Homelessness at the VMAs

Jacqui Frost on September 4, 2014

Miley Cyrus’ VMA activities recently hit the news again – but this time it wasn’t for twerking. Instead, Miley took the spotlight off herself and put it on the issue of homeless youth. Passing her award acceptance on to 22-year-old Jesse Helt, a formerly homeless youth, Miley brought attention to severe social inequality across the U.S. The move raised over $200,000 for Los Angeles homeless youth. However, sociologists show that increasing media awareness of a stigmatized group can have both positive and negative consequences.

Regardless of Miley’s intentions, her effort to give voice to the homeless population is a step in the right direction. Sociologists show that increased awareness of and contact with stigmatized populations can help decrease that stigma.
The media also plays a large role in which issues get deemed “social problems”—problems we feel responsible for helping to fix. Positive media attention given to homelessness at the VMAs, while fleeting, may have some positive impact on social perceptions of homelessness.
However, raising awareness of what many see as a deserving segment of the homeless population—white, healthy, homeless youth—may also detract from what many sociologists call the “undeserving poor.” This equally important group of minority populations and welfare recipients will have a much harder time finding its way into an awards show.

Reflecting on Ferguson

Evan Stewart on August 26, 2014

In the wake of protests responding to the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, sociologists began building a large body of resources to explain how these events fit into a broader pattern of racial bias in the United States’ criminal justice system. Sociologists for Justice has both a public statement on the matter and a syllabus on source material related to racialized policing. Sociology Toolbox has recent data on racial disparities and militarized police departments in Ferguson and nationwide. In addition to the conversation about racial injustice, Ferguson also calls into question our assumptions about how to maintain public safety.

Policing in communities of color presents a paradox. The state offers very little attention for social services, but also embeds itself in residents’ everyday lives through strong policing practices.
While there isn’t much research on the effectiveness of policing tactics, we do know that a militaristic approach which maximizes coercion does little to make a community feel safer. In fact, this approach may actually increase future crime and conflict as community members start to resist coercion.
In addition to racial bias in policing, there is also a gendered dimension to military tactics. Precincts develop a sense of male solidarity through military scorn of feminine traits, and even manufacturers of nonlethal police weapons appeal to these masculine sensibilities to sell their products.  

Ebola and the Epidemic Mindset

Evan Stewart on August 5, 2014

While President Obama is hosting an economic summit with African leaders this week, the Ebola outbreak is overshadowing major economic news. Experts argue that the epidemic can be curbed, but note rampant distrust toward aid organizations in rural communities makes treatment and prevention difficult. Social scientific research helps explain how media and governments shape the way citizens respond to outbreaks.

We usually think media fans the flames of mass panic, but research on previous Ebola shows media sources actually turn toward a “containment” narrative, emphasizing that it’s hard to catch Ebola and the outbreak is “somewhere else.”
It isn’t that local communities “don’t understand” that aid workers are there to help. Epidemics often manufacture misunderstandings and mass panic. Recently, in New York City’s Chinatown, Asians were “stigmatized during the SARS epidemic despite having no SARS cases.”
Political context also matters, including the actions of national governments and international NGOs. Comparative work on Uganda and South Africa’s approaches to HIV/AIDS has shown top-down strategies don’t calm the infection rate. Bottom-up approaches, like changing hygiene behaviors, are more effective at the local level. However, this tactic requires an environment of “representation and democratic participation” that governments and international organizations have to build and frame.

When Child Migrants Weren’t an Unwelcome Problem

Lisa Gulya and Stephen Suh on July 24, 2014

News and images of an influx of unaccompanied child migrants have swept across the nation in recent weeks. In late June, USA Today reported that since Oct. 1, 2013, “more than 47,000 migrant kids primarily from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador” have been caught entering country through the U.S.-Mexico border. More recently, government officials have estimated that this population could grow to 90,000 by the end of September. These children, many of whom have journeyed to the U.S. hoping to reunite with family, are being held in numerous southwestern detention facilities while awaiting trials to determine their fates. Most will be deported back to the countries that they fled.

Child migrants locked up and awaiting deportation, feared as future voters, pushes us to think about how the idea of “immigrant child threat” reveals the ongoing negotiation over the value of different kinds of children. So, while Clay Jenkins, a Democrat elected Dallas County judge in 2010, argues that “these are children—they are precious children,” he is expressing a contested view.

This is not the first time children have come to the U.S. based on rumors that they would be allowed to stay. Today it is cause for alarm and a desire to close borders; in the 1950s, the faulty rumors were CIA-sponsored tall tales of Communist child-eaters during Operation Peter Pan, rumors that served to get thousands of Cuban families to give up their children to foster families in Miami, never to be reunited after the Cuban Revolution.
We see how immigrant children are devalued when we compare them to another group of child migrants: transnational adoptees. Research on legislation regarding children’s citizenship argues that adoptees were granted the privilege of their adoptive parents’ citizenship while children of immigrant parents, who had arrived through official channels, could not access social citizenship rights because of their parents’ non-native status.
Society’s “value” of children changes over time and in different situations. While children were once members of household production in the 19th century—say, just another worker on the family farm—they may now be “sacralized” as priceless, if economically worthless, in the 20th century. However, as adoption scholar Laura Briggs writes on the children of deportees from the U.S., “[T]his is still a fight, a question; immigrant children are not seen as a cute, innocent, victimized population.”

For more on how immigration to the U.S. has changed over time, check out this roundtable.

Religion, Reproduction, and the Supreme Court

Jacqui Frost on July 16, 2014

The recent Hobby Lobby, and subsequent Wheaton College, Supreme Court rulings that exclude organizations with “sincere religious objections” from the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate have raised a plethora of fears and heated commentary about access to birth control, women’s rights, and the slippery slope of religious exemption. Sociological research, however, suggests that this ruling’s infringement on access to reproductive services and women’s rights is far from straightforward.

The language of birth control mandates varies by state, and the more ambiguously worded the mandate, the less likely there is to be a challenge. Instead, it is the more precisely worded statutes that have prompted court cases, as they allow for less interpretation and compromise.
The moral framing of religious exemption cases is key to making them effective. When actors frame an issue in moral terms, as opposed to scientific or technical, their arguments are usually too divisive to be completely adopted, however, they are often able to thwart their opponents by defining an issue in ways that make it difficult for legislators to support progressive causes.
A woman’s access to birth control is not only influenced by her insurance policy or the religion of her employer. Race, class, and cultural understandings of what it means to be a “responsible reproductive subject” all play a role in why women seek reproductive services such as birth control, infertility treatment, and abortion, as well as which services they are more likely to have access to.

For more on the Hobby Lobby decision and the history of birth control in the U.S., check out these great pieces by fellow sociology bloggers families as they really are and Girl w/ Pen.

Modern Mormonism: Kicking Out and Keeping In

Allegra Smith and Evan Stewart on June 30, 2014

Last week the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints drew media attention for the public excommunication of Kate Kelly, a prominent member of the church working for the ordination of women. Women are not permitted to hold the priesthood in the LDS church, meaning that they do not have the authority to act in god’s name, nor can they lead congregations or perform particular sacraments. This is not the first instance of high profile excommunications from the church—in September 1993, six Mormon professors and feminists were excommunicated after church court trials in Utah. These progressive scholars, coined the “September Six” by news media, had published research contradicting official church history, or publicly advocated a feminist position. Al Jazeera interviewed Professor Jan Shipps on the issue, who said this was one instance of the church practicing “boundary maintenance,” but how do these scandals help keep the church together?

Mormonism didn’t necessarily always exclude women from high-profile involvement with the church. Instead, the development of formal institutions and bureaucracies tended to erase historical arrangements where women had a more equal role to male priests.
Excommunicating individuals who speak out for these alternative perspectives seems extreme, but it fits a pattern we often find in organizations. Sociology shows us how punishments for individuals—like excommunications, expulsions, or other public shaming—quickly turn into an “institutional morality tale” about how the group works.

 

Allegra Smith is a master’s student in rhetoric and writing at Michigan State University. Her research interests include digital communities, queer and feminist rhetorics, women in world religions, and pornography and sexuality.

Why Students Don’t Sweat Sweatshops

Jacqui Frost on June 18, 2014

The 1990s saw a surge in student activism surrounding labor issues, most prominently in campaigns against sweatshop labor for cheap clothing. College students around the country held sit-ins and rallies protesting companies like Nike and Gap that were in many ways credited with those companies improving their labor policies. Forever 21—a popular retail chain targeting youth and student shoppers—recently opened a new outlet with even cheaper clothes that has the media revisiting the 90s’ protests. According to an article in The New Yorker, “the grand opening of F21 Red, however, was marked not by picketers but by customers who lined up early for gift cards. What changed?” This question brings up a broader sociological question of how and why student and youth populations participate in activism, as well as how this might be changing.

The student activism in the 90s was not solely spurred by a common cause against sweatshop labor amongst students. Instead, this spike in activism was in many ways led and organized by already formed networks of labor activists that intentionally targeted students. Further, the successes were limited, and the movement did little to affect perceptions of cheap labor overall.
Activism and its outcomes are influenced by local and historical context. Sociologists have found that while today’s youth cohorts are participating in protests and other forms of traditional activism less than their parents, they are participating in alternative, more individualized forms of activism like petition signing and volunteering. They argue that what it means to be a “good citizen” is changing and that younger generations are driving this change.

Italy and the GDP: When Markets Meet Morality

Evan Stewart on June 10, 2014

Last month Italy announced that it would be including revenue from illegal activities such as drug trafficking and prostitution in its GDP. The Economist reports that this isn’t all new—Italy has been recording its “shadow economy” of unregistered businesses since 1987—but the news reminds us how difficult it is to properly measure economic growth even when we think the statistics are cut and dried. Recessions make us take resources seriously, and research shows that the best resources for some social groups can often be the least legit.

Both in-depth ethnographic work and statistical studies show that some of the poorest communities in the U.S. are booming with entrepreneurship—it’s just that most of the work is, well, off the books.
Legal and illegal markets share many of the same coordination problems, but state restrictions change the social relationships in illegal markets. Taxation and regulation may actually be better methods to quell illegal markets than prohibition.
This doesn’t just happen with poor communities or criminal enterprises, though. Secondary markets where companies resell their goods and services—such as “gray markets” for unauthorized transactions or the budding market for buying up strangers’ life insurance policies—highlight the shifting boundaries between market regulation and social morality.

For more on the social construction of markets and value, check out this Sociological Images post and a previous TROT on Bitcoin.



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Waitlists and Worse: Rebuilding VA Health Care

Amy August on June 3, 2014

Eric Shinseki resigned last Friday as head of the Department of Veterans Affairs, stating that “the VA needs new leadership”. This comes in the wake of scheduling issues at VA medical centers leading to extended delays for veterans’ healthcare—issues he now recognizes as a “systemic lack of integrity” involving a widespread cover-up. According to a new VA audit report prompted by a series of CNN investigations, deadly delays in care were being suppressed by clinics driven to meet performance targets. The VA report concluded that the 14-day wait time performance target was “simply not attainable,” and it called for a “long-term, comprehensive reset” of the broken system. While  Shinseki acknowledges these problems, how reasonable is it to expect his successor to fix them? Research shows that scheduling issues are only one barrier among many to veterans’ accessing care.

When predicting which people will seek care, sociologists take into account patients’ prior experiences with the system such as health outcomes and customer satisfaction. Poor service doesn’t just hurt the veterans who seek care—it may keep them from seeking care in the first place!
Some veterans are eligible for both Medicaid and VA services. The largest group of these vets relies on Medicaid rather than VA care or a combination of the two.
Issues with gender in the military also have an effect. Female veterans have less access to VA healthcare relative to males, with 19% of women reporting delayed health care or unmet needs. Knowledge gaps about VA care, perceptions that providers are not gender-sensitive, and a history of military sexual assault predicted women’s likelihood to delay or forgo treatment.

 

Mass Shootings and the “Man”ifesto

Evan Stewart on May 26, 2014

Last Friday—in another chapter of a tragic pattern—22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded more in Isla Vista, California. Rodger also left a manifesto on YouTube in which he laid out his plan to take revenge on women who “shunned him.” The video sparked national conversation over the weekend, including the twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen to share stories of daily gendered and sexual harassment women face. Mass shootings are rare, but the culture that creates them is not. Researchers find strong elements of masculine gender performance in many of these acts—with young men attempting to assert power through violence.

The kind of attack carried out by Rodger closely matches researchers’ profile of other shooters—a clear, sustained pattern of challenges to their masculine identities. They do not just “snap,” but are shaped over time by the way our society polices gender.
Feelings that lost masculinity can only be reclaimed through violence are tied to a broader pattern of threats against women. While there have been declines in violence against women and other crime over the past generation, violence against women remains an enormous problem in the United States and around the world.

For more on the sociology of mass violence, check out this TSP Roundtable.