The 2018 NCSA presidential address: the audience of executions

Capital punishment occupies a precarious position in the modern democratic state. Much scholarship has addressed the political and judicial dilemmas associated with the death penalty. I focus on the execution itself as a fraught state activity and place the analytical spotlight on the audience of executions. The audience of executions is a critical component of executions and has played an important role in the transformation of capital punishment over the past 200 years. I use three modal forms, or ideal types, of the execution audience—the crowd, professional witnesses, and family members of murder victims—to highlight the ways in which the audience provides the American death penalty with some of its key meanings, contradictions, and pressures to change. All three audience forms have coexisted since the early nineteenth century, but their respective roles in the execution drama have changed dramatically as have the meanings generated by their presence.     

Gender, Class Aspirations, and Emerging Fields of Body Work in Urban India

If some research indicates that bodies are becoming central to the life projects of “new liberal Indian” women, public debates simultaneously reveal that their bodies are entangled in satisfying traditional and modern ideals of womanhood. There are few studies, though, that have looked into how women reconcile and make use of contradictory cultural signals surrounding their bodies that arise out of a rapidly changing gender and class structure. We draw upon both followers and critics of Bourdieu to show that bodily concerns and undertakings of 48 urban Indian women, and the ways in which they resist and embrace cultural demands on their bodies, vary by social class locations. The women in the study who were most keenly aware of “options” embedded in thin or fit bodies were the ones who could take advantage of new careers and styles of living that the global economy was bringing to their doorsteps. In contrast, women who saw limited prospects for social mobility were unconvinced of the symbolic value of a thin body and rejected appearance concerns on the ground that it interfered with their mothering responsibilities. We conclude that while the fit body has indeed emerged as an important site of self-making for the modern Indian woman, the degree to which she sees costs and benefits involved in the bodywork of losing weight depends on her class location.     

“What Daughters,what Wives,what Mothers,Think You,They are?” Gender and the Transformation of Executions in the United States

The transformation from public to private executions is generally understood as a consequence of the rationalization of authority in conjunction with growing class tensions and the emergence of bourgeois sentimentality. What is missing from this analysis is the role gender played. The exclusion of women from the execution site captures a more general tension around womanhood in the nineteenth century, but that tension was expressed differently depending on women's class and race locations. Using newspaper coverage of executions as my primary data source, I show that the interpretive challenges posed by women at the execution site varied by the social positions they occupied.     

The Impact of Comedy on Racial and Ethnic Discourse

An overwhelming facet of race literature suggests that American society has entered an era of colorblindness; where instead of perpetuating racist ideology through blatant discriminatory legislation, racial differences are either understated or ignored entirely. These new racial processes are reflected in the policies of major social institutions, but also within popular culture. Yet, as made evident by the success of comedians such as Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, stand‐up comedy challenges acceptable racial discourse, placing race in the forefront. Comedy persists as a facet of popular culture where racial difference is made apparent, yet ironically the art of comedy is usually overlooked by sociologists. What is lacking in the humor research is an understanding of how comedy creates an environment where race can be spoken about directly, and often times harshly. Through the analysis of focus groups, this study finds evidence to suggest that racial and ethnic comedy serves to both reinforce and wane racial and ethnic stereotypes, similarities, and differences. After watching stand‐up comedy clips of popular comedians, black and white respondents show both agreement and disagreement on the following: (1) the offensiveness of ethnic comedy, (2) stereotypes and perceived truths, and (3) the utility of ethnic comedy in everyday interactions. These findings are helpful in understanding how comedy serves as one of the few openly racialized facets of popular culture as well as uncovering some of the ways in which race works within the culture of a self‐proclaimed colorblind society.     

Vanishing Act: Non-straight Identity Narratives of Women in Relationships with Women and Men

This research examines how women who experience a change to a partner of a different gender make sense of this shift both to themselves and to others. Specifically, the study draws on 32 interviews conducted with self-identified lesbian, bisexual and queer women who have moved from relationships with female partners to relationships with male partners. None of the women interviewed sought to identify themselves as straight or heterosexual. Many, instead, tried to negotiate non-straight identities. We conclude that women, in doing their non-straight identities, mainly rely upon a strategy of narrative, including narratives of attraction, choice of men and challenging homophobia.     

Victory and Beyond: A Historical Comparative Analysis of the Outcomes of the Abortion Movements in Sweden and the United States

Sociological Forum - What decides the paths of social policy and movement activity after movements “succeed”? This study compares the policy trajectories in Sweden and the United States...     

Editorial Life at a Small Regional Journal: Simultaneously at the Margins and in the Thick of Things

In this essay I discuss how my editorship of Sociological Focus, the official journal of the North Central Sociological Association, simultaneously places me at the margins, in relation to top-tier journals, and in the thick of things, in relation to the authors and reviewers who participate in the journal. All editors face issues related to the review process and, occasionally at least, struggle with decisions. Given the hierarchical nature of the discipline, however, editors of journals at the lower end of the rankings face additional dilemmas related to fairness and access. Concluding that the margin is a bustling place where lots of sociology gets done, I end with a strong plea that we protect our regional journals and keep them vibrant and inclusive. The easiest way to do that is for all of us to publish in them.     

The Construction and Mobilization of Unemployed Interests: The Case of Sweden in the 1990s

In this paper, using a case of unemployed mobilization in Sweden in the 1990s, we examine the interpretive process by which unemployment interests emerge and evolve in public interactions with other political actors, especially unions, and argue that unemployed mobilization episodes cannot be fully understood without attention to interpretive processes. More specifically, we show how unemployed interests during the unemployment crisis in the 1990s initially were aligned with the labor movement at large, later became aligned with unions against the Social Democrats, and eventually gave rise to an independent federation of unemployed groups, which subsequently collapsed.