Academic odyssey: The training of an African sociologist

This article describes my experience of graduate training in sociology at an elite American university. As an African, I faced cultural and intellectual pressures to adopt white middle class cultural norms and a Eurocentric worldview. The article critiques American sociology, including symbolic interactionism, the sociology of the Third World and the study of race and ethnic relations. I describe my personal encounter with American racism and the process that led me to conduct research on black immigrants. I argue that my exposure to American sociology and experience of American society transformed me into a black marginal sociologist, specializing in teaching and research on the African-American experience in the New World. His forthcoming book,Becoming Black American, is being published by AMS Press.     

When Stepfathers Claim Stepchildren: A Conceptual Analysis

Guided by social constructionist and symbolic interactionist perspectives and a grounded theory method, my conceptual analysis explores stepfathers’ experiences with claiming stepchildren as their own. Using in‐depth interviews with a diverse sample of 36 stepfathers, my analysis focuses on paternal claiming as a core category and generates 10 properties relevant to this social psychological phenomenon: timing, degree of deliberativeness, degree of identity conviction, paternal role range, solo‐shared identity, mindfulness, propriety work, naming, seeking public recognition, and biological children as benchmarks. In addition, I consider how five conditions may influence stepfathers’ perceptions of stepchildren. My analysis reveals a number of sensitizing concepts for studying stepfathers’ efforts to develop a sense of group belonging and a fatherlike identity.     

David R. Maines: Embedding Symbolic Interactionism at the Heart of Sociology

David R. Maines was a key founder of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and a champion of symbolic interactionist sociology. Maines fought against characterizations of symbolic interactionism as astructural and “subjectivist.” He was adamant that symbolic interactionism offered vital perspectives on the study of social structure and organization, and that it was compatible with a variety of research methods. He played a vital role in developing narrative sociology and bringing narrative scholarship from communication studies to sociological audiences. In this retrospective on his life and career, I detail what Maines saw as the five central features of symbolic interactionism: (1) interpretation and meaning, (2) communication, (3) temporality and process, (4) agency, and (5) dialectical thinking. I then examine four interrelated themes of Maines' sociological contributions: (1) temporality, (2) debunking myths about interactionism, (3) mesostructure, and (4) narrative sociology. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/YodjvXbo51Q .     

Rethinking the Margins/Thinking from the Margins: Culture,Power, and Place on the Frontiers of the New World

In this article, I undertake a critical analysis of the writings that contributed to set up the foundation for eclipsing Amerindian social dynamics and their complexity. Starting from a presentation of Jesuit Jos de Acosta's classifications of the indigenous sociopolitical forms, I show that both the evolutionist and discontinuist perspective still in vogue among some Americanists and the positivist approach of some borderlands historians tend to perpetuate a conquest culture (the material and symbolic power relation of domination) while concealing indigenous social dynamics and adaptation strategies. I end the article by presenting some of the perspectives and concepts developed by a new historical anthropology that seek to re-politicize the production of social and cultural differences otherwise considered as natural.     

Little Theories and Big Problems: Chicago Sociology and Ethnic Conflicts*

Since this society is oriented toward a specific theory, I thought I ought to say something about theories in general and our little theory in particular. Let me get that off of my chest. I am not overly fond of terms like “theory” and “theorist,” both of which seem to suggest the importance of the person who claims the identity more than anything else. They are pompous terms. To the extent that we are thoughtful about what we are doing and how we are going about it, all sociologists are theorists and methodologists. But if that is all we are, then we are literally people of no substance. We have no substantial knowledge of or concern for the empirical world. The little theory we share is extraordinarily empirical. It is, as one of its most prominent practitioners called it, a “grounded theory” ( Glaser and Strauss 1967 ). I confess that several years after receiving my degree I had no real sense of what symbolic interaction was and how it might differ from other theoretical orientations. Arnold Rose enlightened me on this when he asked me to submit a paper for a new collection he was editing ( Rose 1962 ). I was pleased and flattered. Rose was a mentor of mine, and I had never before been asked to contribute to an edited volume. But I was unsure of what would be appropriate for a book about symbolic interaction. I screwed up my courage and asked Arnold: “Exactly what is symbolic interaction”” He shrugged off my ignorance, turned on his heels, and muttered over his shoulder, “It is what they do at Chicago.”     

Epistemic authority and the gender lens

Researching ‘hidden’ forms of social inequality such as gender often poses particular challenges. Not least of these is how to uncover such dimensions of social life whilst preserving the perspectives of research participants, who may not consider such matters relevant to their lives, particularly if other forms of identity or oppression are more prominent for them. Here, I reflect on these issues in the context of researching user involvement in mental health services from a feminist perspective. I show how ‘uncovering’ gender and other forms of social inequality in the field was aided through adopting a wide analytical lens focusing on power, along with reflexivity and openness in discussing my own political analysis and commitments in relation to the study area with the researched. I also describe how I attempted to resolve the epistemological‐ethical issues involved through conceptualising these in terms of ‘situatedness’ and gender salience and adopting a feminist standpoint which emphasised what researchers can, and indeed should, bring to the research enterprise. Related issues of power and empowerment in the research process are discussed.     

Researching Race: Identifying a Social Construction through Qualitative Methods and an Interactionist Perspective

Although much of the sociological community now views race as a social construction, empirical research does not always identify it in this way. Many practices of designating a research participant's race approach this process uncritically, implicitly framing race as uncomplicated. Although this is more common in survey‐based work, in this article I explore the tendencies and difficulties of studying race using qualitative methods. I discuss two prevalent but potentially problematic ways of “operationalizing” race in qualitative methodology, and then elaborate on the difficulties of identifying race in practice, using examples from my own ethnographic research. I suggest that symbolic interactionism provides a unique perspective from which to express race as socially situated, as long as this process is approached reflectively.     

Symbolic Interactionism and I

This is a story of my involvement with symbolic interactionism and its influence on my thinking. The process included the following phases or stages: (1) an early foundation from Florian Znaniecki, David Hume, and Adam Smith; (2) participation in “the second Chicago school,” especially with Blumer, Hughes, and colleagues; (3) contact with an expanded circle of symbolic interactionists, working on various theories and concepts in many contexts, often united by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction; (4) attempts at understanding and conceptualizing the interweave of my own work in several areas with my personal experiences; (5) use and development of four basic concepts: social roles, sentiments, identities, and self‐concept.     

“You Are a Racist”: An Early Childhood Educator's Racialized Awakening

This article details my racialized awakenings as a White kindergarten teacher after being called a racist by a parent of one of my students. I chronicle critical reflections of myself and my school in terms of latent institutional racism and actions. I share the actions that I have begun in my efforts to counter racism and move toward teaching for social justice. Changes in my teaching included interrupting deficit perspectives, talking explicitly about race, critiquing literature that I use in my classroom, and exploring ways to provide ongoing counternarratives that honor culturally and linguistically diverse students. I conclude with implications for other Early Childhood teachers who are teaching across racial boundaries. While I do not position my findings as the solution to countering institutional racism in the classroom, I hope that my journey can be enlightening to educators facing similar conflicts.     

Learning from Experience: Recollections of Working with Howard S. Becker

Howard S. Becker is, and has been, a major figure in contemporary sociology, especially within the symbolic interactionist perspective. This discussion describes my initial encounter with Howie in the mid‐1960s and moves to identify the substantive and methodological areas in which he has had major impact. I then briefly outline various ways in which the foci of my own work have been shaped by Becker's instruction and example.     

Negotiating identities: the lives of Pakistani and Bangladeshi young disabled people

Research has generally amalgamated minority ethnic (all called 'Asian' or 'black') disabled young people's experiences and failed to acknowledge the multiple aspects of Asian and black disabled identities, for example how the combined attributes of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, culture, class and disability shape their perspectives and experiences. In an attempt to address this issue my doctoral research explored the experiences and perspectives of 13 young Pakistani and Bangladeshi disabled people. By drawing on the substantive and theoretical findings which emerged from my analysis in this paper I shall consider how multiple aspects of identity, such as ethnicity, disability and gender, affect this population's identity and self-image and how this makes their experiences different from white disabled young people and other minority groups' experiences.     

#BlackIsBeautiful: the radical politics of black hair

Black Lives Matter 5280 (BLM5280) posts an image on its Facebook page each morning with the caption ‘Good morning #Beautiful people. #BlackIsBeautiful.’ The images in this series often depict Black people in ways that challenge heteronormative conceptions of family and white beauty standards. Through feminist visual culture and digital ethnography, I show how BLM5280’s photo series leverages the radical legacy of Black hair to claim symbolic and political power. I discuss my work as an allied filmmaker with the group, and examine BLM5280’s online practices in relation to its local organising. Although curating images on social media may not, in itself, bring about social change, this cultural practice plays an important role in shaping perceptions of Blackness, amplifying the voices and agency of underrepresented people, and strengthening the social and emotional well-being of BLM5280’s online and offline communities.     

Constrained allocation problems with single-peaked preferences: An axiomatic analysis

We introduce a new class of problems that contains two existing classes: allocation problems with single-peaked preferences and bankruptcy problems. On this class, we analyze the implications of well-known properties such as Pareto optimality, strategy-proofness, resource-monotonicity, no-envy, equal treatment of equals, and two new properties we introduce, hierarchical no-envy and independence of nonbinding constraints. Unlike earlier literature, we consider rules that allow free-disposability. We present characterizations of a rule we introduce on this domain. We relate this rule to well-known rules on the aforementioned subdomains. Based on this relation, we present a characterization of a well-known bankruptcy rule called the constrained equal awards rule. Received: 22 June 2000/Accepted: 21 March 2002 This paper is based on the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Rochester. I wish to thank my advisor, William Thomson, for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Choosing the level of a public good when agents have an outside option

The work examines strategy-proof social choice functions which select a level or the location of a public good when its consumption is not compulsory. We assume that agents have single-peaked preferences on the consumption of the public good as well as a reservation utility. Agents opt out of the good whenever they get a utility smaller than their reservation utility. We characterize strategy-proof and efficient social choice functions as well as the ones which are anonymous and group strategy-proof. Finally, we observe that for given preferences a Condorcet winner may not exist.This article constitutes the first chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I wish to thank especially Jordi Massó for supervising my research, Dolors Berga and Matthew Jackson. I also thank José Alcalde, Salvador Barberà, Carmen Beviá, Jeremy Heald, Hervé Moulin, Antonio Romero-Medina and an anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions. The European Commission is gratefully acknowledged for its financial support through the T.M.R. fellowship ERBFMICT960619.     

Bringing young children’s voices into programme development,randomized controlled trials and other unlikely places

Interventions aimed at improving children's lives are widespread and research evaluating these is central to policy decisions that affect their lives. Although there is an increasing move in intervention and evaluation research to include stakeholders’ perspectives this rarely extends to children's voices. As a psychologist committed to children's rights, this article explores my experiences of working at times on the fringes of my own discipline, drawing on wide-ranging resources and collaborating with other disciplines. The article reflects on the challenges and opportunities of multidisciplinary research and bringing young children's perspectives into these places where they are rarely heard.     

“Sometimes,I think I might say too much”: Dark Secrets and the Performance of Inflammatory Bowel Disease*

This study examines the dramaturgical embodiment of chronically ill bodies managing “fecal matters” (Weinberg and Williams 2005) in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) support groups. Data were derived from my reflections as a person with IBD, a year of participant observation, and semi‐structured interviews with support group members. I first uncover the boundaries of the private body (Cahill 2006). Secondly, I focus on the entrenchment of IBD within the stigma of fecal matters. Lastly, I explore the disparate ways that support group members harnessed language to protect their embodied selves from symbolic fecal contamination, from a “soiled self.”     

Teacher Careers and Inhabited Institutions: Sense‐Making and Arsenals of Teaching Practice in Educational Institutions

This article advances emerging scholarship that emphasizes the benefits to new institutional theories of organizational functioning offered by empirical research rooted in the tradition of symbolic interactionism. I present evidence from in‐depth interviews with teachers from three high schools to show how individuals' perspectives about pursuing institutional goals are filtered through their accumulated experience working within those institutions. Findings show teachers develop what I call “arsenals of teaching practice” as they accumulate work experience, and this process creates a key source of difference by career stage among teachers that shapes their instructional decisions. I discuss implications for understanding the relationship between policy and practice, and extend existing theory of inhabited institutions by identifying a key way that people's sense‐making through experience drives institutional functioning.     

Symbolic Interaction and Applied Social Research: A Focus on Translational Science

In symbolic interaction, a traditional yet unfortunate and unnecessary distinction has been made between basic and applied research. The argument has been made that basic research is intended to generate new knowledge, whereas applied research is intended to apply knowledge to the solution of practical (social and organizational) problems. I will argue that the distinction between basic and applied research in symbolic interaction is outdated and dysfunctional. The masters of symbolic interactionist thought have left us a proud legacy of shaping their scholarly thinking and inquiry in response to and in light of practical issues of the day (e.g., Park and Blumer). Current interactionist work continues this tradition in topical areas such as social justice studies. Applied research, especially in term of evaluation and needs assessment studies, can be designed to serve both basic and applied goals. Symbolic interaction provides three great resources to do this. The first is its orientation to dynamic sensitizing concepts that direct research and ask questions instead of supplying a priori and often impractical answers. The second is its orientation to qualitative methods, and appreciation for the logic of grounded theory. The third is interactionism's overall holistic approach to interfacing with the everyday life world. The primary illustrative case here is the qualitative component of the evaluation of an National Institutes of Health‐funded, translational medical research program. The qualitative component has provided interactionist‐inspired insights into translational research, such as examining cultural change in medical research in terms of changes in the form and content of formal and informal discourse among scientists; delineating the impact of significant symbols such as “my lab” on the social organization of science; and appreciating the essence of the self‐concept “scientist” on the increasingly bureaucratic and administrative identities of medical researchers. This component has also contributed to the basic social scientific literature on complex organizations and the self.     

INTERPRETING THE SOCIOLOGICAL CLASSICS: CAN THERE BE A “TRUE” MEANING OF MEAD?

Many sociologists have tried in vain to find the “true” meaning of the classic works in the discipline. An interactionist perspective suggests that this search is not a valid one for sociologists, especially symbolic interactionists. Although there can be no “true” meaning, some authors use conventions of writing that make their work more or less clear. Using Mead's Mind, Self and Society as an example, we discuss the dimensions of clarity. We then argue that the sociological classics should be read to (I) simulate new theories and research (pragmatic analysis), (2) determine how sociologists have used that classic to support or refute particular theories or perspectives (rhetorical analysis), and (3) provide information about the sociological concerns of the author and his/her contemporaries (historical analysis).     

Childless and Bereft?: Stereotypes and Realities in Relation to ‘Voluntary’ and ‘Involuntary’ Childlessness and Womanhood

Drawing on my own personal and research experience and on the research of others I consider issues of definition, identity, support, and kinship in relation to lifecourse issues and the experience of 'voluntarily' and 'involuntarily' childless women. Motherhood is still considered to be a primary role for women and women who do not mother children (either biologically or socially) are often stereotyped as desperate or selfish. However, just as the experience of motherhood is complex and varied, so is the experience of nonmotherhood. Whereas some 'voluntarily' childless women define themselves as childfree and some 'involuntarily' childless women feel desperate some of the time, others are more ambivalent. In this article I draw on empirical work that considers the significance of ages and changes to the experience of nonmotherhood and that considers the particular and potential experience of older childless women. As well as demonstrating concerns and challenges, this work also suggests the need to challenge the caricature of the childless woman (and particularly the older childless woman) as bereft. In relation to this I extend my argument to consider both the myth that women who do not mother children of their 'own' always live a childfree life and critically evaluate the view that parenthood automatically leads to kinship support in old age.