Engaging Erik Olin Wright: Between Class Analysis and Real Utopias. Edited by Michael Burawoy and Gay Seidman (Penguin Random House, 2024)
Erik Olin Wright was one of the most brilliant and world renowned social scientists of our era. He left us in 2019 with an unfinished project – the articulation of class and utopia. Wright’s sociological Marxism embarked from an original class analysis, with its trade-mark contradictory class locations, that empirically mapped class structures across the globe. In response to the collapse of communism and the rise of neoliberalism, Wright turned to the premise of class analysis, that is the possibility of socialism.
Forsaking Marxism’s allergy to utopian thinking, Wright searched the planet for institutions that might sow the seeds of socialism – such as cooperatives, participatory budgeting, basic income grants – institutions that might dissolve racial, gender, and class inequalities by eroding capitalism. His last book How to be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century, published posthumously in over a dozen languages has become a manifesto for a new world, bringing together and inspiring social movement activists.
The essays in this volume pay tribute to his generative theory, his crystalline teaching and his personal warmth. The authors – all close colleagues or former students – wrestle with the relationship between his two expanding research programs, class analysis and real utopias. They burn the candle from either end, all galvanized by Wright’s genius and vision to reinvent Marxism.
Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. Jessica Calarco. (Penguin Random House, 2024)
Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.
Holding It Together chronicles the causes and dire consequences. America runs on women—women who are tasked with holding society together at the seams and fixing it when things fall apart. In this tour de force, acclaimed Sociologist Jessica Calarco lays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo.
Holding It Together draws on five years of research in which Calarco surveyed over 4000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with women who bear the brunt of our broken system. A widowed single mother struggles to patch together meager public benefits while working three jobs; an aunt is pushed into caring for her niece and nephew at age fifteen once their family is shattered by the opioid epidemic; a daughter becomes the backstop caregiver for her mother, her husband, and her child because of the perceived flexibility of her job; a well-to-do couple grapples with the moral dilemma of leaning on overworked, underpaid childcare providers to achieve their egalitarian ideals. Stories of grief and guilt abound. Yet, they are more than individual tragedies.
Tracing present-day policies back to their roots, Calarco reveals a systematic agreement to dismantle our country’s social safety net and persuade citizens to accept precarity while women bear the brunt. She leads us to see women’s labor as the reason we’ve gone so long without the support systems that our peer nations take for granted, and how women’s work maintains the illusion that we don’t need a net.
Weaving eye-opening original research with revelatory sociological narrative, Holding It Together is a bold call to demand the institutional change that each of us deserves, and a warning about the perils of living without it.
The Color of Asylym: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil. Katherine Jensen. (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
In 2013, as Syrians desperate to escape a brutal war fled the country, Brazil took the remarkable step of instituting an open-door policy for Syrian refugees. Why did Brazil—in contrast to much of the international community—offer asylum to any Syrian who would come? And how do their experiences differ from other refugee populations seeking status in Brazil?
The Color of Asylum offers an ethnographic look at the process of asylum seeking in Brazil, uncovering the different ways asylum seekers are treated and the racial logic behind their treatment. It focuses on two of the largest and most successful groups of asylum seekers: Syrian and Congolese refugees. While the groups obtain asylum in Brazil at roughly equivalent rates, their journey to that status could not be more different, with Congolese refugees enduring significantly greater difficulties at each stage, from arrival through to their treatment by Brazilian officials. Syrians, meanwhile, receive better treatment because the Brazilian state sees them as white, in a nation that has historically privileged white immigration. However, regardless of their country of origin, even migrants who do secure asylum status find their lives remain extremely difficult, marked by struggle and discrimination.
Soaking the Middle Class Suburban Inequality and Recovery from Disaster. Anna Rhodes & Max Besbris (Russell Sage Foundation, 2022)
Extreme weather is increasing in scale and severity as global warming worsens. While poorer communities are typically most vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change, even well-resourced communities are increasingly vulnerable as climate-related storms intensify. Yet little is known about how middle-class communities are responding to these storms and the resulting damage. In Soaking the Middle Class, sociologists Anna Rhodes and Max Besbris examine how a middle-class community recovers from a climate-related disaster and how this process fosters inequality within these kinds of places.
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dropped record-breaking rainfall in Southeast Texas resulting in more than $125 billion in direct damages. Rhodes and Besbris followed 59 flooded households in Friendswood, Texas, for two years after the storm to better understand the recovery process in a well-resourced, majority-White, middle-class suburban community. As such, Friendswood should have been highly resilient to storms like Harvey, yet Rhodes and Besbris find that the recovery process exacerbated often-invisible economic inequality between neighbors. Two years after Harvey, some households were in better financial positions than they were before the storm, while others still had incomplete repairs, were burdened with large new debts, and possessed few resources to draw on should another disaster occur.
Rhodes and Besbris find that recovery policies were significant drivers of inequality, with flood insurance playing a key role in the divergent recovery outcomes within Friendswood. Households with flood insurance prior to Harvey tended to have higher incomes than those that did not. These households received high insurance payouts, enabling them to replace belongings, hire contractors, and purchase supplies. Households without coverage could apply for FEMA assistance, which offered considerably lower payouts, and for government loans, which would put them into debt. Households without coverage found themselves exhausting their financial resources, including retirement savings, to cover repairs, which put them in even more financially precarious positions than they were before the flood.
The vast majority of Friendswood residents chose to repair and return to their homes after Hurricane Harvey. Even this devastating flood did not alter their plans for long-term residential stability, and the structure of recovery policies only further oriented homeowners towards returning to their homes. Prior to Harvey, many Friendswood households relied on flood damage from previous storms to judge their vulnerability and considered themselves at low risk. After Harvey, many found it difficult to assess their level of risk for future flooding. Without strong guidance from federal agencies or the local government on how to best evaluate risk, many residents ended up returning to potentially unsafe places.
As climate-related disasters become more severe, Soaking the Middle Class illustrates how inequality in the United States will continue to grow if recovery policies are not fundamentally changed.
Battleground Asymmetric Communication Ecologies and the Erosion of Civil Society in Wisconsin. Lewis A. Friedland, Dhavan V. Shah, Michael W. Wagner, Katherine J. Cramer, Chris Wells & Jon Pevehouse. (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Battleground models Wisconsin’s contentious political communication ecology: the way that politics, social life, and communication intersect and create conditions of polarization and democratic decline. Drawing from 10 years of interviews, news and social media content, and state-wide surveys, we combine qualitative and computational analysis with time-series and multi-level modeling to study this hybrid communication system – an approach that yields unique insights about nationalization, social structure, conventional discourses, and the lifeworld. We explore these concepts through case studies of immigration, healthcare, and economic development, concluding that despite nationalization, distinct state-level effects vary by issue as partisan actors exert their discursive power.
Prisons and Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Jason Schnittker, Michael Massoglia, and Christopher Uggen. (Oxford University Press, 2022)
In an age when over two million people are incarcerated in the United States alone, the wide-reaching impact of prisons in our society is impossible to deny, and the paradoxical relationship between prisons and health has never been more controversial. Prisons are charged at the same time with being punitive and therapeutic, with denying freedom and administering treatment, with confining and rehabilitating. And they are not living up to the charge.
Prison and Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration examines the connection between prisons and health. Based on a decade of empirical research, this book explores the consequences of incarceration on inmates themselves; on the families they leave behind; on the larger communities to which they return; and, ultimately, on entire health care systems at the state and national level. Jason Schnittker, Michael Massoglia, and Christopher Uggen demonstrate that the relationship between incarceration and health is sustained by a combination of social, cultural, and legal forces, and by a failure to recognize that prisons are now squarely in the business of providing care. With an eye to the history that led us to this point, the book investigates these connections and shows how prisons undermine health and well-being.
An evenhanded and comprehensive analysis, this groundbreaking volume demonstrates that the prison system produces unintended and far-reaching consequences for the health of our nation and points the way for a fairer and more effective justice system.
Autistic Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis. Douglas M. Maynard & Jason Turowetz (University of Chicago Press, 2022)
Drawing on hundreds of hours of video recordings and ethnographic observations at a clinic where professionals evaluated children for autism, the authors’ analysis of interactions among clinicians, parents, and children demystifies the categories, tools, and practices involved in the diagnostic process. Autistic Intelligence shows that autism is not a stable category; it is the outcome of complex interactional processes involving professionals, children, families, and facets of the social and clinical environments they inhabit. The authors suggest that diagnosis, in addition to carefully classifying children, also can highlight or include unique and particular contributions those with autism potentially can make to the world around us.
The Ethnomethodology Program: Legacies and Prospects. Edited by Douglas M. Maynard & John Heritage. (Oxford University Press, 2022)
It’s been more than fifty years since Harold Garfinkel created the field of ethnomethodology–a discipline that offers a new way of understanding how people make sense of their everyday world. Since his book Studies in Ethnomethodology, published in 1967, there has been a substantial–although often subterranean–growth in ethnomethodological (EM) work. Studies in and appreciation of ethnomethodological work continue to grow, but the breadth and penetration of his insights and inspiration for ongoing research have yet to secure their full measure of recognition.
This volume celebrates Harold Garfinkel’s enormous contributions to sociology and conversation analysis, exploring how ethnomethodology emerged, the empirical consequences of Garfinkel’s work, and the significant contemporary work that has resulted from it. Doug Maynard and John Heritage bring together experts from a wide range of theoretical and empirical areas to create the first comprehensive collection of work on EM that encompasses its role in “studies of work,” in Conversation Analysis, and in other subdisciplines. Chapters highlight EM’s distinctive forms of ethnographic inquiry and its influences on a host of substantive domains including legal environments, science and technology, workplace and organizational inquiries, survey research, social problems and deviance, and disability and atypical interaction. The book explains how EM especially helped to set the agenda for gender studies, while also developing insights for inquiries into racial and ethnic features of everyday life and experience.
Still, there is much of what Garfinkel called “unfinished business,” which means that ethnomethodological inquiries are continuing to intensify and develop. The Ethnomethodology Program addresses this unfinished business: not only drawing attention to past accomplishments in the field, but also suggesting how these accomplishments set the stage for current and future endeavors that will benefit from EM-inspired approaches to social organization and interaction.
Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea. Edited by Chad Alan Goldberg (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020)
Like many higher education institutions across the United States, the University of Wisconsin’s mission, known as the Wisconsin Idea, emphasizes a responsibility to serve the needs of the state and its people. This commitment, which necessarily requires a pledge to academic freedom, has recently been openly threatened by state and federal actors seeking to dismantle a democratic and expansive conception of public service.
Goldberg uses the Wisconsin Idea as a lens in Education for Democracy to demonstrate that public higher education institutions remain a bastion of collaborative problem solving. Examinations of partnerships between the state university and people of the state highlight many crucial and lasting contributions to issues of broad public concern such as conservation, LGBTQ+ rights, and poverty alleviation. The contributors restore the value of state universities and humanities education as a public good, contending that they deserve renewed and robust support.
Upsold: Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality. Max Besbris (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
In this book, Max Besbris shows how agents successfully upsell, inducing buyers to spend more than their initially stated price ceilings. His research reveals how face-to-face interactions influence buyers’ ideas about which neighborhoods are desirable and which are less-worthy investments and how these preferences ultimately contribute to neighborhood inequality.
Stratification defines cities in the contemporary United States. In an era marked by increasing income segregation, one of the main sources of this inequality is housing prices. A crucial part of wealth inequality, housing prices are also directly linked to the uneven distribution of resources across neighborhoods and to racial and ethnic segregation. Upsold shows how the interactions between real estate agents and buyers make or break neighborhood reputations and construct neighborhoods by price. Employing revealing ethnographic and quantitative housing data, Besbris outlines precisely how social influences come together during the sales process.
Interviewer Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective:
This book presents a comprehensive collection of state-of-the-art research on interviewer-administered survey data collection. Interviewers play an essential role in the collection of the high-quality survey data used to learn about our society and improve the human condition. Although many surveys are conducted using self-administered modes, interviewer-administered modes continue to be optimal for surveys that require high levels of participation, include difficult-to-survey populations, and collect biophysical data. Survey interviewing is complex, multifaceted, and challenging.
In 2019, survey methodologists, survey practitioners, and survey operations specialists participated in an international workshop at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to identify best practices for surveys employing interviewers and outline an agenda for future methodological research. This book features 23 chapters on survey interviewing by these worldwide leaders in the theory and practice of survey interviewing. Written for managers of survey interviewers, survey methodologists, and students interested in the survey data collection process, this unique reference uses the Total Survey Error framework to examine optimal approaches to survey interviewing, presenting state-of-the-art methodological research on all stages of the survey process involving interviewers.
City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right.
Michael M. Bell (Princeton University Press, 2018)
People have long looked to nature and the divine as paths to the good. In this panoramic meditation on the harmonious life, Michael Mayerfeld Bell traces how these two paths came to be seen as separate from human ways, and how many of today’s conflicts can be traced back thousands of years to this ancient divide.
Taking readers on a spellbinding journey through history and across the globe, Bell begins with the pagan view, which sees nature and the divine as entangled with the human—and not necessarily good. But the emergence of urban societies gave rise to new moral concerns about the political character of human life. Wealth and inequality grew, and urban people sought to justify their passions. In the face of such concerns, nature and the divine came to be partitioned from the human, and therefore seen to be good—but they also became absolute and divisive.
Bell charts the unfolding of this new moral imagination in the rise of Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, Jainism, and many other traditions that emerged with bourgeois life. He follows developments in moral thought, from the religions of the ancient Sumerians, Greeks, and Hebrews to the science and environmentalism of today, along the way visiting with contemporary indigenous people in South Africa, Costa Rica, and the United States. City of the Good urges us to embrace the plurality of our traditions—from the pagan to the bourgeois—and to guard against absolutism and remain open to difference and its endless creativity.
Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, Second Edition
Lisa Wade and Myra Marx Ferree (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc: 2018)
An instant best-seller and now the leading book for the course, Wade and Ferree’s Gender is a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to sociological perspectives on gender. Drawing on memorable examples mined from history, pop culture, and current events, Gender deftly moves between theoretical concepts and applications to everyday life. New discussions of #metoo, toxic masculinity, and gender politics in the Trump era help students participate in today’s conversation about gender.
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement.
Monica M. White (The University of North Carolina Press, 2018)
In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans–an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.
Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.