Suchergebnisse

Many domains of social life are being transfigured by new technologies of identification, monitoring, tracking, data analysis, and control. The lived experiences of people subjected to surveillance, however, can vary widely along lines of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, and nationality. This can be seen with the enforcement of different types of mobilities for different categories. Regardless of the domain, new surveillance systems often amplify existing social inequalities and reproduce regimes of control and/or exclusion of marginalized groups in societies.

This article compares experiences of surveillance technologies in low-income public housing and affluent gated communities in Phoenix, Arizona. Contrary to the popular discourse of surveillance as ensuring protection from external threats, in practice, both groups feel subjected to undesired individual scrutiny and policing of their behaviors. Nonetheless, key differences exist. First, residents in gated communities possess relative mobility and minimal personal risk compared to those in public housing. Second, in public housing, the underlying logics behind surveillance are toward the enforcement of state laws, whereas in gated communities, they are toward the enforcement of conformity in appearance and behavior. The article argues that the dissonance between popular discourse and discourse of practice about surveillance technologies is representative of deeper social instabilities engendered by neoliberal forms of governance.

This article explores organizational restructuring in one large public institution as a situated response to the instabilities brought on by globalization. Drawing upon ethnographic research with the Los Angeles public school system, I argue that a process of fragmented centralization is taking place, whereby decision-making authority is becoming more centralized while accountability for centrally made decisions is becoming more distributed. This process is propelled, in part, by the rise of a new occupational group of information technology (IT) specialists that is integrating itself into places of power and altering all aspects of organizational operations, transforming the school system into a post-Fordist organization.

Purpose: Meeting the needs of dual-career academic couples can be an important step in recruiting and retaining university faculty and researchers. The goal of this essay is to review the existing scholarship on dual-career hires and offer concrete recommendations for university administrators.


Background/Motivation: Attending to dual-career needs is especially relevant to efforts at diversifying the academic workforce, as multiple studies have indicated that faculty appointments are a major contributor to the so-called leaky pipeline causing attrition of women and scholars of color, particularly in biomedical and STEM fields. We take it as a feminist imperative to confront institutional discrimination against dual-career scholars and to intervene in the service of collective praxis.


Intended Audience: Scholars and administrators interested in understanding and overcoming institutional barriers to achieving diverse, inclusive, and family-friendly academic workplaces.


Contribution: This essay synthesizes the recent literature on dual-career hires and offers recommendations for university administrators.


Positionality: We approach this issue as a senior academic couple that has navigated dual-career job searches for close to twenty years and has held faculty positions together at three different academic institutions. We are a white, hetero dual-career academic couple interested in developing resources for individuals striving to activate change at their universities.

This article responds to the criticism that 'observer effects' in ethnographic research necessarily bias and possibly invalidate research findings. Instead of aspiring to distance and detachment, some of the greatest strengths of ethnographic research lie in cultivating close ties with others and collaboratively shaping discourses and practices in the field. Informants' performances — however staged for or influenced by the observer — often reveal profound truths about social and/or cultural phenomena. To make this case, first we mobilize methodological insights from the field of science studies to illustrate the contingency and partiality of all knowledge and to challenge the notion that ethnography is less objective than other research methods. Second, we draw upon our ethnographic projects to illustrate the rich data that can be obtained from 'staged performances' by informants. Finally, by detailing a few examples of questionable behavior on the part of informants, we challenge the fallacy that the presence of ethnographers will cause informants to self-censor.