Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews最新文献

{"title":"Surviving Solitary: Living and Working in Restricted Housing Units","authors":"Jesse J. Norris","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317ff","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317ff","url":null,"abstract":"ed, there are almost no references to contemporary research or theory. The claims that are made are often poorly sourced, when they are sourced at all. The phrase ‘‘not a few’’ is used repeatedly throughout and is almost never accompanied by a reference to who those ‘‘not a few’’ claiming something might be. This ironically feels a bit like the academic version of the former president’s ‘‘many people are saying’’ trope. Further, the sections on contemporary issues, particularly the chapters on the Trump era, amount to little more than a blow-by-blow recounting of the indignities and inanities of Trump’s campaign and reign, pulled from newspaper headlines. In the end, there is (quite understandably) a lot of heat here, but also very little light to be gleaned from the analysis. Although I will resist the urge to create a laundry list of oversights and problems, as a multi-generational Appalachian I am compelled to note that calling J. D. Vance a ‘‘perceptive’’ analyst of the problems in the region (p. 86) is akin to cultural heresy among astute observers (see Harkins and McCarroll 2019). This is also rather ironic given that Vance is now a Trump toady and that Tropes of Intolerance largely operates as an anti-Trump argument from the perspective of both social science and liberal democracy. Vance’s (in)famous memoir is discussed as though it were an academic study, is called by the wrong title, and then is not even cited in the bibliography (nor is a block quote from Vance sourced on p. 87). In effect, this example is a telling microcosm of the broader problems plaguing the book. Ultimately, Tropes of Intolerance does not live up to its considerable promise. It is not entirely clear who the intended audience is supposed to be, although my guess would be students in an introductory race and ethnicity course. It will not be of much use for researchers, since contemporary theory and research is not incorporated. Given that fact, a clean, compelling introduction to ethnic prejudice would be expected, but there are too many problems, of both style and substance, to recommend the book for use in a college course. In the end, the book is a well-intentioned effort to use the tools of social science to dissect and combat contemporary bigotry, but the execution unfortunately leaves much to be desired.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"375 - 377"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48152598","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}

{"title":"On the Enduring Ways Masculinity Structures Straight Men’s Sexual Lives","authors":"Tristan Bridges","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181316","url":null,"abstract":"Beth Montemurro’s newest book, Getting It, Having It, Keeping It Up: Straight Men’s Sexuality in Public and Private, is among the most nuanced treatments of the sexual lives of cisgender straight men in the United States with which I am familiar. In the project, Montemurro explores how this group of men navigates their sexual identities and interactions from young adulthood through older age. This enables Montemurro to chart shifts in cisgender straight men’s sexual lives and selves over the course of the five decades of the life course represented by the project. It is a remarkable book from which I learned a great deal; it contributes lots of new information and charts new directions in research on the ways gender inequality structures cisgender straight men’s sexual lives and identities alongside collections of diverse and intersectional consequences. The data the book summarizes and analyzes comprise 95 interviews with straight cisgender men between the ages of 20 and 68. The sample is pretty evenly spread by decade of men’s lives in her sample. And this is important, as Montemurro notes that a good deal of the work on cisgender straight men’s sexualities has concentrated on adolescent and college-aged boys and men on one end of the life course and elderly men on the other. The data also include a racially diverse group, and similar proportions of the sample were married and were fathers to those reported by the U.S. Census (which is a majority here). The data themselves are fascinating for so many reasons, but one that stood out for me was that these men were willing to speak so candidly with Montemurro and her research assistants. Montemurro is a practiced scholar of sexualities and sexual life, but this stands out as cisgender straight men in the U.S. are not a group that has a reputation for enjoying speaking openly and honestly about all the nuances of their sex lives. So these men’s stories of their sexual lives offer a great deal of new information, helping us better comprehend cisgender straight men’s understandings of their own sexual selves and lives over the life course and in different contexts. Montemurro’s overarching framework and argument in Getting It, Having It, Keeping It Up is that sex authenticates masculinity in ways that cause sexual interactions to be laden with opportunities for cisgender straight men to gain (and lose) gendered social status. This builds on previous research and theory on the ways gender inequalities and sexual identities and practices are deeply intertwined. Montemurro adds to this work, in particular, with her focus on a distinction she refers to as between public and private masculinities. As she writes, ‘‘I look at how context impacts the expression of masculinity by examining the notion of private masculinities—that is, the way men demonstrate masculinity in intimate situations, where they are less likely to be policed’’ (p. 16). Here, Montemurro argues, women are framed by men as having the cap","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"295 - 298"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47109277","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}

{"title":"Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms U.S. Health Care","authors":"Michael E. Shepherd","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317z","url":null,"abstract":"sociology and moral systems,’’ which makes up almost two-thirds of the whole volume (pp. 151–432). Nandan points out that juridique should not be understood narrowly in the sense of law and jurisprudence alone, but also includes customs, habits, domestic organization, and political organization, along with an astonishing variety of penal, property, contract, and international laws across a wide range of historical and cultural contexts. As Durkheim and Mauss put it in an introductory note from 1910, ‘‘A juridic system is defined by the social structure it represents: it is this structure that best indicates the direction in which it is moving’’ (p. 152). Morals and laws thus give order to social relationships within such groupings as totemic clans, tribal societies, and national collectives even as they are subject to processes of development or decay over time. The writings of Joseph Kohler and Otto Stoll, for instance, who do not figure in Durkheim’s other publications, stand out in shaping his emerging concerns with nonwestern and premodern societies, the former for his focus on complex exogamous domestic arrangements (pp. 165–71, 234– 44, 267–71, 295–96, 341–42), the latter for his cross-cultural perspective on techniques of sexual ornamentation (pp. 354–60). These and other reviews in this section are important for tracing the evolution of Durkheim’s ideas from his lecture course in the 1890s, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, to the book he outlined before he died, La Morale (Ethics/Morality). Besides showing us the breadth and diversity of empirical materials and theoretical ideas that Durkheim and his colleagues were grappling with apart from their most well-known essays and published books, this collection of reviews also gives us a glimpse into what ‘‘social anthropology’’ contributed to sociology before they went their separate ways. Durkheim and Mauss’s 1913 ‘‘Note on the Concept of Civilization’’ suggests an ambitious program in the ethnography and prehistory of the ‘‘complex and united systems’’ that make up the ‘‘various civilizations that dominate and wrap the collective life of every group of people’’ and that often cut across territorial borders and extend beyond national boundaries (pp. 96–99). Likewise, Durkheim’s 1901 remark on ‘‘Technology’’ proposes that the study of the everyday use of implements in familiar places like the household should be considered a branch of sociology, since ‘‘the instruments which men use (such as tools, weapons, clothes, utilities of all kinds, etc.) are products of collective activity’’ (p. 438). These ambitious statements point beneath the integration of sociology into the mechanisms of the nation-state and reach beyond the function of anthropology as a tool of colonial administration. They also recover a dimension of the critical mission of the social sciences that is independent of their institutionalization in the university and that serves as a provocation for imagining other ways of be","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"364 - 367"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45035197","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}

{"title":"Justice in the Workplace: Overcoming Ethical Dilemmas","authors":"Katherine K. Chen","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317i","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317i","url":null,"abstract":"bloc. Following the line of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘‘the end of history,’’ many academicians in the United States appear to believe that Communist ideology, even if it was dangerous, evaporated at the end of the Cold War, even though one-fifth of the world’s population has remained under the iron grip of a Communist Party that is indeed totalitarian with a global reach, and its threats to liberal democracies have increased in recent years. Clearly following a leftist line, Chapters Three through Five are framed in terms of race, gender, and sexuality and are critical of conservative religious coalitions in American politics. The framing issue or biased political position aside, it is actually interesting to read about Black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. and White celebrities Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor converting from Protestantism to Judaism in the 1960s, Black boxer Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali to Islam (the Nation of Islam in particular, although later he changed to Sunni Islam) in the 1960s, and Chuck Colson (a former advisor of President Richard Nixon) and several others to Evangelical Protestantism in the 1970s. These highly publicized conversions variously attracted and repelled many people, as described by the author. As time goes on, however, it has become accepted by the American public as normal for Americans to convert to these and other religions. The author details the initial disbelief of Ali’s conversion by his own father and the media. Eventually, however, Davis admits that ‘‘Ali represented the greatness of American athleticism and the strength of American religious freedom when he lit the Olympic torch in 1996 in Atlanta’’ (p. 176). Given the eventual acceptance or affirmation of Muhammad Ali by the American public, I think it is right to say that religious freedom in the United States has in fact been enlarged to be inclusive of various religions. As a matter of fact, the anti-cult paranoia also died down by the 1990s. Religion in America has changed greatly in the twentieth century. In recent years, a significant proportion of Americans have given up self-identification with any religion. Which secularisms have substituted for their past religion? How much has Communism or militant atheism crept up on American society or politics again? What about religious conversions in other parts of the world, especially in post-Communist Eastern Europe and the rapidly developing economies of East and Southeast Asia? This historical study serves as a call for scholars to carry out more objective, unbiased, social scientific studies of conversion across religions and religion-like secularisms in the United States and around the globe.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"332 - 333"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45402493","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}

{"title":"Handbook of Digital Inequality: A Review","authors":"G. Longo","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181316a","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181316a","url":null,"abstract":"for men’s gendered feelings surrounding these transitions. Men also described women remaining with men in long-term relationships following erectile dysfunction or changes associated with aging that made sex less possible as affirming their gendered sense of themselves as masculine as well. Men confessing declines in their feelings of sexual desire, for instance, also discussed concerns that women might no longer be interested in them. Men in committed relationships discussed being worried about keeping their partners sexually satisfied. And many men in committed relationships discussed fears that the women in those relationships with them would leave if sexual intercourse was no longer a part of their lives—though Montemurro did find that in her sample, upper-middle-class men, white men, and men in long-term committed relationships were less likely to share these fears. Getting It, Having It, Keeping It Up is easily among the most extensive qualitative studies of cisgender straight men’s sexual lives over the life course with which I am familiar. Montemurro is a talented interviewer. I think it’s worth noting that the interviews were conducted primarily by a woman. I wonder whether I or another man would have elicited the same types of information from the men in this study or whether speaking with another man would have produced less information. Among the most difficult parts of this book to read were the quotes from men in their 50s and 60s still struggling with many of the same gendered concerns brought up by men in their 20s. The oldest men in the sample were not immune from the conflicts and concerns surrounding sex experienced by the youngest men in the sample. While the study does not follow men into their 70s, 80s, and beyond, it suggests many of these gendered sexual struggles go unresolved in cisgender straight men’s lives. Additionally, alongside the anxiety and shame that characterize a large portion of men’s confessions in this book are declarations of sexual entitlement and both casual and more overt forms of misogyny. We learn about the shifting landscape of gender and sexual inequality in new ways by better understanding cisgender straight men’s conflicted relationships with women and sex. I hope that this book is widely read and taught. Getting It, Having It, Keeping It Up should be read by students and scholars alike. It is at once deeply accessible and engaged with an enormous body of scholarship and theory to help us better understand cisgender straight men’s sexualities in public and private over the course of their lives. The data, discussion, and analysis here provide new starting points for diverse research projects on a host of contemporary issues related to cisgender straight men’s sexualities.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"298 - 301"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42480151","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}

{"title":"Automation Is a Myth","authors":"Larry Liu","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317w","url":null,"abstract":"In this short and engaging book, Luke Munn challenges the view in the automation literature that the technological displacement of human labor is a universal, inevitable phenomenon. Recent improvements in artificial intelligence and robotics have induced labor economists to produce forecasts about future employment effects of automation and infer the power of new labor-displacing technologies from the logic of Moore’s law. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on microchips would double every year. Presumably, the compounding effects of improving algorithms would allow for the ever-quicker replacement of workers, slowly at the beginning but much faster in later periods. Munn argues that these economists’ predictions of fast and universal automation are just as wrong as the prediction by left-wing thinkers about a ‘‘postcapitalist world without work’’ and ‘‘fully automated luxury communism’’ (p. 15). The argument of Automation Is a Myth is that automation is a limited, localized, and socially specific phenomenon, and it echoes Gray and Suri’s (2019) point that automation discourse neglects ‘‘ghost workers’’—that is, the many invisible workers who are needed to train the algorithm or to fix the kinks and flaws in technology deployment (p. 30). Quoting Tesla founder Elon Musk’s tweet ‘‘humans are underrated’’ (p. 17), he contends that the main problem plaguing the modern workplace is not too much automation, but insufficient automation, given its imperfections. Tesla was incapable of fixing the inconsistencies in assembly tasks that require human judgment, which resulted in less productivity. Amazon warehouses are filled with shelf-moving robots, which may have reduced the amount of walking among warehouse workers but has also increased physical injuries based on monotonous but fast-paced body movements (p. 94). Furthermore, the more robots Amazon is introducing, the more reliant they are on skilled workers who can fix and maintain the robots. For technological systems to function, workers must internalize the logic of the system and perform their activities such that the algorithms recognize them (p. 25). Rather than producing a world without work, the new work in algorithmically controlled environments could be low quality: social media content moderators must identify violent or pornographic content that the algorithms cannot detect on their own, resulting in psychological trauma (p. 38). Munn also argues that technologies are adopted in a cultural context, noting that East Asian cultures are more likely to trust automation than Middle Easterners (p. 56). However, the dark side in the Chinese context is the use of surveillance technology to control daily lives and forced labor in cotton picking among the Uyghur Muslims, a repressed minority group that the Chinese government forces to assimilate to Han majority culture. In line with the main thesis, the surveillance technology, focused on facial recognition algorithms and cameras, is n","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"359 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64926299","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}

{"title":"Problem-Solving Sociology: A Guide for Students","authors":"Austin H. Johnson","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317bb","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317bb","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"369 - 370"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43083925","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}

{"title":"Index of Reviews by Category","authors":"Rachel Tolbert","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181320","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"393 - 393"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47835600","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}

{"title":"Islam, Justice, and Democracy","authors":"Nazreen S. Bacchus","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317e","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317e","url":null,"abstract":"pose of the place in which one is located. The next couple of chapters explore the inherent circumstances of the offender serving time with limited control contrasted with an individual’s intrinsic need to control their time in alignment with their goals. The authors illustrate inmates’ obsessive need to regain temporal autonomy through modifying their perception of time. This section moved beyond the often expressed and sensationalized media misconception of an offender being in control of their time (e.g., they have all day to do something) to the realization of what the system does to affect an inmate’s time and ultimately their perception of it. The physical nature of time for some in society is marked by pivotal events, but this becomes difficult if an individual is within a prison. Carceral and Flaherty, in Chapters Five and Six, outline distinctive ways prisoners mark the passage of time and their lack of forward momentum. The authors also unlock how tactics to mark the passage of time may not work for the inmate, resulting in the inability to classify time into past, present, and future. The last chapter comes back full circle to explain how inmates navigate time and suggests that the penal system is really an experiment exploring the relationship between involuntary confinement and temporal experiences. This book is well written and methodically organized with the imperative of providing an empirically grounded analysis of time and temporal experiences of offenders. This structure creates two distinctive contributions. The first is that the book challenges the reader to interpret their construction of time and how time can affect a person differently when the individual is confined behind prison walls. This insight within the classroom can be invaluable. Faculty members often look for a book such as this that hits the mark on making the material real for the students. The second contribution is that the reader will gain insight concerning the prison experience from both someone inside and someone outside the correctional system, due to the book’s dual authorship. The perceived mutual respect between the two authors creates a platform in which the reader is cognizant of both views even when they challenge each other. These contributions make the book an imperative to include within a corrections course, introductory sociology course, or an introductory criminal justice class. It would be appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate students. Flaherty is one of the leading scholars in the area of temporal experiences, so it is not surprising that the book provides new insight into a population often forgotten. Interested readers may also benefit from other works by both authors. Works by K. C. Carceral include the following: Prison Inc.: A Convict Exposes Life Inside a Private Prison and Beyond a Convict’s Eyes: Doing Time in a Modern Prison. Works by Michael G. Flaherty include the following: The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal E","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"324 - 326"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48211738","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}

{"title":"Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra","authors":"W. McKinney","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317","url":null,"abstract":"Crisscrossing the Atlantic between Accra and Houston, Anima Adjepong’s Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra offers a refreshing engagement with the quotidian practices and politics that enable a new generation of African migrants to find meaning and assert their place in the world. Adjepong’s examination of the emergent Afropolitan subjectivity through the experiences of interlocutors residing in Ghana and the United States challenges assumptions about the nature of diaspora and transnational migration within the African context. Afropolitan Projects recasts migration, its motivations, and its locales on both sides of the Atlantic and thoroughly breaks from the deep historical traumas of the Middle Passage epistemology and more contemporaneous framings that dichotomize African migrants into refugees and upwardly mobile opportunityseekers. Hence, Adjepong’s extensive ethnographic observations in Houston and Accra and critical analyses of material culture and political projects capture the centrality of aesthetics and assemblage of oftentimes contradictory ideologies of sexuality, race, and belonging. Afropolitan Projects is organized into three sections, with Chapters One and Two elaborating the experiences of Afropolitans residing in Houston, Chapters Three and Four focused on those living in Accra, and, finally, Chapters Five and Six tackling the careful negotiation of sexual, gender, race, and class politics in both settings. In Chapter One we are introduced to an ethnically diverse Ghanaian community residing in Houston. Adjepong demonstrates how their interlocutors disrupt disparaging representations of Africa and migrants by forming civic associations that showcase the vibrancy of their ethno-national heritage and alignment with neoliberal American values. Couched in a discourse that lauds diversity and middle-class valorization of work ethic, participation in civic associations adds meaning and structure to contemporary migration experiences and places Afropolitans within the urban Houston landscape. In Chapter Two, Adjepong focuses on the religious projects of the Houston-based Ghanaian community and the alignment of Ghanaian and American theological traditions. Adjepong reveals the limits of Afropolitan inclusivity through vignettes crafted from interviews and observations of outwardly secular organizations that nonetheless serve to restrict subjectivity within an overtly Christian valence, drawing attention to the exclusion of Muslims and sexual minorities. Beginning in Chapter Three, Adjepong pivots to Accra and engages the Afropolitan Ghanaians who chose to return to advance their careers, effect social change, and explore Afropolitan aesthetics in art and culture. To the Afropolitans residing in Accra, the city embodies contradictions that enable them to give form to their transnational subjectivity. Contradictions exist between universality and parochialism, progress and tradition","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"315 - 316"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47495480","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}