Getting Active in the Gulf: Environmental Attitudes and Action Following Two Mississippi Coastal Disasters

The current study examined the impact of the Gulf Oil Spill and Hurricane Katrina, environmental attitudes, and environmental action among residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The authors sought to determine if disaster impact, worry about the environment, or connection to nature was associated with environmental action following the oil spill and in general. We hypothesized that disaster impact and environmental attitudes would be significantly associated with environmental action. Surveys were administered to 1,108 individuals receiving mental health services in connection with the Gulf Oil Spill. Results indicated that disaster impact was correlated with environmental worry, connection to nature, and action. Additionally, environmental worry and connection to nature were significantly associated with action, as were the effects of Hurricane Katrina to a lesser degree. This study supplements the existing literature by examining environmental attitudes, disaster impact, and their association with environmental action following two disasters.     

Gender-linked Risks for Peer Physical and Relational Victimization in the Context of School-level Poverty in First Grade

In a short‐term longitudinal study of 432 first‐grade children, we examined whether gender interacted with contextual differences (school‐level poverty) and individual differences at school entry (behavioral problems, emotional problems, and social competence) to predict changes in peer physical and relational victimization and receipt of prosocial acts. Gender differences in peer victimization were observed in schools with low levels of student poverty, such that girls showed significant decreases in peer victimization relative to boys. Girls in schools with high levels of student poverty were at greater risk for increases in victimization relative to girls in low‐poverty schools. Individual differences at school entry also contributed to risks for physical (but not relational) victimization. Girls with high levels of behavioral problems and boys with low levels of social competence showed increased risks for physical victimization. We discussed the implications of the present findings for school‐based peer‐victimization prevention programs.     

Black Youth Violence Has a Bad Rap

This research elicited and assessed the perspectives on violence of 41 middle-school students attending a unique school in a low-income section of a large northern California city. Through participation in and observation of instruction and other school-related activities, the researchers explored ways that these students experienced and reflected on violence in their lives and in popular culture. The researchers probed ways that these students' interpreted or reflected upon rap music and hip-hop culture, particularly its representations of violence, crime, and sex. This research provided insights into what these youth thought about violence in their lives including its depictions in electronic media. Additionally, it revealed ways that they resisted and/or critiqued some negative images and influences of hip-hop and rap.     

Glassblowing Tools: Extending the Body Towards Practical Knowledge and Informing a Social World

Understanding tools in the development of practical knowledge and in the formation of social worlds is critical for the sociology of culture insofar as they reveal how matter, or material, informs practice and discourse. This article is an ethnographic exploration of the variations of the maker-tool-material relation in glassblowing, informed by Bourdieu's logic of practice as well as phenomenological considerations of the body's dispositions towards and interactions with the material world. These relations form the backbone of the glassblowing studio, and more importantly provide the subject matter of ‘tool talk,’ studio talk about tools, which forges feelings of empathy and consequently contributes to the formation of the glassblowing social world. Through this exploration, we come to understand how material, the subject of much studio discourse, is a structuring force of a lifeworld, the glassblowing studio.

U.S. Citizen Children De Facto Deported to Mexico

Between 2000 and 2015, the U.S. deported unprecedented numbers of Mexican immigrants. During the same period, the population of U.S.-born children living in Mexico doubled in size. This study estimates the number of U.S.-born children who emigrated to Mexico from the United States in order to accompany a deported parent: de facto deported children. The data come from the Mexican National Survey of Demographic Dynamics (ENADID), a national probability sample of households in Mexico collected in 2014 and 2018. About one in six U.S.-born children living in Mexico in 2014/2018, amounting to an estimated 80,000–100,000 U.S.-born children, were there because the U.S. government deported one or both of their parents. De facto deported U.S.-born children are socioeconomically disadvantaged in Mexico compared to U.S.-born children whose parents migrate to Mexico for other reasons. Women are overrepresented among deported people who bring their U.S.-born children to Mexico, and when deported mothers bring their children, they are far less likely to do so with a partner than are deported fathers. U.S. policy should consider the interests of U.S. citizen children forced to live abroad when redesigning immigration and child welfare policies.