caregiving

Clippings | April 8th, 2026 | TSP Media Report

Jan-Rose Davis on April 8, 2026

IOL Cape Argus News wrote a piece about Elena Moore’s (Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town) inaugural lecture titled Who Cares? The Directions of State–Family Relationships in Changing Times. Moore urges society to rethink the burden of care and argues that the work of care is often invisible. With a team of 40 researchers spanning across Ireland, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Malawi, Moore explores how families, government, and communities share the responsibility of care. In South Africa, Moore’s team found that there are care grant opportunities, but there are also major barriers in the application process. “We all want good care,” Moore said. “But we also want just care relations.”

Elena Moore

Abdelilah Farah (Moroccan Sociologist) wrote a commentary piece for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explaining how Morocco’s Gen Z is developing a new protest culture. The members of Generation Z are mobilizing in an age of rapid technological expansion where they have “developed their political consciousness within a globalized digital environment.” They are departing from traditional modes of protest expression and drawing on cultural influences such as anime, video games, and contemporary music. The commentary explains that “the digital protests of Morocco’s Generation Z can be understood as primarily cultural rather than purely political acts.” Generation Z  maintains a dual consciousness of being “globally connected yet locally grounded in experiences of hardship.”

Abdelilah Farah

In an article for The Conversation, Adam Coutts (Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge) argues that the U.K. government’s new action plan Protecting What Matters–which centers social cohesion–is weak and vague. Coutts explains that the “plan frames division through religion, identity and Islamophobia, which are outcomes and proxies, not root causes.” He offers a better framework centering “community resilience: the measurable capacity of neighbourhoods to absorb shocks, resist divisive narratives and recover from crises.”

Adam Coutts

Clippings – August 15th, 2024 TSP Media Report

Mallory Harrington on August 16, 2024
  • The Nation ran an article on Michael Sierra-Arévalo’s (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas – Austin) recent book The Danger Imperative. Sierra-Arévalo examines police culture and how it shapes interactions with the public. He describes the “danger imperative” as “policing’s governing institutional frame,” which includes a preoccupation with violence and officer safety, leading officers to treat every interaction as a potential emergency.
  • The New York Times ran a story on a prominent video creator of the homesteading movement (which focuses on living self-sufficiently and off-the-grid) who broadcasts the lifestyle to millions of social media followers. Jordan Travis Radke (Director of the Collaborative for Community Engagement at Colorado College) commented that members of the homesteading movement have varied backgrounds and political alignments, but agree that while “the societal systems and structures in which they were embedded could not be changed anymore,” their lifestyles could be changed. “The modern homesteading movement’s big idea is that, rather than trying to change the world collectively and publicly, people are trying to reshape their private sphere — their worlds, their homes, their own tiny network,” Radke said. “They’re changing their lives, but they want other people to see it, because they want others to follow suit.”
  • Vice President Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate for the upcoming presidential election. Republicans are criticizing Walz’s response to the mass protests following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, saying Walz “let Minnesota burn” by not bringing in the National Guard quickly enough. In an article for USA Today, Michelle Phelps (Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota) explains that National Guard activation had to be requested by the mayor, as managing unrest was the city’s responsibility. “To say that [Walz] let Minnesota or Minneapolis burn is just a wild misconstruing of the facts,” Phelps said. “It was a response to a really unusual set of circumstances, and I think they responded as fast as was reasonably possible, given the scale of the operation.” In an article for BBC, Phelps added that a more forceful response could have backfired: “There’s a vision in which if we had had a more conservative governor that escalated the state response in the way that President Trump wanted, we would have seen more violence and more destruction,” she said.
  • Francisco Lara-García (Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hofstra University) was recently interviewed in The Markup discussing the “virtual wall” of digital surveillance along the US-Mexico border and the relationship to surveillance among those who live in border towns. “One thing that is kind of a paradox about living and having lived on the border is that there are moments when you can’t not be aware of the intense amount of enforcement and surveillance and activity across the border. But at the same time, it also just becomes a fabric of your life that you don’t notice, or you just don’t pay attention to it,” ​​Lara-García said. “Part of that is because it gets normalized, but also sometimes because there’s surveillance and enforcement that actually just doesn’t impact your life at a particular moment.”
  • The New York Times ran a story on the “step gap” in senior care. A 2021 study led by Sarah Patterson (Research Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan) found that among older adults needing assistance, about half of adults with biological children received care from them, while fewer than a quarter of adults in blended families received care from their step-children. “We have more reconfigured families than ever before, and these families may increasingly rely on someone who’s not a biological child. In general, those relationships tend to be less close,” Deborah Carr (Director of the Center of Innovation in Social Science and Professor of Sociology at Boston University) commented. Merril Silverstein (Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University) added that relationship quality also depends on the age at which a step-parent enters a child’s life: “When a new father comes in and you’re in your 50s, are you going to call him Dad?” Silverstein asked.

Clippings – February 12th, 2024 TSP Media Report

Mallory Harrington on February 12, 2024
  • Chicago Magazine interviewed Eric Klinenberg (Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University) about his new book, 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed. The book–a “social autopsy”–focuses on New York City in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and examines how institutions broke down during the crisis. “Societies reveal themselves when they’re under threat,” Klinenberg said. “You can see who we are and what we value, whose lives matter and whose don’t.”
  • Jonathan Wynn (Professor of Sociology at UMass Amherst) and Daniel Skinner (Associate Professor of Health Policy at Ohio University) recently wrote a piece for The Conversation on the “paradox of medically overserved communities.” For urban, non-profit hospitals, mission statements usually include providing a benefit to the local community; however, people living around these hospitals tend to have worse health in comparison to the broader city population.
  • Paul Spoonley (Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Massey University) appeared on AM to comment on New Zealand’s aging population and low fertility rates. Spoonley noted that by the 2030s, 1 in 4 people will be over the age of 65 and that care for an older population will place fiscal strain on the government. This story was covered by Newshub.
  • Lindsey D. Cameron (Assistant Professor of Management, Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania), Curtis K. Chan (Professor of Management and Organization at Boston College), and Michel Anteby (Professor of Management and Organizations, Sociology at Boston University) wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review on how gig workers respond to employers labeling them as “heroes.” They interviewed Instacart workers in 2020, after the company launched a “Household Heroes” marketing campaign. While some workers “readily embraced the hero label and viewed their work as resoundingly worthy,” others rejected the label and viewed the label as exploitative and manipulative. Most workers struggled “to reconcile the banality of grocery shopping with the idea that they were doing moral work.” Cameron, Chan, and Anteby warn companies that “moralizing jobs” to increase motivation can backfire.

Why Pay Inequity Is So Stubborn

Allison Nobles on April 15, 2016

Equal Pay Day is marked around the world as the day on which women have officially made as much as their male peers did in the previous year. This year's was April 12, 2016 in the U.S. Photo by metropolica.org, flickr.com
Equal Pay Day is marked around the world. It shows how far into the next year women must work to make as much as their male peers did in the previous calendar year. This year’s was April 12, 2016 in the U.S. Photo by metropolico.org, flickr.com

Recently, I reviewed research showing that women in leadership roles may contribute to decreasing gender segregation at lower positions in the same firm. I also noted that gender segregation is a large contributor to the wage gap between men and women. Unfortunately, while a small number of women moving into top positions may help those below, when large numbers of women enter traditionally male-dominated fields, the results are not so rosy. Why? Women’s work simply isn’t valued as highly as men’s.

The Washington Post recently featured a study by sociologists Paula England and Asaf Levanon demonstrating this trend. When occupations employing mostly men shifted to employing most women, these jobs started to pay employees considerably less, even when the researchers took employees’ education, work experience, skills, race, and geography into account. For instance, wages for a ticket agent dropped 43 percentage points after the position shifted from mainly male to female. Stereotypically “female” jobs that involve caregiving pay less, regardless of whether men or women hold those jobs:

[T]here was substantial evidence that employers placed a lower value on work done by women. “It’s not that women are always picking lesser things in terms of skill and importance,” Ms. England said. “It’s just that the employers are deciding to pay it less.”

Barbara Risman on the “Mommy War” Distraction

Letta Page on April 21, 2012

Maternity Ward Cartoon by Mike Kline, dakinewavamon.blogspot.com

Kudos to University of Illinois sociologist and Council on Contemporary Families head Barbara Risman for putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys, more likely) for CNN.com in an insightful commentary about why it is that the so-called Mommy Wars are a distraction—and how they’re keeping us from truly addressing work-life balance in the United States.

In her short piece, Risman points out just four of the many contradictions between society’s values and actions that put the lie to the valorization of care-giving, using research from sociology and beyond to demonstrate that post-war workplaces don’t (and, quite possibly, can’t) serve millenial families. In one particularly telling example, Risman writes:

Sociologist Mirra Komarovsky pointed out these contradictions back in 1953. She argued back then that if society truly believed caretaking was an important and difficult job, nursery school teachers would rate a salary at least equal to the beginning salary of a street cleaner. Not much has changed since then. As Stephanie Coontz, a historian and co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families, told me: “It’s time for politicians to stop competing over the women’s votes and start competing over who has the best programs to support all parents, whatever their employment status or their gender.”

She concludes with a succinct call to action: “Let’s call a truce on the fictional mommy wars and start a war on workplaces that don’t allow mommies and daddies to live full lives, on the job and at home.”