White Racial Socialization: Progressive Fathers on Raising “Antiracist” Children

For the past 30 years, the definition of racial socialization has referred to how parents prepare children of color to flourish within a society structured by white supremacy. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with eight white affluent fathers, this study explores fathers' participation in white racial socialization processes. The article focuses on fathers who identify as “progressive” and examines the relationship between fathers' understandings of what it means to raise an “antiracist” child, the explicit and implicit lessons of racial socialization that follow from these understandings, and hegemonic whiteness. Findings illustrate how these fathers understand their role as a white father, how their attempts to raise antiracist children both challenge and reinforce hegemonic whiteness, and what role race and class privilege play in this process.     

The Cultural Context of Cognition: What the Implicit Association Test Tells Us About How Culture Works1

This article employs evidence from a literature within social psychology on the malleability of scores on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a measure that is widely used to assess implicit attitudes, and other implicit cognition measures, to provide a theoretical framework for incorporating implicit processes into sociological accounts of culture. Studies from this literature demonstrate the fundamentally contextual and interactional nature of implicit cognition; that is, how the cultural environment shapes the activation of cognitive associations. Understanding how culture works to influence behavior requires attention to the interaction between the cultural environment—including symbols and media, place, situations, and networks—and cognitive representations. Using this theoretical framework, I discuss how evidence from the sociology of culture regarding the nature of this cultural environment can inform our understanding of culture in action.     

Backstage discourse and the reproduction of white masculinities

This article documents the shared patterns of private white male discourse. Drawing from comparative ethnographic research in a white nationalist and a white antiracist organization, I analyze how white men engage in private discourse to reproduce coherent and valorized understandings of white masculinity. These private speech acts reinforce prevailing narratives about race and gender, reproduce understandings of segregation and paternalism as natural, and rationalize the expression of overt racism. This analysis illustrates how antagonistic forms of “frontstage” white male activism may distract from white male identity management in the “backstage.”     

What is the Shortest Russian Joke? Communism. Russian Cultural Consciousness Expressed Through Soviet Humor

In an environment like Soviet Russia where it was difficult, if not impossible, to make assertions that contradicted the official Communist Party word, political humor can be used to challenge, subvert, or uphold official “truths.” The Russian Soviet anekdot—a politically subversive joke—provides an intimate view into the perspective of the Russian people living under Soviet rule. The anekdot serves as a discourse of “cultural consciousness,” connecting otherwise atomized people to a homeland, collective culture, and memory. In conducting a paired content and critical discourse analysis of 1,290 anekdoty collected from Russian archives, I explore how this oral folklore served to construct a Russian collective consciousness that (1) resists Party rhetoric, social policy, and ideology, but also (2) adopts and reifies social boundaries established by Soviet discourse by constructing particular groups as “other.” Those who are familiar with cultural folklore—and the historical context to which it refers—are taught who are the perpetrators responsible for injustices, who are the victims, and how we should feel about these different people; folklore also gives insight into the perspectives of those from the hegemonic '"center."     

Accounting for the Performance of Environmentally Significant Behavior: The Symbolic Significance of Recycling

The scientific community has pronounced climate change unequivocal and its consequences disastrous. Yet Americans' behavioral response to the global social problem of environmental degradation has been largely confined to the individual act of recycling. This article examines why Americans are not doing more to address climate change and other environmental issues. Taking a cognitive sociological perspective, I describe how Americans think about environmental issues and pro‐environmental behavior. I draw on Swidler's concept of a “cultural tool kit,” to examine the cultural narratives Americans use to account for the small amount of pro‐environmental behavior they perform. The act of recycling functions as a synecdoche for pro‐environmental behavior in general, allowing individuals to over‐claim the significance of a modest amount of pro‐environmental behavior. I argue that Americans' failure to engage with environmental issues at a collective level is rooted in the individualized culture of American environmentalism.     

Organizations and the structure of culture

Recent work emphasizes how organizations and organizing are suffused by culture. Ignored, however, is the question of how organizations and organizing shape cultural understandings. In this paper, we draw attention to how organizations impact the creation, maintenance, and matching of cultural associations: The “structure of culture.” Cultural associations are distributed understandings of “what goes with what,” diffused via their co-adoption by individual and corporate actors. We argue that the process of associative diffusion is heavily influenced by organizational forms, routines, and operations. While organizations shape culture production, they likewise shape resulting associations between cultural items, actively modifying the structure of culture. We conclude that the role of organizations in shaping the structure and dynamics of culture should be a central topic of study moving forward.     

Sociological Perspectives on Japanese Manga in America

Japanese popular culture has, according to journalist Roland Kelts, “invaded” the United States in the 21st century, and in particular Japanese comics, known as manga, have successfully “conquered America,” according to Wired magazine. Within the publishing trade itself, the medium's cultural and commercial success became known as the “manga revolution” or the “manga boom.” Yet despite all of this excitable rhetoric, there has thus far been scant sociological research into the particularities of this emerging phenomenon, and what exists is widely dispersed across multiple humanities and social science disciplines. This essay therefore aims to unite this scattered literature and provide a comprehensive survey of sociological perspectives on Japanese manga in America. I identify and explore three main substantive trends in the scholarly discourse: (i) studies of gender and sexuality and the homoerotic manga genres known as boys' love or yaoi; (ii) intellectual property, copyright, and the global digital piracy of manga colloquially known as “scanlation”; and (iii) studies of cultural production and the political economy of the American manga industry. This essay concludes with a discussion of the limitations these perspectives have in common and suggests a more critical research program drawing upon an expanded theoretical toolkit.     

Drawing out culture: productive methods to measure cognition and resonance

Theories of culture and action, especially after the cognitive turn, have developed more complex understandings of how unconscious, embodied, internalized culture motivates action. As our theories have become more sophisticated, our methods for capturing these internal processes have not kept up and we struggle to adjudicate among theories of how culture shapes action. This article discusses what I call “productive” methods: methods that observe people creating a cultural object. Productive methods, I argue, are well suited for drawing out moments of shared automatic cognition and resonance. To demonstrate the value of productive methods, I describe my method of asking focus group participants to devise and draw AIDS campaign posters collectively. I then 1) show how this productive method made visible distinct moments of both automatic and deliberative cognition, 2) offer an operational definition of resonance and demonstrate how the process of drawing revealed moments of resonance, and 3) suggest how this method allowed me to investigate the relationship between cognition and resonance and their effect on action. To conclude, I discuss strategies for using productive methods and advocate for their use in measuring culture.     

Schooling a European Identity: ethno‐cultural exclusion and nationalist resonance within the EU policy of “The European dimension of education”

This article aims to explore how the role of education as an aide in the process of “European” identity formation is being articulated in the European Union's (EU) policy of “The European dimension of education”. After having located the EU's views on education in the context of the neo‐liberal discourse on economic globalization, the article goes on to trace EU discussions of the European dimension of education historically. Subsequently, it deliberates on the understanding of European culture and identity which the European dimension of education endeavours to advance. Here a critique is developed of the policy's ethno‐culturalism, thereby excluding delineation of a collective identity in the EU. Basing itself on a notion of cultural identity which, implicitly, includes only those who fit certain versions of European historical “roots” and cultural “heritage”, the policy, it is argued, impedes a discussion of how a trans‐ethnic identity formation could be created in today's EU. Towards the end of the article, a scrutiny of the European dimension's perception of the so‐called “language diversity” in the EU seeks to illustrate this issue further.     

How scientists and engineers use cultural resources to make controversies and selves meaningful

In this essay, I provide an overview of recent sociological studies of science, technology, religion, and spirituality; the ways they contribute to sociological theorizing; and make some recommendations for future research. There are two major themes in these studies. One of them analyzes religious and spiritual discourse as controversy practice, suggesting how religion and spirituality are used as cultural discourses to understand controversy, who the actors are or should be, how to act in a controversy, and how popular discourses inform, and are informed by, science and technology discourses. This theme contributes to theorizing by describing how forms of cultural talk organize understandings of controversies, interactions, and action. The second theme explores scientific and religious identities, and how they are made compatible with each other. This theme points sociological theory toward considering science and religion relations as intertextual relations.     

Witnessing Things A Response to Sue Grand

I respond to Sue Grand's “Unsexed and Ungendered Bodies: The Violated Self” from my position as a cultural critic, noting in particular how Grand's case history shows that historical trauma is made manifest in everyday sensory experience. I am particularly interested in Grand's suggestion that trauma produces a “thing-self” that must be witnessed in the psychoanalytic encounter. Exploring the implications of this insight for my own investigations of cultural responses to trauma, I focus on performances of the body in lesbian public culture, ranging from the writings of Dorothy Allison, Joan Nestle, and Shani Mootoo to performances by punk rock band Tribe 8.     

Work,Family, and Accounts of Mothers’ Lives Using Discourse to Navigate Intensive Mothering Ideals

Despite the dramatic increase in women’s employment since the 1970s, mothers’ decisions about work remain closely scrutinized. The intensive mothering ethos in which “good” mothers are highly involved in the minutiae of their children’s lives, continues to be the prevailing parenting paradigm in the United States. This article asks: How do women use discourse to navigate the demands of intensive motherhood? First, this article reviews literature on ideologies of intensive mothering. The article then considers research on how accounts are used to navigate the moral dilemmas surrounding women’s work and motherhood. This article provides us with a better understanding of how traditional gender divides remain culturally relevant, how people use discourse to expand cultural schemas to fit their own social location, and how the process of expanding the framework of a schema through this negotiation process can allow traditional gender schemas to remain salient even while different actions are incorporated.     

Resiling From “Resilience”

This is a sketch for a critique of “resilience” and “resiliency” as keywords of neoliberal newspeak (officialese, langue de bois) under the innocuous banner of which all manner of business is now being transacted. I register the rapid extension of resilience discourse, note the socioeconomic context of its rise to prominence, and identify its implicit political assumptions and its social and subjective effects and side effects.     

ETHNIC IDENTITIES AND CULTURAL CAPITAL: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF CHINESE OPERA IN SINGAPORE

This article weaves the trajectory of Chinese opera in Singapore with the country's political development. Starting in 1965, the year of Singapore's independence, it attempts to debunk the myth that national culture is resistant to global culture by describing the state's systematic erosion of local culture. From the late 1970s onward, with economic progress, state fears of “Westernisation” led to a centring of Chinese culture in national culture; this was followed by a mini-revival of Chinese opera that coincided with the emergence of Confucian ethics as national discourse and as a culturalist explanation for the “Asian miracle” of the 1980s. This article shows that globalisation's effect on local cultures is not a straightforward process. Instead, it is a complex relationship where the flourishing of a local culture depends on the changing recognition and valuation of cultural identities, ethnicity, and language as cultural capital. This in turn implicates the structural features of national policies and globalisation processes that determine the recognition and valuation of this cultural capital. The use of “cultural capital” as a conceptual tool to isolate the cultural and social components of Chinese opera demonstrates that a local culture flourishes or withers according to the effects of globalisation and national policies on such cultural and social factors.     

The hybridization of organizational culture in tokyo disneyland

Tokyo Disneyland (TDL), a licensed version of the American theme park which was re-made in Japan, is a unique cultural, organizational and consumerist junction where “Japan” meets “America.” Offering an ethnography of this meeting, I focus here on the appropriation of the “Disney Way” into TDL's socialization practices of hiring and training. TDL's organizational culture is divided between an American influence that relates to part-timers and a Japanese tradition that applies to regular workers. It is discussed how local culture facilitated the successful transfer of the Disney Way to Japan while also promoting a modification of specific elements.     

Becoming “People of Faith:” Personal Moral Authenticity in the Cultural Practices of a Faith-Based Social Justice Movement

Interactive cultural practices such as songs and storytelling are key to contemporary social movement organizing because they can attenuate the challenges of social difference by expanding participants’ understandings of self and community. Yet the precise cultural dynamics through which such practices become effective are not well understood. Using the case of a large faith-based community organizing coalition, I show that practices focused on personal moral authenticity are especially effective in fostering alignment between social movement goals and individuals’ pre-existing moral commitments. I define personal moral authenticity as the ambition to develop, enact, and perform a moral identity that is “true” to an enduring internal self, and validate that identity through interactions with others. This is an effective basis for organizing practices because it spans the various cultures of commitment that prevail in different racial and religious subgroups and gives individuals a personal stake in social change projects. In highlighting how it animates practices in faith-based community organizing, one of the most robust fields of grassroots civic activity in the United States, this article illuminates an important part of the cultural dynamics underlying much contemporary social change work, and specifies how religion contributes to progressive social change efforts amid ongoing religious disaffiliation.     

“What Would a Loving Mom Do Today?”: Exploring the Meaning of Motherhood in Stories of Prenatal and Postpartum Depression

Prenatal depression (PD) and postpartum depression (PPD), experienced by up to one-quarter of pregnant women and new mothers, are associated with maternal impairment and disruptions to children’s behavior, development, and health. Women experiencing PD/PPD must cope with negative feelings and detrimental outcomes that stand in contrast with cultural conceptions of how (ideal) mothers feel and act (i.e., the discourse of intensive mothering), thus furthering stigma and negativity surrounding the PD/PPD experience. The present study, couched in relational dialectics theory, aims to explore how women, through naturally occurring online narratives, make sense of motherhood in light of both PD/PPD experiences and cultural expectations/understandings of mothers. Throughout the narrative corpus, the culturally dominant Discourse of (Self-)Sacrificing Blissful Moms (DSBM)—which expands on the discourse of intensive mothering—is de-centered, albeit never fully delegitimated, by the Discourse of Mothers as Whole People (DMWP). Rather than closing down the DSBM, the DMWP works to expand meanings of what “good” mothers can feel and do. This finding holds both cultural/theoretical and practical implications, as discussed by the authors.     

Displacement risk: Unpacking a problematic concept for disaster risk reduction

“Displacement risk” is increasingly central to global policy discourse on disaster risk reduction (DRR), despite its vague formulation and inconsistent use. Different understandings of displacement, its complex relationship with vulnerability, and its ambiguous role as a necessary survival strategy for people in harm's way that also creates or exacerbates risk, hinder its clear conceptualization. This limits the clarity and value of recommendations to “reduce displacement risk” for DRR. The explicit consideration of two complementary aspects of risk related to displacement could support more comprehensive, actionable discourses: (1) the “risk stemming from displacement”, that is, any negative impact people might experience due to displacement, and (2) the “risk of remaining displaced”, that is, of people being displaced for a long time. Consideration of these aspects would allow to better include protection and durable solution perspectives within DRR, integrate displacement in disaster risk and loss assessments and add value to existing DRR efforts.     

Stop the Beat: Quiet Regulation and Cultural Conflict1

This article explores a recent conflict over the youth phenomenon known as “raving” in the City of Chicago. By interviewing participants involved in the conflict, I set out to understand the extent to which the crackdown on raves in Chicago was similar to earlier social reactions to jazz, comic books, rock and roll, and Dead Head culture, as well as to more recent conflicts over punk, rap music, and raves in other cities. While most previous research on cultural conflict has focused on moral crusades, campaigns, and panics, the Chicago conflict represents an example of “quiet regulation.” Opponents refrained from highly visible, morally charged attacks; instead, in the absence of media hype and visible public discourse, public officials justified the crackdown in highly bureaucratic terms—avoiding risk, collecting taxes, enforcing codes. Nonetheless, they also drew on cultural schemas that linked raves and raving with drugs, sex, and deviance. As a result, officials selected a course of regulation that criminalized DJs and discredited the artform. In the absence of a highly visible moral campaign, the rave participants were unable to mobilize and resist the regulation and defend their lifestyle. Sociologists must move beyond highly visible campaigns and crusades and pay greater attention to quiet regulation, both because such regulation is likely to increase in the future and because it has significant consequences for power, cultural expression, and identity.