» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

Mind Shadows: A Suicide in the Family
Thomas J. Cottle
Research on youth suicide is reviewed along with a brief recounting of family systems theory and the concepts underlying life study research. Together, these three orientations serve as a foundation for an account of a suicide of a teenage girl. The story of the young woman reveals the role of narrative thought in autoethnography as well as the nature of story-telling and the witnessing of personal accounts by the researcher. The actual account describes the life of a young woman growing up in a volatile home where there is constant fighting and tension. Her reaction to the anger surrounding her and the disapproval she feels culminates in an act of self-destruction. The account concludes with a discussion of the role of family systems, shame, and destructive relationships in the development of the self.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 29, No. 2, 222-255 (2000)
http://jce.sagepub.com

The Demedicalization of Self-Injury: From Psychopathology to Sociological Deviance
Patricia A. Adler & Peter Adler
This article offers a glimpse into the relatively hidden practice of self-injury: cutting, burning, branding, and bone breaking. Drawing on eighty in-depth interviews, Web site postings, e-mail communications, and Internet groups, we challenge the psychomedical depiction of this phenomenon and discuss ways that the contemporary sociological practice of self-injury challenges images of the population, etiology, practice, and social meanings associated with this behavior. We conclude by suggesting that self-injury, for some, is in the process of undergoing a moral passage from the realm of medicalized to voluntarily chosen deviant behavior in which participants' actions may be understood with a greater understanding of the sociological factors that contribute to the prevalence of these actions.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 36, No. 5, 537-570 (2007)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Drug Availability, Life Structure, and Situational Ethics of Heroin Addicts
Charles E. Faupel
 In contrast to the conventional wisdom that a process of "moral degeneracy" inevitably ensues with increased heroin addiction, recent research has identified a distinctive set of ethical standards held in common by many "junkies" This article examines the ethical dynamics associated with distinct situations of heroin use with data obtained from extensive life history interviews with 30 hard-core criminal addicts. Addicts tended to violate the ideal norms of their own subculture under circumstances directly related to two contingencies drug availability and life structure Although novice addicts may violate subcultural standards out of ignorance, the greatest potential for deviation from these normative ideals occurs when low levels of drug availability are combined with a lack of daily routine and life structure, a combination typical of the 'street junkie" situation
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 15, No. 3-4, 395-419 (1987) http://jce.sagepub.com

1. What do the stories of the individual’s presented in these articles tell us about the larger sociological picture?

2. What concepts from the chapter are presented in these readings?

3. How have these readings advanced your sociological imagination?

» PBS Frontline Programs

Country Boys
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/view/
This program tracks the dramatic stories of Chris and Cody from ages 15 to 18. It bears witness to the two boys' struggles to overcome the poverty and family dysfunction of their childhood in a quest for a brighter future. This film also offers unexpected insights into a forgotten corner of rural America that is at once isolated and connected, a landscape dotted with roughshod trailer homes and wired with DSL. The program is a story of the American dream seen though the eyes of two boys about to become men and an intimate journey through that exhilarating twilight of adolescence when our lives are poised between who we were born and who we could become.

1. Use the sociological imagination to explain the link between these two individuals and society that is central to this program.

2. Note and describe the social forces at work in the situation presented in the program.

3. How were these boys affected by the larger social forces? How did they resist them?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

322: Shouting Across the Divide
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1163
This program presents stories of the difficulties that arise in communications and relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims. The program includes the story of a family that came to America in the late 1990’s. After September 11, 2001 their otherwise happy life in this country became subject to a high degree of prejudice and discrimination. It also includes the story of an advertising agency who works on a project to promote American values to the Muslim world for the State Department.

1. What was the effect of September 11th on the family? How did their behavior change? How were those around them affected by the larger social forces? How were they able to affect the larger social structure?

2. How were the employees at the ad agency expected to have an impact on the larger social context? How well did it work?

3. What differences do you find in looking at these stories sociologically as opposed to how you would have otherwise?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

PASSING MOMENTS: Some Social Dynamics of Pedestrian Interaction
Nicholas H. Wolfinger
Pedestrian interaction is inherently complex yet observably ordered. For order to be possible, people must behave like competent pedestrians and must expect copresent others to act accordingly. Although many researchers have examined pedestrian behavior, few have considered exactly how pedestrians develop and sustain the expectation that others will indeed behave like competent pedestrians. Using ethnographic data, the author shows how these expectations emerge in the specific practices that comprise pedestrian behavior. Various researchers have attributed pedestrian order to the existence of a tacit contract between users of public space. The author's findings extend the implications of this work by explicating the social and collaborative processes by which users of public space come to trust each other to act like competent pedestrians.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 24, No. 3, 323-340 (1995)
http://jce.sagepub.com

JOCULARITY, SARCASM, AND RELATIONSHIPS: An Empirical Study
Mark A. Seckman & Carl J. Couch
We analyze the intertwinings of jocular and sarcastic transactions with solidary and authority relationships to demonstrate both how those transactions are contextualized by extant relationships and how they modify and affirm relationships. Jocularity is most commonly contextualized by solidary relationships and in turn invites or affirms solidary relationships. Sarcasm may be contextualized by either a solidary or authority relationship. Sarcastic transactions are commonly produced to comment on actions regarded as violations of extant relationships. We conclude that jocularity and sarcasm are significant forms of social action that are routinely used by people with robust relationships to affirm and modify social relationships.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 18, No. 3, 327-344 (1989)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Violent Encounters: Violent Engagements, Skirmishes, and Tiffs
Lonnie Athens
From the author’s study of violent and nonviolent offenders and nonoffenders’ accounts, he drew two main conclusions about the interaction that takes place between the perpetrator and victim when violent crimes are committed. First, these crimes are committed during violent encounters that encompass five stages: (1) role claiming, (2) role rejection, (3) role sparring, (4) role enforcement, and (5) role determination. Second, based on how many of these stages are completed, violent encounters can be divided into three subtypes: (1) engagements, (2) skirmishes, and (3) tiffs. Violent dominance encounters that go through all five stages constitute engagements, those that enter only four of the stages constitute skirmishes, and those that enter only three of the stages constitute tiffs. Thus, for any theory to provide a complete explanation of violent crimes, it must be able to account for not only violent engagements but also violent skirmishes and tiffs.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 34, No. 6, 631-678 (2005)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. Explain how the behaviors of individuals are influenced by others based upon what you have read in these articles.  Be specific and provide examples.

2. What are the commonalities between street interaction, joking and fighting?

3. How do these articles contribute to our understanding of concepts such as culture and norms?

» PBS Frontline Programs

The Storm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/storm/view/
This report examines the chain of decisions that slowed federal response to the calamity of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, government's failure to protect thousands of Americans from a natural disaster that long had been predicted, and the state of America's disaster-response system four years after 9/11.

1. What elements of the larger social structure can be observed in this program? Think in terms of statuses, roles, groups, organizations and social institutions. Can you find examples of role conflict?

2. What can we learn about norms and values of local and national culture from this case?

3. Explain the problem from each of the three major sociological perspectives.

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

318: With Great Power
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1153
This episode is focused on stories of power and responsibility. The first act is a story of a woman who possessed information that could free an innocent man from prison. The second act is the story of a mother and daughter in a family who wished for years they could do something to stop their neighbor from all kinds of shocking behavior. Suddenly they get the power to decisively change things forever and then they have to decide whether they will.

1. How was the behavior of the women in these stories influenced by the people around them?

2. How did statuses and roles factor into these situations?

3. Can you explain the stories in terms of one or more of the major sociological perspectives presented in the chapter? Be specific and provide details.

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

Situational Construction of Masculinity among Male Street Thieves
Heith Copes & Andy Hochstetler
Increasingly, theorists recognize that the influence of masculinity on decision making is situationally contingent and embedded in interactions. Using interviews with ninety-four male street thieves, the authors describe the situations that bring constructions of masculinity into the foreground of street crime. In certain situations, men are likely to engage in criminal behavior as a mechanism for constructing their masculinity. The authors find that hanging with criminally capable associates and partying are critically significant for understanding when masculine concerns bear on criminal decision making. In these situations, copresent others interpret inappropriate actions or responses as definitive signs of weakness, passivity, and failure in the struggle to be a man. They also examine how age and criminal experience shape conceptions of masculinity and the style of their enactment.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 32, No. 3,  279-304 (2003)
http://jce.sagepub.com

College Women and Sororities: The Social Construction and Reaffirmation of Gender Roles
Barbara J. Risman
 Gender socialization in urban societies is acknowledged to occur primarily in preadolescence Risman's analysis of one college sorority displays additional ways in which women adopt role-specific behaviors that are formally encouraged by both official regulations and informally shaped by cultural norms. Her data suggest that the socialization processes and the consequent roles may in fact be inappropriate for facilitating women's adaptation to a changing social environment.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 11, No. 2, 231-252 (1982)
http://jce.sagepub.com

"But I Am a Good Mom": The Social Construction of Motherhood through Health-Care Conversations
Rebecca W. Tardy
Examining the impact of health information seeking among informal, interpersonal networks, this article focuses specifically on the extent to which these conversations serve to identify role boundaries, specifically that of motherhood. Drawing on Goffman's work on region and regional behaviors, this ethnographic analysis of women in a moms and tots play group reveals boundaries between the public and private presentation of self. The regions of front stage, backstage, and "back"-backstage are used here to discuss how talk regarding health issues, and particularly inappropriate or taboo talk, defines and exemplifies the role of the "good" mother. The implications for the accessibility of information are discussed in light of the cultural contradictions women face in fulfilling this role.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 29, No. 4, 433-473 (2000)
http://jce.sagepub.com

 1. Can you observe any commonalities between the social construction of masculinity, femininity and motherhood discussed in these articles?  If so what?

 2. What type of research methods were used to conduct these studies?

» PBS Frontline Programs

News War
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/view/
This program examines the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the news media today and how the press has reacted in turn. Through interviews with key figures in print, broadcast and electronic media over the past four decades -- and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today's most important news organizations, the program traces the recent history of American journalism, from the Nixon administration's attacks on the media to the post-Watergate popularity of the press, to the new challenges presented by the war on terror and other global forces now changing—and challenging—the role of the press in our society

1. Use this program as a case study to explain how reality is socially constructed.

2. Can you find any examples of a self-fulfilling prophecy in this episode?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

328: What I Learned from Television
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1176
This program addresses the role of television in the lives of everyday people. It includes stories of how we watch television and what the images do to our understandings of the world around us. From a general sense of who we are and how we relate to others to such divergent topics as Thanksgiving and sexuality, the program explores the function of television in defining the world around us.

1. Based upon the story about the woman’s conception of Thanksgiving and the man’s sense of his own sexuality, explain the role that television can play in the social construction of reality.

2. Can you find comparable examples from your own life that fit into the stories from the program? If so, what are they and how do they relate?

3. How do language and culture fit into these stories?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

THE DRIVER: Adaptations and Identities in the Urban Worlds of Pizza Delivery Employees
Patrick T. Kinkade & Michael A. Katovich
This article explores the solidary relationships constructed between urban drivers as they take risks and experience dangers associated with pizza delivery. After one of the authors completed working as a driver and participating in drivers' backstage activities, we analyzed their arcane culture as composed of risk takers who receive minimal rewards. In this context, the world of drivers is "hypermasculine," with racist and sexist nuances, and composed of five identifiable types—the comedian, the adventurer, the denier, the fatalist, and the pro. In conclusion, we locate the driver in the context of urban associations where group membership is perceived as or more valuable than monetary rewards and control of time.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 33, No. 4, 406-436 (2004)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Rethinking Subcultural Resistance: Core Values of the Straight Edge Movement
Ross Haenfler
This article reconceptualizes subcultural resistance based on an ethnographic examination of the straight edge movement. Using the core values of straight edge, the author’s analysis builds on new subcultural theories and suggests a framework for how members construct and understand their subjective experiences of being a part of a subculture. He suggests that adherents hold both individual and collective meanings of resistance and express their resistance via personal and political methods. Furthermore, they consciously enact resistance at the micro, meso, and macro levels, not solely against an ambiguous "adult" culture. Resistance can no longer be conceptualized in neo-Marxist terms of changing the political or economic structure, as a rejection only of mainstream culture, or as symbolic stylistic expression. Resistance is contextual and many layered rather than static and uniform.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 33, No. 4, 406-436 (2004)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop
Jason Rodriquez
This article examines how white youths culturally appropriate hip-hop by adhering to the demands of color-blind ideology. Using ethnographic methods and interviews of members in a local hip-hop scene, I argue that colorblind ideology provides whites with the discursive resources to justify their presence in the scene, and more important, to appropriate hip-hop by removing the racially coded meanings embedded in the music and replacing them with color-blind ones. This research contributes to the existing scholarship on racial ideology by analyzing how it is put into action by individuals in a specific local context in which race is salient. Furthermore, it extends our understanding of how color-blind ideology operates in practice, enabling whites with the discursive resources and racial power to culturally appropriate hip-hop, however unintentionally, for their own purposes.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 35, No. 6, 645-668 (2006)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. Identify and describe each of the cultures presented in these articles?

2. What elements of material and nonmaterial culture do you observe in the articles?

3. Can you find examples of sanctions in the articles? If so, what are they?

» PBS Frontline Programs

The Mormons
http://www.pbs.org/mormons/view/
This program explores both the history and the current reality of the Mormon faith. The producers gained unusual access to Mormon archives and church leaders as well as dissident exiles, historians and scholars both within and outside the faith. The director explained that, "Through this film, I hope to take the viewer inside one of the most compelling and misunderstood religions of our time."

1. Explain the Mormons as a religious subculture.

2. What are their institutional norms? How do they impose sanctions?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

337: Man vs. History
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1199
This program presents stories about people taking history into their own hands. In the first act, a man with no practical experience hatches a plan to curb the violence in Iraq. He thought he could get the Sunni resistance to sit down with Coalition forces to negotiate a cease-fire. So he hooked up with a member of the Iraqi parliament and headed to Baghdad and Amman, where, remarkably, doors opened to him.

1. Do the activities of the man in the first act conform to or violate cultural norms? If so, how?

2. What role does cultural variation play in these stories?

3. Identify the cultural forces that are providing stability in these stories?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

Gang-Related Gun Violence: Socialization, Identity, and Self
Paul B. Stretesky & Mark R. Pogrebin
Few studies have examined how violent norms are transmitted in street gangs. The purpose of this research is to add to the gang-related literature by examining socialization as the mechanism between street gang membership and violence. To explore this issue, we draw upon in-depth interviews with twenty-two inmates convicted of gang-related gun violence. We find that the gangs are important agents of socialization that help shape a gang member’s sense of self and identity. In addition, inmates reported to us that whereas guns offered them protection, they were also important tools of impression management that helped to project and protect a tough reputation. Our findings provide greater insight into the way gang socialization leads to gun-related violence and has implications for policies aimed at reducing that violence.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 36, No. 1, 85-114 (2007)
http://jce.sagepub.com

"Shaking It Off" and "Toughing It Out": Socialization to Pain and Injury in Girls’ Softball
Nancy L. Malcom
Ignoring injuries and playing through pain are expected in organized sports. But how do novice athletes learn these social norms? Using participant-observation research focusing on adolescent girls who participated in recreational softball, this study reveals how the clash of norms between traditional femininity and the sport ethic sheds light on the socialization process. In addition to shaking off their own injuries, coaches ignored the girls’ complaints, made jokes when the girls experienced some pain, and told them directly to shake off their minor injuries. Even though many of the girls entered the activity with traditionally feminine attitudes toward pain, most conformed to the norms of the sport ethic and learned to deal with pain and injuries by "shaking them off" and "toughing them out." Those girls who were more enthusiastic about playing softball and who displayed stronger commitments to the softball-player identity were more likely to display these norms.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 35, No. 5, 495-525 (2006)
http://jce.sagepub.com

The Micropolitics of Identity in Adverse Circumstance: A Study of Identity Making in a Total Institution
Debora A. Paterniti
This article is about the micropolitics of identity construction by residents in a total institution. Data come from two hundred hours of participant observation during a four-month period of full-time employment as a nurse aide. Interactional analysis of observations suggests that residents' personal narratives, whether real or imagined, become who some residents conceive themselves to be and define residents' expectations for interactional others. Changes in institutional culture occur as staff begin to recognize in interaction the ways residents think of themselves. The narrative accounts and interactional struggles to define self that the author discovered in the institution are not unlike conceptions and processes of identity construction, maintenance, and change that confront all human actors. These accounts provide insight into the liberating possibilities of personal identity claims.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 29, No. 1,  93-119 (2000)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. Explain the processes of socialization documented in the articles.

2. How do the individuals in these articles negotiate their selves and identities?

» PBS Frontline Programs

The Soldier’s Heart
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heart/view/
This program explores the psychological cost of war and investigates whether the military is doing enough to help the many combat veterans coming home with emotional problems. With unprecedented access to active duty service members at Camp Pendleton, a Marine base in San Diego, and through interviews with mental health experts both in and out of the military and members of a Camp Pendleton support group, the program uncovers one of the underreported stories from the war in Iraq.

1. In this program, the soldier’s problems are explained psychologically. Can you explain them sociologically?

2. How has the experience of war affected their selves and identities? Do the soldiers give you any insights into the construction of a looking glass self? If so what are they?

3. How do you think their military socialization plays into the situation? What are the consequences of being in, and out of, a total institution (i.e., boot camp and the military in general) for the soldiers?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

109: Notes on Camp
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1192
This program presents stories of summer camp. Camp kids explain how their non-camp friends and their non-camp loved ones have no idea why camp is the most important thing in their lives.

1. Does summer camp seem like an important moment in the socialization of the kids who attend? Why or why not? If so, how?

2. How does camp affect the selves and identities of the young people in the stories?

3. What is the role of gender in the socialization experiences at camp?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

Discourses of Authenticity Within a Pagan Community: The Emergence of the "Fluffy Bunny" Sanction
Angela Coco & Ian Woodward
The commodification of the religious impulse finds its most overt expression in the New Age movement and its subculture neopaganism. This article examines discourses in the pagan community in an Australian state. Pagans, who have been characterized as individualist, eclectic, and diverse in their beliefs and practices, network through electronic mail discussion lists and chat forums as well as through local and national offline gatherings. We explore community building and boundary defining communications in these discourses. In particular, we examine interactions that reveal the mobilization of pagans' concern with authenticity in the context of late-capitalism, consumer lifestyles, and media representations of the "craft." Our analysis highlights a series of tensions in pagans' representations of and engagement with consumer culture which are evident in everyday pagan discourse. These notions of in/authenticity are captured by invoking the "fluffy bunny" sanction.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 36, No. 5, 479-504 (2007)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Mothering, Crime, And Incarceration
Kathleen J. Ferraro & Angela M. Moe
This article examines the relationships between mothering, crime, and incarceration through the narratives of thirty women incarcerated in a southwestern county jail. The responsibilities of child care, combined with the burdens of economic marginality and domestic violence, led some women to choose economic crimes or drug dealing as an alternative to hunger and homelessness. Other women, arrested for drug- or alcohol-related crimes, related their offenses to the psychological pain and despair resulting from loss of custody of their children. Many women were incarcerated for minor probation violations that often related to the conflict between work, child care, and probation requirements. For all women with children, mothering represented both the burdens of an unequal sexual division of labor and opportunities for resistance to marginalization and hopelessness.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 32, No. 1, 9-40 (2003)
http://jce.sagepub.com

"You’re Not a Stone": Emotional Sensitivity in a Bureaucratic Setting
Robert Garot
Although the emotion management perspective dominates the micro-sociological study of emotions, a phenomenological approach provides access to phenomena that are inaccessible through emotion management. While the former shows the strategic management of one’s emotions to conform to norms, the latter reveals the myriad ways in which emotions move us. Indeed, if not for the poignant resonance of emotions in social life, emotions would hardly be worth "managing." This article will employ a phenomenological perspective on emotions as they were expressed by applicants and workers in a Section 8 housing office throughout the course of eligibility interviews. I will show that despite giving off an impression of detachment and neutrality, workers are unavoidably sensitive to the emotional displays of applicants. Hence, a research agenda focusing on interpersonal emotional sensitivity is proposed as a complement to the conceptualization of emotions as managed.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 33, No. 6, 735-766 (2004)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. What type of impression management do you observe in these articles?

2. How are performance teams utilized in these contexts?

3. What steps do individuals take in order to fit into their social contexts in these articles?

» PBS Frontline Programs

A Hidden Life
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hiddenlife/view/
In May 2005, readers of Spokane's Spokesman-Review awoke to a startling story: Spokane's Republican mayor Jim West had been leading a double life. In public, he was a conservative politician who had co-sponsored legislation forbidding gays from teaching in public schools. But in private, the paper reported, West spent hours trolling for young men on the Internet, sometimes using the trappings of his office as bait to lure them into more intimate relationships. The story briefly made national headlines and ultimately destroyed West's political career. This program looks beyond the headlines to find a story that is much less clear than it initially seemed. Featuring access to all sides of the story and close readings of the mayor's Internet chats and other documents, the program examines a man's struggle with his sexual identity, a newspaper's controversial online sting, and the growing tension between a politician's private life and the public's right to know in an age of online communications.

1. Explain the story of Jim West dramaturgically in terms of the dynamic between front stage and back stage?

2. What techniques of impression management were employed in this case? Were there performance teams? If so, what were they and who comprised them? Can you find examples of accounts, aligning actions or cooling out in the program?

3. Use this program as a case study to explain the link between social problems and private troubles.

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

121: Twentieth Century Man
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1207
One thing that makes our country different from most others is this idea that you can recreate yourself as someone you'd prefer to be: sell everything off, head out West, start a new life. But what happens if you're too good at it? Over the course of his life, Keith Aldrich was a child of the Depression in Oklahoma; a preacher-in-training in booming California; an aspiring Hollywood actor; in the 1950s, a self-styled Beat writer, and then a man in a gray flannel suit; in the 1960s, a member of the New York literati, and then a hippie; in the 1970s, a denizen of the suburbs with a partying life; and a born-again Christian when the Moral Majority helped put Ronald Reagan in office. The program is devoted to the story of Keith's life, as told by one of his nine children, Gillian Aldrich. Keith's life is not only a history of most of the major cultural shifts in the second half of the Twentieth Century. It's also a case study of the question, "What happens if you're too good at transforming yourself?"

1. Detail the various presentation of selves that Keith negotiates through his life.

2. Explain Keith’s life in dramaturgical terms. Describe his attempts at impression management in front and backstage regions.

3. Can you find examples of stigma and stigma management in this program?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

Baseball Wives: Gender and the Work of Baseball
George Gmelch  & Patricia Mary San Antonio
This article focuses on how the structure and constraints of the occupation of professional baseball shapes the lives of the players' wives. The major constraints on the role of baseball wives include high geographical mobility, the husband's frequent absence, lack of a social support network, and the precariousness of baseball careers. Baseball wives are expected to fulfill a traditional role of support for their husbands and families. Baseball wives play a backstage supporting role but in so doing become far more independent and resourceful than many American women, managing families and households on their own.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 30, No. 3, 335-356 (2001)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Black Single Fathers: Choosing to Parent Full-Time
Roberta L. Coles
This ethnographic study uses the narratives of African American, single, full-time fathers to explore the motivations precipitating their choice to parent. While the fathers had in common a number of demographic characteristics, such as full employment, residence, and support systems, which factored into their timing of and ability to take full custody, none of these are salient in their own narratives expressing why they wanted to be full-time fathers. Instead, their main motives centered on fulfilling a sense of duty and responsibility, reworking the effects of having had weak or absent fathers themselves, wanting to provide a role model for their children, and fulfilling an already established parent-child bond.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 31, No. 4, 411-439 (2002)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Sisters and Friends: Dialogue and Multivocality in a Relational Model of Sibling Disability
Christine S. Davis & Kathleen A. Salkin 
This article takes the reader into a journey of family dynamics, as sisters— one with a physical impairment and the other the sibling of a woman with a physical impairment—try to sort out their feelings and experiences through in-depth interviewing, interactive interviewing, co-constructed narrative, and dialogic conversation. There is little research that looks at the relationship between the sibling with a disability and his or her nondisabled sibling as it is experienced by the two of them. This article engages the siblings, and, perhaps, the readers, into a dialogic conversation that is multivocal, inclusive, and accepting of differences.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 34, No. 2, 206-234 (2005)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. How do religious background, race and ethnicity, as well as social class affect the intimate choices discussed in these articles?

2. What do these articles reflect about family life? How do they relate to the contemporary definition of family?

 3. How is the influence of economics, religion, law and politics, presented in these articles?

» PBS Frontline Programs

The Farmer’s Wife
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/farmerswife/
This program takes us deep inside the passionate, yet troubled marriage of Juanita and Darrel Buschkoetter, a young farm couple in rural Nebraska facing the loss of everything they hold dear. It recounts the moving story of Juanita and Darrel's romantic love affair and begins the journey to the core of their emotional struggles, which have pushed their marriage to the brink.

1. What is the impact of social class on this family?

2. How do they fit into the model of the traditional family? How does the normalization of divorce factor into their situation?

3. How is the family affected by economic forces?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

183: The Missing Parents Bureau
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1184
In the first act of this program the reporter talks with single women who are planning to get pregnant with the help of a sperm bank and finds that they all wrestle with the question of how much they want to know about the fathers of their kids—and how much they want their kids to know. The second act is a collection of letters written by a woman who signs her name as "X" and are addressed to the father of her adolescent son. X has no idea where to send the letters, but she keeps writing. The third act is the story of a girl in an acting class that includes an exercises requiring her to develop a character with a troubled past, and then a real psychologist would come in for a session of character group therapy. The girl chose to take on the character of an orphan. In fact, she remembers that everyone else in her class did too. Twenty years later, she visits her old acting teacher and discovers that for some reason, kids today don't want to be orphans.  The final act is the story of two men who adopt a child and the relationship they all have with the mother.

1. How does the lack of biological parents affect the definitions of family in these stories?

2. How are the situations of the children in the stories influenced by the broader social institutions?

3. How do these stories relate to our mythology of family life?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

Criticism as Deviance and Social Control in Alcoholics Anonymous
Heath C. Hoffmann
Emile Durkheim recognized many years ago that all groups—even a "society of saints"—produce deviants. Group members must then come to terms with how to respond to and control those who violate the group's moral order. The Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting offers an interesting context to explore this process. AA members, by their own admission, are far from being "saints," some admitting to adultery, theft, and assault during their active alcoholism. In this article, the author describes the moral order of AA that functions to prevent and create deviant behavior, focusing on AA members’ use of criticism as both a method of social control and a violation of AA's normative system. This seeming contradiction is explained by showing that criticism is a social control strategy available primarily to high-status members, used primarily against lower-status members.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 35, No. 6, 669-695 (2006)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Constructing Coercion: The Organization of Sexual Assault
Brian A. Monahan, Joseph A. Marolla, & David G. Bromley
There is an abundance of research on how perpetrators organize and orchestrate their activity during the commission of burglary, robbery, and homicide. By contrast, there is very little research on how perpetrators organize sexual assaults. Based on interviews with 33 incarcerated rapists who acted alone and had little or no prior social connection to their victims, we describe rape events in terms of a sequential series of phases that are analogous to those employed to analyze homicides and robbery. The five phases of the kind of rape events we describe include (1) preexisting life tensions, (2) transformation of motivation into action, (3) perpetrator-victim confrontation, (4) situation management, and (5) disengagement. We also argue that within these five phases, perpetrators exhibit differential awareness of their own actions, apply divergent meanings to apparently similar actions, and engage in different degrees and types of organization
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 34, No. 3, 284-316 (2005)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Embodied Surveillance And The Gendering Of Punishment
Jill A. McCorkel
 This ethnography explores the enactment of "get tough" politics in a state prison for women and considers whether the implementation of seemingly gender-neutral programs and policies implies that women’s prisons are no longer operating as "gendered organizations." The author will demonstrate that even when women’s prisons attempt to mimic the disciplinary policies associated with men’s facilities, they modify disciplinary practices in response to perceived differences in offending between men and women. A crucial modification is the use of an "embodied surveillance" that sharply differs from Foucault’s analysis of penal surveillance mechanisms. The article concludes with an analysis of how the practice of an embodied surveillance is embedded within a larger structure of gendered punishment.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 32, No. 1, 41-76 (2003)
http://jce.sagepub.com

 1. Do these articles seem to be written from absolutist or relativist perspectives on deviance?  Explain why?

 2. Can you find support for either deterrence or labeling theory in these articles?  Explain?

» PBS Frontline Programs

The New Asylums
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/view/
This program provides a look deep inside Ohio's state prison system to explore the complex and growing issue of mentally ill prisoners. With unprecedented access to prison therapy sessions, mental health treatment meetings crisis wards, and prison disciplinary tribunals, the episode provides a poignant and disturbing portrait of the new reality for the mentally ill.

1. Explain what you see in this program in terms of the three elements of deviance?

2. How do power and labeling play into the situation presented in this program? Is deviance depoliticized in this context?

3. Explain how this situation fits into either, or both, of the models of criminalization or medicalization?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

207: Special Ed
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1198
This program is composed of stories about people who were told that they're different. Some of them were comfortable with it. Some didn't understand it. And some understood, but didn't like it.  Act one is a series of interviews with three of the people involved in making the documentary How’s Your News?, about a team of developmentally disabled people who travel across the country doing man-on-the-street interviews. The interviewer talks to two of the developmentally disabled reporters, Susan Harrington and Joe Simon, and to the film's non-disabled director, Arthur Bradford. Act two we hear from a mother and her son. By age seven, he'd had heart failure and been diagnosed as bipolar. And then—after a period as the world's youngest Stephen Hawking fan—he got better.  In the third act a woman tells the story of her developmentally disabled brother Vincent, who one day quit his job and then quit everything else, mystifying everyone in his life.

1. Can you find the three elements of deviance in any of these stories?

2. Explain the function of labels in these stories.

3. Are there examples of the medicalization of deviance in these stories?  What are they?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

The Muncie Race Riots Of 1967, Representing Community Memory Through Public Performance, And Collaborative Ethnography Between Faculty, Students, And The Local Community
Lee Papa & Luke Eric Lassiter
 In October 1967, a footnote in the larger national struggle over civil rights for African Americans occurred at Southside High School in Muncie, Indiana. On the nineteenth, a fight broke out between about 100 black and white students in the halls of the school, where the football team was named the "Rebels," and a modified Confederate flag flew just in front of the building. In spring 2001, a group of Ball State University faculty and students along with a group of more than thirty consultants from the Muncie community engaged in a collaborative ethnographic project to present the community’s memory of the event as a theatrical performance. This essay details this process as well as its consequences for practicing reciprocal and collaborative representation.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 32, No. 2, 147-166 (2003)
http://jce.sagepub.com

From Appearance Tales to Oppression Tales: Frame Alignment and Organizational Identity
Daniel D. Martin
Based on participant observation and taped interviews with participants and leaders in Weight Watchers, Overeaters Anonymous, and the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), this article considers how organizations accomplish frame alignment with their members. All three organizations construct frames of meanings concerning participation, appearance, and food that reflect their own objectives. However, these frames must be aligned with members' own meanings, which, at times, contradict the organizational frame. Frame alignment is accomplished in Weight Watchers by group leaders emphasizing rationality with regards to food, body, and social relationships. Within Overeaters Anonymous, a redemptive frame is constructed that transforms the dieting practices of its members into a spiritual activity. The injustice frame of NAAFA transforms mundane aspects of everyday life, such as eating, into a political activity. As all members adopt the meanings of their respective program, they come to embrace a new personal identity that serves the organization.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 31, No. 2, 158-206 (2002)
http://jce.sagepub.com

INTERACTION NORMS AS CARRIERS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE: A Study of Labor Negotiations at International Harvester
Raymond A. Friedman
 Too often, practitioners and theorists alike have tended to locate organizational culture in the mottoes and symbolic acts of top managers and to attribute to those leaders the ability to change and manage meaning from visible, yet distant, perches on the organizational chart. By contrast, I propose that the study of organizational culture focus on the networks of social interaction that constitute organizational life, and the rituals that support those interactions. This perspective is derived from an analysis of International Harvester's six-month-long UAW strike in 1979. In this case, management tried to redefine the established labor-relations culture by eliminating those managers who carried and reproduced that culture, but in doing so they also eliminated the company's knowledge of the subtle interaction rituals that had guided and supported labor negotiations. This, I argue, was a major factor contributing to the breakdown of negotiations at IH in 1979.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 18, No. 1, 3-29 (1989)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. How is the larger social structure affecting the lives of the people discussed in these articles?

2. Can you use your understanding of social dilemmas to explain what you have read in the articles? How?

3. Do the elements of bureaucracy play into what is presented in these articles?

» PBS Frontline Programs

Is Wal-Mart Good For America?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/view/
This program explores the relationship between U.S. job losses and the American consumer's insatiable desire for bargains. Through interviews with retail executives, product manufacturers, economists, and trade experts, correspondent the program examines the growing controversy over the Wal-Mart way of doing business and asks whether a single retail giant has changed the American economy.

1. Use what is presented in the program to explain the processes of globalization. Be specific and give examples.

2. Can the impact of Wal-Mart on society be described as a social dilemma such as the tragedy of the commons? How or why not?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

215: Ask An Expert
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=215
Act One of this program reports on the "Recovered Memory" movement. In the early 1990s people across America turned to experts in psychology for help and many people were told that the source of their problems could be traced to traumatic events they could not even remember, to memories that had to be recovered through special techniques. In the last ten years, this whole approach to psychology has fallen out of favor. So what happened that so many experts came to believe in a treatment that turned out to make many of their patients worse, not better and what happened when the patients and therapists figured all this out?

1. Can you explain the recovered memory situation as a social dilemma?

2. What bureaucratic elements are making this situation possible?

3. Use this episode to explain how organizational reality is created?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

Day Care Differences and the Reproduction of Social Class
Margaret K. Nelson & Rebecca Schutz
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in two day care centers—the Green Mountain Child Care Center in College Town, Vermont, and the Rocky Mountain Christian Day Care in Coalville, Wyoming—the authors demonstrate differences between centers serving different segments of the population. The authors rely on Annette Lareau's (2003) concepts of "concerted cultivation" and the "accomplishment of natural growth" as a way to describe these differences. The authors then reflect on the potential consequences of different styles of child care for the skills, attitudes, and orientations developed by young children.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 36, No. 3, 281-317 (2007)
http://jce.sagepub.com

A Place in Town: Doing Class in a Coffee Shop
Carrie Yodanis
How do socioeconomic differences take on meaning in our daily interactions? Each morning for a summer I joined nine women in a coffee shop in a small rural town. In this public setting, I observed how women "do" class. During interaction, women use work, family, and leisure-related behaviors, values, and tastes associated with socioeconomic positions in the process of class categorization. No set hierarchy results from this process, however. Rather, what emerges from the Coffee Shop is that doing class involves an ongoing struggle to situate one’s own class category higher, not lower, than the others.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 35, No. 3, 341-366 (2006)
http://jce.sagepub.com

The Challenge of Self-sufficiency: Women on Welfare Redefining Independence
Margaret K. Nelson
Drawing on interviews conducted with fifty-one single mothers in a rural state, this article explores how women who rely on state assistance sustain a belief in their own self-worth. The article first shows that single mothers hold firmly to the value of self-sufficiency. It then shows that they can hold to that value because they believe that their welfare reliance is different from that of other women and because they redefine independence to allow for acts that might normally be understood to challenge that norm. The findings are compared to those in other studies that cover some of the same issues. The discussion draws on three levels of context for interpreting the findings: the current discourse concerning single mothers and, more specifically, welfare recipients; the client stance that develops among those who deal with bureaucracies; and, finally, the interview situation itself.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 31, No. 5, 582-614 (2002)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. How were the distinctions between classes negotiated by the people in these articles?

2. What elements of stratification are addressed in these articles? 

3. Is there anything to support the culture of poverty thesis in these articles?

» PBS Frontline Programs

A Dangerous Business
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/workplace/view/
This program examines one of the most dangerous companies in America. In iron foundries danger is everywhere and demands on workers are relentless. And in this very dangerous business, where they make the water and sewer pipes essential to our lives, there is one company whose production, the government says, has left a trail of death and dismemberment. But even when workers have been killed the company continued to put employees at risk. And the government has few tools to stop them. With foundries stretching across 10 states and Canada, over the last 7 years the company has amassed more safety violations than all its major competitors combined. Privately owned by one of the wealthiest families in the country it is called the McWane corporation. This program is a report on how thousands of employees and neighboring communities in the United States and Canada have been repeatedly put at risk by a company in a dangerous business.

1. How do the situations of the workers at the McWane plant fit into the discussion of the social class system from the text?

2. Discuss the McWane story from a structural-functionalist perspective.

3. Use a Marxist class model to explain the circumstances surrounding the McWane story?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

331: Habeas Schmabeas 2007
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1185
The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country's legal tradition longer than we've actually been a country. It means that our government has to explain why it's holding a person in custody. But now, the War on Terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that prisoners should not be covered by habeas—or even by the Geneva Conventions—because they're the most fearsome enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes? In Act one, Jack Hitt explains how President Bush's War on Terror changed the rules for prisoners of war and how it is that under those rules, it'd be possible that someone whose classified file declares that they pose no threat to the United States could still be locked up indefinitely—potentially forever!—at Guantanamo.  Act two explains that Habeas corpus began in England. And recently, 175 members of the British parliament filed a "friend of the court" brief in one of the U.S. Supreme Court cases on habeas and Guantanamo—apparently, the first time in Supreme Court history that's happened. In their brief, the members of Parliament warn about the danger of suspending habeas: "During the British Civil War, the British created their own version of Guantanamo Bay and dispatched undesirable prisoners to garrisons off the mainland, beyond the reach of habeas corpus relief." In London, reporter Jon Ronson, goes in search of what happened. Act three explains that though more than 200 prisoners from the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay have been released, few of them have ever been interviewed on radio or on television in America. Jack Hitt conducts rare and surprising interviews with two former Guantanamo detainees about life in Guantanamo.

1. How does the class system factor into the situation at Guantanamo Bay?

2. Explain the issue form both conflict and structural-functionalist perspectives?

3. Use this story to explain stratification on a global level?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

Negotiating from the Inside: Constructing Racial and Ethnic Identity in Qualitative Research
Lelia Lomba De Andrade
This article provides a critical analysis of the role of the "insider" researcher in qualitative fieldwork in race and ethnicity. The analysis is based on research conducted on the construction of racial and ethnic identity in the Cape Verdean American community of southeastern New England. Reflections are presented on the various ways that the researcher's status as an "insider" was evaluated and negotiated during fieldwork. It is suggested that these negotiations reveal the manner in which group members define the boundaries of the group, the attributes they associate with it, and the meaning of the group itself. This interpretation of insider status, as involving complex and ongoing definitions and negotiations of group membership, highlights the way that researchers and participants are simultaneously engaged in the construction of race and ethnicity.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 29, No. 3, 268-290 (2000)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Ethnic Inclusion and Exclusion: Managing the Language of Hispanic Integration in a Rural Community
David S. Sizemore
This article is part of a larger qualitative project on the processes of Hispanic social integration in a rural Southern Illinois community. Findings indicate that Anglo insiders and outsiders describe the changes associated with Hispanic settlement by using a dualistic language of ethnocentrism and paternalism. I suggest that the discourse of inclusion is double edged because (1) it treads lightly on the sensitive nature of interethnic relations so that no one is offended, yet (2) it allows for the sentiment, especially among Anglos, that this is "our country" and Hispanics should "fit-in." A complex language of quasi-ethnocentrism is in operation that allows for Hispanic incorporation but only to the extent that it is "fair" and not based on "special" ethnic considerations. Building on critical race theory and other linguistic frameworks, several theoretical approaches are employed to understand the relationship between normative exclusion, language, paternalism, and ethnicity.
http://jce.sagepub.com
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 33, No. 5,  534-570 (2004)

White Means Never Having to Say You're Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of "Cultureless" Identities
Pamela Perry
This article examines the processes by which white identities are constructed as "cultureless" among white youth in two high schools: one predominantly white, the other multiracial. The author proposes that whites assert racial superiority by claiming they have no culture because to be cultureless implies that one is either the "norm" (the standard by which others are judged) or "rational" (developmentally advanced). Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, the author argues that in the majority-white school, processes of naturalization—the embedding of historically constituted practices in what feels "normal" and natural—produced feelings of cultural lack among white students. Contrarily, at the multiracial school, tracking and add-on multiculturalism helped constitute cultureless identities through processes of rationalization—the embedding of whiteness within a Western rational paradigm that subordinates all things cultural. The implications of these findings for critical white studies, sociology of education, and racial identity formation are discussed.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 30, No. 1, 56-91 (2001)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. What commonalities can you find in how race and ethnicity factor into the construction of identities in the articles?

2. Can you find examples of quiet racism in these articles?  What are they?

3. Explain racial transparency as explained in the third article.

» PBS Frontline Programs

The O.J. Verdict
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/oj/view/
On October 3, 1995, an estimated 150 million people stopped what they were doing to witness the televised verdict of the O.J. Simpson trial. For more than a year, the O.J. saga transfixed the nation and dominated the public imagination. Ten years later, this program revisits the "perfect storm" that was the O.J. Simpson trial. Through extensive interviews with the defense, prosecution and journalists, the program explores the verdict -- which, more than any other in recent history, measured the difference between being white and black in America.

1. Can you find expressions of prejudice and racism in this case? What stereotypes were exploited?

2. How did institutional racism factor into the different reactions to the Simpson verdict?

3. Use examples from the program to explain the concept of quiet racism?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

72: Trek
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=72
This program is an idiosyncratic first-person travelogue about race relations and tourism in the new South Africa.  The interracial producers of the program travel through the still mostly-segregated society and have very different opinions about what they see, especially when it comes to some distant relatives of the white correspondent’s in South Africa.

1. How do personal racism and stereotypes factor into this story?

2. What types of prejudice and discrimination can you observe in this story?

3. Explain the institutional racism that you observe in this story.

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

The Dialectical Gaze: Exploring the Subject-Object Tension in the Performances of Women who Strip
Alexandra G. Murphy
Much of past research on female exotic dance has characterized strippers as deviant workers who are either passive, objectified victims of a sexploitation system that trades on their bodies for financial gain or as active subjects who work the exchange for their own benefit. Drawing on theories of power, performance, and communication, this work complicates the subject-object tension, showing how power circulates through a system of competing discursive relationships forming a dialectic of agency and constraint in which strippers are simultaneously subjects and objects. The author presents ethnographic data of how strippers discursively negotiate the ambivalence and contradictions they experience during their interactions with customers, management, and their families. Finally, this work concludes that given the need for all women to perform their prescribed gender in the course of their everyday lives, the occupation of the exotic dancer may not be as deviant as previously defined.
http://jce.sagepub.com
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 32, No. 3, 305-335 (2003)

A Vicious Oval: Why Women Seldom Reach the Top in American Harness Racing
Elizabeth A. Larsen
This article explores the gendered contradictions of visibility for self-employed women in male-dominated occupations. It provides a link between the extant literature on women’s workplace issues with visibility and the recent, dramatic increase in self-employed women, especially those who work in male-dominated fields. The author uses a harness-horse racetrack as the site for exploring the social mechanisms behind the invisibility and negative visibility experienced by these women in their work. Through an ethnographic study of their daily work experiences, an insidious pattern of events surfaced in which every path leads to the same endpoint: the underutilization of self-employed women in a male-dominated field. This article also explores the social processes and pressures that lead these women to contribute to their own oppression in male-dominated fields.
http://jce.sagepub.com
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 35, No. 2, 119-147 (2006)

Doing Gender as Resistance: Waitresses and Servers in Contemporary Table Service
Chauntelle Anne Tibbals
This article examines the different ways in which "waitresses" in a traditional restaurant setting and "servers" in a routinized and standardized corporate restaurant setting "do gender" in the workplace. Whereas waitresses are permitted interpretative use of gender in the workplace, the goals and ideologies of the corporate restaurant limit servers' use of gender in the workplace. My findings suggest that normatively accepted versions of gender can be done as a method of resistance, rather than conformity, in standardized and routinized workplace settings. These conclusions are informed by ethnographic research conducted over twenty-two months in two different Los Angeles area restaurants.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 36, No. 6, 731-751 (2007)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. How are the women in these articles suffering from and/or resisting sexism?

2. Is a sentiment of comparable worth present among the subjects of these articles? Explain how?

3. What is the role of the patriarchy in these situations?

» PBS Frontline Programs

American Porn
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/view/
This program reports on the forces behind the explosion of sexually explicit material available in American society. Through interviews with adult entertainment executives and lawyers, porn producers and directors, federal and state prosecutors, anti-porn activists and a Wall Street analyst covering the entertainment industry, the program examines the business ties between respected corporations and porn companies, the rise of extreme hardcore porn, and the pending political battle that may soon engulf the multibillion-dollar pornography industry.

1. Use what you observe in the program to explain the process of objectification. Be specific and give examples.

2. Explain the connection between pornography and rape as presented in the program.

3. Does pornography, as presented in this program, lead to the devaluation of women? Why or why not?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

15: Dawn
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=15
In this program a writer goes on a search for a mysterious neighbor from his childhood in Charleston, South Carolina, and stumbles onto an epic story of the Old South, the New South, gender confusion, Chihuahuas, and changing values in American journalism.
This program documents his quest to find out the truth about the man who lived down the street from him 30 years ago in South Carolina: Gordon Langley Hall, a.k.a. Dawn Langley Hall Simmons. Gordon was rumored to have had one of the first sex change operations in America, then to have married a black man, then to have borne the black man's child. It was said he had a full coming-out party for his Chihuahua. It was said he had voodoo powers. The reporter sets out to find what was true and what was rumor about Gordon Langley Hall, and stumbles onto a sprawling story about changing culture morés in America.

1. Was Gordon/Dawn objectified? If so, explain how?

2. Explain this story in terms of institutional sexism.

3. Are there examples of personal sexism in this story?  If so, what?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

From Pi to Pie: Moral Narratives of Noneconomic Migration and Starting Over in the Postindustrial Midwest
Brian A. Hoey
Research introduced here examines the impact of social and structural transitions during the past three decades on middle-class working families in the United States. Through the telling narrative of an especially iconic case of urban-to-rural migration and career change, this article explores the meaning of relocation away from metropolitan areas and corporate careers to growing ex-urban, small-town communities. The author interprets this life-style migration as a manner of personally negotiating tension between experience of material demands in pursuit of a livelihood within the flexible New Economy and prevailing cultural conventions for the good life that shape the moral narratives that define individual character. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research involving interview and observation of recent migrants to Northern Michigan, this article contributes to our understanding of noneconomic migration and its part in the changing moral meanings of work in postindustrial America.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 34, No. 5, 586-624 (2005)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Slantwise: Beyond Domination and Resistance on the Border
Howard Campbell & Josiah Heyman
Drawing on extensive participant observation and interviews concerned with barriers to census enumeration in colonias (irregular migrant settlements along the United States-Mexico border) and Mexican migration to the United States, we argue that recent ethnography has overemphasized the role of domination and resistance. While power is fundamental to cultural analysis, we also need to examine behavior we call slantwise, that is, actions that are obliquely or only indirectly related to power relations. Ethnographic fieldwork from both sides of the United States-Mexico border uncovered a range of behaviors (including unorthodox building techniques in colonies, hybrid language practices, complex and fluid household structures, nonlinear mobility patterns, and unpredictable political loyalties of migrants) that do not fit neatly into the domination-resistance axis. We argue for the relevance of the slant-wise concept for understanding such behaviors, not as a replacement for studies of naturalized domination and resistance, but as a complement to them.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 36, No. 1, 3-30 (2007)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Contradictory Assumptions in the Minimum-Wage Workplace: A Focus on Immigrants, the American-Born, and Employer Preferences in Brooklyn, New York
Jennifer Parker Talwar
A study of fast-food restaurants in Brooklyn, New York, examines factors contributing to inner-city racial minorities' under representation in low wage consumer-service jobs. Stressing the importance of "geocultural context" and workplace social relations, it helps broaden the framework around other qualitative studies attempting to understand race and ethnic patterns in the growing service-based economy. Findings demonstrate a hiring preference for the foreign-born, shaped by factors rooted in both the neighborhood context and the workplace. In-depth assessment of workplace interactions and conflicts reveals a set of contradictory assumptions between managers and employees, contributing to a "self-fulfilling prophecy" and reduced employment rates among American-born racial minorities.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 30, No. 1, 92-127 (2001)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. What is the affect of demographic transition on how people are constructing identities in the articles?

2. Can you find examples of cohort effect in these articles?

3. Do these articles provide insight into how migration is spurred on by larger social forces?  If so what are they and how do they function?

» PBS Frontline Programs

Living Old
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/livingold/view/
For the first time in American history, those over the age of 85 are now the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population. Medical advances have enabled an unprecedented number of Americans to live longer, healthier lives. But for millions of elderly, living longer can also mean a debilitating physical decline that often requires an immense amount of care. And just as more care is needed, fewer caregivers are available to provide it. This program investigates this national crisis and explores the new realities of aging in America.

1. How does this program fit with what you have read in the chapter?

2. What impacts of age structure can you observe in the program?

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

179: Cicero
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=179
This program tells the story of a town that time forgot, or more accurately, a town that tried to forget the times. It's the story of what at one time was one of most notoriously racist and corrupt suburbs in America. In the 1960s, Cicero residents reacted so violently to threats of integration that officials told Martin Luther King, Jr.'s supporters that marching there would be a suicide mission. Today, two-thirds of the population is Mexican-American, but the political machine from decades past still holds power. A parable of racial politics in America, of white Americans not wanting change, not wanting to let in the outside world, and what happens when they have no choice.

1. What is the effect of migration on this city?

2. Explain the demographic transition of the city?

3. Can you find a period effect in this story?

» Learning From SAGE Journal Articles

IDENTITY TALK IN THE PEACE AND JUSTICE MOVEMENT
Scott A. Hunt & Robert D. Benford
 This article examines identity talk in several peace movement organizations from 1982 to 1991. Identity talk directs attention to how identity discourse concretizes activists' perceptions of social movement dramas, demonstrates personal identity, reconstructs individuals' biographies, imputes group identities, and aligns personal and collective identities. Six types of identity talk are identified and illustrated: associational declarations, disillusionment anecdotes, atrocity tales, personal is political reports, guide narratives, and war stories. These stories revolve around the themes of becoming aware, active, committed, and weary. Suggestions are offered for possible future research.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 22, No. 4, 488-517 (1994)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Emotionality and Social Activism: A Case Study of a Community Development Effort to Establish a Shelter for Women in Ontario
Ruth M. Mann
This article addresses the dynamics and consequences of emotionality in social movement activity through a case study of a community development effort to establish a shelter for women in a small Ontario community in the early 1990s. From the perspective of involved actors, the shelter-building initiative took on "a life of its own," producing outcomes that contravened their goals and values, as community workers and as feminists. These included two eventualities that shelter activists were particularly anxious to avoid—an "us-against-them" vilification of a male "opposition" and the stigmatization of abused women as a "problem population." Theoretical work on the interplay of social structures, cultural repertoires, and the emotionality of the self provides insight into how and why such seemingly "irrational" processes evolve.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 31, No. 3, 251-284 (2002)
http://jce.sagepub.com

Revolutionaries, Wanderers, Converts, and Compliants: Life Histories of Extreme Right Activists
Annette Linden & Bert Klandermans
Life-history interviews were conducted with thirty-six extreme right activists in the Netherlands (1996-1998). Becoming an activist was a matter of continuity, of conversion, or of compliance. Continuity denotes life histories wherein movement membership and participation are a natural consequence of prior political socialization; conversion to trajectories wherein movement membership and participation are a break with the past; and compliance to when people enter activism, not owing to personal desires but because of circumstances they deemed were beyond their control. Stories of continuity in our interviews were either testimonies of lifetimes of commitment to extreme right politics (labeled revolutionaries) or lifelong journeys from one political shelter to the other by political wanderers (labeled converts). Activists who told us conversion stories, we labeled converts and those who told compliance stories, compliants. The article presents a prototypical example of each type of career and suggests each prototype to hold for different motivational dynamics.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 36, No. 2, 184-201 (2007)
http://jce.sagepub.com

1. What is the role of ideology in these articles?

2. How are roles within social movements linked with identity?

3. Explain the movements presented in each article as either reform, revolution or counter movement.

» PBS Frontline Programs

Tank Man
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/view/
In this episode the producers go to China in search of the single, unarmed young man who, On June 5, 1989, one day after the Chinese army's deadly crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, stood his ground before a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Captured on film and video by Western journalists, this extraordinary confrontation became, an icon of the struggle for freedom around the world. The program asks: Who was he? What was his fate? And what does he mean for a China that today has become a global economic powerhouse?

1. Use your sociological imagination to explain the link between the individual and society that is central to this episode.

2. Note and describe the social forces at work in the situation presented in the video. What role does ideology play in this context?

3. Find examples from the video that illustrate reform, revolutionary and counter movements.

» NPR's "This American Life" Programs

336: Who Can You Save?
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1196
Act one focuses on the hypothetical scenario that there's a group of five people standing on a train track, and you're on a train coming toward them. You can save the whole group by pulling a lever and switching to another track, but the catch is that you'll kill another person who's standing on that other track. Do you pull the lever? According to a Harvard scientist, who posed this question to hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet, nine out of 10 people say yes, they would pull the lever. But then, the questions get harder—and the answers much more confusing. It turns out that different parts of our brains make different moral decisions. Act two is about the, moment when the U.S. government sent out a call for volunteers—regular, non-military people—to go to Iraq and help rebuild the country, Randy Frescoln signed up. He believed in the cause of the war and in the promise of its mission. He had experience setting up agriculture projects overseas, so was sent to the Sunni Triangle to try to reconstruct the broken economy there. But three months into his yearlong assignment, he comes to a horrible realization: the people he's trying to help hate him. In Act three, Brady Udall tells the story of the time he helped a stranger get his car out of a ditch. In exchange, the man promises to help him any time, for any reason—legal or not. Brady carries the man's card in his wallet; he's reassured that he has such a powerful guy in his corner. Many years later, Brady finally looks him up.

1. How do these individual stories tie into larger social movements?

2. Can you find examples of anomie in these stories?  If so, describe them.

3. Does it appear that long term collective action will be successful in these cases?