Santiago Molina, Berkeley PhD 2021, and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology and the Science in Human Culture Program at Northwestern University has accepted an Assistant Professor position at Northwestern University. Congratulations Santiago!
NPR's Marketplace Morning Report: Inside California’s new law allowing more people to seal old criminal records
"An old criminal record can derail a person’s economic prospects for years. People who have served prison time often have a hard time finding jobs and qualifying for loans, while also facing higher rates of poverty.
Sarah Payne's paper, Equalization or Reproduction? “Some College” and the Social Function of Higher Education was recently published in the Sociology of Education journal.
On November 27, Professor Cristina Mora was quoted in The Washington Post article, UC-Berkeley can’t use race in admissions. Is it a model for the country?
Congratulations Prof. Mora!
This talk illustrates how, in the context of consumer medicine, physicians convince patients to invest in particular medical treatments by weighing risks with them, reframing uncertain processes as calculable gambles. I delve into the case of twins as a by-product of fertility treatment, which transitioned from a welcome outcome to a problematic one for fertility professionals, while remaining a desirable birth outcome for many patients. From observing hundreds of patient-provider consults at three fertility clinics in New York State that catered to distinct patient populations, as well as conducting over a hundred in-depth interviews with patients and medical providers, I argue that providers reframe the prospect of having twins to patients by communicating with them not only about the associated health risks, but also those related to temporal, financial, and emotional constraints, and show how these negotiations diverge depending clinics' organizational imperatives, particularly the class of patients they are set up to serve.
On November 16, Professor Michael Burawoy was quoted in The Daily Califorian article, "Campus faculty strike in solidarity with academic workers".
Congratulations Prof. Burawoy!
Sociological studies stress how state legibility serves as a form of population control. Often overlooked is how states differ in their will to control, and how this variation shapes legibility projects. This research proposes a three-dimensional analytical framework to study legibility from a comparative perspective that seeks to account for this variation. I illustrate the usefulness of this framework through an in-depth analysis of how Brazil and Mexico rendered poor individuals visible in order to implement conditional cash transfer programs (or CCTs). In the mid-1990s, these two states implemented the same policy, facing very similar challenges; yet, they adopted different solutions for governing their respective CCT programs and making poor families visible. Drawing on the analysis of approximately 15,000 pages of official documents, 125 in-depth interviews with bureaucratic and political elites, and 18 months of fieldwork in Brazil and Mexico, this article reveals the political and governance effects of distinct methods of seeing like a state. Specifically, I show that the differences and consequences of legibility projects depended on the politics of legitimation of each CCT program and had the unanticipated effect of making the state itself visible to broader publics and thus subject to intense scrutiny.
Though social networks have long been theorized as a critical resource that may attenuate the negative impact of residential segregation on health, few empirical studies have explored this possibility. Using an egocentric network approach, this study examines social network processes linking residential segregation to health and health disparities among Black and White Americans. Specifically, drawing on U.S. census data and individual-level survey data from the Person-to-Person Health Interview Study, I ask: (1) To what extent does residential segregation contribute to Black-White disparities in physical and mental health? (2) Do characteristics of social networks moderate the association between residential segregation and health? While I find residential segregation to have no association with physical and mental health for White Americans, residential segregation is associated with worse physical health but better mental health for Black Americans; however, these relationships are moderated by network factors. That is, the adverse association between residential segregation and physical health is substantially attenuated among Black Americans who are embedded in networks with high bridging social capital (i.e., less-dense networks with a high proportion of non-kin and college-educated ties). Further, I find that residential segregation is associated with better mental health only among Black Americans who are embedded in networks with high bonding social capital (i.e., smaller, closer, and more kin-centered networks). Taken together, these findings suggest that the link between residential segregation and health, and processes underlying this relationship, may be more complex than current theory predicts.
There seems to have been a rapid change in recent years in how people talk and think about social justice issues. But how dramatic or broad has the purported shift actually been? When did it start? How durable are current trends likely to be? Who is driving the change? Is this a genuinely novel historical moment? Or are there relevant precedents that can provide us analytical leverage into what’s happening today?
Drawing from his forthcoming book, al-Gharbi will argue that there has indeed been a significant shift in norms and discourse around ‘identity’ issues over the last decade, particularly among a specific subset of the population. The talk will illustrate some ways we can measure the magnitude and timing of the shifts and who seems to be driving them. It will show that the current period of tumult over feminism, antiracism, LGBTQ rights and related causes seems to be a ‘case’ of something. The talk will conclude with an exploration of how understanding the current moment in the context of previous cases can clarify what may have inspired the shifts – and what did not – and how trends may play out over the short-to-medium term.
Today, it is common to treat every home as a potential business or a speculative asset, every person an entrepreneur, and every relationship a commercial opportunity. While these arrangements offer useful forms of flexibility, they are often accompanied by material precarity and insecurity. This talk grounds the ambiguities of “home-based” work in the 1980s, when the political-cultural regime of the family wage, that undergirded the standard labor contract, became undone. In this talk, I examine regulatory politics surrounding the fate of a New Deal era ban on industrial homework. In the 1980s, garment labor organizers concerned with immigrant sweatshops, Reagan administration labor regulators, and middle-class women, clashed over the significance and desirability of resurgent “home-based” work. While opponents of homework argued that its legalization would erode the foundations of the family wage, foreclose pathways for racial economic inclusion, and exacerbate gendered crises of care, proponents of homework portrayed it as a privatized resolution to the economic and social crises of the family wage, generating surprising appeal. This case suggests that the commercialization of homes was driven not only by market ideology and capitalist competition, but also by social reactions against previous regimes of social protection, which protected unevenly and unequally.