study was to identify nursing home characteristics that have differential associations to voluntary and involuntary turnover among formal caregivers (i.e., registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and nurse aides). Primary data from 354 facilities from four states were merged with data from the 2004 Online Survey, Certification and Recording system. Multinomial logistic regression analyses were conducted to determine whether organizational characteristics were related to a greater probability of high or low levels of voluntary and involuntary turnover among formal caregivers. The analysis revealed that a higher ratio of nurses to beds, a smaller number of quality-of-care deficiencies, …

Women's Changing Attitudes Toward Divorce, 1974–2002: Evidence For An Educational Crossover, Steven P. Martin, Sangeeta Parashar

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article examines trends in divorce attitudes of young adult women in the United States by educational attainment from 1974 to 2002. Women with 4‐year college degrees, who previously had the most permissive attitudes toward divorce, have become more restrictive in their attitudes toward divorce than high school graduates and women with some college education, whereas women with no high school diplomas have increasingly permissive attitudes toward divorce. We examine this educational crossover in divorce attitudes in the context of variables correlated with women's educational attainment, including family attitudes and religion, income and occupational prestige, and family structure. We conclude …

Positive Mood And The Perception Of Variability Within And Between Groups, Venezia Michalsen, Steven J. Stroessner, Diane M. Mackie

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Three experiments investigated the effects of positive mood on perceptions of variability within and between groups. Participants formed impressions of two different and highly variable groups under a neutral or positive mood. When participants expected to learn about both groups, positive mood increased perceived intergroup similarity but did not affect perceived intragroup variability. In contrast, when participants expected to learn about only one group, judgments of intergroup and intragroup similarity were both affected by mood. Mood and the intergroup context influenced the nature and degree of information processing and resultant judgments of variability in social groups.