IT'S IN MY GENES: Biological Discourse and Essentialist Views of Identity among Contemporary American Jews

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, an era when immigrant groups were seen as divisible into races with distinct physical and mental traits, American Jews thought of themselves as a race. In the post-Holocaust era, however, racial language was eschewed, and American Jews instead adapted terms such as "community" and "ethnicity." Our research on unsynagogued Jews and adult children of Jewish intermarriage, however, revealed that many contemporary Jews actually continue to employ an essentialist understanding of Jewishness that emphasizes the biological, genetic basis of their identities. Their reliance on ascribed characteristics as central to their identities in an era when the idea of a Jewish race has been debunked, and when most scholars eschew racial categorizations, is surprising and constitutes the analytic focus of this article.     

All Work and All Play: Using Games to Teach Religion and Media

To help students learn the concepts, personages, and events central to a course on religion and media, students were charged with designing a board game or a card game that employed this information. They drew from required books and documentaries, which the instructor chose for breadth and inclusiveness, focusing on both print and electronic media as well as on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The games were evaluated according to the appeal and educational value of the game design, the clarity and coherence of the written instructions, and the accuracy, significance, and comprehensiveness of the knowledge tested. The assignment helped maximize the time students spent thinking about key information in the course. It also provided the instructor with games that students in future classes can play to help them learn terms central to the study of media and religion.     

"We All Have Identity at the Table": Negotiating Difference in a Southern African American Environmental Justice Network

This article focuses on conflicts and resolutions among members of a south-wide environmental justice network as they negotiated their collective goals, identities, and strategies. I find that the process of building and advancing this network raised a host of questions about what it means to be a Black activist in the post-civil rights-era, as well as how to resolve multiple and divergent ideas about contemporary African American identity and the implications of claiming race as a primary basis of identification in social movement organizing. As activists' debates grew heated, they tended to frame their disagreements in class terms; however, I argue that class discourses were flexible and contingent, and reflected important organizing values. In part, due to the flexibility of these categories, I find that, ultimately, activists were able to reframe their differences as a larger problem of racism and move forward as a collectivity.     

Chinese Language Media in the United States: Immigration and Assimilation in American Life

Qualitative Sociology - The upsurge of Chinese language media—publications, radio, television, and the Internet—mirrors the linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity of the...     

The making of the "women's physician" in American obstetrics and gynecology: re-forging an occupational identity and a division of labor

After struggling as a surgical specialty, obstetrics and gynecology initiated its "women physician" program in the 1970s. This program officially defined the mostly male obstetricians and gynecologists at that time as women's primary care physicians. Using archival data, this article explains this development as a response to the specialty's dishonored position within the medical division of labor. Whatever else it was intended to be, the women's physician program, in its most developed form, aimed to galvanize the various interests within obstetrics and gynecology behind a strategy to restructure the medical division of labor serving women so that obstetricians and gynecologists controlled both the upstream positions responsible for their own case referrals and the downstream positions to which they referred their difficult cases. The article illustrates the importance of integrating insights from both macro-institutional and intra-occupational explanatory frameworks in accounting for significant developments in medicine.     

The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations

Over the past decades, the impact of Atlantic ideas and ideologies in the Americas has become a constant subject of discussion. The ways in which the French and Haitian revolutions determined the actions of African slaves in the Americas have only been matched by the relevance given by scholars to the impact of British Abolitionist policies from 1807 onwards. West African wars associated with the transplantation of Islam were just as important. Until today, the impact and the very existence of Islam among West African slaves taken to Cuba have been all but overlooked. In this article, I attempt to establish connections between Islam in West Africa and Islamized West African slaves in Cuba. My key argument is that in one way or another, Islamized Africans were present in Cuba from a very early period and that they continued to arrive in the following centuries. There are certainly enough elements to offer a first, preliminary sketch of the presence and impact of Islamized West Africans in Cuba.     

Must‐See TV: South Asian Characterizations in American Popular Media

In the 21st century, representations of South Asians in American popular television have increased significantly. However, there has been very little critical analysis on the ways in which these characters are created and produced. In this review, I use literature from the sociology of race/ethnicity, immigration, and critical media studies to identify the concept of “(ethnic) characterization.” While it may be assumed that these representations are created unconsciously, I suggest that media producers intentionally use particular ethnic characteristics that are identified and discussed in contemporary sociological literature. As a result, I argue that these types of media characterizations are relevant to the discipline of sociology.     

The Field of American Media Sociology: Origins,Resurrection, and Consolidation

This contribution is written against the backdrop of the historic dispersal of early American media sociology out from the core concerns of the discipline and into various importer academic disciplines (including communication, journalism, and media studies) and an ever‐growing pervasiveness of media in everyday life which is reflected by a resurgence of sociological scholarship in the United States since the early 2000s. The article divides the field in works that study media inwards – along the threefold dimensions of production and technologies, communication and discourse, reception and effects – and works that study media outwards. We argue that this latter perspective, examining broader theoretical, methodological, and substantive social implications of mass‐mediated communication, is the most promising one for a mature field of American media sociology. On this basis, we conclude with some suggestions regarding possible new, and as of yet understudied, lines of inquiry for future media sociologists.     

The Kids Are All White: Examining Race and Representation in News Media Coverage of Opioid Overdose Deaths in Canada

Problematic opioid use in Canada is on the rise, and opioid overdose deaths now number in the thousands each year. While opioids have long been responsible for overdoses among certain demographics of Canadians, such as drug users on Vancouver's notoriously impoverished downtown Eastside, it is only recently that fatal overdoses have also claimed the lives of White, middle-class young people. This critical discourse analysis of Canadian news media examines the differences in racial representation in recent coverage of opioid deaths. I pay particular attention to the ways in which White opioid users are portrayed as innocent victims while other users, such as those from Indigenous communities, are often ignored or stigmatized as “addicts.” I draw on the work of Hall (1978; 2000) and Reinarman and Levine (1989; 2004) on the role of media in representing race and constructing drug scares, to frame the media narratives. I then discuss the Canadian government's current harm-reduction approach to the opioid crisis, as well as calls from Indigenous leaders for “culture as treatment.”