Suchergebnisse

In this article, I utilize a white privilege framework to analyze white women's experiences of the Dust Bowl. In particular, I focus on the question: What do white women's experiences of the Dust Bowl tell us about privilege and inequality? Using oral histories housed in the University of Oklahoma's archive, "Dust, Drought, and Dreams Gone Dry: Oklahoma Women in the Dust Bowl Oral History Project," I engage in a qualitative analysis of the women's experiences that expand our understanding of the dominant narratives of this era. By focusing on the anomalous nature of the sample, I examine the multifaceted way in which race, gender, and class shape these women's experiences of this era. Ultimately, these women's narratives reveal the complex system of privilege and oppression that these white women experienced in a time of economic and environmental crisis.

In this article, I explore how individuals access agency within a large institution. Relying on Dorothy Smith's work with institutional ethnography, I integrate interview data with my experience as part of the institutional change process. What is revealed in the data is that agency is constantly being negotiated with disengagement. In the article, I set up a series of vignettes to establish an interwoven dialogue that enables me to tell the collective story of faculty experiences at a university and their stories of working on institutional change. Through these dialogues, I explore the complex and contradictory ways in which faculty make sense of their roles on campus and within the institutional change process. Ultimately, what I trace in my conversations with faculty is a negotiation of agency and disengagement as they seek out strategies to be brave and work to make lasting and meaningful change at the university.

What are the challenges of doing feminist research within a military institution? This became the guiding force of my research with the Midwest Family Program of the National Guard (MWFP). This article examines both my experiences as a feminist scholar conducting research in a military institution as well as the gendered tensions within the MWFP. While in the field, my research shifted from a traditional ethnographic study to a deeply personal autoethnographic project. Analyzing my interviews, documents from MWFP, and published books by military wives, I consider how hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity shape the MWFP and public discourses of the military family. Simultaneously, I reflect on my own relationship with social power as an academic conducting research on a military institution. What my analysis exposes is how the National Guard relies on a complementary set of gender identities, at both the individual and institutional-level, reinforcing the position of hegemonic masculinity in society.

In this paper, I discuss the possibilities that emerge from using literary fiction as a tool for teaching social theory and critical consciousness. Focusing on data from a social theory course I taught in fall 2007, along with my experiences teaching social theory, I evaluate the utility of utilizing literary fiction in the social theory classroom. Serving as a mechanism to encourage the development of critical consciousness, literary fiction can expand classroom dynamics and establish engaged dialogue between students and teachers. In particular, it has the potential to make social theory interesting and meaningful to students who are often anxious about learning social theory.

In this article, the author explores the process of claiming masculine subjectivity through in-depth interviews conducted with two brothers who are adult children of a Vietnam Veteran. Drawn from a larger research project, these interviews serve as a case study that reveals the ways in which men navigate masculine subjectivity within a specific historical context. Drawing on Connell and Messerschmidt's reformulation of hegemonic masculinity and Butler's work on performativity, the author explores the dynamics of masculine subjectivity through the historical event of the Vietnam War. The author demonstrates how these men utilize both hegemonic masculinity and a subordinate form of masculinity found in the Vietnam Veteran as a way of negotiating their position as masculine subjects. The tension created by this negotiation ultimately produces a state of anxiety as they try to hold onto illusive idealized social narratives of masculine identity.

Using dialogues with our informants, as well as with each other, we explore how the men and women in our research make it through their mathematics coursework and, in turn, pursue their intended majors. Our research focuses on how students navigate what we call the gendered math path and how that path conforms to and diverges from traditional gender norms. Common themes of women's lower than men's self-perception of their ability to do mathematics, along with the divergent processes of doing gender that emerged in men's and women's discussions of their application of mathematics, reminded us of the continued struggles that women have to succeed in male-dominated academic disciplines. Although self-perception helps us understand why there are fewer women in STEM fields, it is important to understand how different forms of application of ideas might add to the diversity of what it means to do good science.