Summer 2012
Volume: 11 | Number: 3
Killadelphia
Violent death is so commonplace in Philadelphia that it infuses the visual culture of the city with haunting imagery. Sociologist James Dickinson shows how memorial portraits, roadside shrines, sidewalk plaques, murals, billboards, and graffiti variously recall, memorialize, criticize, or comment on the epidemic of lethal violence in the City of Brotherly Love. Read More
The Rich and the Rest
Using data from the General Social Survey, sociologist Thomas J. Linneman shows that conservatives and liberals increasingly differ regarding government action to reduce income inequality. Rich liberals support government action nearly as much as poor liberals, while among rich conservatives there is very little support for government action. Read More
Rethinking Sexual Violence
Sociologist Nacy Whittier reviews the books Sex Panic and the Punitive State, At the Dark End of the Street, and Unspeakable. Each differently addresses sexual violence in relation to race, class, and criminalization. Read More
Neurodiversity
The neurodiversity movement emerged as an extension of the disability rights movement to include the those individuals with neurological differences. Micki McGee posits that neurodiversity is also a response to the neoliberalism of the past three decades that has (1) shifted responsibility for individuals with neurological and cognitive challenges back to the family, and (2) fostered a crippling speed-up in our workplaces while simultaneously requiring new levels of sociability and flexibility that render more people debilitated or disabled. The article concludes that demands for the rights of neurologically diverse populations may challenge the very framework of liberal personhood. Read More
Telling Stories about Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks has usually been portrayed as a highly principled but non-political person, not the long-time civil rights activist that she was. Sociologist Michael Schudson finds several factors that account for this, including efforts of civil rights movement participants to deflect criticism of the movement as instigated by outside agitators; participants' efforts to explain their own actions to themselves; and their efforts not to present themselves immodestly as morally superior. Read More
