Sociology

Pandemic Participation: Christopher M. Kelty on Isolation and Participation in a Public Health Crisis

May 28, 2020
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Drawing from ideas in his book, The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories, Christopher M. Kelty discusses how participation changes during a pandemic and what it means for the future. I make a provocative claim in The Participant: To treat participation as general—and democracy as a more specific apparatus to which it responds—amounts to asserting that participation is prior to democracy. Participation is not a simple component of democracy, but something problematic enough that things like representative parliamentary democracy, federal constitutions, secret ballots, and regimes of audit and regulation are oriented toward dealing with too much, too little, or the wrong kind of participation. This is not a conventional way of looking at democracy, and it will not fit well with a political theory tradition in which participation plays only a bit part in the great historical drama of democracy. I think, however, there is something to be gained by reversing this relation. Instead, one can view participation as a longstanding problem of the relation between persons and collectives, and see liberal democracy as existing in an intermediate temporality where institutions, theories, constitutions, legal systems are in a process of steady transformation. The apparatus we call “liberal representative . . .

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Doug Mitchell, 1943-2019

September 19, 2019
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Alan Thomas, Editorial Director of the Press, offers a tribute to Doug Mitchell. During forty-one years as an acquisitions editor at the University of Chicago Press, Doug Mitchell’s influence in sexuality studies and sociology rivaled that of the disciplines’ greatest scholars. A gifted jazz drummer, he compared the editor’s intuitive work of connecting authors and ideas to “playing a really good drum solo.” Doug died on 1 September 2019 in Chicago after a long illness, aged 76, only eight months after his retirement from the Press. He was educated at the University of Chicago in Ideas and Methods, an interdisciplinary program conceived by the philosopher Richard McKeon, whose work Doug later championed as an editor. It was a program, Doug said, “charged with locating the ways in which philosophic problems arise in fields other than philosophy—a good preparation for scholarly publishing.” He earned his A.B. degree from Chicago in 1965, continued for a time as a graduate student while also playing jazz, and took a job as an editor at the college division of Scott, Foresman, where he acquired textbooks in American and European history. Moving to the University of Chicago Press in 1977, Doug took charge of our history . . .

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Summer Book Club Feature: Five Questions with Jennifer Jordan, Author of “Edible Memory”

July 16, 2019
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Now that the dog days of summer are truly upon us, we hope you’re staying cool lakeside or under a shady umbrella with our summer #ReadUCP Twitter book club pick, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods by Jennifer Jordan. And if you haven’t picked it up yet, it’s not too late! We’re reading throughout July and August, so there’s plenty of time for reading in-between watering your tomato and pepper plants or checking out the latest at the farmers’ market. (And there’s a handy discount code below.) Though we’ll soon be announcing dates for our Twitter chats with Jennifer, we decided to get things started with a few questions about what inspired her interest in heirloom foods and what’s next on her plate. Where did your interest in heirloom fruits and vegetables come from? I’d say it came from two sources, one personal, one sociological. I’ll submit this photo as evidence of the personal part. I grew up in California in the 70s, and my parents (both teachers) had a cooperative garden when I was tiny. Amazingly, one of the babies I grew up with ALSO became a sociology professor! So my childhood was surrounded . . .

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Five Question for Jennifer A. Jones, author of “The Browning of the New South”

June 20, 2019
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Studies of immigration to the United States have traditionally focused on a few key states and urban centers, but recent shifts in nonwhite settlement mean that these studies no longer paint the whole picture. Many Latino newcomers are flocking to places like the Southeast, where typically few such immigrants have settled, resulting in rapidly redrawn communities. In this historic moment, Jennifer A. Jones brings forth an ethnographic look at changing racial identities in one Southern city: Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  To get a better sense of what inspired Jones to focus her book on this particular city, we sent her a few questions recently about her research. How did you come to follow the line of research that forms the backbone of The Browning of the New South?  In some ways, I came to the research that forms the backbone of The Browning of the New South by accident. I consider myself a race scholar, and for my MA research I had done some ethnographic research on group identity formation among multiracials. I was really interested in how race gets made and wanted to pursue another project that helped me explore that process. I came to Winston-Salem to do research because . . .

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Derek Hyra on gentrification and neighborhood perception in DC

May 30, 2017
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Derek Hyra on gentrification and neighborhood perception in DC

From a recent interview with Derek Hyra at CityLab—based on his latest book Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City—on the diminishing returns of gentrification in DC’s Shaw/U Street neighborhood. *** In the book, you talk about how the black history of the neighborhood is being leveraged to advertise it to young urbanites. Could you talk about that? In the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, if a neighborhood was branded black, it usually led to economic decline and white flight. And in the ‘90s and 2000s, you see low-income African-American neighborhoods being branded black and yet attracting whites. That is the unique dynamic of the Shaw-U Street area. Many of the developers are branding the buildings after iconic African Americans. There’s the Langston Lofts, there’s the Ellington Apartments. There’s Marvin’s, which is a restaurant that’s named after Marvin Gaye, who grew up in Washington, D.C. There’s Busboys and Poets, Andy Shallal’s restaurant, named after Langston Hughes, which is very well-known in the D.C. area and also around the country. There’s also a historic walking trail, and you can see where Alain Locke, who wrote The New Negro—the philosophy of the Harlem Renaissance—lived. There’s historic preservation related to this community’s . . .

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Black branding in the Cappuccino City

May 10, 2017
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Black branding in the Cappuccino City

Derek Hyra’s Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City, not only offers up an contemporary ethnography of gentrification—DC’s Shaw/U Street district—but also concretizes how we talk about urban displacement in neoliberal late capitalism, centered around the concepts of the “gilded ghetto,” “living the wire,” and the “cappuccino city.”  A cappuccino is basically a cup of coffee with (steamed) milk, but costs nearly double or triple the price, depending on whether or not the espresso bean is artisanal, or if the foam is sculpted into a the shape of a leaf or a heart. In Hyra’s cappuccino city, our black inner-city neighborhoods, under pressure from the gig economy, gutted social programs, and real estate investors luring white millennials, undergo enormous transformations and become racially “lighter” and more expensive by the year. You can listen to Hyra’s recent appearance on the Kojo Nnamdi Show here, or read an excerpt from a Washington Post profile after the jump. *** “Black branding” describes how developers and other mostly white business interests actively promoted Shaw’s historic black identity as a marketing strategy to attract white renters and buyers. Their success helped tip the neighborhood’s demographics from 70 percent black in 1970 to 30 percent in 2010. The Shaw/U Street area was an ideal candidate for . . .

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Personal Branding is blasé auto-fan fiction and other notes on the new economy

April 7, 2017
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Personal Branding is blasé auto-fan fiction and other notes on the new economy

“Personal branding” seems the provenance dystopian fiction—equal parts Idiocracy and neoliberal end game, one would think its merely a belabored joke about the individual in late capitalism, rather than a facts-on-the-ground-style employment strategy. “You are your brand!,” isn’t a line from 1984, though: it’s part and parcel of almost any TedTalk on the job market, despite the fact that—according to anthropologist Ilana Gershon, whose recent book Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (Or Don’t Find) Work Today is profiled in the Quartz review excerpted below—it rarely results in, um, an actual job. Read more from the Quartz piece after the jump. *** Gershon, a professor of anthropology at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, spent a year interviewing and observing job seekers and employers in Silicon Valley and around the US. Her new book, Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (Or Don’t Find) Work Today explains that branding is largely a boondoggle advanced by inspirational speakers and job trainers. It doesn’t help people get jobs. . . . According to Gershon, the concept of personal branding developed over the last 30 years as the concept of work itself became more precarious. Union membership has contracted. The number of hours in the . . .

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John M. Eason, Big House on the Prairie, and the rural prison boom

March 31, 2017
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John M. Eason, Big House on the Prairie, and the rural prison boom

Working crucial arguments from his book Big House on the Prairie down the line, John M. Eason takes on the rise of the rural prison industry—and its role as impediment to criminal justice reform—for the Conversation; excerpt after the jump. *** As I explain in my book, “Big House on the Prairie,” the number of prisons in the U.S. swelled between 1970 and 2000, from 511 to nearly 1,663. Prisons constructed during that time cover nearly 600 square miles, an area roughly half the size of Rhode Island. More than 80 percent of these facilities are operated by states, approximately 10 percent are federal facilities and the rest are private. The prison boom is a massive public works program that has taken place virtually unnoticed because roughly 70 percent of prisons were built in rural communities. Most of this prison building has occurred in conservative southern states like Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and Texas. Much of how we think about prison building is clouded by the legacy of racism and economic exploitation endemic to the U.S. criminal justice system. Many feel that prison building is the end product of racist policies and practices, but my research turned up a more complicated relationship. People of color . . .

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[The] Boystown: Jason Orne’s new ethnography

March 24, 2017
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[The] Boystown: Jason Orne’s new ethnography

Aimee Levitt reviewed Jason’s Orne new ethnography Boystown: Sex and Community in Chicago for the Chicago Reader; an excerpt follows below. *** We should be past the need for “gayborhoods,” as Amin Ghaziani argued in his influential 2014 book There Goes the Gayborhood. Don’t areas like Boystown, fun as they are, only remind us of the bad old days? Nope, they’re still necessary, sociologist Jason Orne argues in his new book, also called Boystown, and for one very important reason: sex. What distinguishes Boystown from Wrigleyville or Logan Square or any other gentrifying neighborhood with good nightlife is its sense of what Orne calls “sexy community,” defined as “a network of people, bound together through sexual intimacy.” He believes that open sexuality should be embraced and encouraged: straight people should be adopting queer habits, not the other way around. “By shedding its queer elements,” he writes, “Boystown trades sexuality for normalcy. It trades queer sexual connection for legal equality.” In other words, it would be a damned shame if the men of Boystown stopped hooking up on the dance floor or disappearing into certain basements for sex. And it’s hard to do those things when you’re surrounded by gawking tourists and straight women . . .

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Bronzeville: Recommended reading for a new podcast

March 20, 2017
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Bronzeville: Recommended reading for a new podcast

Josh Olson’s new 10-part podcast Bronzeville, which stars Laurence Fishburne, Larenz Tate, and Tika Sumpter, chronicles the lives of players in the illegal lottery that swept the African American community in the 1940s before the game was taken over by the mob. If that’s not enticing enough, here’s a list of some recommended background reading on the city, then and now; how it become one of America’s most iconic black neighborhoods; and why its redevelopment—in which the middle class benefits as lower-income residents are pushed out—continues to matter, now more than ever. *** Derek S. Hyra’s The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville explores the shared metamorphosis of these formerly notorious urban ghettos into two of our most iconic black communities, as the pressure of late-capitalist gentrification and a complicated web of factors—local, national, and global—shaped their remarkable revitalization. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, based on research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers, is a sweeping historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago’s South Side from the 1840s through the 1930s, as path-breaking today as it was when it was first published in 1945. Diane Grams’s Producing Local . . .

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