Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421t
Hiro Saito
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
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421jj
Samantha Bradshaw
‘‘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.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421n
Veronica L. Horowitz
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).
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421e
Aaron Arredondo
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421r
Michael L. Rosino
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
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421ii
Matthew Canfield
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421bb
I. Cohen
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
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421dd
P. Sledge
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
在《内在的癌症:罗马尼亚的生殖、文化转型和医疗保健》一书中，克里斯蒂娜·a·波普(Cristina A. Pop)梳理了当代罗马尼亚的亲生主义、父权制、生活宗教、国家医疗政策、道德以及妇女从堕胎到HPV疫苗的生殖选择之间的关系。Pop对罗马尼亚Ros xiori de Vede的Delcel社区进行的人种学分析，深入探讨了影响妇女获得生殖保健的复杂结构和人际因素，以及她们对自己所做选择的理解方式，对这些选择的限制，以及这些选择如何将她们参与医疗的历史和她们对自己和后代的希望的未来联系起来。Pop仔细考虑了生殖选择和医疗干预的背景如何不是罗马尼亚这个社区所独有的。相反，《内在的癌症》一书提供了一个框架，让我们思考那些广泛而不断变化的结构性因素，这些因素塑造了病人和医生之间的互动方式，父母和祖父母如何建议他们的子女和孙辈，以及与性别相关的权力动态如何使个人会根据医学上公认的健康观念做出选择这一看似简单的逻辑变得复杂。Pop本人也是罗马尼亚人，她从2005年到2013年在德尔塞尔进行了实地调查。除了对附近的妇女进行采访外，Pop还对罗马尼亚男性进行了调查(他们不愿参与采访)，并讲述了她自己在罗马尼亚接受生殖保健和分娩的经历。Pop写道:“《内心的癌症》里的人是一群孩子，他们生来就是为了完成一项官方法令已经为他们计划好的命运”(第16页)。罗马尼亚政府的生育政策影响着医疗保健、病人的选择以及任何能够在罗马尼亚生育的人的生育未来。Pop将自己的经历融入其中，为她的分析增添了一层理解，并让读者与她一起体验医疗护理。通过这种方式，波普自己的经历在一个受过教育的读者的假定世界观与一个社区的生活经验之间架起了一座桥梁，在实地工作期间，这个社区没有污水处理系统或自来水(第15页)。这些细节可能会影响读者对Pop收录的罗马尼亚女性故事的看法。通过将民族志、调查和她自己的经历结合起来，Pop鼓励读者分享生殖决策的全部复杂性，并将同样的分析镜头转向其他地方的生殖状况。《癌症内部》一书旨在了解罗马尼亚的宫颈癌和死亡率高得不成比例，而欧洲其他地区的宫颈癌和死亡率却在下降(第1页)。波普首先用流行病学方法来理解这些极高的癌症发病率，他认为，“我们缺乏一种细致入微的、历史清晰的方式来说明罗马尼亚的原因”(第4页)。Pop认为，罗马尼亚的宫颈癌是“系统性突发事件”的结果，其中疾病和社会条件对妇女的生育选择产生了不可避免的影响。虽然对罗马尼亚情况的分析是独特的，但对470次审查的审议
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421m
Jordanna Matlon
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Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191420
A. Meghji
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
《学术局外人：排斥与希望的故事》（Academic Outsider:Stories of Exclusion and Hope），维多利亚·雷耶斯（Victoria Reyes）声称，“我每天在学院里遇到的根深蒂固的种族主义和性别歧视引发了愤怒”（第101–102页）。雷耶斯分析这种根深蒂固的种族主义和性别歧视的方法受到了杜波依斯和黑人女权主义认识论的启发，基于“个人。批判权力结构”（第十三页）。在这方面，雷耶斯的《学术局外人》让我想起了杜波依斯的《黎明的黄昏》，或者帕特里夏·希尔·科林斯的《战斗的话语》，因为她在个人叙事、现存的社会学理论、学术界和学术界所处世界的结构运作之间令人信服地交织在一起。当有大量书籍旨在引导研究生和教职员工了解学术世界时——雷耶斯在书中称之为航海资本和学术公民的潜规则——《学术局外人》仍然是独一无二的，它不是一本“该怎么做”的指南，而是一本“怎么做”指南。我的意思是，雷耶斯的书借鉴了她的经历，向我们解释了尽管人们越来越认识到学术界是由种族主义、性别歧视、阶级主义和能力主义的根本不平等所塑造的，但学院是如何继续运作的。因此，雷耶斯的书涵盖了一系列讨论——从引用政治到疫情期间作为母亲的“重叠转变”、学术界的“母亲惩罚”和报销文化——以个人细节向我们展示了学院如何仍然是一个深度不平等的空间。贯穿《学术局外人》的一个中心主题是，美国学院有内部人也有外部人，学院是为前者设计的。从内部人和外部人的语言来看，雷耶斯有意采用帕特里夏·希尔·柯林斯的“内部外部人”概念，以及安娜·朱莉娅·库珀、贝尔·胡克和奥德尔·罗德等知名人士所产生的广泛的黑人女权主义学术。雷耶斯与这股黑人女权主义学术流的联系在于，它突出了“一道无形的屏障，将‘我们’与‘他们’分隔开来，‘永远在外面，永远看到但不完全成为另一面的一部分’”（第9页）。雷耶斯的书带我们参观了学术界内部/外部界限是如何运作的。当Reyes深入研究内部人和外部人是如何在美国学院中形成和复制的时，我们得到了一系列有用的概念，这些概念有助于命名正在进行的过程。其中一个概念是学术公民身份，它“不仅涉及学院中人员的权利和责任，而且与等级有区别和联系。”。它还包括归属感、获得政治参与的机会，以及与学术生活相关的一系列实践和主张，所有这些都是种族化、性别化和分类的（第43页）。雷耶斯认为，学术公民的权利是维多利亚·雷耶斯的《学术局外人：排斥与希望的故事》。加利福尼亚州斯坦福：斯坦福大学出版社，2022年。184页，论文14.00美元。ISBN:9781503632998。
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