Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421o
B. Cahusac de Caux
support arrears. But perhaps the most powerful yet difficult solution Haney proposes is shifting the cultural narratives around fatherhood to recognize the important roles that fathers play in their children’s lives beyond their financial contributions, acknowledging the precious social value that fathers’ caretaking has on the lives of their children. As is the case in all groundbreaking studies, Haney’s book generates new questions for future examination, especially regarding the effects of indebted fatherhood on the lives of custodial parents and children. Her analysis points to gendered distrust as an outcome of current policies and practice, and future scholarship can use this as a starting point to build from. Additionally, as Haney points out, very little is known about how the children of indebted fathers fare. Since children and their well-being are the primary moralized justifications for the debts accrued by their fathers, assessing how child support and reentry practices shape child outcomes and the perspectives of these children is a paramount next step for researchers concerned with poverty governance and child well-being. Another clear set of questions that logically follows from this study surrounds the extent to which Haney’s findings hold true in other locales, such as those with lower accumulations of child support arrears. However, this book in and of itself is a major accomplishment in both its breadth and depth, providing social scientists with foundational knowledge on the heretofore underexamined experiences of the sizeable population of marginalized men reentering society postimprisonment with child support debt. Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles, by Linda Herrera. New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2022. 256 pp. $35.00 paper. ISBN: 9781649031020.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421f
Intan Suwandi
this manner, we can envision such Latinx anthropology by merging the intellectual habitus of trained Latinx ethnographers with that of marginalized community members. This is how we would normalize a genuine decolonial praxis, one that goes beyond the self-reflexive turn in ethnography— having sublimated the colonial instinct into theoretical innocence—to now centering the norms, beliefs, and creative practices of written-in Latinxs. In this way, Latinidad functions as a categorical representation of agency, dissent, and resilience to creatively imagine a more just and equitable world. To do so, one must defy the categorical impositions that stem from colonial institutions and recognize how marginalized knowledges are valid. To be Latinx is redefined as a cultural innovation regarding gender, sexual, and multiple racial identifications, such that we recover identities from an erased past and move toward a more comprehensive and open-ended Latinx future—one that poses fewer limits on what it means to belong, whether in the nation-state of the United States or within our own transnational Latinx communities.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421i
M. Lorek
Emmanuel Deutschmann’s Mapping the Transnational World: How We Move and Communicate across Borders, and Why It Matters challenges the assumption that all aspects of societal life have become and continue to become more and more global. Deutschmann argues that human mobility and communication that overcomes large geographical distances are generally an exception rather than a common or emerging pattern. Mapping the Transnational World instead puts forward strong arguments for why the world is in fact much more regional than it is global. By doing so, Deutschmann challenges prominent social scientific theories, such as McLuhan’s concept of the ‘‘global village,’’ Luhmann’s idea of a ‘‘fully actualized world society,’’ or theories inspired by Marx’s notion of the ‘‘annihilation of space by time.’’ To substantiate this argument, the book draws on an expansive amount of data on refugees, migration, asylum seekers, tourism, international students, online friendships via Facebook, monetary remittances sent across national borders, and international phone calls. For Deutschmann, transnationalism does not imply that interaction between borders will be sustained as understood by some scholars, such as Peggy Levitt or Alejandro Portes. Instead, the author defines the concept of transnationalism as the crossing of a national border either physically (as a refugee, asylum seeker, migrant, student, or tourist) or through communication (such as online friendships, phone calls, or remittances). The book contains four content chapters in addition to an introduction and one concluding chapter. Drawing on dominant theories of globalization, such as Wallerstein’s worldsystem, Meyer’s world polity, and Luhmann’s world society, Chapter Two develops a theoretical argument toward what Deutschmann calls comparative sociology of regional integration. Writing from a European context of knowledge production, where regionalism is often theorized as a uniquely European phenomenon, Deutschmann argues that such a perspective is not particularly helpful in understanding it as a universal phenomenon. Instead, transnationalism should be studied across time and comparatively across regions. Chapter Three fleshes out the distinction between global and regional activity. The chapter investigates the question of whether the data examined, in the context of this book, on national cross-border activity is global or regional. This is also where the strength of the book lies and where its use of vast-ranging data shines. Drawing on data on transnational mobility reaching back to 1960, Deutschmann shows how much of this transnational mobility remains in fact regional. At its center, this chapter grapples with different concepts of regionalism—from the regional categories proposed by Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations to those regions identified by Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) as well as a data mining approach proposed by Deutschmann that detects regions—and how the data collecte
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421a
Alison Dahl Crossley
outputs. Airoldi transforms computer scientists and developers’ ‘‘garbage in, garbage out’’ into ‘‘society in, society out’’ (p. 43), inventing a much-needed sociological explanation of algorithmic bias and discriminatory behaviors stemming from data and design of machine learning tools. Airoldi thoughtfully argues that the code in the culture occurs when socialized machines act as social agents, participating in and shaping societal and cultural practices. Socialized machines are ‘‘also more than tools; they are agents, embedded in feedback loops where machine learning and social learning compenetrate each other’’ (p. 71). In each chapter, Airoldi effectively uses examples of automated systems, such as Google’s virtual assistant that makes restaurant or hair appointments on behalf of its users. Airoldi highlights the fact that, while this feature can, for example, save time, from a sociological perspective the virtual assistant influences human social interactions. Classification systems filter and rank the social world, while recommendation systems guide users on what to buy and what movies or television shows to watch, thus becoming more influential than ‘‘human cultural intermediaries such as critics, producers, and journalists’’ (p. 83). Readers will appreciate the comprehensive range of machine learning algorithms showing how socialized machines act as social agents with machine agency and authority. Airoldi highlights how machines are involved in cultural reproduction by reshaping social interactions, relations, and the social order, raising many questions for the readers about human and machine agency. A key strength of the book is the theory of the machine habitus that Airoldi ambitiously develops. The theory’s premise is that machine habitus is the outcome of primary and secondary socializations. Airoldi creates four theoretical points that constitute the theory: these include structures—social structure and digital infrastructure; entanglements— human-machine interactions within the techno-social fields; trajectories—temporality and multiplicity, the effects of feedback loops on cultural disposition trajectories of humans and socialized machines over time and across fields or platforms; and social, symbolic, and automated boundaries. Airoldi notes that the limitations of his theory and the complex matter of algorithms ‘‘might risk producing oversimplifications’’ (p. 112) and attempts to simplify the theory using practical examples and a fictional character, Andrea, situated in real-life contexts. Perhaps a chapter using the theory with data and observations would have been a more robust addition to the book and the theory of machine habitus. Nevertheless, researchers may apply or test the theory to sociologically understand machine learning and algorithmic systems. Overall, Machine Habitus is an engaging theoretical book that provides significant insights into the socio-technical aspects of algorithms. The interdisciplinary perspective
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421y
Shelytia Cocroft
omit them altogether, especially when they might be relevant or helpful. Rather than sociological methodologies or approaches to reading fiction, MacMillen relies more often on literary and aesthetic frameworks, and even on the analytical methods of classicists, who use ancient literary references and linguistic histories as forms of evidence. Arguing that fictional accounts of the past can be understood to anticipate contemporary social movements, MacMillen considers her sample of ‘‘stories that are telling’’ in light of contemporary social problems, such as the effects of globalization, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, ‘‘cancel culture,’’ debates about gender nonconformity, and the profound impact that COVID-19 is having on individuals and communities. I appreciate the author’s interest not only in exploring sociological ideas and literary works that emerged during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but also in making clear that historical sociological ideas can be used to understand what is happening today. That said, I only wish she had placed W. E. B. Du Bois and others, such as Anna Julia Cooper, more firmly at the center of her ‘‘classical’’ canon of sociological theory. The whiteness of her literary sample, in combination with the largely dominant social identities of the sociological theorists she includes, strikes me as a missed opportunity. Conversations about who or what should be included in any canon are necessarily complicated and divisive, but are made likely and perhaps inevitable when invoking the idea of a ‘‘canon’’ at this moment in our collective history. As I read this monograph, full as it is of sociological observations, I couldn’t stop wondering about its intended audience. I don’t know whether literary scholars of nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels would be as fascinated as I was by the author’s commitment to exploring classical sociology. At the same time, sociological users of theoretical ideas from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—either in their classrooms or research projects—might find the author’s commitment to aesthetic and literary frameworks at times demanding and, perhaps, peripheral. While I enjoyed spending time with this author’s exploration of historical ideas, especially those that are sociological in nature, I continue to wonder whether this book is intended not primarily for sociologists but instead for scholars of literature and aesthetics.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421k
S. Shuster
the perspectives of Crossroads teachers, Chapter Four showcases Pinnacle’s Korean parents and students as they engage in the institutionalization of ethnic capital by sharing and enhancing ethnic-based community resources and opportunities within Pinnacle. For instance, Korean parents host extravagant teacher appreciation and education events through the Korean Parent Teacher Association (KPTA)—a separate organization from the general PTA. These events are intended to educate teachers about Korean ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘values’’ and signal Korean parents’ deep devotion to their children’s achievement, implicitly helping Korean children to receive extra classroom attention and the benefit of the doubt, such as when facing discipline at Pinnacle. Given that Chapter Four comes directly after Drake’s discussion of the criminalization of Black and Latinx Crossroads students and segregated teaching and learning environments in Chapters Two and Three, we wondered how school officials reproduce and respond to the institutionalization of ethnic capital, which could further support the racialization of academic achievement across the two schools. Drake’s final empirical chapter begins with a conversation with one of Crossroads’ assistant principals discussing how the administration and the district have missed opportunities to effectively help students meet their learning, social, and emotional needs. Though Crossroads did present some opportunities for gainful employment after graduation (e.g., a job fair with local Armed Forces recruiters, professional schools, and academies), these opportunities were sparse. Drake also underscores some of Pinnacle’s limitations by highlighting its lack of support for its students of color and exemplifying a crucial need to do more to advance students that do not fit into Pinnacle’s success framework. To conclude, Drake presents some actionable steps toward equity that revolve around credit recovery programs within comprehensive schools. Though imperfect, this would create a less marginalized and stratified schooling experience. Overall, Academic Apartheid highlights the academic segregation and racial and socioeconomic inequalities that persist within a high-achieving and well-resourced suburban district. Useful for sociology of education scholars, instructors, and students, as well as teachers and administrators overseeing school curriculum, practices, and policies, this book serves as a glaring representation of how institutional strategies promoting hyper-competition and hyperacademic success can fail the most vulnerable students. Drake peels back the layers of racial and socioeconomic stratification that exist in this well-resourced school district to shine light on both within-school and between-school disparities that disproportionately affect the educational opportunities of Black, Latinx, and low-income students. In doing this, Drake opens the door for critical intersectionality work within the developing research ar
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421h
Arthur Shiwa Zárate
Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence: A MicroSociological Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Collins, Randall. 2012. "C-Escalation and D-Escalation: A Theory of the Time-Dynamics of Conflict." American Sociological Review 77(1):1–20. Kadivar, Mohammad Ali. 2022. Popular Politics and the Path to Durable Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2009. The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in PostCommunist Poland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421w
Robin G. Isserles
It was a pleasure to read Care and Capitalism by the sociologist Kathleen Lynch. As the lessons of the COVID-19 global pandemic have clarified the many ways our care crisis has played out—in our homes, classrooms, and our workplaces—this book provides an important sociological perspective. Drawing on the multi-disciplinarity of care theory, Lynch reminds us that care is relational, operating at all levels—personal, community, and political— and traversing the public and private spheres. In the first part of the book, Lynch provides a cogent and comprehensive account of neoliberalism and outlines what care is, how it operates, and how it is deformed by neoliberal capitalism. Lynch clearly shows the ways that care is routinized, marketized, digitized, and based largely on efficiency and expediency. While neoliberalism has demeaned care, at the same time it idealizes and glorifies it. Care becomes a powerful site of further exploitation in very gendered, racialized, and class-based ways. Lynch then historicizes this discussion, expounding the ideological roots of liberalism and neoliberalism and offering insights into the rise of capitalism and its relationship to care. The book’s third part focuses on deformed care, especially violence, both toward humans and nonhumans, an important contribution to the discourse. Seeking to claim an important theoretical space to discuss violence and care, both of which have been marginalized in our philosophical and sociological imaginations, she offers an intersectional analysis as fundamental to care, recognizing the parallel inequalities that have emerged and with which we must contend. The final section is devoted to the future framed as resistance, turning again to the lessons learned from the pandemic. Lynch has written a timely book for those who have been theorizing and researching care as well as for those who are new to its complexities. Boldly challenging Rawls’s veil of ignorance, a philosophical ideal ‘‘not grounded in sociological or political reality,’’ Lynch asserts that the centrality of freedom over equality in liberalism has meant that matters of social justice, where care is situated, are nearly impossible to realize. Without addressing social and political inequalities that exist, equality is narrowed to equalizing the right to compete, rather than the right to choose alternatives with equal value. As such, liberal reforms continue to be severely compromised. Rather, an alternative relational framework, centered on care, makes affective justice possible, a thread she weaves throughout the book. In the final chapter, reflecting on perhaps the most important lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lynch illuminates the travesty of the privileged indifference in not knowing the lives of others, a reality enabled by neoliberal ideology where matters of care have been demeaned and subordinated to those of justice. Another important consideration is how she addresses the thorny question of the individual.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421gg
Judith Taylor
Sociology is a comparatively young discipline, and younger still in Canada, wherein the first sociology department was started at McGill University in the mid 1920s. Canadian Sociologists in the First Person is an edited volume of invited essays that asks Canadian sociologists across the country to reflect on their lives and intellectual work. The book is organized into five sections: Professional Sociology, Policy Sociology, Political Economy, Social Activism, and Ethnography and Cultural Studies. Taken together, and historicized by the editors, these essays give readers a strong sense of what it meant to be trained in Canada from roughly the 1950s to the 1990s and how these scholars found their way to sociology and stayed. Throughout the sections of this book, there is a prevailing and meaningful engagement with class—the modest, transnational, and hardscrabble experience of parents, as well as a concern for class mobility and consciousness. C. Wright Mills is the most mentioned academic influence, particularly his work on the Power Elite, which many Canadian sociologists extended in Canada. In partnership with one another and Statistics Canada, an arm of social science data collection in the federal government, scholars in this collection also aimed to build databases from which inequality in Canada could be better understood. We see other emphases in Canadian sociology such as migration and immigration, network analysis, feminist sociology, and critical Marxist studies. Nearly every chapter includes assertions of happenstance—a journey of wandering, not knowing, making what the authors call ‘‘stupid’’ or uninformed decisions, and having little guidance. Notably, many scholars in this collection attribute their lives to luck—even though sociology shows us that, in fact, our trajectories are usually part of larger patterns of history, identity, and opportunity. Maybe no one, including sociologists, wants to feel like a data point. Sociologists don’t have much experience making sense of our own lives or reflecting on how our individual narratives might matter in themselves rather than in aggregate. This absence does at times show. The strongest sections in the book are Policy Sociology, Political Economy, and Social Activism, and these are also, arguably, the strongest subfields in the discipline in Canada. In the Policy section, Daniel Béland gives a moving account of traversing francophone Canada and Anglophone sociology and the ways in which such translation work led him to a life of comparative historical analysis. There is a nice pairing of David Tindall and Mark Stoddart, the latter a student of the former. Their collective endeavors give an important account of environmental sociology in Canada, touching on topics such as forestry, colonial natural resource extraction, and violation of Indigenous treaties, rights, and sovereignty. Both recall conflicts between Indigenous activists and the Canadian nation-state as pivotal in their journey
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421c
M. McLemore
In Babylost: Racism, Survival, and The Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A To Z, Monica J. Casper takes an innovative approach to put in both historical and sociological context the shameful tragedy (c.f. Jones 2016) of infant mortality in the United States. She uses the alphabet to organize the factors that contribute to preventable infant mortality that can be divided into clinical, political, social, theoretical, and actual categories, and this method allows for readers to grasp both the entirety and the simplicity of what is necessary to stop babies from dying. Additionally, she achieves the difficult task of tackling the hard reality that not all infant deaths are preventable and yet still pushes us to think about the families that experience these losses. It is an effective approach that is filled with tangible suggestions and solutions. Full disclosure: My work is cited and I am named in the book, so it is not lost on me that I read and am reviewing this book after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe v. Wade in the United States. Ironically, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear a case this term that specifically addresses the legal aspects of fetal personhood. Therefore, it is particularly profound for me—as a scholar who works across the reproductive spectrum and whose attention is needed on acute problems such as the intersection of the Black maternal health crisis and draconian abortion restrictions—to be addressing infant mortality, a problem that has been documented for decades. That said, these concepts are closely related, and I will use my review of Casper’s book to show the brilliance of her approach and how it adds to analytic frames that have been historically siloed. She provides a deeply researched book with rich references that allow transdisciplinary scholars to connect some dots that perhaps for others may be blocked because of disciplinary perspectives—yet another gift from sociologists. Black feminists and other scholars have proposed reproductive justice as an antidote, strategy, theory, and organizing frame to drive and guide action (Ross and Solinger 2017). Given that the tenets of reproductive justice are outlined in the book and briefly summarized as the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent children that families already have in safe and sustainable environments, to understand Babylost as a book that is not championing reproductive justice would be a mistake. First, even though the words ‘‘social safety net’’ appear nowhere in the book, there are implicit examples throughout Casper’s writing that suggest that a more robust social safety net would result in reductions of infant mortality. This is also borne out by evidence that she cites. Similarly, the need for human services to align with health— that is, Health and Human Services—is clear and obvious if we are to act in face of need. Second, Casper masterfully intertwines multiple domai
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