Feature

Mourning Becomes Democratic

Public mourning is not a spontaneous expression of grief but a symbolic and political practice. Sociologist Bin Xu examines a new trend in recent decades, the “democratization of public mourning,” that celebrates our symbolic equality and individuality instead of affirming status hierarchies. Read More

Beyond The One-Size-Fits-All College Degree

James Rosenbaum, Kennan Cepa, and Janet Rosenbaum examine how commonplace assumptions about higher education limit opportunity. Read More

Truth-Telling and Intellectual Activism

Patricia Hill Collins, a feminist public intellectual, discusses the importance of speaking across multiple audiences. Read More

The Maquiladora Syndrome

Sociologist Gloria González-López offers her reflections about one of the most important lessons she learned about conducting sociological research inspired in feminism and intellectual activism in a Mexico-USA-Mexico transnational context. Read More

Born Amid Bullets

Different forms of violence are enveloping territories of urban relegation in Latin America. Sociologist Javier Auyero examines how children and adolescents have become familiarized with diverse types of interpersonal brutality. Read More

The White Girl’s Burden

Sociologist Amy C. Finnegan provides a critical analysis of the movement behind the Kony 2012 campaign and how this unique form of activism coalesces with the biographies of the activists, who are notably white, privileged, Christian, adolescent females. Read More

The Not-So-Pink Ivory Tower

Sociologist Ann Mullen explores what it means that women now earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees. Rather than seeing this as a sign of a “male crisis” in higher education, this article concludes that the gender integration of higher education is far from complete. Read More

Anti-Social Debts

The current student debt burden is an unsustainable outcome of the government's abdication of responsibility to secure access to higher education. Andrew Ross analyses the factors behind the funding crisis and suggests some ways to reestablish an affordable education system. Read More

Teaching to Distraction

The classroom is a social space, and how students experience and perceive that space shapes how they approach their classrooms and what they do in them. Margaret Austin Smith uses ethnographic data of college students' classroom experiences to demonstrate the degree of importance understanding students' ways of knowing the classroom has on the effectiveness of teaching and learning relationships. Read More

Degree by Default

In past generations, college was thought to be a site for higher learning in America. Yet April Yee's ethnographic research finds that few undergraduates are enrolling for the pursuit of knowledge anymore; instead, students are going to college simply because they believe they must have a degree to have a future in our society. Read More