Feature

Cool Stores, Bad Jobs

Sociologist Yasemin Besen-Cassino explores the techniques through which employers attract young, attractive, and middle-class workers for minimum wage, service sector jobs. Using in-depth interviews and job ads, she shows that employers focus on social benefits, discounts, and prestige of the brand to attract higher income workers to low paying jobs. Read More

Gated Communities For The Rich And The Poor

Sociologist Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores discusses how the concentration of class and racial privilege in gated communities takes place alongside the spatial concentration and confinement of the poor. She argues that gates help sort and segregate people, physically and symbolically distinguish communities, and cement inequality. Read More

Tiger Girls On The Soccer Field

Scholar Hilary Levey Friedman investigates how parental decisions result in different classed forms of femininity for girls who learn to be either “graceful girls” through dance, “aggressive girls” through soccer, or “pink warrior girls” through chess. She finds that parents higher up in the hierarchy of the middle class promote a more aggressive femininity, and we see this with both soccer and chess. Read More

Ritual Violence in a Two-Car Garage

KICK ASS AND TAKE NAMES! You were **BORN** for violence my fellow MAN. Take up that stick knowing in your heart of … Read More

Coming Home To Friendly Fire

In an age of ongoing military conflict, more and more veterans survive battle wounds only to find they return home to face psychological wounds. Why aren't they seeking the mental health services offered by the Veterans' Association and other groups? Read More

Challenges of Prisoner Re-entry

Criminologist Charis Kubrin explains the big--and problematic--picture for those who have served their time, but will now be put to new tests on the outside. Read More

Dinner With Bruce

Journalist Sabine Heinlein explores the difficulties of post-incarceration reentry through discussions with a recently released convict. Read More

Atlanta and Other Olympic Losers

Cities launch major campaigns to convince the International Olympic Committee to grace them with a staging of the Summer or Winter Games, and they spare no expense in readying their cities for the events. But will the promise of tourist riches and urban improvements pan out once the Olympic torch passes to the next host city? Read More

Jeremy Lin’s Model Minority Problem

In 2012, an Asian American, Ivy-League educated basketball player captured the country's attention: what was it that made Jeremy Lin so exceptional, from his race to his physical and mental prowess to his athletic masculinity. In short: what led to the rise and fall of Linsanity? Will it have a legacy? Read More

Disaster Porn!

The term disaster porn has evolved over time, from an epithet directed at extreme depictions of suffering in the developing world, to a broader critique today of all sorts of disaster-related media—even fictional Hollywood blockbusters. Sociologist Timothy Recuber examines how disaster porn, in all its iterations and for all its flaws, is a vital political terrain in which publics are at least implicitly asked to struggle with the social significance of the suffering of others. Read More