Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper is a leading expert in the field of gender and family dynamics. Her latest book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, details her efforts to understand how families representing an array of social classes perceive and manage contemporary economic anxieties. She and guest-host Sarah Catherine Billups discuss the many ways that these problems often fall to wives and mothers, even amongst those who have transcended gender boundaries in professional life.
inequality
With the election of Donald Trump, much has been made about the construction of barriers to entry along the US border with Mexico. But while Trump has placed particular emphasis on the image of a wall designed to limit illegal movement across this border, thousands of workers travel lawfully from cities like Tijuana into the US — and back again — every day. In today’s episode, I talk with Rice University’s Sergio Chávez about his new book Border Lives: Fronterizos, Transnational Migrants, and Commuters in Tijuana, an ethnographic product of many years spent traveling (and waiting to travel) across the border with commuting workers. Dr. Chávez describes the incredible strain that border controls and bureaucracies place on low wage workers, but he also provides a remarkable account of the way that many workers leverage these difficulties into relationships and livelihood strategies. We also explore the implications of his findings for a relatively new approach to the scholarship on immigration, which social scientists call transnationalism.
Prior to the 1990s, the sociology of immigration focused mainly on just a handful of major cities where most new arrivals had settled throughout the 20th century. But more recently, immigrants have been moving to new destinations in the rural South and Midwest, drawing scholars like today’s guest, Vanesa Ribas, to closely monitor how race and labor dynamics might be playing out in these smaller communities. Dr. Ribas’ new book, On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South, examines these changes through a case study centered around a meat packing plant in rural North Carolina.
In this episode, University of Colorado sociologist Sanyu Mojola discusses her work on HIV rates among young African women. She discusses social mechanisms – specifically the entanglement of love and money – that lead to higher rates of HIV death among African females compared to African males. She also considers why money holds a value for African women above and beyond its economic value, specifically pointing to its cultural power and ability to advance women toward modernity.
Her new book earned the 2015 American Sociological Association’s Sex and Gender Section Distinguished Book Award. It’s
called Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS.
In this episode, we step into the global market for surrogate mothers with University of Texas sociologist Sharmila Rudrappa. She explains why India has become an increasingly popular destination for American couples searching for affordable pregnancy assistance. She also considers why most Indian women who become surrogates come from working class backgrounds, and how their experiences as wage workers inform what kind of value gets placed on this new form of “labor”. Her book is called Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India.
It’s no secret that shifting economic winds have driven American workers to take on more work and more job changes today than in previous generations. But what does this shift mean in a culture where so many invest so much of their identities in their jobs? In this episode, guest host Lisa Gulya interviews professor Allison Pugh about her new book, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity. In it, Dr Pugh investigates some of the ways that the precarious conditions in today’s workplace have generated ripple effects in the nature of relationships and family life. She explains how changes in obligations at work shape how we think about obligations and commitment in the most intimate corners of life.
Diversity is one of those concepts that is all but taken for granted as a good and desirable quality in American social life. However, as professor Ellen Berrey explains, the actual institutions and practices designed to promote diversity can sometimes obscure real inequalities and limit the ways we think about social justice. Her new book, The Enigma of Diveristy: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice, chronicles three cases – one at a university, one in a neighborhood, and one at a large corporation – that demonstrate some of the problems that the idealization of diversity raises for minorities in America today.
University of Michigan professor Greta Krippner offers a sociological perspective on changes that have made the American economy dangerously dependent on credit and speculation in recent decades. Her book, Capitalizing on Crisis, describes the government’s role in supporting this system, even as it continues to spiral through periodic disaster.
Guest host Sarah Shannon interviews Victor Rios, professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In his recent ethnography, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, Dr. Rios searches for ways that police and a culture of punishment cause boys of color to internalize fatalistic attitudes about class and race. His book is the winner of several awards, including the American Sociological Association’s Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award.
This week we talk with Lane Kenworthy, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona. Lane studies causes and consequences of poverty, inequality, economic growth, and social policy in the United States and other affluent countries, and recently published Social Democratic America, a look at the current state of inequality in the U.S. and what can be done to fix it. We touch on a number of hot policy issues and discuss the role of the sociologist in producing relevant research and writing for public audiences.
With the election of Donald Trump, much has been made about the construction of barriers to entry along the US border with Mexico. But while Trump has placed particular emphasis on the image of a wall designed to limit illegal movement across this border, thousands of workers travel lawfully from cities like Tijuana into the US — and back again — every day. In today’s episode, I talk with Rice University’s Sergio Chávez about his new book Border Lives: Fronterizos, Transnational Migrants, and Commuters in Tijuana, an ethnographic product of many years spent traveling (and waiting to travel) across the border with commuting workers. Dr. Chávez describes the incredible strain that border controls and bureaucracies place on low wage workers, but he also provides a remarkable account of the way that many workers leverage these difficulties into relationships and livelihood strategies. We also explore the implications of his findings for a relatively new approach to the scholarship on immigration, which social scientists call transnationalism.
Prior to the 1990s, the sociology of immigration focused mainly on just a handful of major cities where most new arrivals had settled throughout the 20th century. But more recently, immigrants have been moving to new destinations in the rural South and Midwest, drawing scholars like today’s guest, Vanesa Ribas, to closely monitor how race and labor dynamics might be playing out in these smaller communities. Dr. Ribas’ new book, On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South, examines these changes through a case study centered around a meat packing plant in rural North Carolina.
In this episode, University of Colorado sociologist Sanyu Mojola discusses her work on HIV rates among young African women. She discusses social mechanisms – specifically the entanglement of love and money – that lead to higher rates of HIV death among African females compared to African males. She also considers why money holds a value for African women above and beyond its economic value, specifically pointing to its cultural power and ability to advance women toward modernity.
Her new book earned the 2015 American Sociological Association’s Sex and Gender Section Distinguished Book Award. It’s
called Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS.
In this episode, we step into the global market for surrogate mothers with University of Texas sociologist Sharmila Rudrappa. She explains why India has become an increasingly popular destination for American couples searching for affordable pregnancy assistance. She also considers why most Indian women who become surrogates come from working class backgrounds, and how their experiences as wage workers inform what kind of value gets placed on this new form of “labor”. Her book is called Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India.
It’s no secret that shifting economic winds have driven American workers to take on more work and more job changes today than in previous generations. But what does this shift mean in a culture where so many invest so much of their identities in their jobs? In this episode, guest host Lisa Gulya interviews professor Allison Pugh about her new book, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity. In it, Dr Pugh investigates some of the ways that the precarious conditions in today’s workplace have generated ripple effects in the nature of relationships and family life. She explains how changes in obligations at work shape how we think about obligations and commitment in the most intimate corners of life.
Diversity is one of those concepts that is all but taken for granted as a good and desirable quality in American social life. However, as professor Ellen Berrey explains, the actual institutions and practices designed to promote diversity can sometimes obscure real inequalities and limit the ways we think about social justice. Her new book, The Enigma of Diveristy: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice, chronicles three cases – one at a university, one in a neighborhood, and one at a large corporation – that demonstrate some of the problems that the idealization of diversity raises for minorities in America today.
University of Michigan professor Greta Krippner offers a sociological perspective on changes that have made the American economy dangerously dependent on credit and speculation in recent decades. Her book, Capitalizing on Crisis, describes the government’s role in supporting this system, even as it continues to spiral through periodic disaster.
Guest host Sarah Shannon interviews Victor Rios, professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In his recent ethnography, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, Dr. Rios searches for ways that police and a culture of punishment cause boys of color to internalize fatalistic attitudes about class and race. His book is the winner of several awards, including the American Sociological Association’s Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award.
This week we talk with Lane Kenworthy, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona. Lane studies causes and consequences of poverty, inequality, economic growth, and social policy in the United States and other affluent countries, and recently published Social Democratic America, a look at the current state of inequality in the U.S. and what can be done to fix it. We touch on a number of hot policy issues and discuss the role of the sociologist in producing relevant research and writing for public audiences.