Kids Talking About Race: Tween‐agers in a Post‐Civil Rights Era

Our research examines how American children understand and talk about how race matters in their everyday lives. We draw on interviews with 44 middle school children who attend schools in an integrated county‐wide system and find that while some use color‐blind rhetoric, most children in our study know that race matters, while they offer alternative accounts for why and how. Some explain race as social inequality, while others offer cultural accounts of racial differences. Our analysis suggests that for white children, gender matters; more girls describe racial inequality than boys. For children of color, class seems to be key, with middle‐class children giving cultural explanations, including negative evaluations of others in their own racial group. We use an intersectionality framework to analyze the alternative and complex narratives children give for their own experiences of race and race relations between peers.     

The Importance of “Empty Gestures” in Recovery: Being Human Together

What do clients/patients want or value from their encounters with healthcare providers? Based on ethnographic research conducted with individuals suffering from drug addiction and mental health issues, this article argues that clients/patients treasure “everyday” or “human” interaction with medical staff. Everydayness is accomplished through three generic social processes: **co‐silence, inclusion in back‐stage activity, and physical dramatizations of authenticity. These processes and other ordinary interactional strategies for “being human together” should be seen as vital tools for recovery.     

The Interactional Construction of Social Authenticity: “Real” Identities and Intergroup Relations in a Transylvania Internet Forum

Authenticity has become an increasingly salient topic within various interactional traditions, including conversational and discourse analysis, discursive psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and symbolic interactionism. However, there has been remarkably little cross‐fertilization of ideas and concepts. In this study, we consider the relevance of the interactional sociolinguistic concept of relationality for symbolic interactionist theories of authenticity. We first disambiguate two forms of authenticity that are commonly studied but not clearly differentiated in symbolic interactionist research—self‐authenticity, which emphasizes selves, and social authenticity, which emphasizes social identities. We then argue that relationality and its three pairs of interactional tactics—verification and denaturalization, adequation and distinction, and authorization and illegitimation—are particularly useful in conceptualizing social authenticity. We draw on data from an interethnic internet forum to show how members of two ethnic groups, Hungarian and Romanian, employ these relational tactics to authenticate their own ethnicity as the rightful inheritors of a place‐based Transylvanian identity, and to limit the other ethnicity's similar identity work. We then clarify the significance of social authenticity for the interactional study of category‐based identities by widening our discussion to other contestations over social identities in everyday life.     

“Just a Typical Teenager”: The Social Ecology of “Normal Adolescence”—Insights from Diabetes Care

In Western society “normal adolescence” is understood to be a biologically driven phase characterized by emotional turmoil and irrational behavior. Despite being discredited within academic literature this discourse persists both in formal theory and everyday use. Drawing on the case of diabetes care, I argue that the discourse of “normal adolescence” derives its power from its value as a vocabulary of motive through which to navigate the contradictions inherent in the social order at this stage of the life‐course. While helping us to comprehend sociologically the ecological niche in which “normal adolescence” is sustained, this analysis raises questions about the persistence of this discourse for social action.     

“A Grain of Salt in a Pepper Shaker”: Interviewing Whites,Blacks, and Latinos about Their Neighborhood Preferences

Several perspectives dominate as explanations for neighborhood preferences: pure race, racial proxy, race‐based neighborhood stereotyping, and race‐associated neighborhood factors. This analysis extends and supports the pure race and race‐associated neighborhood factors arguments by showing that these theories are applied differently depending on respondents' social class, race and ethnicity, and whether they are talking about white, black, or Latino neighborhoods. Race‐associated factors are emphasized for white and black neighborhoods, but pure race serves as a better theoretical framework for understanding people's preferences for Latino neighborhoods. I analyze qualitative interview data, using maps of real neighborhoods and hypothetical neighborhood show cards, to examine the neighborhood preferences of 65 white, black, and Latino residents in Ogden, Utah, and Buffalo, New York.     

Race scholarship “with,by, and for” children: How critical youth studies can inform research on race

Children's perspectives on race and their own racialized experiences are often overlooked in traditional social scientific race scholarship. From psychological and child development studies of racial identity formation, to social psychological survey research on children's racial attitudes, to sociological research conducted on children in order to quantify racially disproportionate child outcomes, the unique perspectives of young people are often marginalized. I explore some of the key themes in existing sociological and psychological research involving race and young people and demonstrate the important contributions of this expansive body of scholarship but also highlight limitations. I argue that when it comes specifically to the sociological study of young people and race, much can be learned from an emerging field known as “critical youth studies.” Further, I argue that more research on race that, as Kate Telleczek (2014, p. 16) describes, is “with, by, and for” young people, grounded in the epistemological and methodological tenants of critical youth studies, can lead to new sociological understandings of race and childhood, serve to inform public policies and practices intended to improve children's lives, and provide a platform for young people to express their own concerns and ideas about the racialized society in which they live.     

Conceptualizing and understanding the Gülen movement

The Gülen movement (GM) is a controversial international Islamic movement originating in Turkey. Interestingly, the movement seems to be “in between” the standard conceptual categories used by social movement scholars: The GMs' focus on individual transformation and religious practices suggests that it is a religious movement; its extensive outreach into various institutions (i.e., education, health care, and media) suggests a social movement seeking legitimacy and broad social change; its purported infiltration of key government and military offices suggests a political movement. In this article, I demonstrate the utility of conceptualizing the GM as an everyday‐life‐based movement and of using a multi‐institutional politics model to examine this type of movement. By doing so, it becomes clear that sometimes, movements focusing on individual change may also be seeking to transform social, economic, and political institutions.     

“Don't Cry,You're Not a Baby!”: Emotion,Role and Hierarchy in Korean Language Socialisation Practice

I examine how South Korean children learn culturally specific emotional knowledge, especially affective hierarchy and the association between emotional displays and social roles, through participation in peer talk. An analysis of children's and teachers’ everyday emotional discourses shows that children, rather than passively adopting adult emotional discourses, creatively employ a range of linguistic and communicative features regarding emotions to construct their own culture‐laden emotional world. Findings articulate the role children's peer talk has in cultural reproduction and dynamic aspects of the language socialisation processes.     

A Case Study of State‐Level Policymakers’ Discursive Co‐Constructions of Welfare Drug Testing Policy and Gender,Race, and Class

Welfare provision is distributed based on determinations of recipient worthiness, commonly assessed by racial‐ and gender‐specific characterizations of the poor as constructed through policy discourse. Social constructions of the poor contribute to the construction of welfare policy discourse and subsequently welfare policy. Welfare drug testing policy raises questions of the co‐constructions of race, class, and gender and welfare drug testing discourses. This case study of state legislators’ discourse on welfare drug testing explores these ideas. Using an intersectional perspective, we examine how categories of race, class, and gender give meanings to policy discourses concerning drug testing of welfare recipients, and conversely, how policy discourses concerning welfare drug testing give meanings to categories of race, class, and gender. We find a move away from explicit racialized and gendered discourse, and toward implicit constructions of race and gender, with a predominant explicit focus on constructions of social class in the characterization of an unworthy, suspect, and deviant poor population. The constructions of race, gender, and particularly social class effectively co‐construct welfare drug testing discourse, which justifies welfare drug testing policy in order to manage the derelict poor.     

“If I Can Offer You Some Advice”: Rapport and Data Collection in Interviews Between Adults of Different Ages

Reflexively analyzing interactions between myself (young adult woman) and 150 adult research participants, I explore how interviewees responded to the interviewer's perceived age in combination with other social identity categories. Addressing a gap in scholarship on adult‐adult interview interactions, this article examines how age gradations, in combination with other axes of similarity or difference, affect researcher‐interviewee rapport and data acquisition. Racial similarity, regardless of age, unlocked access to the topic of race/ethnicity. Age intersected with gender such that women within a decade of the woman interviewer's age assumed similarity and were communicative. In interviews with similarly‐aged heterosexual men, awareness of sexuality inhibited answers around intimacy. With older interviewees, gender similarity bridged the age chasm with women. In contrast, age and gender difference inspired older men to act paternalistically and give unsolicited advice. Even among adults, interviewees' classification of the interviewer's age contours the interactional dynamic, impacts data acquisition, and reproduces social distinctions.     

“Basically it's the Usual Whole Teen Girl Thing”: Stage‐of‐Life Categories on a Children and Young People's Helpline

This article explores the practices of membership categorization in the interactions of clients and counselors on a national Australian helpline (Kids Helpline [KHL]) for children and young persons. Our focus is on membership categories drawn from three membership category devices (MCDs): stage‐of‐life (SOL), age, and family. Analysis draws on data across different contact modalities—email and web‐counseling sessions—to examine how category‐generated features are relevantly occasioned, attended to, and managed by the parties in the course of interaction. This shows clients' use of MCDs in presenting their trouble and building a relevant case for their grievance. By examining counselors' subsequent receipts of the clients' complaints, we are able to trace some of the cultural knowledge that the clients' categorizations make relevant to the counselors. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates how the inherent flexibility of MCDs allows counselors to exploit these same categorial resources and to re‐specify the clients' trouble in a more positive fashion to accomplish counseling work. In explicating how taken‐for‐granted notions of the lifespan as well as of family relations are mobilized by participants in KHL's sessions, the findings contribute to previous studies of social interaction in counseling, and to research on social identity and categorization more broadly.     

Repelling the “Rutter”: Social Differentiation Among Rural Teenagers

This paper examines low‐income white rural teenagers' management of race and class‐based inequality. It analyzes how these teenagers constructed boundaries to distinguish themselves from outsiders, but also to distinguish themselves from the local abject category of “rutter.” The findings reveal hidden interconnections between race and class in interactional practice, and highlight local processes of differentiation through which actors attempt to deflect stigma and attain credibility. The paper discusses how interactional mechanisms such as “internal othering” and “stigma‐theory” bolster race and class credibility, but reproduce inequality.     

The “sharing” economy: labor,inequality, and social connection on for‐profit platforms

For social analysts, what has come to be called the “sharing economy” raises important questions. After a discussion of history and definitions, we focus on 3 areas of research in the for‐profit segment, also called the platform economy: social connection, conditions for laborers, and inequalities. Although we find that some parts of the platform economy, particularly Airbnb, do foster social connection, there are also ways in which even shared hospitality is becoming more like conventional exchange. With respect to labor conditions, we find they vary across platforms and the degree to which workers are dependent on the platform to meet their basic needs. On inequality, there is mounting evidence that platforms are facilitating person‐to‐person discrimination by race. In addition, platforms are advantaging those who already have human capital or physical assets, in contrast to claims that they provide widespread opportunity or even advantage less privileged individuals.     

“An Economics of Capital”: Genealogies of Everyday Financial Conduct

Although recent forms of neoliberalism have been associated with everyday forms of ‘investment’, this paper argues that the financial conduct of everyday populations has long been an intense site of intervention. Drawing on the history of nineteenth and twentieth‐century Canadian government savings, annuities and tax deferral programs, this paper argues that everyday financial conduct has long been a key site of experimentation and innovation in practices of the self. These programs experiment with a language and practice of investment which emphasizes everyday conduct as a space of individual responsibility attached to diverse political goals. This suggests that enterprise as a mode of self and citizenship has a diverse and longer trajectory that predates neoliberalism. By extension, this paper conclude with a case for more diversified, complicated and historically‐situated analyses of ‘neoliberalism’.     

“The Way That I Look at Things [Is] Different Because It's Me”: Constructing and Deconstructing Narratives About Racialized Sexual Selves

Many gender scholars have abandoned the notion that we can explore women's experiences without attention to other identities such as race, class, and/or sexual orientation. Until now, the ways race influences the development of sexual selves has been underexplored. In this paper, I focus on heterosexual women's accounts of the interplay of race, gender, and sexualities. Based on in‐depth interviews with sixty‐two white and African American heterosexual women between the ages of twenty and sixty‐eight, I examine the ways in which narrative work tells a story about the presentation of public sexual selves. I also explore how women's personal narratives are impacted by larger cultural narratives about race. Specifically, through a study of sexuality, I focus on the social construction of “postracialism.”     

“Police,Public Safety,and Race‐Neutral Discourse”

In the final decades of the 20th century policing in America was refashioned in the public image of community policing. Race‐neutral discourses dominate public and professional support for community‐oriented policing philosophies. In the contemporary era of hyper‐incarceration a focus on ethnoracial divisions grounded in the sociology of peculiar institutions is essential for documenting transformations in how the municipal police services are legitimized. Here I analyze how the public discourses of law‐and‐order center on distortions of social fact and public safety. Today the criminalization of immigrants is the latest turn in public discourses shaping patterns of ethnoracial visions and divisions. The carceral breadth of the neoliberal penal state extends beyond social structure, repackaged as race‐neutral ideology across the public sphere.     

“Everything's There Except Money”: How Money Shapes Decisions to Marry Among Cohabitors

Cohabitation is now the modal path to marriage in the United States. Drawing on data from 115 in‐depth interviews with cohabitors from the working and lower middle classes, this paper explores how economics shape marital decision making. We find that cohabitors typically perceive financial issues as important for marriage, and we delineate several key themes. Whereas some social scientists speculate that cohabitors must think that marriage will change their lives in order to motivate marriage, our findings suggest that cohabitors believe marriage should occur once something has already changed—in this case, their financial status. Our results also imply that political and scientific discourse on financial problems as deterrents to marriage should be broadened beyond a focus on poor unmarried parents.     

“Let's Talk about the Institution”: Same‐Sex Common‐Law Partners Negotiating Marriage Equality and Relationship Legitimacy

The 2005 Canada‐wide legalization of same‐sex marriage provided same‐sex couples with access to an institution they had previous been excluded from. Yet not all couples choose to marry. In this paper, we examine why this is the case, considering the role of personal, political, and historical factors. We draw on 22 interviews with people in common‐law same‐sex relationships in Toronto to examine how they understand their relationship within the new context of marriage equality. We find that participants feel they are held accountable to marriage as a default relationship legitimacy norm, indicating that this new institutional access is accompanied by a set of social expectations. Despite their awareness of the need to navigate a social context favoring marriage, participants individualize their relationship decisions as personal rather than political. Participants often contradict themselves as they articulate what marriage means to them, suggesting that, in this period of legal and social transition, people are negotiating multiple meanings, societal messages, and traditions when it comes to making sense of their relationship. We discuss the implications of these findings for LGBQ activism and the framing of sexuality‐based inequalities in Canadian society.     

The “Obesity Epidemic”: Evolving Science,Unchanging Etiology

“Obesity epidemic” discourse relies on scientific and epidemiological research to justify subjecting certain bodies to healthist messaging and disciplinary technologies. The science and framing of obesity has evolved, potentially partially due to critical obesity scholars. However, critical obesity scholars are now reliant on outdated critiques of ever progressing evolving/adapting discourse. Recent discoveries have been made concerning the determinants of obesity and the complexity of weight loss. Scientific discourse often now references environmental factors as contributors to obesity, low levels of sustained weight loss, and limitations of common measures such as the body mass index. Despite this refinement, the ultimate conclusion of studies, as presented within the scientific articles or in related media reportage, remains unchanged. Individuals are still expected to attempt to “correct” their non‐normative bodies through lifestyle changes, regardless of the evidence underscoring the likely futility of these endeavors. This paper updates obesity science and public health responses and evaluates the extent to which new findings, with the potential to greatly subvert standard weight loss advice, have altered supposedly evidence‐based public health communications and recommendations. As emerging scientific insights have further muddied already‐complex obesity‐related pathways, solutions have largely remained the same.