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AbstractResearch on forced disappearances, which refer to state‐orchestrated abductions and disappearances of men and women, has long emphasized the roles of families, specifically mothers, in contesting state violence. However, the family as the locus of social movements resisting inequality and state‐related violence remains underexamined in the broader field of social movement study. In this article, I provide an overview of research in areas of the Global South, specifically Latin America and the Middle East, related to family‐based activism around disappearance to highlight how turning our analytical lens towards the family enriches our understandings of gender, power, and resistance to systemic inequality. In the discussion, I outline a burgeoning literature around other forms of state violence, such as incarceration and immigrant deportation, that centers the family as a site to critique structural inequality. I conclude by identifying future directions for sociological inquiry into family‐based movements that can enrich our understandings of social movements.

Following 9/11, hundreds of individuals in the USA were detained on suspicion of engaging in terrorism and subjected to a "hold until cleared" policy which permitted their indefinite detention while authorities vindicated them of terrorist connections. However, these experiences of detention are not unique to the post-9/11 era. Drawing on a critical analysis of prominent Supreme Court cases concerning the War on Terror, mass incarceration, and immigrant deportation, I argue that the US state has developed a series of institutions that operate to effectively "disappear" people from public and political life. While discussions of disappearance often focus on a specific type of state violence, several important features of state-enforced disappearance characterize all three of the cases considered here. First, disappearances focus on particular communities on the basis of sociological categories such as gender, age, race and ethnicity, and religion, among others. Second, disappearances foster a sense of uncertainty regarding why someone has been disappeared, and render it difficult to ascertain information about the individual. And lastly, disappearance has protracted and extended effects—psychological, social, economic—on the families and friends of the disappeared person. In the USA, capitalism plays a critical role in the development of institutions that disappear individuals.

As a billion-dollar industry with millions of consumers, DNA-based ancestry testing has become a highly sought out tool for people seeking knowledge of their ancestry and, recently, their family health history. As sociologists have emphasized, however, these DNA-based technologies have also risked reinvigorating dubious connections between biology and race. In this article, we outline a class assignment utilizing YouTube videos that feature consumers narrating the results of their DNA-based ancestry testing. The assignment invites students to interrogate the claims of consumers, who often seamlessly connect their ancestry results to particular racial and ethnic identities. As a result, students are poised to better understand how race and ethnicity are social constructions rather than individual biological traits.

Examining immigrant detention and forced disappearance through their effects on family and social networkds reveals the pernicious power of state removals.

In this photo essay, the authors examined over 3,500 photos of the early phase of the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, to capture the meanings that protestors brought to the fore.

In this article, we propose a campus-based pedagogy to teach sociology. We offer the example of a project designed to critically assess university Title IX policy and situate it within existing sociological research on gender-based inequalities and violence. Students engage in sociological research regarding issues such as sexual harassment and assault, intimate partner violence, consent, and rape culture, among others, and develop a tool to create greater awareness among the student body of university policy in these areas. Drawing surveys and focus group interviews with students who completed the project, we found that students acquire a historical and sociological understanding of gender-based violence and institutional sexism and consequently adopt a critical lens toward university Title IX policy regarding these issues. By situating students as central to the process of analyzing and critiquing university policy, this exercise fosters an intellectual efficacy among students to embark on sociologically informed interventions in their university's campus culture.

The role of gender in the Middle East and North Africa is widely discussed—but often little understood. Seeking to close that gap, the authors of this comprehensive study explore a wide range of issues related to gender in the region as they have been unfolding since the Arab Spring