In an op-ed published in the Raleigh-based paper, the Newsobserver, sociology Ph.D student Amanda Gengler provides insight into what is at stake in the current political struggle in Wisconsin. To do so Gengler draws upon her experience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she earned her master’s degree.

As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison 10 years ago, every month a few dollars of my stipend went to pay dues to the TAA; a unique union that represents and protects graduate employees working in the UW-System. In return, I worked under a contract that ensured full health care benefits and basic dental care (with no out-of-pocket premiums), and tuition remission (without which my education would not have been possible) as well as other fair labor protections.

Now, even after each subsequent renegotiation of the rights for Wisconsin’s graduate employees has resulted in more and more concessions, current Gov. Scott Walker is proposing to remove the TAA’s collective bargaining rights altogether. This would make it impossible to fight for any of these protections, all of which could be immediately revoked.

Graduate students are not alone in seeing this as an attack on the education system.

Under the rallying cry “Hands off our Teachers,” undergraduates have taken to the streets in recent days alongside their graduate student instructors.

Gengler cautions us to not see this as an isolated threat directed at the University system.

Wisconsin’s 3,000 graduate student workers are but one of the many constituencies that will be directly harmed by the state government’s attack on unions and workers’ rights. As Wisconsin’s unions offer up economic concessions in terms of pay and premiums, only to be completely rebuffed by state lawmakers, it is clear that this issue is not about the budget: it is about ending workers’ collective bargaining rights.

The op-ed serves as a call for all workers and unions to pay close attention to what is occurring in Wisconsin. While the situation appears bleak, Gengler leaves us with a statement of resolve:

Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have those rights know what they are worth, and the thousands who continue to flood Madison’s streets make it clear that the right to fight is one thing they will not concede.

Many people view aggressive behavior as the behavior of social outcasts.  But, a new study covered by LiveScience (and many other news sources) found that popular adolescents, except for those at the very top of the social ladder, are the ones who are more likely to bully their peers.

It isn’t aggression that makes kids more popular. But becoming more popular makes kids more aggressive, said study author Bob Faris, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis — suggesting that those kids see tormenting others as a way to gain and cement status.

Robert Faris and his co-author Diane Felmlee used data on 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th graders from 19 public schools in North Carolina.  Rather than just looking at the individual traits of bullies, they looked at the social networks in which bullying takes place.

“For the most part, we find that status increases aggression,” Faris told LiveScience….The gradual increase of aggression with popularity continues until you reach the top 2 percent of popular students, Faris said. At that point, aggression suddenly drops off. The top 2 percent are even less aggressive than the kids at the very bottom of the heap, Faris said.

The sociologists also complicated this story by examining gender.

On the whole, kids with many friends of the other gender are 16 percent less aggressive toward their same-gender peers, Faris said. Schools where boys and girls mix and mingle are also less aggressive on the whole. But in schools where mixed-gender friendships are rare, the few kids who do have them tend to be more aggressive, Faris said.

These cross-gender ambassadors (Faris calls them “gender bridges”) are rare, Faris cautioned, so it’s harder to be certain of the results. What may be happening, he said, is that gender bridge kids are proportionately more popular, thanks to their ability to connect the guys to the girls and vice versa.

See LiveScience for the complete story.

In February’s issue of Wired (now available online), Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh helps us understand the life of a prostitute in New York City and how the trade has been transformed by advances in technology.

While Venkatesh’s initial goal was to examine how the gentrification of Times Square and other areas of New York City would impact the sex trade, he quickly found himself documenting the rise of a new type of sex worker.

The economies of big cities have been reshaped by a demand for high-end entertainment, cuisine, and “wellness” goods. In the process, “dating,” “massage,” “escort,” and “dancing” have replaced hustling and streetwalking. A luxury brand has been born.

The shift has resulted in an increase in both the price of, and level of respect for, prostitutes. Technology has played a large part in this as it allows clients to find companionship without resorting to driving the streets.

The Internet and the rise of mobile phones have enabled some sex workers to professionalize their trade. Today they can control their image, set their prices, and sidestep some of the pimps, madams, and other intermediaries who once took a share of the revenue.

Most exciting about this short piece was the amount of information conveyed in about ½ a page of writing through the use of a wide array of supplemental graphics. A map is used to show the movement of sex workers to trendier, more upscale districts in Manhattan. And a compilation of images, statistics, and well-chosen quotes demonstrate the divide between types of sex work, as well as the infusion of technology into the escort services. For instance, Facebook is quickly becoming a medium for advertising adult-services and a BlackBerry phone has come to symbolize a professional (and disease-free) status.

Ah…to be a college student. Days spent on the college quad, frisbee or text book in hand, and late nights filled with frivolity. It is a time many people look back upon fondly, reminiscing of a simpler time. However, recent studies highlighted by the NY Times and Slate suggest college is not the carefree place it is often made out to be.

Tamar Lewin of the NY Times reports that the emotional health of freshman entering college is at an all time low.

In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.

The statistic is seen as confirmation of what college counselors are encountering on a daily basis.

“More students are arriving on campus with problems, needing support, and today’s economic factors are putting a lot of extra stress on college students, as they look at their loans and wonder if there will be a career waiting for them on the other side.” said Brian Van Brunt, director of counseling at Western Kentucky University and president of the American College Counseling Association.

This pressure is in part due to a combination of increased, and internalized, expectations and the devaluing of having ‘just’ a college degree.

While first-year students’ assessments of their emotional health was declining, their ratings of their own drive to achieve, and academic ability, have been going up, and reached a record high in 2010, with about three-quarters saying they were above average.
“These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.” said Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at Southern Oregon University.

To make matters worse, Lippy Copeland reports in Slate that social networking websites, which have become pervasive on college campuses, only compound the suffering of the unhappy.

Led by Alex Jordan, who at the time was a Ph.D. student in Stanford’s psychology department, the researchers found that their subjects consistently underestimated how dejected others were–and likely wound up feeling more dejected as a result. Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends’ reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others’ attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. “They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life.”

The results of both reports are particularly concerning to women. Each study found that women reported higher stress and lower emotional well-being. According to Linda Sax, a professor of education at U.C.L.A. and former director of the freshman study, leisure activity helps us understand the gender gap.

“One aspect of it is how women and men spent their leisure time,” she said. “Men tend to find more time for leisure and activities that relieve stress, like exercise and sports, while women tend to take on more responsibilities, like volunteer work and helping out with their family, that don’t relieve stress.”

Copeland’s article also highlights the significance of leisure time in reporting that women are not only more likely to second guess major life decisions and measure themselves against others success, but they are also more likely to be active on Facebook.

Each article highlights youth confronting a time of increased pressure and uncertainty. While there are few simple answers, Copeland’s article provides a useful reminder when she turns once more to Jordan, now a postdoctoral fellow studying social psychology at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, who suggests

we might do well to consider Facebook profiles as something akin to the airbrushed photos on the covers of women’s magazine. No, you will never have those thighs, because nobody has those thighs. You will never be as consistently happy as your Facebook friends, because nobody is that happy.

Despite recent political bluster over shrinking the size of government, sociologist Dalton Conley and political scientist Jaqueline Stevens contend that bigger might be better. According to their op-ed in the New York Times, the House of Representatives may be too small:

It’s been far too long since the House expanded to keep up with population growth and, as a result, it has lost touch with the public and been overtaken by special interests.

Indeed, the lower chamber of Congress has had the same number of members for so long that many Americans assume that its 435 seats are constitutionally mandated.

But that’s wrong: while the founders wanted to limit the size of the Senate, they intended the House to expand based on population growth. Instead of setting an absolute number, the Constitution merely limits the ratio of members to population. “The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every 30,000,” the founders wrote. They were concerned, in other words, about having too many representatives, not too few.

Historically, House members had been added after each census up until 1920, when fear of growing numbers of “foreigners” in the population stymied expansion. As a result, US citizens may be underrepresented:

The result is that Americans today are numerically the worst-represented group of citizens in the country’s history. The average House member speaks for about 700,000 Americans. In contrast, in 1913 he represented roughly 200,000, a ratio that today would mean a House with 1,500 members — or 5,000 if we match the ratio the founders awarded themselves.

According to Conley and Stevens, increasing the number of representatives would address several concerning issues, such as the disproportionate influence of lobbyists and special interest groups; ending two-party deadlock in smaller districts; making campaigns cheaper; and lowering reliance on staffers rather than members themselves.

True, more members means more agendas, legislation and debates. But Internet technology already provides effective low-cost management solutions, from Google Documents to streaming interactive video to online voting.

Will it happen?

The biggest obstacle is Congress itself. Such a change would require the noble act — routine before World War I but unheard of since — of representatives voting to diminish their own relative power.

What do you think?

In November, Arizona joined California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nebraska, Texas, and Washington by banning affirmative action in higher education.  Miller-McCune recently reflected on how these bans are failing to “keep pace with the changing demographics” of the United States.

Take the case of California, as reported in Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, a new book on the state’s voter-approved ban on affirmative action known as Proposition 209. In 1994, four years before the measure went into effect, when colleges were giving a boost to applicants based on race, 38 percent of high school graduates and 18 percent of University of California students were African American, Latino or Native American. In 2008, after a decade with the ban, these minorities represented nearly half of high school graduates but only 20 percent of UC students.

“By stepping back from its commitment to affirmative action, we believe California and other states and colleges have contributed to an increase in racial and ethnic stratification,” wrote co-editors Eric Grodsky, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, and, Michal Kurlaender, a professor of education at the University of California, Davis. Within college types, [underrepresented minority] students tended to shift from higher- to lower-quality colleges and universities. … African American and Latino undergraduates in the state of California may be worse off now than they were 10 years ago.”

Peter Hinrichs, an economist at Georgetown, also weighs in on the effects of these bans.

Taking a broad look at college enrollment and racial composition across the country between 1995 and 2003, economist Peter Hinrichs found that affirmative action bans have no effect on the typical four-year college or the typical student. But at public universities in the top 50 of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, he found, the numbers of blacks and Latinos typically drop 30 percent and 27 percent, respectively, after affirmative action bans are imposed, compared to pre-ban enrollments, while the numbers of whites and Asian Americans increase 5 percent to 6 percent.

Over a broader range — the top 115 public and private colleges in the U.S. News rankings — the numbers of black and Latino students drop 17 percent and 16 percent, respectively, at schools with affirmative action bans, Hinrichs found.

Some supporters of the bans claim that many students who are ethnic and racial minorities attend mediocre high schools and are thus not equipped for the academic rigors of college.  But, social scientists have found otherwise.

A 2010 study co-authored by Marta Tienda, a Princeton University sociologist, showed that black and Latino students who were admitted to the University of Texas at Austin on the basis of their high school rankings consistently got as good or better grades in college than the affluent whites with higher SAT scores whom they replaced. The minority students also were equally or more likely to graduate in four years.

Read more about these  studies and attempts to replace affirmative action laws in the full article.

In a recent article in the New York Times, economics professor Nancy Folbre helps us understand why men have not only experienced greater job loss during the current recession but have also continued to suffer during the economic recovery.

As Folbre explains, the higher job loss does not come without historical precedence.

The Great Recession has sometimes been dubbed the Mancession because it drove unemployment among men higher than unemployment among women. Because men tend to work in more cyclical industries than women, they have historically lost more jobs on the downturn and gained more on the upturn.

However, the current upturn, has not followed this trend due to the decline in the jobs that men usually fill.

For example, men constitute more than 71 percent of the work force in manufacturing but less than 25 percent of the workers in health and education services…These two employment categories were similar in size in 2000, but manufacturing employment has failed to rise, even in non-recession years. Employment in health and education, in contrast, has risen slowly, but steadily.

The question than becomes, why aren’t more men moving to jobs traditionally occupied by women? Holbre turns to Stanford sociologists Maria Charles and David B. Grusky’s book Occupational Ghettos who illustrate how “gender segregation is a remarkably persistent and complex phenomenon shaped by deep cultural beliefs.” Or to put it more simply, men don’t want the jobs that are thought of as being ‘for women’.

With nursing and home health being projected to grow the most rapidly between now and 2018 and manufacturing jobs continuing to be outsourced to overseas locations, it appears it might be time for men to trade in the work boots for  some tasteful loafers.

Arab News recently covered the two books that sociologist Asef Bayat published this year.  In them, he uses social movement theory to explain how everyday actions create change in the Middle East.

While many believe radical Islam expresses the interests of the poor, Bayat has observed that the urban poor are generally reluctant to support any kind of political movement. The poor cannot afford to be ideological, but they are interested in organizations and associations that can help them and answer their needs. Their political opinion is not linked to political Islam, but in a poor people’s “nonmovement,” which is the main form of activism in the Muslim Middle East.

Instead of organized politics, everyday life turns into “street politics.”

The concept of “street politics” is closely tied to the economic situation prevalent in the Middle East. Bayat rightly points out that the streets of Cairo, Tehran or Jakarta are jam-packed with people “compelled by the poverty or dispossession” to work, socialize and spend their day in the public spaces. Streets allow people to come into contact with each other and share their problems and this can turn a small manifestation into a massive demonstration. Revolutions and protest movements originate on the streets. Therefore, authorities are often weary of the potential danger of street politics, which often reflect the feelings and opinions of a nation.

The organizations and associations that work to meet the needs of the poor people’s “nonmovement” are also covered by Bayat.

Bayat rightfully highlights the positive role played by Muslim movements who provided health care, education and financial aid. This is the case of the Rifah Party in Turkey, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria and how Hezbollah filled the vacuum triggered by the total absence of the state in Lebanon. The growing number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) confirms the vital role they play especially in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Sudan. Social Islam and NGOization “despite their flaws, appear to have become the dominant forms of activism that now contribute to improving some aspects of people’s lives in Middle Eastern countries,” writes Bayat.

After the recent shock of a federal indictment of 29 Somali and Somali American individuals on sex trafficking charges, the New York Times reports on the Minnesota Somali community’s attempts to deal with the situation.

The allegations of organized trafficking, unsealed this month, were a deep shock for the tens of thousands of Somalis in the Minneapolis area, who fled civil war and famine to build new lives in the United States and now wonder how some of their youths could have strayed so far. Last week, in quiet murmurings over tea and in an emergency public meeting, parents and elders expressed bewilderment and sometimes outrage — anger with the authorities for not acting sooner to stop the criminals, and with themselves for not saving their young.

The indictment was the latest in a series of jolting revelations starting around 2007, when a spate of deadly shootings in the Twin Cities made it impossible to ignore the emergence of Somali gangs. Then came the discovery that more than 20 men had returned to Somalia to fight for Islamic extremists, bringing what many Somalis feel has been harsh and unfair scrutiny from law enforcement and the news media.

A sociologist weighs in on why this pattern of problems seems to be continuing:

Cawo Abdi, a Somali sociologist at the University of Minnesota, said that past surges in concern about troubled youths had not been followed up with money and programs to help them. “This is viewed as such a huge scandal and outrage,” she said of the new charges, “that it has to lead to some kind of action.”

Read the rest of the article for discussion of some of the challenges facing Somali people in the Twin Cities.

The phrase “you are what you eat” may refer to more than your physical make-up. In fact, the food in your fridge might say just as much about your social class as about your health.  Newsweek reports:

According to data released last week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 17 percent of Americans—more than 50 million people—live in households that are “food insecure,” a term that means a family sometimes runs out of money to buy food, or it sometimes runs out of food before it can get more money. Food insecurity is especially high in households headed by a single mother. It is most severe in the South, and in big cities. In New York City, 1.4 million people are food insecure, and 257,000 of them live near me, in Brooklyn. Food insecurity is linked, of course, to other economic measures like housing and employment, so it surprised no one that the biggest surge in food insecurity since the agency established the measure in 1995 occurred between 2007 and 2008, at the start of the economic downturn.

Growing inequality between the rich and the poor in the United States is reflected at the dinner table as well:

Among the lowest quintile of American families, mean household income has held relatively steady between $10,000 and $13,000 for the past two decades (in inflation-adjusted dollars); among the highest, income has jumped 20 percent to $170,800 over the same period, according to census data. What this means, in practical terms, is that the richest Americans can afford to buy berries out of season at Whole Foods—the upscale grocery chain that recently reported a 58 percent increase in its quarterly profits—while the food insecure often eat what they can: highly caloric, mass-produced foods like pizza and packaged cakes that fill them up quickly.

Using language evocative of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one epidemiologist explains:

Lower-income families don’t subsist on junk food and fast food because they lack nutritional education, as some have argued. And though many poor neighborhoods are, indeed, food deserts—meaning that the people who live there don’t have access to a well-stocked supermarket—many are not. Lower-income families choose sugary, fat, and processed foods because they’re cheaper—and because they taste good. In a paper published last spring, Drewnowski showed how the prices of specific foods changed between 2004 and 2008 based on data from Seattle-area supermarkets. While food prices overall rose about 25 percent, the most nutritious foods (red peppers, raw oysters, spinach, mustard greens, romaine lettuce) rose 29 percent, while the least nutritious foods (white sugar, hard candy, jelly beans, and cola) rose just 16 percent.

“In America,” Drewnowski wrote in an e-mail, “food has become the premier marker of social distinctions, that is to say—social class. It used to be clothing and fashion, but no longer, now that ‘luxury’ has become affordable and available to all.”

Concern about rising obesity, especially among low income communities, had led to some controversial policy proposals.

In recent weeks the news in New York City has been full with a controversial proposal to ban food-stamp recipients from using their government money to buy soda. Local public-health officials insist they need to be more proactive about slowing obesity; a recent study found that 40 percent of the children in New York City’s kindergarten through eighth-grade classrooms were either overweight or obese. (Nationwide, 36 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds are overweight or obese.)

But French sociologist Claude Fischler suggests that there might be a better way to address both food insecurity and obesity: Americans should be more French about food.

Americans take an approach to food and eating that is unlike any other people in history. For one thing, we regard food primarily as (good or bad) nutrition. When asked “What is eating well?” Americans generally answer in the language of daily allowances: they talk about calories and carbs, fats, and sugars. They don’t see eating as a social activity, and they don’t see food—as it has been seen for millennia—as a shared resource, like a loaf of bread passed around the table. When asked “What is eating well?” the French inevitably answer in terms of “conviviality”: togetherness, intimacy, and good tastes unfolding in a predictable way.

Even more idiosyncratic than our obsession with nutrition, says Fischler, is that Americans see food choice as a matter of personal freedom, an inalienable right. Americans want to eat what they want: morels or Big Macs. They want to eat where they want, in the car or alfresco. And they want to eat when they want. With the exception of Thanksgiving, when most of us dine off the same turkey menu, we are food libertarians. In surveys, Fischler has found no single time of day (or night) when Americans predictably sit together and eat. By contrast, 54 percent of the French dine at 12:30 each day. Only 9.5 percent of the French are obese.

Others suggest addressing systematic barriers to food accessibility and delivery. According to author and foodie icon Micahel Pollan:

“Essentially,” he says, “we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.” He points to Walmart’s recent announcement of a program that will put more locally grown food on its shelves as an indication that big retailers are looking to sell fresh produce in a scalable way. These fruits and vegetables might not be organic, but the goal, says Pollan, is not to be absolutist in one’s food ideology. “I argue for being conscious,” he says, “but perfectionism is an enemy of progress.”

Community activists agree:

Food co-ops and community-garden associations are doing better urban outreach. Municipalities are establishing bus routes between poor neighborhoods and those where well-stocked supermarkets exist.

Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, says these programs are good, but they need to go much, much further. He believes, like Fischler, that the answer lies in seeing food more as a shared resource, like water, than as a consumer product, like shoes. “It’s a nuanced conversation, but I think ‘local’ or ‘organic’ as the shorthand for all things good is way too simplistic,” says Berg. “I think we need a broader conversation about scale, working conditions, and environmental impact. It’s a little too much of people buying easy virtue.”re as well,” Berg says…

Berg believes that part of the answer lies in working with Big Food. The food industry hasn’t been entirely bad: it developed the technology to bring apples to Wisconsin in the middle of winter, after all. It could surely make sustainably produced fruits and vegetables affordable and available. “We need to bring social justice to bigger agriculture as well,” Berg says.