Sociology Lens

“If you don’t believe that childcare is work, then try telling your parents or whoever took care of you that raising you was not work.  I don’t imagine that would go over well.”  I say this in my social problems class as a counterpoint to the assertion that welfare-recipients are lazy and immoral.  Most recently the sentiment was employed to defend wealthy “stay-at-home mom,” and wife of presidential candidate, Ann Romney.  The sentiment that childcare is work is fairly uncontested when referring to the non-poor.  In class, I urge students to consider whether the sentiment is equally valid for their (likely) non-poor parents and for poor parents.  I make this statement in the context of welfare to point out that both the ability to stay at home and the status of “stay-at-home mom” are class privileges and not merely reflections of moral or ideological choices.  Indeed, even for women who have privilege the vernacular meaning of “choice” rarely applies. (more…)

As prior posts may express, my attention has been gripped by the motivations and experiences of those engaged in deviant activity. More specifically, it is not major crimes under consideration but rather the marginal acts of expression and resistance – tagging, unsanctioned extreme sports, controversial fashions, and the like. While trying to empathetically understand the ‘deviant’ perspective, it seems this perspective is often dismissed as delinquent and nothing more, void of any further value. As scholars have often noted, this sentiment can be found along a rising fear of crime, profound sense of insecurity, and a perpetual need to safeguard against any act symbolizing little more than a threat to public order (see Garland, 2001; Hudson, 2003; Simon, 2007). This post then asks whether the practices and policies aimed at enhancing and maintaining civility are, in turn, provoking unrest, rebellion, resistance, and upheaval. (more…)

The two professors sat in front of me, making conversation before the talk. The speaker’s title slide already projected on the wall ahead: “What (if anything) are undergraduates learning during college?” The professors laughed at just how apt they thought the title was: “Isn’t that right?” “Yes, anything, please!” And then the more senior faculty member, a female, returned with a comment that made her junior colleague bristle: “Especially the boys. Some of those boys just try to get by with the minimum possible.” The junior colleague sat silent, and then spoke with sharpness spiking into the buoyant mood of moments before: “Well that was me in high school. But the thing is, I was just bored to tears.” His senior colleague stopped chuckling to nod, knowingly.

The slides belonged to Josipa Roksa, a co-author of the 2011 sociology/media sensation Academically Adrift (with Richard Arum) and of its 2012 follow-up report, “Documenting Uncertain Times: Post-graduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort.” The premise of the talk, as the premise of the book and the premise of its sequel, was that undergraduate students are not improving their critical thinking skills in college, that this claim is sustained by the failure of a putatively representative sample of 2,362 students at 24 four-year institutions to increase their average score on standardized tests of critical thinking, and that this failure in critical thinking is affecting them negatively in the labor market and in civil society (as indicated by the percentage with full time employment or graduate or professional school status, and by self-reported newspaper-reading habits).

The primary instrument with which Arum and Roksa document students’ drift away from critical thinking is the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a self-described “authentic assessment” or “test worth teaching to” developed by the Council for Aid to Education, non-profit organization created by a group of “enlightened business leaders” for the purpose of

…promot[ing] a better understanding of the substantial contribution which higher education makes to the effectiveness, skill, growth, and success of American business, and to the development of the country.

CLA claims to present test-takers with “real-life” scenarios, to which students respond in writing rather than multiple choice. Arum and Roksa (2011: 21-22) share an example: “You” are an assistant to the president of “Dynatech,” a company that wants to purchase a plane. But the model of plane Dynatech President Pat Williams wants to purchase was recently involved in a crash. “You” are charged with the assignment of writing a memo using news articles, consumer report data, and reports about the sorts of accidents it has encountered. You are to advise Pat Williams whether or not Dynatech should purchase the plane.

This “real-life” scenario begs the question for whom is this real-life? This is not a rhetorical question. The ways in which I make meaning of the scenario and my response to it are likely to be shaped by how I relate to “Dynatech”: am I really an employee, as the scenario dictates? Can I imagine a future as an employee? Can I imagine a future somewhere similar? Am I imagining a future somewhere else, concerned with quite different decisions? Or am I, like that junior faculty member sitting in front of me at the Research I institution where Roksa gave her talk, “bored to tears” by this test? And if so, is this instrument an adequate measure of the way I think and an adequate provider of feedback to the people – the faculty – who are supposed to be supporting me as I develop my thinking?

Engaging thinking means engaging people – their identities, their experiences, their imagined futures. Indeed, Arum and Roksa are correct that an ability to perform the sorts of tasks the CLA asks students to do is a necessity and an asset in what education scholar Lisa Delpit calls the culture of power. Equity in education, Delpit argues, calls for equipping students for success in the culture of power – while valuing and building on the cultural identities and resources they bring with them to school, especially when those identities and resources may be ignored, or even derogated by the culture of power. What happens when schools and teachers are asked – demanded, even – to focus solely on the culture of power without coming to know, and to draw in, and engage and develop, the resources students carry with them?

In documenting the “uncertain times” of the college graduates that Arum and Roksa identify as “academically adrift,” the authors observe that the students with stagnant CLA scores during college are more likely to be the young adults living at home after college, or not reading newspapers, or not finding full time jobs. What the authors do not observe is the extent to which their results speak to patterns of social reproduction – in which those whose home cultures are deeply tied to the culture of power are also those who perform best on the “real-life” abstractions of the CLA and are those for whom reading a newspaper constitutes a more legitimate form of civic engagement than reading a blog or a Twitter stream. Yet coverage of the murder of high school student Trayvon Martin did not trickle into the print of major newspapers until after weeks of deeply, civically engaged blogging and tweeting and talking and petitioning.

What Arum and Roksa count as “critical thinking” matters, no doubt. But it seems that the inequities in college learning about which they claim concern persist because they are so often relegated to the spaces akin to those that Arum and Roksa do not count, spaces of lived experience and meaning making through which one man can understand his being “bored to tears” as a sign of academic worthiness, and through which another might feel he’d be better off drifting out of academia. Again, engaging thinking means engaging people. So when it comes to assessing thinking, I say we need relationships before we need measurements, and when we measure, we need to do so in dialogue with those real, human relationships. But I hope you’ll share with me: what do you think?

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about how much of our lives are being captured and translated into numbers, percentages, and statistics. It seems that no matter where one turns, some aspect of our social life is being measured quantitatively. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon – things like age, weight, body mass index, intelligence quotient, height, and physical aptitude scores have been with us for some time now. However, it appears that this movement to quantify and measure aspects of our social life and then translate them into numbers and statistics has increased with great haste; perhaps resembling a juggernaut out of control. While gaining acceptance among many circles and embraced as a way to better one’s life, this movement as often been termed as the ‘quantified self’. (more…)

Knee deep in studying for comprehensive exams, the literature has drawn my attention toward (1) how an illegal activity can have a legal counterpart, and (2) how a deviant activity becomes socially acceptable and celebrated within mainstream culture. As examples, there is skydiving and its illegal counterpart of base jumping; wall murals and their illicit sibling of extravagant graffiti; or the ‘world’s fastest growing sport’ of MMA versus the back-yard-brawls caught on tape. While the actual activity performed for each legal-illegal example above may be similar (free falling, spray-painting, fighting) with the end purpose being the same, there is a distinction between which is allowed and which is deemed deviant and illegal. This development, the creation of legal and illicit phenomena, highlights an important trend: that is, the power of the state and market working on culture through a dialectic process.

Prior research has examined capitalisms tendency to package social phenomena for mass consumption/popular culture. Although this position is instructive, it does little to observe the formal mechanisms of the state in this process. For instance, sociological and criminological scholarship has tended to overlook the legitimization/legalization of deviant activities. Perhaps there are nuances being missed – a nexus that exists between the state and market. In essence, this post highlights a perhaps false dichotomy existing between the state and market. More consequently, it considers the role that legalizing and commercializing forces played in ensuring the survival of once ‘deviant’ activities. (more…)

Photo courtesy: Official Site of the City of Dayton, Ohio

Editor’s note: This post has been printed with permission of the author.

By Dr. Jamie Longazel

We should certainly applaud Dayton’s willingness to embrace immigrants and refugees, especially at a time when many cities and states are passing sweeping anti-immigrant legislation. Yet for this countertrend to generate meaningful social change, it must be more than a redevelopment ploy. What we need is the formation of class-based alliances that are unwilling to submit to anti-immigrant scare tactics and eager to challenge the economic processes that have distressed these communities in the first place.

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A recent article published in the Kansas City Star stimulated my interest for a discourse. I found the article especially relevant, as presently, a wide segment of the United States population vehemently opposes undocumented aliens in the country. The article’s author reported that an immigration bill proposal sponsored by State Senator Will Kraus, a Lee’s Summit Republican, would require public schools in Missouri to verify the immigration status of students. A provision of the proposed bill stipulates that all public schools document the immigration status of students in order to authenticate that they are lawful aliens. Another segment of the bill proposes that schools compile a report on students’ immigration status for classification purposes and to report the amount of students enrolled in English as a second language to the State Board of Education.

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In 2010, MSNBC published an article written by Alex Johnson entitled “Some schools rethink bans on cell phones: Bans don’t work, so administrators explore using mobile devices”. In the report, Johnson notes that 100 plus students were suspended – not for cheating, smoking, or bullying – but for having cell phones. While presented here as merely an anecdote, there can little doubt that the use of cell phones, and mobile technology more generally, is an issue that has caught the attention of school administrators across the nation. Within the article, Brian Begley, principal of Millard North High School, illustratively notes: “Cell phones aren’t going away.” As mobile devices become increasingly marketed to today’s youth and as their functionality blurs with that of computers, the issue of wireless, new media technology within high schools will reshape school operations.

The article cites that although 69 percent of American high schools have placed a ban on cell phones, 63% of student respondents nonetheless reported using them on campus. Recognizing that simply banning the devices does little to discourage their usage, Johnson notes that “a growing number of school districts are exploring other ways to shut them down.” Rather than employing suspension as a punishment, certain schools have resulted to more invasive forms of social control,  including “confiscating phones…keeping them for 30 days and searching them for evidence of cheating, pornography or other ‘illicit activities.’ If such evidence is found, it’s turned over to the sheriff’s office”.

Whilst illustrating both the complications for banning cell phones and their potential applicability within schools, the issue of cell phones points to a larger development.  Scholars have recently begun to document how two large-scale trends are transforming the socialization of youth within school settings. The first stems from a late-modern preoccupation with safety and security (see Garland, 1996, 2000; Simon, 2007; Foucault, 1977). Whether accelerated by internal events such as school shootings, or external factors like reported rates of youth violence, it is clear that crime has now become a chief organizing principle shaping school discipline. Consequently, issues such as cell phone use are caught in the proverbial cross-hairs and mobilized against in the name of promoting school safety. (more…)

On my weekly trip to the grocery store, the traffic seems heavier than usual; perhaps the nice weather has coaxed people from their homes or out of work. It is surprisingly warm today with a high reported to reach the 70s. Taking advantage, my car windows are rolled down, sunglasses are on, and it seems that Bruno Mars has gripped popular radio channels. While stopped at a red light (about a dozen cars back), I notice a group of about eight cars parked on the right side corner of the upcoming intersection.

This intersection is rather bleak and run-down. The building on the lot is abandoned; it seems to have been a major fueling station, but now, all that remains is the building’s structure and gas lines protruding from the ground. It resembles a quilt with different shades of white – some patches are more faded, some soiled from the dirt of the lot, and some brightly white. Having driven by this lot a few times in the past, graffiti artists oftentimes ‘tag’ and ‘piece’ this building for recognition but their artwork is quickly covered by a fresh coat of white paint.

As the light turns green, I find myself looking toward the gathering instead of the road. Three cars have been parked so that their trunk opens toward the road. From a distance I can see NFL jerseys, shoe boxes, clothing accessories, and a set of 22s (rims/wheals). Looking for a Bears jersey for the upcoming season, I pull in. Packed in the trunk of a ‘murdered out’ Dodge Charger, I notice “NFL Authentic” jerseys being sold for $40 instead of the sport store’s $120. Also, there are new air force ones, hand bags, new car parts, and even fresh sea catches being sold for a fraction of what major stores charge. During the roughly five to ten minutes on the lot, the three different ‘retailers’ had cycled through nine ‘customers’ making approximately $340. It seems that the deal was always on the turn; that the street-level sale had garnered attention from both ‘entrepreneurs’ and prospective ‘consumers’. (more…)