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I develop "personalized social policy" as a speculative exercise to examine the possibility that policy makers and service providers, making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, could use genetic information to divide clients into "treatment groups" receiving differential service goods to better meet individual needs or achieve efficiency. Using real and hypothetical examples from genetics and social services, I show how personalized social policy might work and discuss its implications for the practical organization and theoretical justification of social policy. The analysis suggests that behavior genetics could dramatically impact social policy, not by sowing fatalism about change, but by offering specific, practical tools that would reorganize the institutional and professional composition of social services delivery and bolster functionalist rationales for social welfare. Policy analysts should focus on specific ways genetic information might affect policy decisions to prepare proactive responses should the prospect of personalized social policy become a reality.

White nationalists have a genetic essentialist understanding of racial identity, so what happens when using genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to explore personal identities, they receive upsetting results they consider evidence of non-white or non-European ancestry? Our answer draws on qualitative analysis of posts on the white nationalist website Stormfront, interpreted by synthesizing the literatures on white nationalism and GATs and identity. We show that Stormfront posters exert much more energy repairing individuals' bad news than using it to exclude or attack them. Their repair strategies combine anti-scientific, counter-knowledge attacks on the legitimacy of GATs and quasi-scientific reinterpretations of GATs in terms of white nationalist histories. However, beyond individual identity repair they also reinterpret the racial boundaries and hierarchies of white nationalism in terms of the relationships GATs make visible. White nationalism is not simply an identity community or political movement but should be understood as bricoleurs with genetic knowledge displaying aspects of citizen science.

Epigenetics is a burgeoning area of biomedical research into the mechanisms by which genes are regulated—how the activity of producing proteins is controlled. Although molecular epigenetic research is highly biochemical, it is of interest to sociologists because some epigenetic changes are environmentally mediated and can persist across the life span or into further generations. Environmental epigenetic research tracks mechanisms by which social forces—from pollution to nutrition to mothering to traumatic experience—become molecularly embodied, affect gene expression, and induce durable changes in behavior and health. We begin with an introduction to the science of environmental epigenetics focused on articulating the logic of experimentation and explanation in this field. Turning to sociologists' key interests, we review the growing literature on epigenetics of socioeconomic status. Finally, we consider how epigenetics offers opportunities and challenges for sociological research on both empirical and theoretical grounds.

AbstractWhen studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvement in the scientific process as a story of suppression and persecution, in which only a few remarkable figures can withstand scrutiny and take on challengers with dignity. Description and elaboration of these figures and the folklore surrounding them sets in motion the interpretive processes by which some actors become charismatic leaders and others charismatic followers within science, ultimately providing alternative symbolic resources for an embattled research agenda to accrue legitimacy. To illustrate, we use the case of Arthur Jensen – a deceased intelligence researcher and the intellectual father to contemporary texts like The Bell Curve – and the circles of hero worship that admirers inside and outside academia have created to praise him. Using this perspective to study Jensen and his admirers demonstrates how the perennial race and intelligence debates gain a kind of symbolic power, unrelated to their scientific merit or racist appeal, which enables such debates to thrive and persist in the public sphere. More generally, our approach identifies contemporary processes by which scientific ideas can gain public authority even when their intellectual merit has been deemed dubious.

This article explores the processes involved in the construction and contestation of community in New York City following the disaster of September 11, 2001. By employing insights from the literatures on disaster and cultural meaning making, we examine how New Yorkers created and negotiated the meanings of the cultural, symbolic, and moral problems that followed the attacks. Though this postdisaster period has come to be heralded as one that witnessed a spontaneous and uniform rise in patriotism, helping behaviors, and memorial practices, we demonstrate that New Yorkers actively contested and negotiated these terrains. We argue that the tension inherent in this contestation was rooted in uncertainty about identity, interaction, and the boundaries of community in the wake of the attacks, and that its negotiation resulted in a structure of feeling that was fraught with lingering inconsistencies. This was ultimately taken for granted and incorporated into the cultural framework of the "new normal," marking the collapse of the acute liminality of the New York community's postdisaster experience.

In contrast to the audience in most of the world, New Yorkers experienced the events of 9/11 as more than symbolic images. Indeed, the experiential and practical foundations of New Yorkers' cultural existences were transformed in the wake of 9/11, at least temporarily. The weeks following the crisis were spent coming to terms with what happened; making meaning in practical, interpersonal, and historico-political terms; and interpreting and manipulating a new flood of experiences and practices made possible by the newly problematic order of daily life. This article documents the significant, though now largely forgotten, shifts in the cultural experience of living in New York City to trace the eventual construction of "normalcy" and its attendant hegemonic and political meanings.