Transgender student experiences in single‐sex colleges

This article reviews popular and scholarly literature on transgender students' experiences who are enrolled in single‐sex colleges. Because such colleges rely on bounded conceptions of sex/gender to determine who can and cannot be eligible for admission, the enrollment and matriculation of transgender students pose a challenge to the central organizing logic of the single‐sex environment. As such, I first draw upon theorizations of gendered and queer organizations to highlight the utility of sociology in analyzing the transing of organizations through transgender inclusion. Using this framework, I then address trans student experiences at the time of admission and during matriculation at single‐sex colleges. These perspectives frame transgender inclusion as a new organizational form but one that is rooted in the social construction of transnormativity rather than institutional transformation.     

Capturing Capital to Negotiate the Intersections of Motherhood and Work

Women are judged and judge themselves in response to cultural norms about motherhood and employment. While much has been written in sociology and other disciplines about the intersections of motherhood and work, there is not much on their ideals and the enactment of the ideals of womanhood and worker in connection to various forms of capital. In this paper, we review the literature on motherhood to explore the ways in which these ideals are related to the meanings of mother and worker. Further, we highlight how differential access to economic and non‐economic capital due to one's social location influences a woman's ability to be viewed successful simultaneously as mother and worker.     

“There are Two People at Work that I'm Fairly Certain are Black”: Uncertainty and Deliberative Thinking in Blind Race Attribution

Geneticists, biologists, social scientists, and humanist scholars have powerfully critiqued race as a stable set of biological categories. Despite this, in everyday life, race is consistently assumed to be visually available in physical features. Racial categories also continue to be used in scientific and social scientific research as if they were self‐evident and real. In this study, I examine the role of visual perception in the construction of racial categories and their recalcitrance in everyday thought and interaction. My observations are based on in‐depth interviews with 25 blind people, which highlight the unique features of their nonvisual, non‐appearance‐based experiences of race.     

Analyse visuelle e représentation de la réalité

The author's objective is to establish a relationship between the theoretical structure at the basis of a qualitative sociological analysis and the forms of visual representation of social reality, such as photography and social documentaries. Visual material becomes an object of analysis when it refers to a society that talks about itself and when it reproduces a reality which it records and makes nameable. The theme of observation is characterized by a complex activity in which perception, imagination, and representation are different functions from the sociological point of view, yet strongly connected because they make it possible for the researcher to interact visually with social reality. Observation procedures ask sociologists to have an eye capable of recognizing and perceiving in a representative way the experiences they have lived and the social facts they have observed and described. These must be portrayed not only as suggestive visual metaphors, but also as a consequence of ‘sensitive hearing’ which is essential in all research phases, from anthropology to ethnography and sociology.     

The sociologist and the state. An assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology

This paper provides an assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology based on a reading of his posthumously published lectures on the state in Sur l'État. It argues that the state was a foundational element in Bourdieu's rendition of the symbolic order of everyday life. As such, the state becomes equally pivotal in Bourdieu's sociology, the applicability of which rests on the existence of the state, which stabilizes the social fields and their symbolic action that constitute the object of sociology. The state, which Bourdieu considers a ‘meta'‐ordering principle in social life, ensures that sociology has a well‐ordered object of study, vis‐à‐vis which it can posit itself as ‘meta‐meta’. The state thus functions as an epistemic guarantee in Bourdieu's sociology. A critical analysis of Bourdieu's sociology of the state offers the chance of a more fundamental overall assessment of Bourdieu's conception of sociology that has relevance for any critical sociological perspective that rests on the assumption of a meta‐social entity, such as the state in Bourdieu's work, as a final ordering instance.     

The idea of philosophical sociology

This article introduces the idea of philosophical sociology as an enquiry into the relationships between implicit notions of human nature and explicit conceptualizations of social life within sociology. Philosophical sociology is also an invitation to reflect on the role of the normative in social life by looking at it sociologically and philosophically at the same: normative self‐reflection is a fundamental aspect of sociology's scientific tasks because key sociological questions are, in the last instance, also philosophical ones. For the normative to emerge, we need to move away from the reductionism of hedonistic, essentialist or cynical conceptions of human nature and be able to grasp the conceptions of the good life, justice, democracy or freedom whose normative contents depend on more or less articulated conceptions of our shared humanity. The idea of philosophical sociology is then sustained on three main pillars and I use them to structure this article: (1) a revalorization of the relationships between sociology and philosophy; (2) a universalistic principle of humanity that works as a major regulative idea of sociological research, and; (3) an argument on the social (immanent) and pre‐social (transcendental) sources of the normative in social life. As invitations to embrace posthuman cyborgs, non‐human actants and material cultures proliferate, philosophical sociology offers the reminder that we still have to understand more fully who are the human beings that populate the social world.     

Relational Troubles and Semiofficial Suspicion: Educators and the Medicalization of “Unruly” Children

Using an interview‐based analysis of the accounts of interactions between educators, parents, and clinicians, this study explores educators' roles in interpreting childhood troubles as the medical phenomenon of attention deficit‐hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The analysis of interviews shows how children's “personal” troubles become understood as “relational” ones, prompting increasingly sophisticated social responses. I argue that the institution of education, operating in a clinical capacity but lacking the legitimate authority to assign ADHD diagnoses, plays a hybridized, semiofficial role in the medicalization process. This assertion informs a critique of the “informal/official” dichotomy found in the sociology of deviance lexicon, and furthers previous positions in the sociology of mental health that have implicated school representatives in the social construction of behavior disorders.     

Editorial

This introductory article provides an overview and theoretical anchor for the following contributions in this special issue. The article discusses, first, the necessity for introducing a new research paradigm – ‘visual competence’ – in the social sciences (anthropology, communication science, media and social psychology, political science, sociology), arguing that the actual transformations of reality triggered by processes of globalisation and digitisation require a closer scrutiny of the visual. In a second step, the new paradigm ‘visual competence’ is introduced, focusing on four dimensions: visual production, perception, interpretation and reception competencies. A new model, the visual competence cycle, is suggested. The article concludes with a specific application example for studying visual interpretation competence in a case study of the humanising and de‐humanising effects of portraiture.     

The meanings of migration,remittances and gifts: views of Honduran women who stay

In this article we examine the non‐economic, emotional meanings that men's economic migration has for the wives and mothers who stay in two rural communities in Honduras. Combining the literature on economic sociology and on the social meanings of relations within transnational families, we identify three areas that allow us to capture what the men's migration means for the women who stay – communication between the non‐migrant women and migrant men, stress and anxiety in women's personal lives, and added household responsibilities. Through interviews with 18 non‐migrant mothers and wives and qualitative fieldwork in Honduras, we find that women's interpretations of men's migration are not simple, black‐and‐white assessments. Instead, these are multifaceted and shaped by the social milieu in which the women live. Whereas the remittances and gifts that the men send improve the lives of the women and their families, these transfers also convey assurances that the men have not forgotten them and they become expressions of love.     

It don't go both ways: Limited bidirectionality in sociolinguistic perception

This article explores the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation, using sociolinguistic priming experiments. Two experiments tested participants' perception of the connection between social status and variation in two English subject‐verb agreement constructions: there's+NP and NP+don't. Experiment 1 tested sentence perception and found that exposure to non‐standard agreement boosted the perception of non‐standard agreement, but only for there's+NP. Social status cues had no effect on sentence perception. Experiment 2 tested speaker perception and found that participants were more likely to believe that non‐standard agreement was produced by low‐status than high‐status speakers. Results suggest that, especially for heavily stigmatized variables, non‐standard sentences strongly constrain the social judgments made by speakers, yet social cues do not necessarily constrain linguistic perception. The results suggest that the perceptual relationship between linguistic and social knowledge may be one of only limited bidirectionality. Implications for sociolinguistic perception and exemplar‐theoretic accounts of sociolinguistic competence are discussed.     

The ‘animal‐advocacy agenda’: exploring sociology for non‐human animals

This paper focuses on sociology and the study of human non‐human animal relations. Using as a catalyst referees' comments on a previous paper about experiments using non‐human animal subjects, in this present paper three problematics are identified and discussed. These problematics centre on the ‘acceptable’ content of sociological inquiry, the ‘permissibility’ of advocacy‐oriented sociology, and the ‘admissibility’ of non‐human animal‐advocacy to advocacy‐oriented sociology. The three problematics are explored through the lens of reflexive and critical sociology. Two central questions are raised: first, should sociology include the study of non‐human animals and secondly, can sociology advocate for non‐human animals? The paper concludes with an affirmative response to both of these questions. The paper ends by stressing that sociology has so much to offer the study of human non‐human animal relations. Professional sociologists have a key role to play in enabling this work to move from margins to centre in published sociology.     

Research,policy and funding – academic treadmills and the squeeze on intellectual spaces1

In recent years, there has been a great deal of collective rumination about social scientists' role in society. In the post‐1997 UK context, public policy commitments to ‘evidence‐based policy’ and ‘knowledge transfer’ have further stimulated such reflections. More recently, Michael Burawoy's 2004 address to the American Sociological Association, which called for greater engagement with ‘public sociology’ has reverberated throughout the discipline, motivating a series of debates about the purpose of sociological research. To date, most such contributions have been based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence. In contrast, this paper responds directly to Burawoy's suggestion that we should ‘apply sociology to ourselves,’ in order that we ‘become more conscious of the global forces’ driving our research ( Burawoy 2005 : 285). Drawing on an empirical research project designed to explore of the relationship between health inequalities research and policy in Scotland and England, in the period from 1997 until 2007, this paper discusses data from interviews with academic researchers. The findings suggest that the growing pressure to produce ‘policy relevant’ research is diminishing the capacity of academia to provide a space in which innovative and transformative ideas can be developed, and is instead promoting the construction of institutionalized and vehicular (chameleon‐like) ideas. Such a claim supports Edward Said's (1994 ) insistence that creative, intellectual spaces within the social sciences are increasingly being squeezed. More specifically, the paper argues we ought to pay far greater attention to how the process of seeking research funding shapes academic research and mediates the interplay between research and policy.     

Nurturing Citizens: Secure Attachment and Democratic Citizenship

Attachment research has been concerned with social policy issues as well as with individual pathology and dysfunction. This paper applies attachment theory to the large populations addressed by sociology and political science. It argues that modern citizenship requires qualities similar to those found in securely attached adults. It proposes an approach that links the development of adult citizenship behaviours with infant attachment style and the child's induction into the family's construction of reality. Discussion of the implications of this approach and proposals for future research complete the paper.     

Introduction

The challenge of ‘visualizing globalization’ requires analytical frames that engage the local‐global dynamic as well as a variety of visual methods. The article reflects on two uses of photography in a cross‐border research project tracing the journey of a tomato from the Mexican field to the Canadian fast food restaurant, and the role of women workers within the various stages of continental food production, distribution, and consumption. To examine globalization from above, the ubiquity of corporate advertising images is exploited, and their messages deconstructed and reconstructed to expose the production processes behind the commodities being promoted. Globalization from below is explored through photo‐stories of the daily lives of Mexican women agricultural workers as food producers at work and at home; Teresa's story illustrates how subsistence and market economies co‐exist and how family economies remain the survival and social base for Mexican peasants. The juxtaposition of two classic forms of image production—social documentary and corporate advertising photography—raises questions about the social construction of reality and creates new kinds of visual dialogues offering multi‐layered interpretations of the local‐global nexus.     

TOWARD A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ENTERTAINMENT MAGIC (CONJURING)*

The dynamics of everyday social interactions can often be clarified by studying the social organization of unusual realms of activity. One such activity is conjuring–magic performed as entertainment. This article discusses various sociological and social psychological dimensions in the performance of magic. It focuses on the similarities between a magic act and the social interactions of everyday life. It also discusses the dialectic between magic reasoning and mundane reasoning–between the audience's expectations built from the organization of everyday life and the violations of expectations produced by the magician's construction of an alternate reality. A magic trick is described from the perspectives of both magician and spectator using such topics as the directional, concealment, and disattend channels of activity; breaking frames; bracketing; sex roles; expectations; perception and attention; and rationality. The article concludes with some brief suggestions for additional research topics and some implications for both a theoretical and an applied sociological social psychology.     

Sexual Misgivings: Producing Un/Marked Knowledge in Neoliberal Marriage Promotion Policies

This article draws on what Brekhus has called “the sociology of the unmarked” to illuminate the construction of knowledge in the debate over heterosexual marriage's significance in society. It conducts a qualitative content analysis of archival data written by marriage advocates from 1990 to 2010 and finds that marriage advocates use discourses that incorporate unmarked assumptions concerning heterosexuality and marked knowledge about single motherhood and same‐sex marriage that is linked to neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility and self‐reliant family life. This article uncovers how cultural battles over marriage's significance are connected to a neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility, negotiated through boundary work that marks single motherhood and same‐sex marriage as in need of special consideration.     

Coming Back Across the Fence: Masculinity and the Transition to Sustainable Agriculture*

Abstract In this paper we explore the social construction of agricultural masculinity and its role in the transition to sustainable agriculture. We draw our evidence from a participatory qualitative study comparing members of the sustainable agriculture group Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) with their non‐PFI neighbors. On the non‐PFI farms, men more often represented what we call monologic masculinity, a conventional masculinity with rigid and polarized gender expectations and strictly negotiated performances that make a clear distinction between men's and women's activities. The male farmers belonging to PFI, on the other hand, more often represented what we call dialogic masculinity, characterized by different measures for work and success than in monologic masculinity, less need for control over nature, and greater social openness. Although both are present to some extent in all male participants, we argue that acceptance of a more dialogic masculinity helps promote the transition to sustainable agriculture.     

Sebastião Salgado and Visual Sociology

This paper links the work of Sebastião Salgado, recipient of the 2010 American Sociological Association (ASA) Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues, with the discipline of sociology. I reflect on Salgado’s biography, method, and concerns in order to demonstrate how his work contributes to the awareness and understanding of social issues. Toward this end, I summarize sociology’s record of involvement with visual documentation. Prior to 1915, the American Journal of Sociology regularly included photographs that provided visual documentation of environments under study. However, as sociology moved away from social reform activities and toward scientific investigation, the regular publication of photographs ceased. During the 1930s and 1940s, photographic projects in disciplines and social movements beyond sociology developed a variety of methods that would prove useful to sociology. During the 1970s, sociologists once again began to use visual methods in their teaching, research, and publication, putting sociology in the position to both contribute to and benefit from insights and social commitments that have distinguished Sebastião Salgado as a globally significant photographer and social activist during the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries.     

Complicating categories: Personae mediate racialized expectations of non‐native speech

This paper examines how American listeners’ expectations of non‐native English speech from speakers of East Asian descent can be modulated by the persona invoked by a speaker's visual display. While prior work has typically linked expectations of non‐native speaker status with East Asian‐ness broadly construed, this study indicates that US listeners’ expectations can be tied to more particular manifestations of this racialized identity, themselves informed by raciolinguistic ideologies. In a lexical recall task with persona‐based photographic primes, different visual styles embodied by the same Korean individual induced contrasting expectations of “foreign accented” speech, which corresponded to significant differences in how well the speech was remembered. Ultimately, I argue that models of sociolinguistic perception should include cognitive representations of social constructs like personae, not only to better capture the detailed nature of listeners’ sociolinguistic expectations, but also to avoid perpetuating homogenizing treatments of racialized groups’ language practices.