在冲撞中感悟——关于《撞车》(Crash)的读解和分析

《撞车》在第78届奥斯卡上击败呼声很高的《断背山》夺得最佳影片大奖,引起了各界的关注。对影片的叙事策略、人物塑造,以及由其主题所迁延出的美国种族问题进行分析,可以从几个不同的角度来认识这部作品。     

Issue Conclusion: Sociology,Political Inequality,and Democracy Beyond 2020

The articles in this special issue all contribute to a broader and richer understanding of racial and gender politics. They help reveal how racialized and gendered barriers to political participation reflect and reproduce intersecting racialized and gendered systems of domination. In doing so, they provide insights that can be applied to uncover political processes, cultivate political praxis, and draw our awareness to empowering modes of social and political transformation. Given all this, I propose a renewed sociology of political inequality that focuses on advancing democracy. This agenda includes (1) emphasizing the state of democracy over the state of political party competition, (2) highlighting how democratizing social change happens at various levels, (3) developing and practicing empirically grounded public advocacy, (4) seeing social and political structures are interconnected, and (5) employing sociology in the service of democracy.     

Systems,features, figures: Approaches to language and class vs. language and race

This paper contrasts different approaches taken in research on language and race vs. language and class. It looks at the timescales, units of analysis, and phenomena that have drawn scholars’ attention, and considers how each subfield approaches the study of language and inequality. ??? ??? ???? ??, ??? ???? ??? ? ???? ??? ??? ??? ???? ??·?? ??. ??? ??????? ??? ???? ????, ???? ??? ???? ? ?? ??? ???? ???? ??? ??? ???? ??? ?? ??? ????? ??? ???? ? ??? ????.     

Transnational land investment web: land grabs,TNCs, and the challenge of global governance

ABSTRACT

Despite international media’s waning attention, research and political debates on global land grabbing have not subsided. We argue the importance of understanding the ‘transnational land investment web’ of corporate and state actors and institutions, which are not always immediately visible. Focusing on transnational corporations (TNCs) based in the European Union (EU), we examine five sets of actors and institutional spheres through which these actors are able to grab lands beyond Europe. It is crucial to understand these not as individual sets of actors or institutions, but as interconnected sets, comprising a web. These are EU-based: (1) Private companies using regular institutional platforms; (2) Finance capital companies; (3) Public–private partnerships; (4) Development Finance Institutions; and (5) Companies using EU policies to gain control of land through the supply chain. One implication of this complex web is that democratic governance in the context of land grabs becomes an even more daunting challenge.     

#FamiliesBelongTogether: Facts and Fictions of Race and Family in U.S. Immigration Policy

Family reunification is widely seen as a relatively stable feature of the contemporary U.S. immigration regime protected by the nation’s liberal democratic institutions and humanitarian values. Drawing on critical scholarship that situates immigration policies in racial nation‐building projects, this article explores the development of U.S. family‐based admission policies from 1965 to the early 2000s. I bring attention to the role of racial family logics in the changing character and meaning of these policies. Racial family logics reflect the emergent and contested ways in which families are both idealized and institutionally organized in relation to the state, the economy, and other social institutions to support racial projects. A normative conception of “the family” as a white, heterosexual, male wage earner, nuclear household unit informed the 1965 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act and its emphasis on family‐based admissions. However, by the 1990s, the landscape of immigration, race, and family in the United States had shifted quite dramatically. The family‐based admissions system was now associated with immigrants from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe. The “browning” of the system was accompanied by its incorporation into racialized projects of state discipline, surveillance, and control over those deemed “undeserving” in relation to neoliberal values of self‐reliant and self‐regulating families.     

Critical race theory meets posthumanism: lessons from a study of racial resegregation in public schools

Critical race theory (CRT) was used to frame a study of the impact of racial resegregation on students in a public school district. Racism operated in the district at multiple ontological levels – such as interpersonal microaggressions, structural economic arrangements, and discursive processes. CRT provided a rationale for the interdisciplinary approach required to track these different manifestations of racism, while maintaining an emphasis on the material reality of racism. Having its origins in the field of law, however, CRT provided limited guidance for methodological decisions often required in a social scientific study. The author found posthumanist philosophy of science offered guidance for these decisions in a manner that complemented the philosophical and political commitments of CRT. This essay reflects on the advantages this combination of theories offers for the analysis of institutionalized racism. Illustrations are drawn from the study on school resegregation.     

Counternarratives of students’ experiences returning to comprehensive schools from an involuntary disciplinary alternative school

Educators’ excessive uses of exclusionary discipline have led to increased placements of students in disciplinary alternative schools, but few studies examine student experiences after their alternative school placements. Using a theoretical framework informed by critical race theory and the role of the discourse of safety in student discipline, we compose the counternarratives of nine middle school students’ experiences with the transition from an involuntary disciplinary placement back to a comprehensive school. We then analyze across cases to identify commonalities in their stories. Findings show that students experience dehumanization and exclusion that reflect second-class citizenship. We discuss how educators can resist perpetuating this under class even as the overtly racist rhetoric of populist nationalism replaces the neoliberal color-blind version of the discourse of safety.     

“Call to Home?” Race,Region, and Migration to the U.S. South, 1970–20001

This research examines recent migration patterns of native‐born blacks and whites to the U.S. South. Our primary research questions concern race and regional migration dynamics, and whether new insights into such can be gleaned by comparing migrants to the South with persons moving within the non‐South. Using samples of 1970–2000 census data, we focus on race differences in the tendency to choose the South as a migration destination, and whether whites and blacks differ in key selection mechanisms shaping movement to different regional destinations. We observe increasing rates of black (compared to white) migration to the South. Additionally, patterns of selectivity within this growing African‐American migration stream are especially dramatic when southern migrants are compared to persons moving within the non‐South. Our analyses also show that black migrants are targeting particular parts of the South (e.g., states where blacks are a larger share of the population), suggesting that future research should disaggregate the “Census South” region to provide a more comprehensive picture of contemporary interregional migration in the United States.