Feature

Consuming Rice, Branding the Nation

Sociologist Janine Chi examines how rice-based dishes and cuisines in Asia are featured in culinary tourism to promote national distinction and identity. Read More

The Joy of Cooking?

Sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton offer a critique of the increasingly prevalent message that reforming the food system necessarily entails a return to the kitchen. They argue that time pressures, tradeoffs to save money, and the burden of pleasing others make it difficult for mothers to enact the idealized vision of home-cooked meals advocated by foodies and public health officials. Read More

Inside the Extreme Sport of Competitive Eating

Sociologist Priscilla Ferguson considers competitive eating as an expression of identifiably American connections between abundance and country. Overeating both honors country and transgresses social norms. Read More

Eating Military Base Stew

Sociologist Grace M. Cho investigates the origins of a Korean dish called budae jjigae ("military base stew") and reveals its layered meanings for Korean American diasporic identity. Read More

Loving Across Racial Divides

Sociologist Amy C. Steinbugler examines the everyday lives of lesbian, gay, and heterosexual black/white couples. She shows that even as overt racial prejudice declines, racism continues to shape interracial lives through residential segregation, racial orientations, and racial-gender stereotypes. Read More

Working Class Growing Pains

Sociologist Jennifer M. Silva examines how working-class men and women navigate the transition to adulthood amid economic insecurity and social isolation. She finds that young adults experience fear of intimate relationships, low expectations of work, and widespread distrust of institutions as they come of age. Read More

Suffering In An Age Of Personal Responsibility

Drawing on more than five years of research with women who inhabit a circuit of suffering made up of prison, homeless shelters, drug programs and the streets, sociologist Susan Sered argues that punishment and treatment often function as two sides of the same coin: a coin that construes women's suffering in terms of their private traumas, personal flaws, and poor choices. This ideological script functions to blame the victim, obscure the structural causes of poverty and violence, and absolves governments from public responsibilities for the well-being of citizens. Read More

Black Brazil Never Slept

Analyzing the media coverage of the 2013 Brazil protests, sociologist Katherine Jensen uncovers that violence against white women became the rallying cry for popular political action, while black mobilization was depoliticized as violent chaos and violence against blacks was ignored. Read More

The Trouble With Tebowing

Sociologists Grace Yukich, Kimberly Stokes, and Daniela Bellows explore cultural norms around religious displays in sports, and in public life more generally, by examining media coverage of controversial football player Tim Tebow. Read More

Challenging Motorism In New York City

Public contention over recent changes in New York City's streetscape, allocating more space and priority to pedestrians and cyclists, illuminates an underlying conflict between a belief system regarding motor vehicles as central to American life—the windshield-perspective assumptions here termed Motorism—and dissenting beliefs questioning the rationality of automotive monoculture. New York-based writer Bill Millard argues that during the twentieth century, Motorism attained a level of dominance thorough enough to be unrecognized and unquestioned in most locales; though it encounters enough opposition to be visible as an ideology only in a few places (particularly New York), its ill effects on the environment, the economy, health, and other values are increasingly apparent, suggesting that the New York "streetfight" has social ramifications extending well beyond New York. Read More