Negotiating race and place in the Garifuna Diaspora: Identity formation and transnational grassroots politics in New York City and Honduras

This paper is an exploration of the relations between the politics of identity and the socio‐economic and political processes of the current era of globalization. Using ethnographic material from the transnational grassroots organizations of the Garinagu—an Afro‐Indigenous population living in transnational communities between Central America and the US—I show the multiple ways that they articulate their identity between and among the tropes of “autocthony,” “blackness,” “Hispanic,” “diaspora,” and “nation.” This construction and negotiation of identity is intimately connected to the negotiation of rights vis‐à‐vis nation‐states and international political bodies, where ideologies of race, ethnicity, nation, and citizenship carry with them different implications for rights and belonging. I argue that the complexities of this case point to the uneven processes of globalization, within which the power to define the ideological terrain of economic and political struggles is still profoundly unequal.     

In the Eye of the Beholder: The Stratification of Taste in a Cultural Industry

Scholars argue that cultural intermediaries—that is, people that sell popular culture—accomplish their work through an affinity between their personal taste and that of their consumers. Yet, studies have not examined the social origins of such taste. To address this gap, I use qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze data collected from a probability sample of U.S. advertising practitioners. I find that although the tastes of cultural intermediaries are socially stratified, they are not consistently the “middlebrow” taste long associated with such industries. Additionally, by incorporating a two‐dimensional model of class and focusing on how cultural goods are consumed, I extend knowledge on taste more generally.     

A comparison of “black” and “white” integration attitudes on a deep‐south campus: A research note

A survey of “racial” attitudes on a deep‐South university campus indicates that both “black” and “white” students strongly support desegregation—equality of political and economic rights including access to public facilities. Although “blacks” are receptive to integration also, the majority of “whites” reject “blacks” socially.     

Social Work in Academia

Social work has long attempted to gain public recognition and support as a profession and as a “legitimate” university program. Although efforts to improve the image of social work as a profession have been moderately successful, attempts to solve the problems within the university setting are yielding less than satisfactory results. This article carefully considers the dual roles of social work within the university as both an academic discipline and as a profession. Eight criteria are identified that clearly differentiate professional disciplines from academic disciplines. These criteria are presented in an attempt to help identify the problems with which social work educators struggle. Five guiding principles—(1) cooperation, (2) identity, (3) education, (4) leadership, and (5) fact-finding—are offered for consideration as strategies and solutions for developing a plan of action.     

Briefly Noted

The biennial International Drug Policy Reform Conference, sponsored by the Drug Policy Alliance and held Nov. 7–9 in St. Louis, Missouri, was full of varying sessions on harm reduction and reform — 45 of them in all. An article by Filter editor Will Godfrey summed up his perspective — he was the only print reporter so far to have covered the entire conference. We asked him what his feeling was about the prospects for treatment and harm reduction working together, as they have in the past. “There's plenty of friction, but there can and should be rapprochement between the harm‐reduction and traditional treatment communities,” he told ADAW. “Many people in the harm‐reduction movement pursue traditional recovery, and there are treatment folks who support harm reduction. All should be trying to save lives and empower people. Harm reductionists' legitimate concerns about mainstream treatment include its coercive or controlling deployment, its frequent eschewal of evidence‐based practices and its promotion of abstinence at the expense of stigmatizing people who use drugs. Treatment advocates often overlook that most people who use drugs are fine. And in any case, everyone must be free to choose their own path.” But the fact that two approaches — one more radical than the other — coexist still is bound to make some treatment providers uncomfortable. After all, some of the speakers said that even supervised consumption sites are unfair to drug users, who have no need to be “supervised,” and instead should be free to use drugs. All viewpoints were there. “There's constant debate in the harm‐reduction movement about working to change systems that inflict harm from the inside, versus calling for radical reforms from the outside,” said Godfrey. “I think both approaches are simultaneously necessary.” Not everyone saw the conflict. “I have to say that I didn't see an anti‐public health movement there at all,” Maia Szalavitz, who is writing a history of harm reduction and is respected in both harm reduction and some, at least, treatment camps, told ADAW. “There has always, of course, been tension between activists and researchers and between people who want to fight within the system and those who want to tear it all down.” For the Filter article, go to https://filtermag.org/drug‐policy‐reform‐movement/ .     

Thinking and Working Politically: Learning from practice. Overview to Special Issue

Over the last 15 years, a set of ideas now referred to as “thinking and working politically” (TWP) has coalesced into a “second orthodoxy” about how to take context into account when implementing development interventions. This approach stresses the importance of obtaining a better understanding of the local context (“thinking politically”) in order to support local actors to bring about sustainable developmental change (“working politically”). However, the evidence base to justify this new approach remains thin, despite a growing number of programmes which purport to be implementing it. Officials in development agencies struggle with putting it into practice and it is unclear how TWP differs—or not—from similar approaches, such as Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) and Doing Development Differently (DDD). This Special Issue sheds light on what TWP means in practice by examining a set of initiatives undertaken by both development partners and government departments in Nigeria, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, China and India. This overview article outlines, in brief, each of the Special Issue's four papers and then draws out five lessons—for funders and for practitioners—from across all the papers. Our five lessons are: (1) the fundamental importance of undertaking political economy analysis (PEA) to adapt programmes to their contexts; (2) the importance of having a realistic level of ambition for interventions; (3) the need to support local ownership—not just “agreement ownership” (between a donor agency and government) or local “management ownership” of the programme, but critically “driver ownership” by generating trust with the key local actors driving change; (4) the need for a more effective set of tools for measuring results in complex programmes that attempt to achieve improvements in long‐run governance; and, (5) that although the political economy of donors is often seen as a barrier to applying TWP, the articles show how much can be done with a TWP approach if the analysis takes into account the political economy of donors as well as that of the local context. We conclude with a set of operational recommendations for donors and implementors, as well as suggestions of avenues for further research.     

Promoting sustainable development through civil society: A case study of the EU’s NSA/LA thematic programme in Kyrgyzstan

The article focuses on the contribution of the European Union (EU) in promoting sustainable development through the involvement of civil society in partner countries. More specifically, it analyses the main features and outcomes of the projects implemented by civil society organizations (CSOs) in Kyrgyzstan under the EU thematic programme Non‐State Actors and Local Authorities in Development (NSA/LA). Despite its importance—this is the only EU programme providing direct support to non‐state actors and local authorities engaged in poverty reduction—to date, there has been very little research on the functioning of this instrument on the ground. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature by examining the EU’s contribution to sustainable development through a case study on Kyrgyzstan. The study is based on primary data: 10 semi‐structured interviews conducted with the EU‐funded organizations implementing the NSA/LA programme. The NSA/LA projects were analysed by considering two major fields of engagement of non‐state actors in the development process: as service providers and as advocates (Banks & Hulme, 2012). Overall, the organizations awarded EU support were not only focused on fulfilling short‐term needs but also sought to introduce new ways of dealing with poverty and inequality, positioning themselves between the “Big‐D” and the “little‐d” approaches to development (Bebbington, Hickey, & Mitlin, 2008). Nonetheless, the EU‐funded projects were too limited and fragmented to be able to sustain long‐term structural change. Therefore, the EU should place new emphasis on creating synergies between new and old structures at the grassroots level and establishing mechanisms and bodies that could merge and co‐ordinate their efforts. In addition, the calls for proposals could highlight the need to share the lessons learnt by “obliging” the beneficiaries to act as multipliers and to pass on their positive experience to neighbouring communities. Finally, the EU could stimulate the funded organizations to experiment with innovative mechanisms of involvement in the policy‐making process, by making this aspect a mandatory requirement of the projects implemented with its support.     

Fight Club,or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism

Most critical engagement with the film Fight Club tends to emphasize its relevance for the study of contemporary representations of gender and masculinity. These readings tend to primarily highlight the “reactionary” aspects of the film, which are seen as a response to structural sources of feminization experienced by men as they are embedded in the consumerist machine of the service‐oriented economy. In this paper I argue that these takes on Fight Club, while enlightening and indeed capturing a key aspect, miss what I think is its most essential contribution: its attempt to craft a transcendental “counter‐myth” capable with dealing with the cultural and societal contradictions of post‐industrial capitalism in the context of the transition to a service oriented economy. I draw on the work of Daniel Bell in order to offer a neo‐Weberian reading of Fight Club which makes sense of various aspects of the film which are rendered meaningless by the gender‐focused reading. I argue that Fight Club can be seen as an attempt to deal with the evacuation and exhaustion of the original form of value‐rationality from the realm of production in service work — grounded in the older ethic of ascetic Protestantism — as well as the failure of ideological interpellation in the consumer society — grounded in a domesticated version of the experience‐based counter‐Bourgeois ethic associated with aesthetic modernism — to provide an adequate substitute for it. I conclude that Fight Club can therefore be interpreted as an inchoate attempt to produce some version of a class consciousness and cognitive mapping in the late‐capitalist situation.     

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.     

Development of a Culturally Specific Career Exploration Group for Urban Chinese Immigrant Youth

A rapid increase in the number of Chinese immigrants and the specific challenges faced by low‐income Chinese immigrant youth attending urban schools warrant culturally sensitive school‐based interventions and services. However, research and services are limited for this population because of cultural biases in traditional career theories and the “model minority” myth suggesting that Asian students are excelling. The authors developed and implemented a culturally specific career exploration group for low‐income Chinese immigrant youth to address their career concerns with respect to multiple social and cultural factors and to provide social support. Implications for future program development and research are provided.     

Environmental Risks and Environmental Justice,Or How Titanic Risks Are Not So Titanic After All*

Some of the best‐known social scientific theories of risks are those that have been elaborated by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. Although their arguments differ greatly, they agree in seeing the technologically induced risks of today’s “Risk Society” as global—so pervasive that they transcend all socioeconomic as well as geopolitical and national boundaries. Most empirical work, however, provides greater support for a theoretical tradition exemplified by Short and Erikson. In this paper, we argue that many of the technological mega‐risks described by Giddens and Beck as “transcending” social boundaries are better described as “Titanic risks,” referring not so much to their colossal impact as to the fact that—as was the case for the majority of the victims on the Titanic—actual risks are related to victims’ socioeconomic as well as sociogeographic locations. Previous research has shown this to be the case with high‐risk technologies, such as nuclear energy and weaponry, and also with localized ones, such as toxic waste disposal. This article illustrates that the same is true even for the most genuinely “global” risks of all, namely those associated with global climate disruption.     

The Unnecessary Nudge: Education and Poverty Policy in a Cairo Slum

Drawing on data collected from 2008 to 2013 in a low‐income Cairo neighborhood, this article examines the impact of a poverty alleviation program, a conditional cash transfer (CCT ) that attempted to incentivize poor mothers, through a direct cash transfer, to send their children to school. The program met its goal. The mothers did send their children to school. I argue that only observing this outcome of school access, however, black‐boxes the causal pathway of how mothers sent their children to school in the Egyptian context, and how the program mattered. Public schools in Egypt are free on paper but expensive in practice due to an informal system of “private lesson” and “study group” fees imposed by teachers. Mothers had always managed this expense, using scarce gendered household resources, before, during, and after the program. Through ethnographic, interview, and survey data, this article shows that while the cash—transferred to the mothers and labeled for education—enabled the mothers to send their children to school, the program conditions were unnecessary. The mothers did not need to be nudged to send their children to school. This Egyptian case study has implications for the use of behavioral incentives and for the importance of qualitative methods to the study of policy impacts.     

Serial Cohabitation and the Marital Life Course

Using cohort data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this paper tracks the experiences of serial cohabitors. Results indicate that only a minority of cohabiting women (about 15% – 20%) were involved in multiple cohabitations. Serial cohabitations were overrepresented among economically disadvantaged groups, especially those with low income and education. They also were less likely than single‐instance cohabiting unions to end in marriage rather than dissolve. If serial cohabitors married, divorce rates were very high — more than twice as high as for women who cohabited only with their eventual husbands. The results suggest the need to balance the government’s current preoccupation with marriage promotion with greater support of “at risk” unions that marriage promotion initiatives have helped create.     

Telling Others How You Live—Refining Goffman's Stigma Theory Through an Analysis of Housing Strugglers in a Homeowner Nation

This article revisits Goffman's stigma theory from the perspective of housing studies. We elaborate on Goffman's approach by exploring how housing tenure can work as a proxy for moral character. We interviewed twenty‐seven people who are excluded from access to homeownership in two cities in Norway, which is a “homeowner nation.” These individuals are unable to enter the dominant “homeowner class” for different reasons, including drug‐dependency, mental illness, refugee background, low socioeconomic status; thus, they must access housing through other tenures; private renting or social housing. To many of them, housing becomes a stigma, in Goffman terms, an “undesired differentness.” Social housing is known to carry stigma in Norway. It was thus a paradox, that those with the softest differentness—private rental—were most likely to practice (Goffman:) “information control” over their housing situation. Goffman's theoretical apparatus, and his distinction between the discreditable and the discredited in particular, helped us make this paradox comprehensible. Through this analysis, refinements to Goffman's theory were discovered. We suggest that “multiple stigmas,” which was not seen clearly by Goffman himself, should be a key notion in stigma studies. We use this notion to distinguish between possible sub‐types to the discredited‐discreditable distinction.     

‘Survival Employment’: Gender and Deskilling among African Immigrants in Canada

Recent research points to a growing gap between immigrant and native‐born outcomes in the Canadian labour market at the same time as selection processes emphasize recruiting highly educated newcomers. Drawing on interviews with well‐educated men and women who migrated from countries in sub‐Saharan Africa, this paper explores the gendered processes that produce weak economic integration in Canada. Three‐quarters of research participants experienced downward occupational mobility, with the majority employed in low‐skilled, low‐wage, insecure forms of “survival employment”. In a gendered labour market, where common demands for “Canadian experience”, “Canadian credentials” and “Canadian accents” were uneven across different sectors of the labour market, women faced particular difficulties finding “survival employment”; in the long run, however, women’s greater investment in additional post‐secondary education within Canada placed them in a somewhat better position than men. The policy implications of this study are fourfold: first, we raise questions about the efficacy of Canadian immigration policies that prioritize the recruitment of well‐educated immigrants without addressing the multiple barriers that result in deskillling; second, we question government policies and settlement practices that undermine more equitable economic integration of immigrants; third, we address the importance of tackling the “everyday racism” that immigrants experience in the Canadian labour market; and finally, we suggest the need to re‐think narrowly defined notions of economic integration in light of the gendered nature of contemporary labour markets, and immigrants’ own definitions of what constitutes meaningful integration.     

Environmentalism,New Social Movements,and the New Class: A Cross‐National Investigation*

Abstract The environmental movement is one of the most successful social movements in recent decades, garnering substantial public support throughout western Europe and the United States. Environmentalism is also considered a key “new social movement” (NSM), assumed to share fundamental characteristics with other NSMs such as the women's, antinuclear, and peace movements. Using the results of a 1990 cross‐national survey of western Europe and the United States, we examine three broad suppositions regarding public support for the environmental movement and other NSMs. We first examine the idea that the general public distinguishes between two branches of contemporary environmentalism—the more traditional one of nature conservation and the newer, broader one of general environmental protection—and find that the general publics in 18 nations make little distinction between them. We next examine the degree to which public support for environmental protection is related to support for other NSMs, and find a strong relationship between the two‐thereby validating a widely assumed but seldom‐tested tenet found in the NSM literature.Finally, we examine the presumed bases of support for environmental protection and other NSMs, particularly the notion that NSM supporters are drawn heavily from the “new class.” We find that demographic variables, including membership in the new class, are poor predictors of support for the goals of NSMs in general and of support for environmentalism in particular.     

A Multilevel Analysis of Gender Differences in Psychological Distress Over Time

Females have higher rates of depression than males, a disparity that emerges in adolescence and persists into adulthood. This study uses hierarchical linear modeling to assess the effects of school context on gender differences in depressive symptoms among adolescents based on two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N=9,709 teens, 127 schools). Analysis indicates significant school‐level variation in both overall symptom levels and the average gender gap in depression net of prior symptoms and individual‐level covariates. Aggregate levels of depressive symptomatology were positively associated with contextual‐level socioeconomic status (SES) disadvantage. A cross‐level contingency emerged for the relationship between gender and depressive symptoms with school SES and aggregate perceived community safety such that the gender “gap” was most apparent in contexts characterized by low SES disadvantage and high levels of perceived safety. These results highlight the importance of context to understanding the development of mental health disparities.     

BIDDING FOR TALENT IN SPORT

We present a novel microstructure for the market for athletes. Clubs simultaneously target bids at the players, in (Nash) equilibrium internalizing whether—depending on the other clubs' bids—a player not hired would play for the competition. When talent is either scarce or has low outside options, we support—and generalize to heterogeneous players—the Coasian results of Rottenberg (1956) and Fort and Quirk (1995): talent allocation is efficient and independent of initial “ownership” and revenue sharing arrangements. We also characterize equilibria when talent is abundant (or has a high outside option). The analysis uses a nonspecific club objective with an endogenously derived trade‐off between pecuniary and nonpecuniary benefits.(JEL J4, L1, L2)     

Cyclops Cave

Written in the post‐structural traditions of symbolic interactionism, Cyclops Cave is a biographic‐interview‐based and fact‐and‐fiction‐plotted ethnodrama of anti‐Semitism in Soviet higher education. This project is premised on the theories of the “social self”—namely, the “looking‐glass racialized self,” constructed by the dominant ethnic “supremacy,” and the theories of racial stigma as an outcome of the racialized “me” production. Showing the stigma experiences of former Soviet Jewish academics from 1970 to the 1980s, the play adds a new illuminative and self‐interpretive case of a race‐situated symbolic interaction and deconstructs the “root image” of Soviet anti‐Semitism through interpreting the informants' stigma incidents and interactional conflicts between their “selfhood” symbols.