Sociology Lens

After the French elected Socialist Francois Hollande in a rebuke of austerity policies gripping Europe, news headlines issued reports of worried markets.  The fear, among some, is that the new president would act in such a way, or more precisely that the public was acting in such a way that, would spook markets.  Some economists, most notably Princeton professor and Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, have argued against austerity in favor of government stimulus to push economic demand and growth.  Krugman has made frequent reference to the Great Depression-era economic theories of John Maynard Keynes.  While Keynes is important here, a less noted theorist – Karl Polanyi, is, in my view, more apt to the particular electoral impulses unfolding across Europe. (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?

Lately there has been a lot of talk about class, and not just the vague election year pandering to the vague demographic of the “middle class.”  Instead, the very concept of class has become a subject of debate.  Last time, I focused on Mitt Romney’s comment’s about “people who have fallen out of the middle class.”  This time I focus on fellow candidate Rick Santorum’s criticism of Romney for using the word class.  Here’s what Santorum said:

“There are no classes in America. We’re a country that don’t allow for titles. We don’t put people in classes. Maybe middle income people.”

Once again, it’s tempting to dismiss these statements as bizarre gaffes perhaps brought on by a grueling campaign season.  However, I have convinced myself that there are no “bad” political soundbytes.  Partly because shouting “what are you insane?!?!?” at my computer is apparently frowned upon at my local Starbucks, but also because such comments often provide a useful starting point to discuss a complex phenomenon like class. (more…)

found at http://www.impactlab.net/2011/09/08/many-americans-falling-out-of-the-middle-class/

“Somebody who’s fallen from the middle class to poverty, in my opinion is still middle class.”  Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, made this statement on a talk show a few weeks ago.   Bloggers ridiculed the comment as nonsensical.  I admit I too was tempted to just call Romney an idiot (again) and move on.  But, as I’ve been watching politicians in a society of growing inequality and high unemployment struggle with the concept of class while desperately trying not to alienate any potential voters, I’ve begun to see these comments as teachable moments regarding class.  Here I will offer some possibilities of Romney’s meaning and more importantly employ this statement to discuss the concept of class. (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…)

AJ shrugged when I asked him why he didn’t even mention the panel. He had been working on it since last semester. Yet during the class period when the very theme of his panel was central to the topic at hand in his upper-level Gender and Families seminar, AJ said nothing of his own work.

He spoke, of course. And as usual, his teacher and his classmates seemed engaged in what he said. They nodded; they looked at him when he was speaking. Some responded to his comments directly. At least one made reference to “what AJ was saying” when making a contribution later in the discussion.

AJ’s panel centered on experiences shaping Black male identities and the development of supportive relationships around those identities. The class discussion that day and the assigned readings for it were billed under the heading of Men and Masculinities. The instructor was White and female. Over half the students in the class appeared to be White. As in many of his college classrooms, AJ was the only African American male. And now, here he was, leaving class with me, a White, female graduate student and researcher with whom he’d consented to spend an inconveniently large number of hours. Here he was shrugging his shoulders as he searched for a verbal answer that might skirt any sensitivities I might have and still answer my question about why he had not discussed his own work where it seemed so relevant and so important to furthering the discussion at hand. Softly he critiqued that powerful discussion I (and perhaps also his professor, the college deans, and the University Viewbook for prospective students) were imagining as he shrugged his shoulders and said: “It’s not going to go as far as you want it to.”

I thought about this experience with AJ when I was reading through The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color, a report released Monday (20 June 2011) by the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center. The College Board report makes “six clear recommendations” toward addressing some of the issues that young men of color face, including teacher education for culturally responsive pedagogy in the college classroom and the strengthening of campus multicultural centers. Sounds great to me, but what about AJ’s classroom and countless other classrooms quite like it? What about those class discussions that hold so much potential, but that “don’t go as far as you want [them] to” because one student feels looked to, again and again, to represent a  provide a neat and tidy synopsis of the myriad perspectives and experiences of  myriad others who share his race and gender? What about those deliberations and disagreements and questions and shared experiences that students like AJ want to participate in but have learned not to look for in the classroom? What about the cultural and disciplinary messages students receive day after day, semester after semester, to channel their classroom energies and efforts have to go into preparing for tests of discrete skills rather than into dialogue and collaborative knowledge construction?

The College Board study finds that campuses with strong multicultural centers that reach out to students and families tend to have higher retention rates. Indeed many of the students in my study have indicated that the campus multicultural center at our University has been a key resource for academic advising, extracurricular activities, peer mentoring programs, and summer opportunities. I can’t help but think, though, about a comment from Chloe, another student in my study, a rising senior, who transferred last year from an HBCU (Historically Black College/University):

There’s just a lack of diversity [on this campus]. This is a predominantly white university. I think you can call it a PWI. I looked that up. And I don’t care any type of way, but the fact that there’s even a multicultural center, this one separate place, that says a lot about the lack of diversity.

The College Board’s six recommendations are indeed clear and worthwhile. But recommendations that suggest changes that can be made around the margins without reconstructing the center are, like AJ’s class discussion, “not going to go as far as you want it to.”

Many political candidates use their wealth as proof of their competence, work ethic, and expertise.  They craft campaign-ready stories about how a successful businessperson wishes to use their immense talents and work ethic to serve the nation.  At the same time, politicians have to convince voters that they share the concerns of the common person.  So, while wealth may be listed on the resume presented to voters, politicians omit the expenditures that accompany such wealth.  Wealthy politicians go out of their way to convince voters that while they may be wealthy they don’t live elite lifestyles.  For example, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg takes the subway, while former President George W. Bush was filmed clearing brush at his ranch.  However, occasionally this façade falls away and one of the wealthy elite ends up answering questions about a 500,000 dollar Tiffany’s credit line. (more…)

A careful understanding of epigenetic mechanisms allows sociologists to include a new biological perspective into research designs – when it is incorporated carefully and not used casually or blindly as a deus ex machina explanatory device that is.

Epigenetics provides us with one of several “mechanisms by which social influences become embodied” (Kuzawa and Sweet 2008: 2). A promising place for sociologists to enter into this research or use it fruitfully is to examine how social environments and inequalities become embodied as epigenetic imprints, altering gene expression and consequently affecting a wide array of health outcomes. Additionally, while mapping the epigenome, epigeneticists are exploring differences in the plasticity of particular alleles at various points in the lifecourse. Could the inclusion of epigenetic biomarkers in sociological work allow for the separation of early life events from cumulative ones?

These mechanistic stories are bound to be messy, but such feedback loops and the enmeshment of social and biological processes are inescapable. With the knowledge and technology available today, we are far beyond oversimplified nature versus nurture debates. Many biologists who do epigenetic work realize that in order to get a complete, complex mapping of these mechanisms, the social needs to be included. These biologists view sociological and cultural variables as more of a signal rather than just contextual noise. Sociologists should not only collaborate with such researchers, but also help shape what these projects look like.

Further, sociologists should be aware of developing epigenetic discourse and how it is being received in the media. Over the past year or so, non-scientific magazines from Time to Newsweek have picked up on epigenetic findings, publishing articles for the general public on the topic. However, not all of this reporting clearly emphasizes epigenetics’ softening of geneticization’s hard line determinism. Further, some of it mistakenly over-emphasizes our agency in the changing of our own and our future generations’ genetic code. Sociologists should be aware of such reporting, lest it follow the route of the powerful, persuasive, and pervasive hold the narrative of geneticization has in everyday, non-scientific talk (Chaufan 2007) – especially since general understandings of genetic findings often easily allow genetics to take the stage as a deus ex machina of causal efficacy despite findings that clearly prove otherwise.

What is Epigenetics?

Controlling Your Genes

DNA: How You Can Control Your Genes, Destiny

Ghost in Our Genes

In January of 2010, the New York Civil Liberties Union, along with the national ACLU and law firm Dorsey & Whitney, filed a class action lawsuit against the City of New York, for NYPD School Safety division practices of seizing and arresting middle and high school children. In particular, the NYPD officers allegedly arrested students for minor, non-criminal activities, handcuffed students and locked them in seclusion rooms without teacher or parental consent, and took students to hospitals for psychiatric evaluations, again without teacher or parental consent.

The ongoing case epitomizes a phenomenon that has proliferated in the last two decades, according to professors Paul Hirschfield and Katarzyna Celinska in their January 2011 review in Sociology Compass: the criminalization of school discipline. In the late 1970s, there were reportedly fewer than 100 police officers in schools; by 2007, almost 70 percent of schools had security guards and/or police officers (Dinkes et al. 2009), despite the fact that rates of school violence have been declining since the early 1990s (see, for example, graphs here). There is no consensus among scholars about what, exactly, constitutes the criminalization of discipline in schools; studies examine the use of “zero tolerance” policies, school police or resource officers, metal detectors, drug sweeps and surveillance cameras.

Hirschfield and Celinska focus in particular on evidence regarding the social distribution of such practices, the causes underlying such a transformation in disciplining students at school, and the effects of the transformation. (Throughout, they note that the empirical evidence regarding the criminalization of discipline is far behind theoretical formulations of the issue.) There is mixed evidence regarding which types of schools are more likely to use criminalized discipline. Urban, suburban and rural schools all use police and surveillance cameras, and suburban school police are more likely to be armed, and to conduct lockdowns and drug sweeps. One qualitative study of four schools found that arrests were standard only at the most privileged of the schools. Regardless of the percentage of non-white students across the four schools, black students within those schools were more likely to be suspected and monitored, in part because they did not have powerful parents to protect them.

Other evidence, however, suggests that urban schools with large non-white populations have greater rates of criminalized disciplinary practices. For example, urban schools constitute only 15 percent of middle and high schools nationwide, but comprise 75 percent of schools that carry out daily metal detector scans of students. Another study found that the percentage of black students in a school was the only predictor of the use of “extreme disciplinary measures” (Welch and Payne 2010). In a parallel finding, Torres and Stefkovich (2009) observe that schools with small minority student populations have lower rates of criminalization of discipline.

The authors point to two theoretical traditions to explain the origins of such practices in schools: a social fear account—that criminalization of schools is a social and political response to fears about school crime, and a social and political structure account—that changing macro-structural features have contributed to the growth of such practices. This latter account argues that industrial decline and its associated population movement to the suburbs left certain areas with concentrated poverty and greater youth violence. At the same time, the explosion of mass incarceration (see Bruce Western’s Punishment and Inequality in America– a selection of which is here– or Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow) changed the political calculus around the distribution of resources. Hirschfield (2008) argues that it was advantageous for legislators to funnel money into the penal industry, mostly located in rural areas, which left urban schools with fewer resources. This left less money for non-criminalized types of behavioral control, including more teachers and better facilities. Hirschfield (2008) also notes that the growth of the criminal justice profession around mass incarceration promoted school criminalization, as these professionals peddled their wares—both advice and technology—to schools.

While the empirical evidence regarding the effect of criminalization on school climate is rather sparse, there are plenty of reasons to think that these practices weaken community at a school by placing authority in the hands of police who often do not understand nor care about students’ problems, eroding student trust. One study finds that schools with criminalized disciplinary measures have lower attendance rates than similar schools without those measures (Brady et al. 2007). Students often see zero tolerance policies as unfair, as they fail to provide due process or they are unevenly enforced, which may highlight social divisions within a school. Zero tolerance policies may have the effect of teaching students that they have few rights, and they have little recourse if those rights are violated. On the other hand, a number of studies find that student often welcome more policing, as some students are so disruptive that they significantly impede learning.

Paradoxically, the trend of state anti-bullying legislation may not help the situation. Many of these laws include extremely punitive measures against both students who harass other students (heavy on the use of suspensions and expulsions) and against schools who fail to adequately curb bullying (the New Jersey law is an especially punitive one). There are exceptions; the New York anti-bullying law, the Dignity for All Students Act, attempts to limit the amount of police involvement in punishment, and acknowledges the importance of emotional and psychological help for both the subjects of harassment and the perpetrators. (And, as more and more studies are pointing out, the line between these two is often not clear; an example.) The lawsuit and this legislation is part of the ACLU’s program challenging what they call the “School-to-Prison Pipeline.” The criminalization of discipline may not only participate in this pipeline, but it may obscure the boundaries between these two institutions.

“Beyond Fear: Sociological Perspectives on the Criminalization of School Discipline”

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