Winter 2013
Volume: 12 | Number: 1
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
Measuring Same-Sex Relationships
The last decade has seen dramatic changes in how U.S. society views and recognizes same-sex couples. U.S. Census Bureau employees, Nancy Bates and Theresa J. DeMaio, chronicle recent efforts taken by the Census Bureau to update and improve the measurement and counting of same-sex couples. Read More
What They’re Watching
A "list" of what six social scientists are watching on television and film. Read More
Is Marriage for Anyone?
Two recent books on marriage—Is Marriage for White People? by Ralph Richard Banks and Unhitched by Judith Stacey—are considered in this review essay by sociologist Micki McGee. Banks argues that the decline of marriage among African American women constitutes a social problem that could be remedied if more women from this group opted for interracial marriages. Stacey's cross-cultural study contends that marriage is an institution that attempts the near impossible task of reconciling the goals of domesticity with those of erotic life, and that in the process an extraordinary range of marital arrangements have emerged. Taken together these arguments ask us to consider who marriage serves. Read More
Body Lessons
Sociologist Janet Enke explores the challenges of teaching a course on the body. She discusses how to synthesize the subjective experience of the body with academic theory, and convey knowledge about the politics of the body. Read More
Speciesism
Speciesism, coined in the 1970s, means the implicit superiority of one species, usually humans, over all others. Sociologist Lisa Jean Moore discusses this term and how sociologists are primed to use the concept in teaching and research. 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 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
