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
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
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
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
by Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong
|
Fall 2012
Monica and Karen, two typical in-state students starting college at a mid-tier public university in the Midwest, encounter organizational arrangements best designed to serve affluent, out-of-state partiers who can afford to pay full freight. Sociologists Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong discuss how Monica and Karen's stories reveal the great mismatch between the needs of most college students and what many four-year residential universities offer.
Read More
Based on ethnographic research on the male sex industry in China since 2004, sociologist Travis S.K. Kong examines how male rural migrants become male sex workers (or “money boys”) and explains how to make sense of their lives within the context of China’s quest for urbanization, modernization, and globalization. Money boys have found opportunities opened up in new spaces by the development of the market economy, the burgeoning of the sex industry, and the emergence of the gay community in reform China; however, they are struggling in these new spaces of social exclusion, legal constraints, and cultural domination.
Read More
Accompanying Michael Schudson's feature on Rosa Parks, Aldon Morris provides commentary to enhance our understanding of Rosa Parks and her activism.
Read More
Using life stories and observing opera fans in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Claudio E. Benzecry shows how passion for a cultural object develops, gets refined and sustained over time and the consequences this has for personal identity. In addition, Benzecry argues that his observations at the opera house serves as a template to understand other forms of fandom, cultural consumption and passionate behavior more generally.
Read More
Based on participant observation and interviews in the Parisian metropolitan region, sociologist Jean Beaman discusses middle-class and upwardly-mobile children of North African immigrants in France, who despite their upward mobility feel just as marginalized as other children of immigrants.
Read More
by Orit Avishai, Melanie Heath, and Jennifer Randles
|
Summer 2012
In recent years, policy efforts to alleviate poverty have focused on marriage and relationship education. Orit Avishai's, Melanie Heath's,and Jennifer Randles's research finds that efforts to address poverty via relationship skills training are misguided because this approach does not address the structural causes of poverty.
Read More