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3027 books match the query 'Sociology' and 538 start with t

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The Dividends of Dissent

How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington

Amin Ghaziani

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Marching on Washington is a hallowed tradition of American political protest, and demonstrations led by the women’s rights, civil rights, and antiwar movements all endure in popular memory. Between 1979 and 2000 four major lesbian and gay demonstrations took place there, and while these marches were some of the largest of their time, they have been sorely overlooked—until now. Drawing on extensive archival research, historical data, original photographs, interviews with key activists, and more than a thousand news articles, The Dividends of Dissent offers a thorough analysis—descriptive, historical, and sociological—of these marches and their organization.

Amin Ghaziani ably puts these demonstrations into their cultural context, chronicling gay and lesbian life at the time and the political currents that prompted the protests. He then turns to each march in detail, focusing on the role that internal dissent played in its organization. Ultimately, Ghaziani concludes that infighting can contribute positively to the development of social movements, and that the debates over the marches helped define what it means to be gay in the United States.

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The Divine Institution

White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family

Sophie Bjork-James

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Winner of the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize from the Human Sexuality and Anthropology Interest Group (HSAIG)

The Divine Institution provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics.

This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family. The consequences of this theology are both personal suffering for individuals who cannot measure up to prescribed gender and sexual roles, and political support for conservative government policies. Exposure to experiences that undermine the idea that an emphasis on the family is the solution to all social problems is causing a younger generation of white evangelicals to shift away from this narrow theological emphasis and toward a more social justice-oriented theology. The material and political effects of this shift remain to be seen.

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The Dream of a Common Movement

Selected Writings of Urvashi Vaid

Urvashi Vaid. Edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman

Duke University Press, 2025

The Dream of a Common Movement collects essays, interviews, and speeches by the late feminist and civil rights activist Urvashi Vaid, whose pioneering writing and organizing over the course of four decades fundamentally shaped the LGBTQ+ movement. Vaid explores the LGBTQ+ movement’s impact on the AIDS epidemic and its challenges as it developed a national presence. She calls out movement leaders and donors for not addressing gender, race, and class issues and passionately argues that the goal of any liberation movement should be transformation, not assimilation. In personal essays, Vaid describes a double consciousness forged by the experience of immigration and a complicated relationship with her Indian-American and lesbian identities. Whether she was focused on the Donors of Color Network, the 22nd Century Initiative, the Lesbian Political Action Committee, or other initiatives she launched, Vaid was steadfast in her vision of a more just society and believed deeply in the power of people coming together to effect change. Offering a window into the breadth of her progressive vision for social change, this volume inspires readers to never stop organizing and marching.

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The Du Boisian Challenge

Rethinking Sociological Methodology

José Itzigsohn, Ricarda Hammer, and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, editors

Duke University Press, 2027

Sociology is living through an epistemological and ethical reckoning. At the center of this intellectual uprising is William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Although long silenced by the discipline’s racist and colonial logics, generations of Black and other critical scholars have ushered a return to, and recovery of, Du Bois’s sociological thought and work. Rather than focusing on his empirical and theoretical contributions to sociology, The Du Boisian Challenge instead grapples with Du Boisian questions of methodology and methods—the intellectual frameworks and normative orientations that guide the questions we pursue, the way we organize and conduct our research, and how we conceive the relationships between theory and data, scholarship and society. Drawing inspiration from Du Bois’s evolving research program, this volume enlists Du Boisian sociologists to reflect on the methodological sensibilities, practices, and commitments that have informed their diverse analyses of racialized modernity and colonial capitalism. These contributors offer indispensable insights to the ongoing conversation about the methodological foundations and potential of contemporary Du Boisian sociology.

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The Du Boisian Challenge

Rethinking Sociological Methodology

José Itzigsohn, Ricarda Hammer, and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, editors

Duke University Press, 2027

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The Du Boisian Challenge

Rethinking Sociological Methodology

José Itzigsohn, Ricarda Hammer, and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, editors

Duke University Press, 2027

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The Early Essays

Talcott Parsons

University of Chicago Press, 1991

With the publication in 1937 of his first book, The Structure of Social Action, Talcott Parsons (1902-79) established himself as one of America's most important social theorists. Yet Parsons's essays from the decade preceding 1937 are virtually unknown to theorists and historians of sociology. By gathering the majority of Parsons's articles and book reviews published between 1923 and 1937, Charles Camic supplies the first comprehensive selection of the writings of the "early Parsons."

In his superb introductory essay, Camic situates Parsons's early writings in their sociointellectual and biographical context. Drawing upon extensive historical research, he identifies three overlapping but relatively distinct thematic phases in the early development of Paron's ideas: that on capitalist society and its origins, that one the historical development of the theory of action, and that on the foundations of analytical sociology. Camic correlates the emergence of these phases to Parsons's experiences at Amherst College in the early 1920s, in London and Heidelberg during the mid-1920s, and at Harvard University in the important period from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s. Reproducing in full each of twenty-one selections, this volume charts the changes and continues in the early development of some of Parsons's most fundamental ideas.

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The Earthly Community

Achille Mbembe. Translated by Steven Corcoran.

Duke University Press, 2027

In The Earthly Community, Achille Mbembe assesses our planetary condition. Connecting the ongoing destruction of the environment, the concentration of capital, and the technological tools that accelerate these trends, Mbembe asserts that we are pushing ourselves and our planet past our limits. He traces the current state of the world back to the division of land and systems of control over humans which characterized colonialism and the slave trade. When profit is frequently the only end, data continues to divide everything into smaller and smaller pieces, intensifying ecological and human harm. In the face of the disaster created by the combination of algorithmic instruments and capitalist colonial thinking, Mbembe takes lessons from ecology and African experience to argue for reparative alternatives. The Earthly Community calls us to defy our artificial divisions and gather as living communities to make a planetary way forward while there is still time.

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The Earthly Community

Achille Mbembe. Translated by Steven Corcoran.

Duke University Press, 2027

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The Ecological City

Preserving and Restoring Urban Biodiversity

Rutherford H. Platt

University of Massachusetts Press, 1994

Interdisciplinary in content as well as approach, this collection of original essays takes a fresh look at the ecology of urban communities. Written by experts from a variety of professions—academic researchers, private and public program managers, and citizen activists—the book explores issues of geography, ecology, landscape architecture, urban forestry, law, and environmental education. Contributions include broad overviews of common problems a well as detailed case studies of specific programs.

Although several contributors are natural scientists, the book focuses on matters of public policy and public-private collaboration. The aim is not only to assess the impact of increasing urbanization on biodiversity, but also to propose new ways of preserving and restoring the balance between the natural and the built environment through planning and design.

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The Economic Sociology of Immigration

Essays on Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship

Alejandro Portes

Russell Sage Foundation, 1995

"Portes suggests that immigration constitutes an especially appropriate Mertonian 'strategic research site' for economic sociology in that it provides very good opportunities for investigating the embeddedness of economic relationships in social situations....the contributors expand the conventional domain of economic sociology quite literally in both time and space."—Contemporary Sociology "Alejandro Portes and his splendid band of collaborators make clear that the causes, processes, and consequences of migration vary dramatically from group to group, that a group's history makes a profound difference to its fate in the American economy. They have produced a sinewy book, a book worth arguing with."—Charles Tilly, Columbia University The Economic Sociology of Immigration forges a dynamic link between the theoretical innovations of economic sociology with the latest empirical findings from immigration research, an area of critical concern as the problems of ethnic poverty and inequality become increasingly profound. Alejandro Portes' lucid overview of sociological approaches to economic phenomena provides the framework for six thoughtful, wide-ranging investigations into ethnic and immigrant labor networks and social resources, entrepreneurship, and cultural assimilation. Mark Granovetter illustrates how small businesses built on the bonds of ethnicity and kinship can, under certain conditions, flourish remarkably well. Bryan R. Roberts demonstrates how immigrant groups' expectations of the duration of their stay influence their propensity toward entrepreneurship. Ivan Light and Carolyn Rosenstein chart how specific metropolitan environments have stimulated or impeded entrepreneurial ventures in five ethnic populations. Saskia Sassen provides a revealing analysis of the unexpectedly flexible and vital labor market networks maintained between immigrants and their native countries, while M. Patricia Fernandez Kelly looks specifically at the black inner city to examine how insular cultural values hinder the acquisition of skills and jobs outside the neighborhood. Alejandro Portes also depicts the difference between the attitudes of American-born youths and those of recent immigrants and its effect on the economic success of immigrant children.

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The Edge of Surrealism

A Roger Caillois Reader

Roger Caillois, Edited by Claudine Frank

Duke University Press, 2003

The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France’s most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois’s work to appear in any language.

These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois’s political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois’s consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois’s intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss.

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The Edge of the Law

Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo

Jacinto Cuvi

University of Chicago Press, 2025

How street vendors tangle with the law in São Paulo, Brazil.

With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might sell you a number of delights and conveniences familiar to city dwellers—from cold water bottles while you’re sitting in traffic to a popsicle from a cart on a summer afternoon in the park. Such vendors form a significant share of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil, but their ubiquity belies perpetual struggle. Some have the right to practice their trade; others do not. All of them strive to make it—or stay afloat.

In The Edge of the Law, sociologist Jacinto Cuvi introduces us to the world of street vendors and teases out the relationship between the construction of legality and the experience of citizenship. As São Paulo’s city government undertakes a large-scale plan to cancel street vending licenses and evict street vendors, Cuvi reveals how the rights of informal workers can be revoked or withheld and how the lines can be redrawn between work that is “legal” and work that takes place under constant fear of law enforcement. Alongside the mechanics of disenfranchisement, Cuvi captures the lived experience of criminalization, dissecting the distribution of (shallow) rights among vendors who continually reinvent strategies to eke out a living while dealing with the constraints and pressures of informal citizenship at the edge of the law.

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The Emotions of Protest

James M. Jasper

University of Chicago Press, 2018

In Donald Trump’s America, protesting has roared back into fashion. The Women’s March, held the day after Trump’s inauguration, may have been the largest in American history, and resonated around the world. Between Trump’s tweets and the march’s popularity, it is clear that displays of anger dominate American politics once again.

There is an extensive body of research on protest, but the focus has mostly been on the calculating brain—a byproduct of structuralism and cognitive studies—and less on the feeling brain. James M. Jasper’s work changes that, as he pushes the boundaries of our present understanding of the social world. In The Emotions of Protest, Jasper lays out his argument, showing that it is impossible to separate cognition and emotion. At a minimum, he says, we cannot understand the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or pro- and anti-Trump rallies without first studying the fears and anger, moral outrage, and patterns of hate and love that their members feel.

This is a book centered on protest, but Jasper also points toward broader paths of inquiry that have the power to transform the way social scientists picture social life and action. Through emotions, he says, we are embedded in a variety of environmental, bodily, social, moral, and temporal contexts, as we feel our way both consciously and unconsciously toward some things and away from others. Politics and collective action have always been a kind of laboratory for working out models of human action more generally, and emotions are no exception. Both hearts and minds rely on the same feelings racing through our central nervous systems. Protestors have emotions, like everyone else, but theirs are thinking hearts, not bleeding hearts. Brains can feel, and hearts can think.

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The End of International Adoption?

An Unraveling Reproductive Market and the Politics of Healthy Babies

Estye Fenton

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Since 2004, the number of international adoptions in the United States has declined by more than seventy percent. In The End of International Adoption? Estye Fenton studies parents in the United States who adopted internationally in the past decade during this shift. She investigates the experiences of a cohort of adoptive mothers who were forced to negotiate their desire to be parents in the context of a growing societal awareness of international adoption as a flawed reproductive marketplace. Many parents, activists, and scholars have questioned whether the inequality inherent in international adoption renders the entire system suspect. In the face of such concerns, international adoption has not only become more difficult, but also more politically and ethically fraught. The mothers interviewed for this book found themselves navigating contemporary American family life in an unexpected way, caught between the double-bind of work-family life and a new paradigm of thinking about the method—international adoption—that they used to create those families.

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The End of Nomadism?

Society, State, and the Environment in Inner Asia

Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath

Duke University Press, 1999

Those who herd in the vast grassland region of Inner Asia face a precarious situation as they struggle to respond to the momentous political and economic changes of recent years. In The End of Nomadism? Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath confront the romantic, ahistorical myth of the wandering nomad by revealing the complex lives and the significant impact on Asian culture of these modern “mobile pastoralists.” In their examination of the present and future of pastoralism, the authors recount the extensive and quite sudden social, political, environmental, and economic changes of recent years that have forced these peoples to respond and evolve in order to maintain their centuries-old way of life.
Using extensive and detailed case studies comparing pastoralism in Siberian Russia, Mongolia, and Northwest China, Humphrey and Sneath explore the different paths taken by nomads in these countries in reaction to a changing world. In examining how each culture is facing not only different prospects for sustainability but also different environmental problems, the authors come to the surprising conclusion that mobility can, in fact, be compatible with a modern and urbanized world. While placing emphasis on the social and cultural traditions of Inner Asia and their fate in the post-Socialist economies of the present, The End of Nomadism? investigates the changing nature of pastoralism by focusing on key areas under environmental threat and relating the ongoing problems to distinctive socioeconomic policies and practices in Russia and China. It also provides lively contemporary commentary on current economic dilemmas by revealing in telling detail, for instance, the struggle of one extended family to make a living.
This book will interest Central Asian, Russian, and Chinese specialists, as well as those studying the environment, anthropology, sociology, peasant studies, and ecology.

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The End of Organized Capitalism

Scott Lash

University of Wisconsin Press, 1987

The End of Organized Capitalism argues that—despite Marx’s and Weber’s insistence that capitalist societies become increasingly more ordered—we now live in an era of “disorganized capitalism.” The book is devoted to a systematic examination of the shift to disorganized capitalism in five Western nations (Britain, the United States, France, West Germany, and Sweden). Through the analysis of space, class, and culture, Lash and Urry portray the restructuring of capitalist social relations that has resulted from this disorganization. They adduce evidence for the claims that in each of the nations there is a movement toward a deconcentration of capital within nation-states; toward the increased separation of banks, industry and the state; and toward the redistribution of productive relations and class-relevant residential patterns.
The authors also show that national disparities in contemporary, disorganized capitalism can be understood through close examination of the extent to which, and mode in which, capitalism became historically organized in each of the five countries under consideration.
The lucid arguments and judicious comparisons in this book will be of great interest to political scientists, sociologists, geographers, economists, and historians.

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The End of the Cognitive Empire

The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Duke University Press, 2018

In The End of the Cognitive Empire Boaventura de Sousa Santos further develops his concept of the "epistemologies of the South," in which he outlines a theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical framework for challenging the dominance of Eurocentric thought. As a collection of knowledges born of and anchored in the experiences of marginalized peoples who actively resist capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, epistemologies of the South represent those forms of knowledge that are generally discredited, erased, and ignored by dominant cultures of the global North. Noting the declining efficacy of established social and political solutions to combat inequality and discrimination, Santos suggests that global justice can only come about through an epistemological shift that guarantees cognitive justice. Such a shift would create new, alternative strategies for political mobilization and activism and give oppressed social groups the means through which to represent the world as their own and in their own terms.

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The End of the Line

Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America

Kathryn Marie Dudley

University of Chicago Press, 1994

The End of the Line tells the story of the 1988 closing of the Chrysler assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kathryn Marie Dudley uses interviews with residents to chart the often confusing process of change that deindustrialization forced on every corner of the community. This honest, moving portrait of one town's radical shift from a manufacturing to a postindustrial economy will redefine the way Americans think about our families, communities, and future.

"An excellent study not only of the cultural disruptions caused by the shutdown of Chrysler's operations in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but also of the ideology of progress that abetted the shutdown."—Stephen Amberg, Industrial and Labor Relations Review

"With the eye of an anthropologist, [Dudley] examines the tensions between the 'culture of hands' and the 'culture of mind.' Her account is especially instructive because, by many measures, Kenosha has successfully recovered, yet for many the pain still remains."—Booklist

"Exceptional. . . . Should be widely read."—Douglas Harper, Contemporary Sociology

"Make[s] clear what a tenuous concept economic security is, especially when the rules for achieving security are in flux."—Barbara Presley Noble, New York Times

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The Enigma of Diversity

The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice

Ellen Berrey

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Diversity these days is a hallowed American value, widely shared and honored. That’s a remarkable change from the Civil Rights era—but does this public commitment to diversity constitute a civil rights victory? What does diversity mean in contemporary America, and what are the effects of efforts to support it?

Ellen Berrey digs deep into those questions in The Enigma of Diversity. Drawing on six years of fieldwork and historical sources dating back to the 1950s and making extensive use of three case studies from widely varying arenas—housing redevelopment in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, affirmative action in the University of Michigan’s admissions program, and the workings of the human resources department at a Fortune 500 company—Berrey explores the complicated, contradictory, and even troubling meanings and uses of diversity as it is invoked by different groups for different, often symbolic ends. In each case, diversity affirms inclusiveness, especially in the most coveted jobs and colleges, yet it resists fundamental change in the practices and cultures that are the foundation of social inequality. Berrey shows how this has led racial progress itself to be reimagined, transformed from a legal fight for fundamental rights to a celebration of the competitive advantages afforded by cultural differences.

Powerfully argued and surprising in its conclusions, The Enigma of Diversity reveals the true cost of the public embrace of diversity: the taming of demands for racial justice.

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The Enigmatic Academy

Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American Education

Christian J. Churchill

Temple University Press, 2012

The Enigmatic Academy is a provocative look at the purpose and practice of education in America. Authors Christian Churchill and Gerald Levy use three case studies—a liberal arts college, a boarding school, and a Job Corps center—to illustrate how class, bureaucratic, and secular-religious dimensions of education prepare youth for participation in American foreign and domestic policy at all levels.

The authors describe how schools contribute to the formation of a bureaucratic character; how middle and upper class students are trained for leadership positions in corporations, government, and the military; and how the education of lower class students often serves more powerful classes and institutions.

Exploring how youth and their educators encounter the complexities of ideology and bureaucracy in school, The Enigmatic Academy deepens our understanding of the flawed redemptive relationship between education and society in the United States. Paradoxically, these three studied schools all prepare students to participate in a society whose values they oppose.

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The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890–1894

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Edited and with an introduction by Andrew J. Ball

University of Alabama Press, 2024

A foundational archive of Gilman’s early feminist, sociological, and philosophical thought, revealing the origins of a major American intellectual tradition.

The last decades have seen a resurgence of interest in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, now considered among the most important thinkers in US history. She is best known for fiction—such as the classic short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892)—and nonfiction, including her manifesto Women and Economics (1898), a work of intersectional sociology avant la lettre. Nevertheless, as a young writer, Gilman made her living delivering lectures. One cannot know Gilman without some knowledge of this body of lectures; this book fills that critical gap in Gilman scholarship.

Since the recovery of Charlotte Perkins Gilman began in the late 1960s and continued with the republication of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” in the 1970s, her image in cultural memory has been increasingly celebrated. Andrew J. Ball presents here fifty previously unpublished texts. They trace the development of Gilman’s thoughts on diverse subjects like gender, education, labor, science, theology, and politics—forming an intellectual diary of her growth.

These lectures are not just a testament to Gilman’s personal evolution, but also a crucial contribution to the foundations of American sociology and philosophy. The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890–1894 marks a historic moment, unveiling the hidden genius of Gilman's oratory legacy.

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The Ethics of Space

Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England

Steph Grohmann

HAU, 2020

Across the Western world, full membership of society is established through entitlements to space and formalized in the institutions of property and citizenship. Those without such entitlements are deemed less than fully human as they struggle to find a place where they can symbolically and physically exist. Written by an anthropologist who accidentally found herself homeless, The Ethics of Space is an unprecedented account of what happens when homeless people organize to occupy abandoned properties.

Set against the backdrop of economic crisis, austerity, and a disintegrating British state, Steph Grohmann tells the story of a flourishing squatter community in the city of Bristol and how it was eventually outlawed by the state. The first ethnography of homelessness done by a researcher who was formally homeless throughout fieldwork, this volume explores the intersection between spatial existence, subjectivity, and ethics. The result is a book that rethinks how ethical views are shaped and constructed through our own spatial existences.

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The Ethnographer's Way

A Handbook for Multidimensional Research Design

Kristin Peterson and Valerie Olson

Duke University Press, 2024

The Ethnographer’s Way guides researchers through the exciting process of turning an initial idea into an in-depth research project. Kristin Peterson and Valerie Olson introduce “multidimensioning,” a method for planning projects that invites scholars to examine their research interests from all angles. Researchers learn to integrate seemingly disparate groups, processes, sites, and things into a unified conceptual framework. The handbook’s ten modules walk readers step-by-step, from the initial lightbulb moment to constructing research descriptions, planning data gathering, writing grant and dissertation proposals, and preparing for fieldwork. Designed for ethnographers and those working across disciplines, these modules provide examples of multidimensional research projects with exercises readers can utilize to formulate their own projects. The authors incorporate group work into each module to break the isolation common in academic project design. In so doing, Peterson and Olson’s handbook provides essential support and guidance for researchers working at all levels and stages of a project.

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The Existential Self in Society

Edited by Joseph A. Kotarba and Andrea Fontana

University of Chicago Press, 1984

The Existential Self in Society explores the ways in which we experience and shape our individuality in a rapidly changing social world. Kotarba and Fontana have gathered eleven original essays that form an exciting contribution and an ideal introduction to the emerging field of existential sociology.

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The Failure of Our Fathers

Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama

Victoria E. Ott

University of Alabama Press, 2023

An in-depth study of non-elite white families in Alabama—from the state’s creation through the end of the Civil War

The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama examines the evolving position of non-elite white families in Alabama during one of the most pivotal epochs in the state’s history. Drawing on a wide range of personal and public documents reflecting the state’s varied regions and economies, Victoria E. Ott uses gender and family as a lens to examine the yeomanry and poor whites, a constituency that she collectively defines as “common whites,” who identified with the Confederate cause.

Ott provides a nuanced examination of how these Alabamians fit within the antebellum era’s paternalistic social order, eventually identifying with and supporting the Confederate mission to leave the Union and create an independent, slaveholding state. But as the reality of the war slowly set in and the Confederacy began to fray, the increasing dangers families faced led Alabama’s common white men and women to find new avenues to power as a distinct socioeconomic class.

Ott argues that family provided the conceptual framework necessary to understand why common whites supported a war to protect slavery despite having little or no investment in the institution. Going to war meant protecting their families from outsiders who threatened to turn their worlds upside down. Despite class differences, common whites envisioned the Confederacy as a larger family and the state as paternal figures who promised to protect its loyal dependents throughout the conflict. Yet, as the war ravaged many Alabama communities, devotion to the Confederacy seemed less a priority as families faced continued separations, threats of death, and the potential for starvation. The construct of a familial structure that once created a sense of loyalty to the Confederacy now gave them cause to question its leadership. Ott shows how these domestic values rooted in highly gendered concepts ultimately redefined Alabama’s social structure and increased class distinctions after the war.

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The Family and Inheritance

Marvin Sussman

Russell Sage Foundation, 1970

Two sociologists and a lawyer examine here the attitudes of both survivors and attorney on various problems surrounding inheritance—from will-making through estate settlement. Within a legal frame of reference, this book is a study of what happens within a family at death—and why. The authors use the "inheritance unit" as the basis for looking at the functions of inheritance in intergenerational family continuity and the general patterns of family relationship.

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The Fantasy of Feminist History

Joan Wallach Scott

Duke University Press, 2012

In The Fantasy of Feminist History, Joan Wallach Scott argues that feminist perspectives on history are enriched by psychoanalytic concepts, particularly fantasy. Tracing the evolution of her thinking about gender over the course of her career, the pioneering historian explains how her search for ways to more forcefully insist on gender as mutable rather than fixed or stable led her to psychoanalytic theory, which posits sexual difference as an insoluble dilemma. Scott suggests that it is the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender such an interesting historical object, an object that includes not only regimes of truth about sex and sexuality but also fantasies and transgressions that refuse to be regulated or categorized. Fantasy undermines any notion of psychic immutability or fixed identity, infuses rational motives with desire, and contributes to the actions and events that come to be narrated as history. Questioning the standard parameters of historiography and feminist politics, Scott advocates fantasy as a useful, even necessary, concept for feminist historical analysis.

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The Fear of Child Sexuality

Young People, Sex, and Agency

Steven Angelides

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Continued public outcries over such issues as young models in sexually suggestive ads and intimate relationships between teachers and students speak to one of the most controversial fears of our time: the entanglement of children and sexuality. In this book, Steven Angelides confronts that fear, exploring how emotional vocabularies of anxiety, shame, and even contempt not only dominate discussions of youth sexuality but also allow adults to avoid acknowledging the sexual agency of young people. Introducing case studies and trends from Australia, the United Kingdom, and North America, he challenges assumptions on a variety of topics, including sex education, age-of-consent laws, and sexting. Angelides contends that an unwillingness to recognize children’s sexual agency results not in the protection of young people but in their marginalization.

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The Feeling Intellect

Selected Writings

Philip Rieff

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Collected here for the first time, these writings demonstrate the range and precision of Philip Rieff's sociology of culture. Rieff addresses the rise of psychoanalytic and other spiritual disciplines that have reshaped contemporary culture.

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The Fine Line

Eviatar Zerubavel

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Eviatar Zerubavel argues that most of the distinctions we make in our daily lives and in our culture are social constructs. He questions the notion that a clear line can be drawn to separate one time or object or concept from another, and presents witty and provocative counterexamples in defense of ambiguity and anomaly.

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The First Year Out

Understanding American Teens after High School

Tim Clydesdale

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Wild parties, late nights, and lots of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many assume these are the things that define an American teenager’s first year after high school. But the reality is really quite different. As Tim Clydesdale reports in The First Year Out, teenagers generally manage the increased responsibilities of everyday life immediately after graduation effectively. But, like many good things, this comes at a cost.

Tracking the daily lives of fifty young people making the transition to life after high school, Clydesdale reveals how teens settle into manageable patterns of substance use and sexual activity; how they meet the requirements of postsecondary education; and how they cope with new financial expectations. Most of them, we learn, handle the changes well because they make a priority of everyday life. But Clydesdale finds that teens also stow away their identities—religious, racial, political, or otherwise—during this period in exchange for acceptance into mainstream culture. This results in the absence of a long-range purpose for their lives and imposes limits on their desire to understand national politics and global issues, sometimes even affecting the ability to reconstruct their lives when tragedies occur.

The First Year Out is an invaluable resource for anyone caught up in the storm and stress of working with these young adults.

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The Flight from Ambiguity

Essays in Social and Cultural Theory

Donald N. Levine

University of Chicago Press, 1985

The essays turn about a single theme, the loss of the capacity to deal constructively with ambiguity in the modern era. Levine offers a head-on critique of the modern compulsion to flee ambiguity. He centers his analysis on the question of what responses social scientists should adopt in the face of the inexorably ambiguous character of all natural languages. In the course of his argument, Levine presents a fresh reading of works by the classic figures of modern European and American social theory—Durkheim, Freud, Simmel and Weber, and Park, Parsons, and Merton.

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The Forest and the Trees

Sociology as Life, Practice, and Promise

Allan Johnson

Temple University Press, 2008

If sociology could teach everyone just one thing, what would it be? The Forest and the Trees is one sociologist's response to the hypothetical—the core insight with the greatest potential to change how people see the world and themselves in relation to it.

This revised and updated edition features:

• A new chapter that brings together the various aspects of the sociological model described in previous chapters with a detailed application to the origins of racism in the United States

•A discussion of how individuals can participate in social change by stepping off paths of least resistance

•The addition of graphics to illustrate the sociological model of systems and individuals

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The Forest and the Trees

Sociology as Life, Practice, and Promise

Allan Johnson

Temple University Press, 2014

New Third Edition!

If sociology could teach everyone just one thing, what would it be? The Forest and the Trees is one sociologist's response to the hypothetical-the core insight with the greatest potential to change how people see the world and themselves in relation to it.

This Third Edition features:
• Updated key references, data, resources, and examples, from global warming, Obama's election, and gay marriage to transgender/cisgender and the Occupy Movement
• A glossary of terms
• The short essays in Chapter 6, framed around the power of sociology, dig beneath easy and popular understandings to reveal what lies beneath
• An additional analysis of how men's violence is made invisible even though most violence is perpetrated by men
• Chapter 7's focus on sociology as a worldview with an analysis of the origins of white privilege

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The French Writers' War, 1940-1953

Gisèle Sapiro

Duke University Press, 2014

The French Writers' War, 1940–1953, is a remarkably thorough account of French writers and literary institutions from the beginning of the German Occupation through France's passage of amnesty laws in the early 1950s. To understand how the Occupation affected French literary production as a whole, Gisèle Sapiro uses Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the "literary field." Sapiro surveyed the career trajectories and literary and political positions of 185 writers. She found that writers' stances in relation to the Vichy regime are best explained in terms of institutional and structural factors, rather than ideology. Examining four major French literary institutions, from the conservative French Academy to the Comité national des écrivains, a group formed in 1941 to resist the Occupation, she chronicles the institutions' histories before turning to the ways that they influenced writers' political positions. Sapiro shows how significant institutions and individuals within France's literary field exacerbated their loss of independence or found ways of resisting during the war and Occupation, as well as how they were perceived after Liberation.

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The Future of Futurity

Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Global City

Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta

Duke University Press, 2025

In The Future of Futurity, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in India’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Mankekar and Gupta show how futurity—an affective-temporal potentiality and mode of being that emphasizes the unfolding of time—enables BPO workers to strive for hopeful futures despite their experiences of growing inequality, volatility, and violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. They point to the heterogeneous lives, yearnings, and anxieties of BPO workers, foregrounding the disjunctions and conjunctions between labor, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility. Mankekar and Gupta show how workers’ daily lives and imaginings of the future point to the relationships between futurity, capital, and technology as well as futurity’s imbrications with contemporary racial capitalism. In so doing, the authors insist on the transformative potential of futurity even in conditions of extreme precarity.

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The Future of National Urban Policy

Marshall Kaplan, ed.

Duke University Press, 1989

The Future of National Urban Policy brings together scholars, policymakers, and journalists to explore the condition of America's cities. The authors focus on policies of the previous five presidential administrations to examine the history of urban policy and offer suggestions for its future. Individual chapters address a variety of topics, including housing, employment, education, the infrastructure of cities, and public policy.

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The Future of the Family

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Russell Sage Foundation, 2004

High rates of divorce, single-parenthood, and nonmarital cohabitation are forcing Americans to reexamine their definition of family. This evolving social reality requires public policy to evolve as well. The Future of the Family brings together the top scholars of family policy—headlined by editors Lee Rainwater, Tim Smeeding, and, in his last published work, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—to take stock of the state of the family in the United States today and address the ways in which public policy affects the family and vice versa. The volume opens with an assessment of new forms of family, discussing how reduced family income and lower parental involvement can disadvantage children who grow up outside of two-parent households. The book then presents three vastly dissimilar recommendations—each representing a different segment of the political spectrum—for how family policy should adapt to these changes. Child psychologist Wade Horn argues the case of political conservatives that healthy two-parent families are the best way to raise children and therefore should be actively promoted by government initiatives. Conversely, economist Nancy Folbre argues that government's role lies not in prescribing family arrangements but rather in recognizing and fostering the importance of caregivers within all families, conventional or otherwise. Will Marshall and Isabel Sawhill borrow policy prescriptions from the left and the right, arguing for more initiatives that demand personal responsibility from parents, as well as for an increase in workplace flexibility and the establishment of universal preschool programs. The book follows with commentary by leading policy analysts Samuel Preston, Frank Furstenberg Jr., and Irwin Garfinkel on the merits of the conservative and liberal arguments. Each suggests that marriage promotion alone is not enough to ensure a happy, healthy, and prosperous future for American children who are caught up in the vortex of family change. They agree that government investments in children, however, can promote superior developmental outcomes and even potentially encourage traditional families by enlarging the pool of "marriageable" individuals for the next generation. No government action can reverse trends in family formation or return America to the historic nuclear family model. But understanding social change is an essential step in fashioning effective policy for today's families. With authoritative insight, The Future of the Family broadens and updates our knowledge of how public policy and demography shape one another.

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The Gang

A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago

Frederic Milton Thrasher

University of Chicago Press, 1963

While gangs and gang culture have been around for countless centuries, The Gang is one of the first academic studies of the phenomenon. Originally published in 1927, Frederic Milton Thrasher’s magnum opus offers a profound and careful analysis of hundreds of gangs in Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century. With rich prose and an eye for detail, Thrasher looked specifically at the way in which urban geography shaped gangs, and posited the thesis that neighborhoods in flux were more likely to produce gangs. Moreover, he traced gang culture back to feudal and medieval power systems and linked tribal ethos in other societies to codes of honor and glory found in American gangs. Thrasher approaches his subject with empathy and insightfulness, and creates a multifaceted and textured portrait that still has much to offer to readers today. With handsome images that evoke the era, this unabridged edition of The Gang not only explores an important moment in the history of Chicago, but also is itself a landmark in the history of sociology and subcultural theory.

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The Gender Knot

Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy

Allan Johnson

Temple University Press, 2014

New Third Edition!

The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson's response to the pain and confusion that men and women experience by living with gender inequality, explains what patriarchy is and isn't, how it works, and what gets in the way of understanding and doing something about it. Johnson's simple yet powerful approach avoids the paralyzing trap of guilt, blame, anger, and defensive denial that often results from conversations about gender.

This edition features:
• Updated references, data, resources, and examples, especially in relation to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity (e.g., gay marriage, transgender/cisgender)
• A glossary of terms
• A new chapter, "What Changes and What Does Not: Manhood and Violence," that provides an extended analysis of the causes of men's violence as a patriarchal phenomenon

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The Genealogical Sublime

Julia Creet

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry, a massive data mining project, and fodder for reality television. But the fact remains that our contemporary fascination with family history cannot be understood independently of the powerful technological tools that aid and abet in the search for traces of blood, belonging, and difference.

In The Genealogical Sublime, Julia Creet traces the histories of the largest, longest-running, most lucrative, and most rapidly growing genealogical databases to delineate a broader history of the industry. As each unique case study reveals, new database and DNA technologies enable an obsessive completeness—the desire to gather all of the world's genealogical records in the interests of life beyond death. Archival research and firsthand interviews with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officials, key industry players (including Ancestry.com founders and Family Search executives), and professional and amateur family historians round out this timely and essential study.

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The Gift Paradigm

A Short Introduction to the Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences

Alain Caillé

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2020

In his classic essay The Gift, Marcel Mauss argued that gifts can never be truly free; rather, they bring about an expectation of reciprocal exchange. For over one hundred years, his ideas on economy, social relations, and exchange have inspired new modes of thought, none more so than what crystallized in the 1980s around an innovative group of French academics. In TheGift Paradigm, Alain Caillé provides the first in-depth, English-language introduction to La Revue du MAUSS—or, “Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences,” combining the work of anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and others. Today, the very idea of a “general social science” seems unthinkable, unless you count the pervasive sway of a utilitarian logic in orthodox economics, or the diffuse influence of neoliberalism. Here, Caillé offers a distinctly different reading of economy and society, inspired by Mauss—as vital now as ever.

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The Global Pigeon

Colin Jerolmack

University of Chicago Press, 2013

The pigeon is the quintessential city bird. Domesticated thousands of years ago as a messenger and a source of food, its presence on our sidewalks is so common that people consider the bird a nuisance—if they notice it at all. Yet pigeons are also kept for pleasure, sport, and profit by people all over the world, from the “pigeon wars” waged by breeding enthusiasts in the skies over Brooklyn to the Million Dollar Pigeon Race held every year in South Africa.

Drawing on more than three years of fieldwork across three continents, Colin Jerolmack traces our complex and often contradictory relationship with these versatile animals in public spaces such as Venice’s Piazza San Marco and London’s Trafalgar Square and in working-class and immigrant communities of pigeon breeders in New York and Berlin. By exploring what he calls “the social experience of animals,” Jerolmack shows how our interactions with pigeons offer surprising insights into city life, community, culture, and politics. Theoretically understated and accessible to interested readers of all stripes, The Global Pigeon is one of the best and most original ethnographies to be published in decades.

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The Globalization of Supermax Prisons

Ross, Jeffrey Ian

Rutgers University Press, 2013

2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

“Supermax” prisons, conceived by the United States in the early 1980s, are typically reserved for convicted political criminals such as terrorists and spies and for other inmates who are considered to pose a serious ongoing threat to the wider community, to the security of correctional institutions, or to the safety of other inmates. Prisoners are usually restricted to their cells for up to twenty-three hours a day and typically have minimal contact with other inmates and correctional staff. Not only does the Federal Bureau of Prisons operate one of these facilities, but almost every state has either a supermax wing or stand-alone supermax prison.

The Globalization of Supermax Prisons examines why nine advanced industrialized countries have adopted the supermax prototype, paying particular attention to the economic, social, and political processes that have affected each state. Featuring essays that look at the U.S.-run prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanemo, this collection seeks to determine if the American model is the basis for the establishment of these facilities and considers such issues as the support or opposition to the building of a supermax and why opposition efforts failed; the allegation of human rights abuses within these prisons; and the extent to which the decision to build a supermax was influenced by developments in the United States. Additionally, contributors address such domestic matters as the role of crime rates, media sensationalism, and terrorism in each country’s decision to build a supermax prison.

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