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.
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