Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe transformation from public to private executions is generally understood as a consequence of the rationalization of authority in conjunction with growing class tensions and the emergence of bourgeois sentimentality. What is missing from this analysis is the role gender played. The exclusion of women from the execution site captures a more general tension around womanhood in the nineteenth century, but that tension was expressed differently depending on women's class and race locations. Using newspaper coverage of executions as my primary data source, I show that the interpretive challenges posed by women at the execution site varied by the social positions they occupied.

Researchers have identified a host of factors that influence immigrant men's understanding of and commitment to health, but overall the scholarship is still unsettled, in large part because the experiences of immigrant groups are so varied. In this paper, based on interviews with Kurdish immigrants in the United States, we demonstrate that the field of health provides both opportunities and pitfalls for men whose social, familial, and masculine aspirations simultaneously pull them into American life and push them towards a segregated existence. We conclude that men use a discourse of health to simultaneously assert themselves as men and maintain their connections to their original culture, just as they use a discourse of masculine responsibility to account for the health-related choices they make.

An overwhelming facet of race literature suggests that American society has entered an era of colorblindness; where instead of perpetuating racist ideology through blatant discriminatory legislation, racial differences are either understated or ignored entirely. These new racial processes are reflected in the policies of major social institutions, but also within popular culture. Yet, as made evident by the success of comedians such as Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, stand‐up comedy challenges acceptable racial discourse, placing race in the forefront. Comedy persists as a facet of popular culture where racial difference is made apparent, yet ironically the art of comedy is usually overlooked by sociologists. What is lacking in the humor research is an understanding of how comedy creates an environment where race can be spoken about directly, and often times harshly. Through the analysis of focus groups, this study finds evidence to suggest that racial and ethnic comedy serves to both reinforce and wane racial and ethnic stereotypes, similarities, and differences. After watching stand‐up comedy clips of popular comedians, black and white respondents show both agreement and disagreement on the following: (1) the offensiveness of ethnic comedy, (2) stereotypes and perceived truths, and (3) the utility of ethnic comedy in everyday interactions. These findings are helpful in understanding how comedy serves as one of the few openly racialized facets of popular culture as well as uncovering some of the ways in which race works within the culture of a self‐proclaimed colorblind society.

Scholars have identified a range of factors that influence the ability of researchers to access hard-toreach groups and the willingness of their members to participate in research. In this paper, we draw on insights from both ethnographic methods and participatory action research to demonstrate the importance of building trust in our relationships with hard-to-reach participants in research based on interviews. Such trust-building, we show, is greatly facilitated by pre-recruitment immersion that aids not only the recruitment of individual participants but also improves the quality of the data collected. These methodological concerns emerged from an interview study focusing on Muslim women's use of urban public recreational spaces in South-East Michigan. Although the first author of this paper, as a woman and a Muslim, is a formal insider in the study population, her experiences with recruitment demonstrate that the access granted by insider status is insufficient as grounds for a research relationship based on trust. This is so especially when the target population is as marginalized and embattled as the post 9/11 immigrant Muslim community. With more than two years of community immersion, however, she was able to foster enough trust to secure a large number of committed participants that spoke freely and thoughtfully about the issues at stake (78 in all).

In this article, we interrogate the entanglement of technology with the moral dilemmas of capital punishment in the United States. Although death is obviously front and center of capital punishment, it is often backgrounded analytically speaking, serving as a looming backdrop that rarely makes it to the center of analysis. For the purposes of this article, however, death is an important focal point precisely because it is the direct target of execution technology and also the most crucial element implicated when something goes wrong with executions. Using the introduction of new execution technology (the electric chair, the gas chamber, and lethal injection) in every state as our empirical case, we enhance our understanding of the promises and perils of new execution technology by showing how the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable executions get redrawn with each new technology, thus undermining the prospects of a technological solution to the dilemmas with capital punishment. We argue that technology cannot fix capital punishment and that is because the problem, at its root, is not about how efficiently and painlessly we kill but instead the fact that we kill at all. And this, we conclude, is a moral, not technological, problem.

This project aims to advance knowledge in labour politics by focusing on the 'contentious politics of unemployment', i.e. the relationship between political-institutional approaches to employment policy and political conflicts mobilized by collective actors over unemployment in the public domain. It is designed to study this topic at national, international comparative, and transnational levels. Key objectives: (a) to generate new data for longitudinal and comparative analyses of ideological and policy positions of actors and their relationships; (b) to study the potential for political participation 'from below' by citizens campaigning for the rights of the unemployed and the conditions under which existing organizational networks and policy dialogues transform in a more open civil policy deliberation; (c) to provide knowledge based on rigorous cross-national and EU-level transnational analyses allowing grounded empirical statements about the Europeanisation of the field.

As the contested and negotiated character of the employment policy field expresses itself both in the public domain and in the institutional arenas for interest mediation, we look both at political claim-making in the public space and policy deliberation within the polity. The overall design of the research has three main components: (a) mapping the field of political contention, i.e. structures of ideological cleavages and actor relationships, both longitudinally and cross-nationally; (b) examining the nature of the multi-organizational field extending from the core policy domain to the public domain, i.e. networks and channels of political influence between core policy actors and intermediary organizations, on one side, and civil society organizations and social movements representing the unemployed (including the unemployed themselves), on the other; (c) studying the nature of the interaction between EU-level and national policy-making by determining the channels of political influence that exist between European institutions and national policy domains in the field (the multi-level governance of employment policy), and examining to what extent there are new political opportunities for the bottom-up empowerment of citizens' organizations as a consequence of the emergence of the EU as an actor in the field. The body of data generated allows for longitudinal (1990-2002) and comparative (F, D, I, S, CH, UK) analyses of ideological and policy positions of actors and their relationships in the unemployment issue-field. It is backed up by interviews conducted with key actors in the organizational field (policy actors, employers associations, trade unions, parties, NGOs and social movements) both at the national and transnational levels. Innovative attempts are made to establish networks and links between the involved actors as part of our dissemination strategy, which is key to the overall success of the project.

This project aims to advance knowledge in labour politics by focusing on the 'contentious politics of unemployment', i.e. the relationship between political-institutional approaches to employment policy and political conflicts mobilized by collective actors over unemployment in the public domain. It is designed to study this topic at national, international comparative, and transnational levels. Key objectives: (a) to generate new data for longitudinal and comparative analyses of ideological and policy positions of actors and their relationships; (b) to study the potential for political participation 'from below' by citizens campaigning for the rights of the unemployed and the conditions under which existing organizational networks and policy dialogues transform in a more open civil policy deliberation; (c) to provide knowledge based on rigorous cross-national and EU-level transnational analyses allowing grounded empirical statements about the Europeanisation of the field.

As the contested and negotiated character of the employment policy field expresses itself both in the public domain and in the institutional arenas for interest mediation, we look both at political claim-making in the public space and policy deliberation within the polity. The overall design of the research has three main components: (a) mapping the field of political contention, i.e. structures of ideological cleavages and actor relationships, both longitudinally and cross-nationally; (b) examining the nature of the multi-organizational field extending from the core policy domain to the public domain, i.e. networks and channels of political influence between core policy actors and intermediary organizations, on one side, and civil society organizations and social movements representing the unemployed (including the unemployed themselves), on the other; (c) studying the nature of the interaction between EU-level and national policy-making by determining the channels of political influence that exist between European institutions and national policy domains in the field (the multi-level governance of employment policy), and examining to what extent there are new political opportunities for the bottom-up empowerment of citizens' organizations as a consequence of the emergence of the EU as an actor in the field. The body of data generated allows for longitudinal (1990-2002) and comparative (F, D, I, S, CH, UK) analyses of ideological and policy positions of actors and their relationships in the unemployment issue-field. It is backed up by interviews conducted with key actors in the organizational field (policy actors, employers associations, trade unions, parties, NGOs and social movements) both at the national and transnational levels. Innovative attempts are made to establish networks and links between the involved actors as part of our dissemination strategy, which is key to the overall success of the project.