politics

The mayor of Ithaca, New York recently proposed a facility for people to use heroin and other injected drugs safely. It’s part of a larger plan to focus on prevention and treatment of drug use, and the facility’s trained medical staff would provide clean needles, referrals to treatment programs, and naloxone, an opioid overdose antidote. Today’s opioid epidemic—which kills an estimated 78 Americans every day—has shocked many, given that other forms of illicit drug use have generally declined in prevalence and mortality during recent decades. Ithaca’s plan falls under the umbrella of “harm reduction” approaches, which attempt to mitigate personal and societal harm from drug and alcohol use. Social science shows us how and why these programs work.

Supervised injection facilities are relatively recent, originating in the Dutch and Swiss harm reduction movements of the 1970s and ‘80s. The first site in North America opened in Vancouver in 2003 and is linked to drastic declines in public injection and overdose deaths. Today a number of supervised drug consumption rooms operate throughout northern Europe, Canada, and Australia. Ithaca’s would be the first in the U.S.

• Kate Dolan et al. 2000. “Drug Consumption Facilities in Europe and the Establishment of Supervised Injecting Centres In Australia,” Drug & Alcohol Review, 19, 337-346.

Substance use was once a popular element of social events, like election day, but by the 20th century, “drug scares” stigmatized drug use, associating it with racial stereotypes, immigration, and crime. Smoking opium was first outlawed in the U.S. in the 1870s, for instance, as a result of anti-Chinese sentiments in California. Non-smoking opioid use remained popular among the white middle class—for supposed medical reasons, but by the turn of the century though, users who preferred injection became the stigmatized face of opiate addiction.

• Craig Reinarman. 1989. “Crack in Context: Politics and Media in the Making of a Drug Scare,” Contemporary Drug Problems 16(4):535-577.

• Caroline Jean Acker. 2002. Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Stigma remains a critical issue in drug treatment, preventing users from accessing clean injection tools, uncontaminated opiates, information about safe injection practices, and life-saving overdose antidotes. Harm reduction efforts, like needle exchanges, have the potential to restore self-respect and autonomy to populations generally believed to lack these characteristics. Programs that provide work to formerly incarcerated individuals who have undergone drug treatment has been shown to reduce certain crimes, like robberies. Harm reduction communities also offer a space for drug users to empathize with and support each other, creating networks that bolster success.

• Teresa Gowan, Sarah Whetstone, and Tanja Andic. 2012. “Addiction, Agency, and the Politics of Self-Control: Doing Harm-Reduction in a Heroin Users’ Group.” Social Science and Medicine 74(8):1251-1260.
• Christopher Uggen and Sarah Shannon. 2014. “Productive Addicts and Harm Reduction: How Work Reduces Crime—But Not Drug Use.” Social Problems 61(1): 105-130.

From last year’s attacks in Paris to recent bombings in Ankara, Brussels, and Lahore, transnational terrorism is at the forefront of public concern. The media often gravitates toward focusing on who the perpetrators are and what drove them to commit these heinous acts. There is a wealth of research on the individual and psychological factors that may be at play, but sociological studies highlight the strong influence of social context and institutions in turning people toward terror, challenging easy explanations that focus on individual ideology alone.

Quantitative analysis shows how radical Islamic groups are motivated by many of the same social and political factors as older radical groups. Social and political change, especially international development, urbanization, and western military dependency, is associated with more frequent attacks. Higher foreign investment associates with a lower frequency of attacks, however, and research on terror in Israel shows this kind of conciliatory action may do more to limit terror than repressive strategies alone.

• Laura Dugan and Erica Chenoweth. 2012. “Moving Beyond Deterrence: The Effectiveness of Raising the Expected Utility of Abstaining from Terrorism in Israel,” American Sociological Review 77(4):597-624.
• Kristopher K. Robison, Edward M. Crenshaw and J. Craig Jenkins. 2006. “Ideologies of Violence: The Social Origins of Islamist and Leftist Transnational Terrorism,” Social Forces 84(4):2009-2026.

Research also shows that individual attackers are actually fairly “normal.” They are not more likely to be poor or poorly educated, and, often, they are not psychologically pathological. Instead, scholars look to the social arrangements of the institutions and networks that recruit and empower individuals. These terror groups are rarely centralized, hierarchical organizations that train bombers from on high; attacks stem from struggles for power among fractured organizations, local splinter groups, and state forces. As these conflicts escalate, local groups mobilize network relationships to recruit attackers and build the autonomy to develop their own motivational strategies to spur attacks. These local relationships and networks matter much more than individuals’ beliefs alone.

• Scott Atran. 2003. “Genesis of suicide terrorism,” Science (299):1534-1539.
• Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger. 2006. “The Changing Nature of Suicide Attacks—A Social Network Perspective,” Social Forces 84(4):1983-2004.
• Eitan Y. Alimi. 2011. “Relational dynamics in factional adoption of terrorist tactics: a comparative perspective,” Theory and Society 40(1):95-118.

The FBI now says they may not need Apple’s help to break into a terrorist’s iPhone, but for months they have insisted Apple’s programmers must write a program enabling them to bypass security on this and other Apple devices. The demand raised questions about security and surveillance in a time of rapid technological change. Apple’s refusal to comply stemmed from both a philosophical stance on privacy and concerns that such a program could easily be exploited. The company and its programmers further argued that code should be covered by free speech protections—no one can be forced to write code against their will. Sociological research shows how assumptions about the objectivity of computer code work against arguments like Apple’s and how these assumptions are often used to legitimize the policing of already marginalized populations.

Apple’s concerns about controlling how and when a “break-in” program gets used are valid. Not only can it fall into the hands of hackers and the like, technologies like this can be used by law enforcement to maintain social inequalities and reinforce harmful stereotypes. Sociologists show how computer code and surveillance technologies are not value-neutral, but are instead composed of the values and opinions of those who write and use them. The result is that the police often use these presumably objective technologies to justify intrusive policing of the already at-risk.

• Carrie Sanders and Stacey Hannem. 2012. “Policing ‘the Risky’: Technology and Surveillance in Everyday Patrol Work.” Canadian Review of Sociology 49(4):317-451.
• David Lyon. 2003. “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies.” Pp. 13-30 in Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital
  Discrimination, edited by David Lyon. New York: Routledge.

From this perspective, it becomes easier to understand code as speech. Codes are the expression, intentional or otherwise, of the values and beliefs of the programmer. What makes code in some ways more powerful than speech is that it is also highly functional. Jennifer Peterson explains that code is at once the writing of a program as well as the program’s execution—it is both expressive and functional—but the legal system overlooks the functional capacity of code as speech and the ways that it can be used to protest, dissent, and discriminate.

• Jennifer Peterson. 2015. “Is Code Speech? Law and the Expressivity of Machine Language,” New Media & Society 17(3):415-431.

And for a great read on surveilling sociologists, check out Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology by Mike Forrest Keen.

Conservative and liberal legislators alike are calling for criminal justice reform. Last November, President Obama proposed a “ban the box” initiative that prevents federal agencies from inquiring about an applicant’s criminal history during the initial stages of the hiring process. The plan mirrors similar policies in over 100 U.S. cities that seek to reduce employment discrimination against people with criminal records and alleviate the socioeconomic burdens they often face as they reenter the job market. Social science highlights the scope of this problem and how ban the box policies may help.

Employers often dismiss applicants with criminal records, which disproportionately affects black men. A Milwaukee study revealed employers contacted only 5% of black men who disclosed a record; even black men without a criminal record were less likely to receive a callback than their white male peers with a criminal record. Thus, even in the absence of criminal background checks, employers may use racial indicators, education levels, and gaps in employment to evaluate potential criminality among job applicants.

• Devah Pager. 2007. MARKED: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Harry Holzer, Steven Raphael, and Michael Stoll. 2006. “Perceived Criminality, Criminal Background Checks, and the Racial Hiring Practices of Employers,” Journal of Law and Economics 451-480.

Among candidates with a record, employers may consider the severity of the crime, the time since the crime was committed, and the outcome of the crime. Felony crimes and convictions appear to create the most barriers, while job applicants with misdemeanor arrests face lower hurdles. Since interviews with employers show that making personal contact with job applicants can help overcome the negative effects of a criminal record, “ban the box” measures that delay consideration of the criminal record until the interview process could make a real difference in individuals’ job prospects.

• Chris Uggen, Mike Vuolo, Sarah Lageson, Ebony Rhuland, and Hilary K. Whitham. 2014. “,The Edge of Stigma: An Experimental Audit of the Effects of Low-Level Criminal Records on Employment.” Criminology 52(4): 627-654.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center suggests that “Nones”—people who are unaffiliated with any organized religious institution or belief system—now make up the single largest religious group in the Democratic party. Organizations like the American Atheists launched the #AtheistVoter campaign, and members of this growing voting bloc assembled at the recent Republican presidential debate in Iowa, questioning the candidates’ ability to represent non-religious Americans and demanding they “Keep Your Theocracy out of Our Democracy.” Sociologists of non-religion detail how the Nones are increasingly diverse, and their social and political agendas sometimes conflict.

The history of non-religious and atheist politics in the U.S. is one of constant tension. The non-religious take varying stances on the role of religion in social and political life, and the movement has had to balance “accommodationist” approaches to religion in the public sphere that support religion as a social good and “confrontational” approaches that position religion as a danger to democracy and progress.

• Steven Kettell. 2014. “Divided We Stand: The Politics of the Atheist Movement in the United States,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 29(3): 377-391.
• Stephen LeDrew. 2016. The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tensions among the Nones can be a barrier to success as a cohesive political group, but their diversity can also be an advantage. Secular groups often define “the secular” differently depending on the context, which allows for a wider net to be cast over the variety of individual, non-religious identities. This enables more inclusive political agendas.

• Joseph Blankholm. 2014. “The Political Advantages of a Polysemous Secular,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53(4): 775-790.
• Lois Lee. 2015. “Ambivalent Atheist Identities: Power and Non-religious Culture in Contemporary Britain,” Social Analysis 59(2): 20-39.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a contested space for queer folks. Persecution is common in Egypt, where gay men are continuously subjected to mass arrests, and queer Palestinians are often blackmailed. In contrast, Lebanon has led the LGBT*Q movement with a recent court ruling that homosexuality is not “unnatural or a crime. Celebrities like Hamed Sinno, the gay lead singer of Mashrou’ Leila, can even use music to address gender expression and gay love there. Research on the origins of queerness and homophobia in the region and why governments repress queer communities can help us understand such conflicting trends.

Contrary to beliefs that queerness is un-MENA, un-Islamic, or un-African, Abu Nawas (756-814) wrote uninhibited erotic poetry about men and, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries in Egypt, homosexual and homosocial relations were quite common. Lesbianism is documented in the 9^th century throughout the region.

• Samar Habib. 2007. Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: History and Representations. New York: Routledge.
• Mervat Hatem. 1986. “The Politics of Sexuality and Gender in Segregated Patriarchal Systems: The Case of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Egypt,” Feminist Studies. 12(2):250-274

Contemporary state repression often involves torture, surveillance, and harassment of gays and lesbians by state actors. After the Arab Spring revolutions, social science sheds light on how such politically unstable governments attempt to maintain and enforce social stability and societal moral. This larger sense of a need for control could fuel queer community repression.

• Jennifer Earl. 2011. “Political Repression: Iron Fists, Velvet Gloves, and Diffuse Control,” Annual Review of Sociology 37:261-284.
• Mark Ungar. 2000. “State Violence and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (lgbt) Rights,” New Political Science 22(1):61-75.
• Christian Davenport. 1995. “Multi-Dimensional Threat Perception and State Repression: An Inquiry, into Why States Apply Negative Sanctions.” American Journal of Political Science 39(3):683-713.

For more on sexuality in the MENA, see lectures from the ““Sexualities and Queer Imaginaries in the Middle East/North Africa’ conference at Brown University.

New York’s State Attorney has opened an investigation into whether ExxonMobil lied to the public and investors about the risks of climate change and funded outside groups to question climate science, even as the company’s own expert researchers found that fossil fuel emissions do, indeed, contribute to rising temperatures.

The Exxon investigation reflects the broader politicization of climate change and the role of corporations in shaping public perceptions. Surveys have found that the U.S. public is poorly informed about the science of climate change. A climate change countermovement flush with funds from business and conservative organizations works to create skepticism and distort public understanding. These efforts mirror other controversies over science and risk, and past corporate campaigns to create doubt about the harmful impacts of chemicals such as tobacco, DDT, or holes in the ozone layer.

• Robert J. Brulle. 2014. “Institutionalizing Delay: Foundation Funding and the Creation of U.S. Climate Change Counter-Movement Organizations.” Climatic Change 122(4):681–94.
• Thomas Dietz, Paul C. Stern, and Robert W. Rycroft. 1989. “Definitions of Conflict and the Legitimation of Resources: The Case of Environmental Risk.” Sociological Forum 4(1):47–70.
• Riley E. Dunlap and Peter J. Jacques. 2013. “Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks: Exploring the Connection.” American Behavioral Scientist 57(6):699–731.
• Valerie J. Gunter. 2005. “News Media and Technological Risks: The Case of Pesticides after ‘Silent Spring.’” The Sociological Quarterly 46(4):671–98.
• Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

Climate change denial is not simply the result of well funded public relations campaigns, however. It also reflects collective and individual anxieties and the difficulties of coming to terms with abstract and long-term risks. Everyday experiences, cultural norms, political beliefs, and religion shape how people come to terms with problems like climate change.

• John H. Evans and Justin Feng. 2013. “Conservative Protestantism and Skepticism of Scientists Studying Climate Change.” Climatic Change 121(4):595–608.
• Kari Marie Norgaard. 2011. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. MIT Press.
• Min Zhou. 2015. “Public Environmental Skepticism: A Cross-National and Multilevel Analysis.” International Sociology 30(1):61–85.

For more on echo chambers and how climate change denial narratives gain credibility, check out this new piece over at Contexts!

In the ongoing battles around whether to defund Planned Parenthood, Lindy West and Amelia Bonow created the Twitter hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion to encourage women to share their abortion stories, express their experiences, and recognize the stigma that often silences women who have an abortion. Consequently, many have criticized the hashtag and attacked the women involved. Supporters of #ShoutYourAbortion argue that sharing real women’s stories on social media produces cultural change around an issue surrounded by legal rhetoric. Sociological research details why women have generally felt compelled to stay silent about having abortions and the potential benefits of speaking up.

Many women believe that disclosing their abortion experiences will lead to negative responses from relatives and friends, due to widely held norms of femininity and motherhood that assert women are “natural nurturers” and the idea that having an abortion negates those qualities. In a classic study of pro-life and pro-choice activists, Kristin Luker notes that abortion is often seen as a “referendum on the place and meaning of motherhood.” For pro-life activists, terminating a pregnancy may be the ultimate example of being a “bad mother.” Rather than face anticipated judgment and condemnation around moral codes of appropriate feminine behavior, women then choose to conceal their procedures.

• Kristin Luker. 1984. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Paula Abrams. 2015. “The Bad Mother: Stigma, Abortion, and Surrogacy.” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 43(2):179-191.

A major source of stress and frustration women experience centers on the gendered imbalance of responsibility for contraception and abortion decisions. Research finds that women are often expected be responsible for providing or taking contraception, but are heavily criticized when they take responsibility by choosing to have an abortion. Thus, Sally Brown argues, where women are held responsible for reproductive decisions, “decision making, if ‘decisions’ happen at all, is bound up with notions of hegemonic masculine and feminine roles.”

• Sally Brown. 2015. “‘They Think it’s All Up to the Girls’: Gender, Risk, and Responsibility for Contraception.” Culture, Health, & Sexuality 17(3): 312-325.
• Katrina Kimport, Kira Foster, and Tracy A. Weitz. 2011. “Social Sources of Women’s Emotional Difficulty After Abortion: Lessons from Women’s Abortion Narratives.” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 43(2):103–109.

Stigma, however, does not reduce the likelihood that a woman will have an abortion. Cockrill and Nack write that even women who “believe abortion is morally wrong and that women who have abortions are careless and irresponsible will still have abortions.” Instead, the primary consequences of abortion stigma are decreased mental and physical health, strained relationships, and loss of social status. Spaces of affirmation and support like the #ShoutYourAbortion campaign allow women to engage in “collective stigma management,” offering a supportive network where their public presence can work to change social attitudes and shatter the silence surrounding abortion experiences.

• Kate Cockrill and Adina Nack. 2013. “‘I’m Not That Type of Person’: Managing the Stigma of Having an Abortion.” Deviant Behavior 34(12): 973-990.
• Gretchen Sisson and Katrina Kimport. 2014. “Telling Stories about Abortion: Abortion-Related Plots in American Film and Television, 1916–2013.” Contraception 89(5): 413-418.

Since his election in March 2013, Pope Francis has gained attention for his efforts to refocus the Catholic Church on issues of social justice. His recent visit to the U.S. was met with acclaim from religious leaders and political liberals, but also sparked consternation among cultural and political conservatives. U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), a Catholic himself, boycotted Francis’s address to Congress and accused him of adopting “socialist talking points presented to guilt people into leftist politics.”

The cultural divisions within American Catholicism exposed by Pope Francis’s visit are not new. While Gosar may be more vocal than most conservative Catholics, his protest reveals a split between interpretations of the Catholic faith that have been simmering for generations.

• Andrew Greeley. 1979. “The Sociology of American Catholics.” Annual Review of Sociology 5:91–111.

Mary Ellen Konieczny shows that the narratives American Catholics use to construct their religious identities have profound political consequences. Some congregations use the language of community to structure their worship, while others structure their activities around the concept of family. In parishes where community talk is dominant, social justice is usually the focus of ministry, but in congregations where family is the main narrative, concerns about personal and sexual morality get more attention. Neither model is more Catholic than the other: both types of congregations draw upon doctrines and use ritual practices central to the Catholic tradition. Hence, the variation Konieczny observes has less to do with texts or doctrines than with the ways people interact in group settings.

• Mary Ellen Konieczny. 2013. The Spirit’s Tether: Family, Work, and Religion among American Catholics. Oxford University Press.

The ideological divide in Catholicism also has historical roots in the relationships between the papacy and states. Gene Burns argues that as European states liberalized in the 19^th century, Popes struggled to retain political influence for the church. Attempts to engage questions of poverty were seen as intrusions into government affairs, but through discussions of personal morality, the Church could carve out a space where its authority still dominated. As a result, the Church’s ideological emphases turned toward sexual morality and family issues, while sociopolitical concerns grew peripheral.

• Gene Burns. 1990. “The Politics of Ideology: The Papal Struggle with Liberalism.” American Journal of Sociology 95(5):1123–52.

The postwar period saw a revitalization of Catholic religious activity in the politics of economic justice. Jose Casanova shows how the Solidarity movement in Poland and letter-writing campaigns among American nuns after Vatican II helped to steer church activity back toward social justice work, and John O’Brien charts the influence of labor activist-priest George G. Higgins on Catholic social thought in the 20^th century.

• Jose Casanova. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press.
• John O’Brien. 2004. George G. Higgins and the Quest for Worker Justice: The Evolution of Catholic Social Thought in America. Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward.

Pope Francis’s return to social justice issues does not necessarily make him a “liberal” pope. We might better view him as interested in returning the Catholic church to a language of social justice, firmly rooted in Church history, despite being obscured by previous Popes’ focus on other issues.

Europe is facing a major refugee crisis. Some nations welcome refugees, some do not. Much of the media attention is focused on how these countries are dealing with large populations fleeing from Syria. There is ongoing debate as to whether the Syrians fleeing war are “migrants” or “refugees”. We usually think “migrants” move for economic reasons, while “refugees” move during temporary political crises. Social science on the motives and meaning of migration shows a clear difference in why these two groups travel, but also how the places where they move can blur the lines between them.

Syria has faced civil unrest since 2011, when civilians took to the streets to protest against Bashar Al Assad’s regime. The unrest escalated quickly to a civil war with a total of 220,000 deaths as of January 2015. Approximately 4,000,000 Syrians have been displaced. This has ignited international conversation on the future of Syria and its refugees.Four million Syrians have been displaced.

• Philippe Droz-Vincent. 2014. “‘State of Barbary’ (Take Two): From the Arab Spring to the Return of Violence in Syria.” The Middle East Journal. 68(1): 33-58

Refugees have a distinct set of reasons for leaving their home countries. In many cases, they are highly skilled workers forced out by extreme violence and social instability. They are more likely to request asylum from countries that have passed domestic refugee laws or ratified more human rights treaties than countries that are economically affluent.

• Susanne Schmeidl. 1997. “Exploring the causes of forced migration: A pooled time-series analysis, 1971-1990” Social Science Quarterly. 78(2): 284-308
• Hans Lucht. 2011. Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today. Oakland, CA: University of California Press
• Eunhye Yoo and Jeong-Woo Koo. 2014. “Love thy neighbor: Explaining asylum seeking and hosting, 1982-2008” International Journal of Comparative Sociology. 55(1): 45-72

Refugees are looking for a society in which to build a new life, but public policy in destination nations shapes those cultural opportunities. Receiving countries often have their own foreign policy interests at heart when they decide to accept some people as refugees and deny others as migrants. These labels affect future outcomes. Studies of second-generation migrants show that they do better in countries that have many different ways to integrate new-comers, including cultural, economic, and social supports.Receiving countries accept some people as refugees and deny others as migrants. These labels affect outcomes.

• Jeremy Hein. 1993. “Refugees, Immigrants, and the State.” Annual Review of Sociology 19:43-59
• Stephanie J. Nawyn. 2006. “Faith, ethnicity, and culture in refugee resettlement” American Behavioral Scientist 49(11):1509-1527
• Frank D. Bean, Susan K. Brown, James D. Bachmeier, Tineke Fokkema, and Laurence Lessard-Philips. 2012. “The dimensions and degree of second-generation incorporation in US and European cities: A comparative study of inclusion and exclusion.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology. 53(3):181-209
• Cawo M. Abdi. 2015. Elusive Jannah: The Somali Diaspora and a Borderless Muslim Identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press