by amelia on
Jul 08, 2008 at 8:49 am
The latest issue of Newsweek featured an article entitled, ‘The Future of Freedom: The Fate Of Liberty In The Next Century Is Fragile, In Part, Because The Very Notion Is Now So Ill-Defined.’
Newsweek reporter Robert J. Samuelson writes,
In a century scarred by the gulags, concentration camps and secret-police terror, freedom is now spreading to an expanding swath of humanity. It is not only growing but also changing–becoming more ambitious and ambiguous–in ways that might, perversely, spawn disappointment and disorder in the new century.
Undoubtedly, it was time for some sociologists to weigh in…
In 1900, this was unimaginable. “Freedom in the modern sense [then] existed only for the upper crust,” says political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset of George Mason University. There were exceptions–America certainly, but even its freedom was conspicuously curtailed, particularly for women and blacks.
…
Traditional freedom historically meant liberation from oppression. But now freedom increasingly involves “self-realization.” People need, it’s argued, to be freed from whatever prevents them becoming whoever they want to be. There’s a drift toward “positive liberty” that emphasizes “the things that government ought to do for us,” says sociologist Alan Wolfe of Boston College. This newer freedom blends into individual “rights” (for women, minorities, the disabled) and “entitlements” (for health care, education and income support) deemed essential for self-realization.
Read more.
by amelia on
May 19, 2008 at 9:04 pm
The New York Times reports on a new collaborative study by sociologist Philip Kasinitz of CUNY, political scientist John H. Mollenkopf, and Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters. The findings from this $2 million 10-year project will soon be published in a book titled “Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age” from Harvard University Press.
The study focused on a number of different groups to examine the experiences of adult children of immigrants in the New York region including: Dominicans, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans (encompassing Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians) and West Indians. For the purposes of comparison, the investigators also studied U.S.-born whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans born on the mainland who live in the New York area.
The study pointed to signs of positive progress as many of these adult children achieve more than their parents in education as well as earnings, in some cases surpassing native-born Americans. But on a more cautionary note, the study highlighted how persistent poverty and low academic achievement among Dominicans and the prevalence of racial discrimination again Caribbean immigrants impede universal progress for all groups.
How did they do it?
“The study was based on 3,415 telephone interviews conducted between 1998 and 2000; 333 face-to-face follow-up interviews in 2000 and 2001; and a final round of 172 follow-up interviews in 2002 and 2003. The subjects of the study were 18 to 32 at the time of the initial interviews and were either born in the United States to at least one immigrant parent, or arrived in the United States by age 12. The study covered 10 counties: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Westchester and Nassau in New York and Essex, Hudson, Passaic and Union in New Jersey.”
by amelia on
Mar 25, 2008 at 7:15 am
A recent Washington Post article provided a glimpse into a recent fundraiser for Barack Obama held in Washington, DC. Sociologist Mary Pattillo was asked to weigh in on why young Black professionals have become so actively involved in fundraising for Obama.
“… ‘He is very familiar to them,’ says Mary Pattillo, a professor of sociology and African American studies at Northwestern University. ‘He’s done a great job of doing what middle-class blacks do, work in a predominantly white world but still maintain a sense of racial identity and groundedness.’”
“…College-educated African Americans remain an ‘elite’ group, said Pattillo, noting that just 17 percent of black adults ages 25 and over have undergraduate degrees. ‘They think it’s extraordinary that you have this eminently qualified man,’ said Candace Tolliver, a longtime Hill aide who now works as an Obama campaign spokeswoman. ‘They expect no less because that’s what they expect of themselves.’”
by jon on
Feb 16, 2008 at 9:43 am
Discussions about inequality and access to the internet are one thing, but if you look only at people who already have access, are there differences in online behavior? Eszter Hargittai found that race, ethnicity and education level predict whether young people are more likely to use the social networking site MySpace or its competitor Facebook.
TechCrunch points to a study by Hitwise (a marketing company that tracks internet usage) that suggests class, geography and other factors shape whether people use Google or Yahoo! as their search engine of choice:
They include “lifestyle” indicators like “Urban Essence,” “American Diversity” and “Small-town Contentment” that I’m not sure how to react to, and of course, as a private consulting company, it’s not like they’re giving their data away here for social scientists to scrutinize. (Though I admittedly have no idea what it would take to get the data…I got impatient with their website very quickly!) Nonetheless, pretty interesting.
by amelia on
Feb 08, 2008 at 9:51 am
Diverse: Issues in Higher Education reports on the results of a new survey from the Pew Foundation which reveals Black perceptions of a deepening social split between poor and middle-class Blacks.
Sociologists Earl Wright and Darnell Hunt were asked to weight in on the results.
“We’ve seen over the past 20 years now a rolling back of many of the advances and gains of the civil rights movement, plain and simple. Attacks on affirmative action, attacks on welfare programs and not only welfare programs, but programs designed to benefit individuals who are among the working poor. And, add to this, the deteriorating economic structure in America,” says Dr. Earl Wright, the chair of the sociology department at Texas Southern University in Houston.
“My reading of that is that they probably are worse off. The economy has tanked. Look at the news right now; the housing market, the financial markets, the Iraq war has siphoned off resources away from the infrastructure and the domestic economy. I think that’s a reflection of what people are really feeling,” says Dr. Darnell Hunt, a professor of sociology and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.