Faculty Bookshelf - Sociology
| Title & Authors | Description |
|---|---|
The Stigma Trap: College-educated, Experienced, and Long-term Unemployment Ofer Sharone (Oxford University Press, 2024) | In The Stigma Trap, Ofer Sharone explains how the stigma of unemployment can render past educational and professional achievements irrelevant and how it leaves all American workers vulnerable to becoming trapped in unemployment. Drawing on interviews with unemployed workers, job recruiters, and career coaches, Sharone brings to light the subtle ways that stigmatization prevents even the most educated and experienced workers from gaining middle-class jobs. Stigma also means that an American worker risks more than financial calamity from a protracted period of unemployment. One's closest relationships and sense of self are also on the line. |
The City and The Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities Jonathan Wynn, Daniel Skinner, and Berkeley Franz (U of Chicago Press, 2023) | In The City and the Hospital two sociologists, Jonathan R. Wynn and Berkeley Franz, and a political scientist, Daniel Skinner, track the multiple causes of this problem and offer policy solutions. The City and the Hospital compares three different hospitals and their communities to show how, according to Sara Shostak (Professor of Sociology and Health: Science, Society, and Policy at Brandeis University), hospitals “are not only medical institutions but powerful and complex forces within urban contexts.” Harold Pollack (Helen Ross Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago), writes that the book “chronicles these gut-wrenching urban health disparities—how they came to be, how hospitals and policymakers learned to tolerate them, and what we must do about them. The City and the Hospital is essential reading for any citizen, policymaker, and hospital leader who wishes to address this profound failure of America’s medical political economy.” |
Race and Police: The Origin of Our Peculiar Institutions Ben Brucato (Rutgers University Press, 2023) | Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order. The state determined not only that it would administer slavery, but that it would regulate slaves, authorizing the use of violence by agents of the state and white citizens to secure the social order. In doing so, slavery, citizenship, and police mutually informed one another, and together they produced racial capitalism, a working class defined and separated by the color line, and a racial social order. |
Transforming Ethnicity: Youth and Migration in the Southern Ecuadorian Andes Jorge Daniel Vásquez (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) | This book explores how global migration transforms local dynamics in the communal life of indigenous peoples in southern Ecuador. At its heart, the focus is on Cañar, a region marked by more than seven decades of migratory flows to the United States. Cañar features one of the areas of greatest human mobility in the entire Andean Region. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews and dialogue-based workshops with indigenous youths, the author shows how migratory processes and forms of self-representation have challenged the idea that ethnic identity is tied to fixed cultural patterns. He further shows how youths’ transnational experiences reconfigure generational differences within indigenous communities. In analyzing how transnational life, adultcentrism, gender power dynamics, and institutional discourses intersect in the production of indigenous youths’ subjectivities, this book provides an innovative approach to the studies of indigenous peoples and migration. |
Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Fight Over the U.S. Labor Movement Jasmine Kerrissey and Judith Stepan-Norris (Oxford University Press, 2023) | Union Booms and Busts takes a bird's eye view of the shifting fortunes of U.S. workers and their unions on the one hand, and employers and their organizations on the other. Using detailed data, this book analyses union density across 11 industries and 115 years, contrasting the organizing and union building successes and failures across decades. With attention to historical developments and the economic, political, and legal contexts of each period, it highlights workers' and their unions' actions, including strikes, union elections, and organizing strategies as well those of employers, who aimed to disrupt union organizing using legal maneuvers, workforce-based strategies, and race and gender divisions. By demonstrating how workers used strikes, elections, and other strategies to win power and employers used legal maneuvers, workforce-based strategies, and race and gender divisions to disrupt unions, the authors reveal data-driven truths about the ongoing history of unionization. |
Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism Janice Irvine (University of Michigan Press, 2022) | Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it. |
Silences, Neglected Feelings, and Blindspots in Research Practices Janice Irvine and Kathy Davis (Routledge Press, 2022) | This book addresses wide-ranging dilemmas that social researchers may face as a result of silences, neglected feelings, and blind-spots in their research. In every research endeavor, thoughts, intuitions, biases, feelings or sensations may be left aside as the researcher attempts to come to terms with the complexities of material and figure out what the ‘main issue’ is. Researchers may pay attention to their own emotional responses during the interview, but often only in their field notes. Rarely do feelings of shock, irritation, boredom or, for that matter, amusement, excitement and delight find their way into the analysis itself. In addition, researchers are all susceptible to blind-spots, often unaware of what is being avoided in research or omitted from it. = In this volume, an international, cross-disciplinary cohort of researchers think critically about the silences, neglected feelings, and blind-spots in their own work, and offer insights for enhancing research practices. |
Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work Joya Misra and Kyla Walters (University of California Press, 2022) | In malls across the United States, clothing retail workers navigate low wages and unpredictable schedules. Despite these problems, they devote time and money to mirror the sleek mannequins stylishly adorned with the latest merchandise. Bringing workers' voices to the fore, sociologists Joya Misra and Kyla Walters demonstrate how employers reproduce gendered and racist "beauty" standards by regulating workers' size and look. Interactions with customers, coworkers, and managers further reinforce racial hierarchies. New surveillance technologies also lead to ineffective corporate decision-making based on flawed data. By focusing on the interaction of race, gender, and surveillance, Walking Mannequins sheds important new light on the dynamics of retail work in the twenty-first century. |
Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas (Duke University Press, 2021) | Antiblackness investigates the ways in which the dehumanization of Black people has been foundational to the establishment of modernity. Drawing on Black feminism, Afropessimism, and critical race theory, the book's contributors trace forms of antiblackness across time and space, from nineteenth-century slavery to the categorization of Latinx in the 2020 census, from South Africa and Palestine to the Chickasaw homelands, from the White House to convict lease camps, prisons, and schools. Throughout, the contributors demonstrate that any analysis of white supremacy---indeed, of the world---that does not contend with antiblackness is incomplete. |
The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance Jennifer Hikes Lundquist, Celeste Vaughn Curington, and Ken-Hou Lin (University of California Press, 2021) | The Dating Divide is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism," a distinct form of racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating. Drawing on large-scale behavioral data from a mainstream dating website, extensive archival research, and more than seventy-five in-depth interviews with daters of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual identities, Curington, Lundquist, and Lin illustrate how the seemingly open space of the internet interacts with the loss of social inhibition in cyberspace contexts, fostering openly expressed forms of sexual racism that are rarely exposed in face-to-face encounters. The Dating Divide is a fascinating look at how a contemporary conflux of individualization, consumerism, and the proliferation of digital technologies has given rise to a unique form of gendered racism in the era of swiping right—or left. |
| The New Handbook of Political Sociology Thomas Janoski, Cedric de Leon, Joya Misra, and Isaac Martin (Cambridge University Press, 2020) | The Handbook presents the field in six parts: theories of political sociology, the information and knowledge explosion, the state and political parties, civil society and citizenship, the varieties of state policies, and globalization and how it affects politics. Covering all subareas of the field with both theoretical orientations and empirical studies, it directly connects scholars with current research in the field. A total reconceptualization of the first edition, the new handbook features nine additional chapters and highlights the impact of the media and big data. |
Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Dustin Avent-Holt (Oxford University Press, 2019)
| Organizations are the dominant social invention for generating resources and distributing them. Relational Inequalities develops a general sociological and organizational analysis of inequality, exploring the processes that generate inequalities in access to respect, resources, and rewards. Framing their analysis through a relational account of social and economic life, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Dustin Avent-Holt explain how resources are generated and distributed both within and between organizations. They show that inequalities are produced through generic processes that occur in all social relationships: categorization and their resulting status hierarchies, organizational resource pooling, exploitation, social closure, and claims-making. |
Have a new addition to this list? Email mworoner [at] umass [dot] edu (Morgan Woroner) with the details!