Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews最新文献

筛选
英文 中文
Creating a Culture of Mindful Innovation in Higher Education 在高等教育中营造注重创新的文化
IF 0.2 4区 社会学
Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews Pub Date : 2023-08-24 DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421t
Hiro Saito
{"title":"Creating a Culture of Mindful Innovation in Higher Education","authors":"Hiro Saito","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421t","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421t","url":null,"abstract":"Creating a Culture of Mindful Innovation in Higher Education makes a vitally important contribution to raging debates on the ‘‘crisis’’ of higher education in the United States. In essence, Michael Lanford and William Tierney demonstrate how the ‘‘crisis’’ is misdiagnosed and, accordingly, why American higher education needs a different solution than the neoliberal one increasingly popular among policy-makers and administrators. To begin with, Lanford and Tierney identify the widespread neoliberal discourse of ‘‘innovation’’ as a driving force of the ‘‘crisis’’ debates. This discourse traces the root cause of rising tuition and fees, declining public confidence, and other major problems of higher education to the inability of faculty to innovate to keep up with the changing structures of the economy and society. This inability, as the discourse goes, ultimately stems from the tenure system and shared governance that perpetuate institutional inertia and conservatism. The solution, then, is to ‘‘disrupt’’ the tenure system and shared governance—to make higher education institutions more agile, entrepreneurial, and innovative—by introducing the latest technologies and corporate practices. Lanford and Tierney comprehensively deconstruct this neoliberal discourse by illuminating how the tenure system and shared governance have in fact made American universities innovative, propelling them into global leaders in research and education. Specifically, they show how the tenure system and shared governance enable faculty to acquire deep expertise, retain intrinsic motivations, and consider diverse perspectives, all of which are indispensable for substantive innovation. They also illustrate the multifaceted nature of higher education— not simply training the future workforce but also educating citizens, building communities, and producing knowledge as the common good—to explain why ‘‘disruptive innovation,’’ narrowly technological and economic, is likely to have only limited, and often negative, effects on higher education. While delineating the advantages of the tenure system and shared governance, Lanford and Tierney also recognize that higher education nonetheless needs innovation to effectively respond to ongoing economic, sociocultural, and demographic changes. To this end, they propose a new kind of innovation—‘‘mindful innovation’’—that will empower higher education institutions to build on their unique strengths to become truer to their missions and ideals. Specifically, Lanford and Tierney elaborate on their proposal for mindful innovation in terms of the following six tenets: ‘‘(1) societal impact; (2) the necessity of failure; (3) creativity through diversity; (4) respect for autonomy and expertise; (5) the consideration of time, efficiency, and trust; and (6) the incentivization of intrinsic motivation and progress over scare tactics and disruption’’ (p. 9, p. 143). Although I enthusiastically support this proposal, I also find that it relies to","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"452 - 453"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47441893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare 推特上的暴君:保护民主国家免受信息战
IF 0.2 4区 社会学
Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews Pub Date : 2023-08-24 DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421jj
Samantha Bradshaw
{"title":"Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare","authors":"Samantha Bradshaw","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421jj","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421jj","url":null,"abstract":"‘‘above all the name for an art of living and dying with others in a tremorous cosmos . . . spinning our tales otherwise in appreciation of the precarious fragility both subtending and upending a divergent plurality of worlds’’ (p. 97). Pragmatism is a useful framework for Savransky because it approaches ‘‘metaphysics as a radically practical affair’’ (p. 111). Savransky evades conclusions. He argues that the pluriverse is not a story of conclusions, but beginnings and openings, again embracing an experimental and pragmatic approach to living with and understanding any worlds, while also undermining the monism of colonial thought. In doing so, Savransky builds on recent scholarship, particularly in the field of anthropology, that has sought to inquire into the anthropological foundations of ‘‘reality,’’ while also making a philosophical intervention into the meaning of decoloniality. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds ultimately provides a fresh take on the meaning of decoloniality. Yet by recasting decoloniality as a pragmatic project divorced from Land, reparations, and neocolonialism—that which has been at the core of decolonial activism and scholarship—Savransky also evades that which has been at the very core of recent calls for decolonization: power. Though critical of Latin American decoloniality theorists for ignoring questions of realism and reality, his experimental approach is also deeply vulnerable to the powerful forces of coloniality and capitalism that have worked to eliminate pluriverses through centuries of epistemicide. Still, with its elegant prose and its thoughtful introduction of metaphysics into the debates over epistemology, ontology, and how to think other worlds, it is likely to offer an important conceptual resource to struggles for decoloniality. Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare, by David L. Sloss. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 352 pp. $28.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781503628441.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"482 - 484"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48911199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers 债务的监狱:被监禁的父亲的后生
IF 0.2 4区 社会学
Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews Pub Date : 2023-08-24 DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421n
Veronica L. Horowitz
{"title":"Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers","authors":"Veronica L. Horowitz","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421n","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421n","url":null,"abstract":"engagement with how her respondents’ upbringings shaped the connections they drew to their professional and marital ideals—well prior to setting foot on the Morehouse campus. Demography is of course not destiny, and how Morehouse reaffirmed or foreclosed the range of respectable or responsible masculinities is part of the story of the making of race men that cannot be divorced from a larger societal context similarly immersed in ‘‘Moynihanian’’ projects (p. 109). Yet I suspect that with or without the Morehouse Brand the Moynihanian imaginary would have been central to the men’s framings of respectable and responsible manhood. Grundy might have provided valuable insight by engaging the (perhaps mutually reinforcing) dynamic between personal troubles and public issues from within the Black male experience. Describing her methods, Grundy sets the parameters of her investigation as consisting of 33 phone interviews (p. 24). Confining her wide-ranging study to its strictly sociological interrogation does not do it justice. What Grundy achieved is in fact much more: in part, it is a memoir of her SpelHouse experience—with the privileged perspective of a former Miss Maroon and White, deeply informed by the scholarly literature and complemented by retrospective interviews. Her frequent breaks into firstperson recollections and the laughs she shares with her respondents indicate how her findings derive from a methodological novelty in which the boundaries between her research project and her adult life and friendships blur. This was a study to a large extent facilitated by Grundy’s exceptional positionality. Her identity as ‘‘sister-outsider’’ (p. 30), beyond facilitating access, was integral to her entire project, from theory and site selection to insight and analysis. Not only did this result in a highly accessible narrative, but it also, in the emergent decolonial, Du Boisian tradition, provides a concrete instance of what standpoint theory and methodological expansiveness offer sociological research—the discipline would be richer to name it. Social scientists with personal stakes in their questions, sympathetic to their subjects, and biographically immersed in their sites do more than add diverse perspectives. As Respectable shows, they can produce deeper, more nuanced research. And so Grundy concludes hers with this powerful reflection: ‘‘It is the story I went to graduate school for, in order to master a scientific discipline just to get the story right, with the one clear objective that I had some truth on this institution that would benefit our people to know’’ (p. 277).","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"441 - 443"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41434759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 3
Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades 人种学上的拒绝,不守规矩的拉丁裔
IF 0.2 4区 社会学
Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews Pub Date : 2023-08-24 DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421e
Aaron Arredondo
{"title":"Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades","authors":"Aaron Arredondo","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421e","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421e","url":null,"abstract":"the successful execution of instrumental projects, it follows that dreaming should be encouraged by parents, educators, therapists, and others. The authors speak of ‘‘advisory support for dreamers in disadvantaged locations’’ (p. 208). The questions raised by this monograph could inspire further contributions to our understanding of the interrelations of structure and agency through the life course.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"423 - 425"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64926345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Would Democratic Socialism Be Better? 民主社会主义会更好吗?
IF 0.2 4区 社会学
Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews Pub Date : 2023-08-24 DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421r
Michael L. Rosino
{"title":"Would Democratic Socialism Be Better?","authors":"Michael L. Rosino","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421r","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421r","url":null,"abstract":"The relative merits of democratic socialism are becoming progressively more relevant in the United States. More Americans are beginning to see through the obscuring haze cast by the moral panics and political repression of the Cold War era. The rise of political leaders and organizations under the broad banner of democratic socialism in a time of surging economic and political equality presents an essential and unique set of opportunities for social progress and flourishing. In the face of this emerging debate, Lane Kenworthy’s Would Democratic Socialism Be Better? demonstrates one of the core values of the field of sociology. It addresses a prescient but seemingly philosophical or normative question about society and social life. And, importantly, it does this through empirical analysis and theorizing of case studies. This approach is at the heart of the sociological tradition. Groundbreaking sociologists, from Durkheim to Du Bois, endeavored to lend empirically grounded and sociologically minded voices to critical public debates about what constitutes a ‘‘good’’ social system. Kenworthy draws on an appropriate, if imperfect, case study. The meat of the text examines the social, economic, and political conditions produced by the ‘‘Nordic Model’’ of democratic socialist capitalism. Through a series of empirical demonstrations, the text advocates for a ‘‘capitalist economy, a democratic political system, good elementary and secondary (K-12) schooling, a big welfare state, employment-conducive public services (childcare, job training, and others), and moderate regulation of product and labor markets’’ (p. 2). His core contention is that this system ‘‘improves living standards for the least well-off, enhances economic security, and boosts equality of opportunity’’ (p. 2). In an implicit rebuke of currently existing socialist countries (self-styled or otherwise), he posits also that this form of capitalism ‘‘does so without sacrificing the many other things we want in a good society, from liberty to economic growth to happiness’’ (p. 2). Having established this core argument, the remaining text sets up a series of investigations to demonstrate Nordic nations’ laudable outcomes in economic, social, political, and environmental well-being. These arguments and their empirical basis provide many substantial and convincing contributions. Moreover, the tone of much of the book is more conversational and investigative than polemical, and its overall deduction is admirably humble. Kenworthy concludes that democratic socialism might indeed be an ideal and even inevitable alternative but points out that, unlike democratic socialist capitalism, it remains untested. In this sense, the book’s initial framing is understandable but somewhat misleading. It seems to have much more to offer as a comparison between democratic socialist capitalism and other forms of existent capitalism rather than a statement on the validity of some hypothetical democratic socialism or ","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"449 - 450"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47631051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse 《八十个世界的一天:多元宇宙的政治
4区 社会学
Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews Pub Date : 2023-08-24 DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421ii
Matthew Canfield
{"title":"Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse","authors":"Matthew Canfield","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421ii","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421ii","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135420916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Personal Sociology: Finding Meanings in Everyday Life 个人社会学:在日常生活中寻找意义
IF 0.2 4区 社会学
Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews Pub Date : 2023-08-24 DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421bb
I. Cohen
{"title":"Personal Sociology: Finding Meanings in Everyday Life","authors":"I. Cohen","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421bb","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421bb","url":null,"abstract":"Sociologies of everyday life generally earn their stripes in one of three ways. Some works develop novel frames of reference that cast familiar realities in a new light. A second group shines a critical light on day-to-day injustice and its consequences. A third group employs familiar frames to make sociological sense of contexts and/or experiences with which most sociologists are unfamiliar. The three leading essays in Jeffrey Nash’s Personal Sociology: Finding Meanings in Everyday Life fall into the latter camp. The volume is actually a collection of Nash’s essays and research reports, a number of which have been published in whole or in part during the course of a long and varied career. Nash has eclectic tastes. His topics range from a comparison of the treatment of race in popular comedy series separated by thirty years to a provocative comparison of the morality of pro-life groups versus groups advocating animal rights. There is also an essay in support of a more personal form of sociological rhetoric and research. Only a superficial survey of Nash’s eight essays would be possible in the space of this review. Instead, I shall review the three essays that open this collection in order to convey Nash’s sociological sensibility. The first essay concerns the world of barbershop singers who sing old-fashioned tunes with extraordinarily tight harmonies. Nash establishes his credentials as a barbershop singer by providing a brief guide to how the distinctive harmonies of barbershop singing are produced. Though this guide is incidental to his sociological interests, readers may learn about a musical folk art that is far more complicated and difficult to master than many audiences recognize. Nash seems quite at home in the distinctive social relations and interactions that constitute the barbershop milieu. Barbershop singing groups mainly attract a membership of white men, most of whom are from middle-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds. Like many other forms of group singing, for example the high school choral group portrayed in the television musical drama Glee, barbershop singing can be a competitive activity both among groups who vie with one another at various conclaves and within groups as well. Nash might have made more use than he does of the sociology of conflict here. But conflict is not his main concern. Instead, he pays special attention to an implicit disjunction between two antithetical cultural identities. On the one hand there are the cultural identities and norms of men from middleand lower-middleclass backgrounds. Male identities here discourage displays of softer emotions such as heartbreak or longings for others. Such feelings may make a man from the middle class appear weak or vulnerable. Hence, when such feelings arise, they are best kept to oneself. On the other hand, sentimentality is at the very heart of both the lyrics and music of what distinguishes barbershop singing as a genre. Men who might be unsentimental in their","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"467 - 468"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43088151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania 内部癌症:罗马尼亚的生殖、文化转型和保健
IF 0.2 4区 社会学
Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews Pub Date : 2023-08-24 DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421dd
P. Sledge
{"title":"The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania","authors":"P. Sledge","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421dd","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421dd","url":null,"abstract":"In The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania, Cristina A. Pop untangles the relationship between pronatalism, patriarchy, lived religion, state medical policies, morality, and women’s reproductive choices from abortion to the HPV vaccine in contemporary Romania. Pop’s ethnographic analysis of the Delcel neighborhood of Ros xiori de Vede in Romania offers a deep engagement with the complicated structural and interpersonal factors that shape women’s access to reproductive health care and the ways they understand the choices they have, the constraints on those choices, and how those choices link together both their histories of medical engagement and the futures they wish for themselves and future generations. Pop carefully considers how the context of reproductive choice and medical intervention is not unique to this neighborhood in Romania. Rather, The Cancer Within offers a framework to consider the broad and shifting structural factors that shape how patients and doctors interact, how parents and grandparents advise their children and grandchildren, and how power dynamics relating to gender complicate the deceptively simple logic that individuals will make choices based on medically accepted notions of good health. Pop, a Romanian herself, conducted fieldwork in Delcel from 2005 to 2013. In addition to interviews with women in the neighborhood, Pop conducted surveys with Romanian men (who were reticent to participate in interviews) and recounts her own experiences receiving reproductive health care and giving birth in Romania. Pop writes, ‘‘The people who populate The Cancer Within are children born to fulfill a destiny that an official state decree had already planned on their behalf’’ (p. 16). The pronatalist policies of the Romanian government shape medical care, patient choice, and the reproductive futures of any person able to give birth in Romania. Pop’s inclusion of her own experiences adds a layer of understanding to her analysis and allows the reader to experience medical care along with her. In this way, Pop’s own experience creates a bridge between the presumed world view of an educated reader with the lived experience of a community that, during the field work period, did not have a sewage system or access to running water (p. 15). Such details might shape how a reader approaches the stories Pop includes from Romanian women. By bringing together ethnography, surveys, and her own experience, Pop encourages readers to share in the full complexity of reproductive decision-making and to turn that same analytic lens to reproductive conditions in other places. The Cancer Within sets out to understand the disproportionately high rates of cervical cancer and mortality in Romania while those rates were declining in other parts of Europe (p. 1). Engaging first with epidemiological approaches to understanding these drastically high cancer rates, Pop contends that ‘‘we lack a nuanced and historically ar","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"470 - 472"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45453607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man 尊敬:造就莫尔豪斯人的政治与悖论
IF 0.2 4区 社会学
Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews Pub Date : 2023-08-24 DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421m
Jordanna Matlon
{"title":"Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man","authors":"Jordanna Matlon","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421m","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421m","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"439 - 441"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47556134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
How Outsiders Within Are Made: Structural Inequalities and the Making of Academic Outsiders 内部的局外人是如何形成的:结构不平等和学术局外人的形成
IF 0.2 4区 社会学
Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews Pub Date : 2023-08-24 DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191420
A. Meghji
{"title":"How Outsiders Within Are Made: Structural Inequalities and the Making of Academic Outsiders","authors":"A. Meghji","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191420","url":null,"abstract":"Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope, Victoria Reyes claims, ‘‘has been fueled by anger—the fury—that grows from the entrenched racism and sexism I encounter every day in the academy’’ (pp. 101–102). Reyes’s approach to analyzing this entrenched racism and sexism is inspired by Du Boisian and Black feminist epistemologies, based on using ‘‘the personal . . . to critique structures of power’’ (p. xiii). In this regard, Reyes’s Academic Outsider reminds me a lot of Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn, or Patricia Hill Collins’s Fighting Words in the way she cogently weaves between personal narratives, extant sociological theory, and the structural workings of academia and the world in which academia is situated. At a time when there is a plethora of books intended to guide graduate students and faculty through the academic world— what Reyes refers to in her book as sorts of navigational capital and unspoken rules of academic citizenship—Academic Outsider remains unique in the way that it is less a ‘‘how-to’’ guide and more of a ‘‘how does’’ guide. By this, I mean that Reyes’s book draws on her experiences to explain to us how the academy keeps working as it does despite growing recognitions that the academic world is shaped by fundamental inequalities of racism, sexism, classism, and ableism. Reyes’s book thus encompasses a range of discussions—from the politics of citation through to ‘‘overlapping shifts’’ as a mother during the pandemic, academia’s ‘‘motherhood penalty,’’ and reimbursement culture—to show us precisely how, in personal detail, the academy remains a space of deep inequality. A central theme running through Academic Outsider is that there are insiders and outsiders in the U.S. academy and that the academy is designed for the former. From the very language of insiders and outsiders, Reyes deliberately engages with Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of ‘‘the outsider within’’ and a wide range of Black feminist scholarship generated by, to name a few cited figures, Anna Julia Cooper, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. Reyes connects with this stream of Black feminist scholarship in the way that it highlights ‘‘an invisible barrier separating ‘us’ from ‘them,’ being always on the outside, forever seeing but not fully being a part of that other side’’ (p. 9). Reyes’s book then takes us on a tour of how the insider/outsider boundaries of academia work. As Reyes excavates how insiders and outsiders are made and reproduced in the U.S. academy, we get an array of useful concepts that help name the processes going on. One such concept is academic citizenship, which ‘‘concerns not only the rights and responsibilities of those in the academy, which are differentiated and tied to rank . . . it also encompasses the sense of belonging, access to political participation, and sets of practices and claims-making related to academic life, all of which are racialized, gendered, and classed’’ (p. 43). The rights of academic citizenship, Reyes argues, are Academic","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"395 - 397"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43438760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
0
×
引用
GB/T 7714-2015
复制
MLA
复制
APA
复制
导出至
BibTeX EndNote RefMan NoteFirst NoteExpress
×
提示
您的信息不完整,为了账户安全,请先补充。
现在去补充
×
提示
您因"违规操作"
具体请查看互助需知
我知道了
×
提示
确定
请完成安全验证×
相关产品
×
本文献相关产品
联系我们:info@booksci.cn Book学术提供免费学术资源搜索服务,方便国内外学者检索中英文文献。致力于提供最便捷和优质的服务体验。 Copyright © 2023 布克学术 All rights reserved.
京ICP备2023020795号-1
ghs 京公网安备 11010802042870号
Book学术文献互助
Book学术文献互助群
群 号:481959085
Book学术官方微信