Recent ucsb_soc items

The Night is Still Young: A Cross-Disciplinary Forum on Queer Nightlife Studies

Thu, 6 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Night is Still Young: A Cross-Disciplinary Forum on Queer Nightlife Studies

Cycles of Sameness and Difference in LGBT Social Movements

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on oscillations of the movement's collective identity between emphasizing similarities to the heterosexual mainstream and celebrating differences. We contrast earlier movement cycles mobilized around difference with efforts to legalize same-sex marriage. Our review highlights the turning points that led to shifts in protest cycles, and we trace the consequences for movement outcomes. Scholarship will advance if researchers recognize the path-dependent nature of social movements and that sameness and difference are not oppositional, static, or discrete choices. We conclude by recommending directions for future research.

The Sociology of Queer Nightlife

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Queer nightlife is receiving increasing recognition in a growing field of nightlife studies, yet its insights have been largely mined by humanists. In this introduction to a subfield-defining special issue, I blend arguments from the social sciences about “dirty work” with humanistic notions of “disidentification” as a survival strategy to amplify a sociological point of view. What theoretical opportunities arise from working on and against the conservative tendencies of the discipline, neither abandoning queer nightlife for something perceived as more legitimate nor refusing entirely to engage with other sociologists? A review of select multidisciplinary works distills three expressions of disidentification used by researchers to negotiate novel arguments. I describe these as conceptual renovations, deconstructive reframings, and epistemological affirmations. From this baseline, I classify special issue papers into additional clusters that articulate sociology-specific interventions...

Problems and prospects of measurement in the study of culture

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Problems and prospects of measurement in the study of culture

Minding the gap(s): The uneven gendering of engineering and computing work across Europe

Thu, 9 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This study investigates variability across 31 European countries in the gender composition of engineering and computing (“tech”) occupations, and possible sociocultural drivers of this variability. As previously documented for other STEM domains and geographies, the largest tech gender gaps are in the most affluent societies of Europe (which are also most postmaterialist and gender-liberal culturally). Multilevel regression models explore key attitudinal and socioeconomic predictors of this gender segregation that have been identified through previous comparative research. Results show that men, but not women, who espouse postmaterialist values have higher odds of working in engineering or computing, and that the gender-specific effects of postmaterialist values account for a substantial share of cross-country variability. Findings are consistent with research suggesting a heightened salience of gender math stereotypes to career aspirations in societies that valorize individual...

Beyond antiracism

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Beyond antiracism

Is It Really a Paradox? A Mixed-Methods, Within-Country Analysis of the Gender Gap in STEM Education

Thu, 8 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It is well established that women’s representation in scientific and technical fields decreases with societal affluence, but the mechanisms underlying this so-called paradox remain contested. This study leverages distinctive features of the Israeli educational system to identify social psychological and organizational mechanisms driving contextual variability in the gendering of physics and computing subjects. Using in-depth interviews and original surveys, we compare gender gaps in ninth graders’ attitudes and aspirations across two highly segregated yet centrally administered state school sectors: one serving the socioeconomically marginalized Arab Palestinian minority, and one serving the Jewish secular majority. Results reveal curricular affinities, discourses, and course-taking patterns that are differentially gendered across school sectors. While boys and girls in Arab Palestinian schools report more instrumentalist motivations and more positive attitudes toward mathematically...

Globalization – everything, everywhere, all the time

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Is globalization still a proper descriptor? Does globalization also include satellites and space shuttles in outer space? Recent work widens the definition of globalization: ‘Globalization is the trend of greater worldwide connectivity of people over time and the awareness of this happening.’ This shift of emphasis to connectivity as the driving force and the key point, implies that globalization is just one of the many forms this takes. Important is not the form, which changes according to circumstances, but connectivity and what it aspires and achieves. In an era of comeback of geopolitics this may be an important course adjustment.

What is Global Studies?

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This discussion examines global studies and whether and how it differs from the earlier wave of globalization studies. Although treatments generally regard these as equivalent, studies of globalization are anchored in social science and humanities disciplines while global studies are, in principle, conceived on a different footing. We can distinguish two accounts of global studies: an empirical account, i.e. a description of actual existing global studies, and an analytical or programmatic account, which refers to what global studies can or should be for theoretical or other reasons. The first section of this paper discusses global knowledge as a database that exists independent of studies of globalization; the second section turns to studies of globalization; the third section concerns global studies as it actually exists; the fourth section offers a programmatic account of global studies. The concluding sections address cognitive problems of global thinking, in particular the...

Review of “On Wars”

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Review of “On Wars”

Ain’t I a Migrant?: Global Blackness and the Future of Migration Studies

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the wake of recent interventions to better connect the subfields of international migration and race and ethnicity through a sociology of racialized immigration, we push this further by arguing for the necessity of a global Blackness perspective on global migration. Such a focus does not just reflect the role of race in the dynamics of migration, and vice versa, but more importantly shifts assumptions about this relationship. So, it is not enough to say that race matters in migration but rather that blackness and Black lives matter in how migration unfolds. Using global blackness as a starting point in our analyses of migration reveals a clearer and closer entanglement of race, racism, colonialism, and migration. We argue that global Blackness structures notions of who migrates and under what conditions, as well as our ideas regarding migrants and their descendants and use the examples of New York City, Paris, and France as paradigmatic sites for understanding this relationship.

Categories in Social Interaction: Unlocking the Resources of Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization for Psychological Science

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article reviews two related approaches-conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA)-to sketch a systematic framework for exposing how categories and categorial phenomena are (re)produced in naturally occurring social interaction. In so doing, we argue that CA and MCA address recent concerns about psychological methods and approaches. After summarizing how categories are typically theorized and studied, we describe the main features of a CA approach to categories, including how this differs from conventional psychology. We review the core domains of research in CA and how categories can be studied systematically in relation to the basic machinery of talk and other conduct in interaction. We illustrate these domains through examples from different settings of recorded naturally occurring social interaction. After considering the applications that have arisen from CA and MCA, we conclude by drawing together the implications of this work for psychological...

International morality and international law

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

International morality and international law

Fadi Lama. Why the West Can’t Win: From Bretton Woods to a Multipolar World

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Fadi Lama. Why the West Can’t Win: From Bretton Woods to a Multipolar World

Traditional Asians? Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Policy Attitudes in the United States

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Traditional Asians? Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Policy Attitudes in the United States

The gendering of tech selves: Aspirations for computing jobs among Jewish and Arab/Palestinian adolescents in Israel

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The gendering of tech selves: Aspirations for computing jobs among Jewish and Arab/Palestinian adolescents in Israel

Context Matters: Differential Gendering of Physics in Arabic-speaking, Hebrew-speaking, and Single-Sex State Schools in Israel

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Context Matters: Differential Gendering of Physics in Arabic-speaking, Hebrew-speaking, and Single-Sex State Schools in Israel

Correction to: Context Matters: Differential Gendering of Physics in Arabic-speaking, Hebrew-speaking, and Single-Sex State Schools in Israel

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Correction to: Context Matters: Differential Gendering of Physics in Arabic-speaking, Hebrew-speaking, and Single-Sex State Schools in Israel

Complicating Patriarchy: Gender Beliefs of Muslim Facebook Users in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Western stereotypes often characterize gender relations in Muslim-majority societies as uniformly traditional and patriarchal. Underlying this imagery is a unidimensional understanding of gender ideology as moving along a single traditional-to-egalitarian continuum. In this study, we interrogate these assumptions by exploring variability across and within Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian (MENASA) societies in beliefs related to two regionally salient gender principles: women’s chastity and marital patriarchy. Data from a new online survey of Muslim Facebook users show substantial heterogeneity across and within six MENASA societies in support for these principles. These data also reveal a multidimensional structure, in that societies show different configurations of chastity and marital patriarchy beliefs, and each of these gender principles is influenced by respondents’ religious beliefs and gender status in different ways. Although religious absolutism predicts...

Gender Attitudes in Africa: Liberal Egalitarianism Across 34 Countries

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: This study provides a first descriptive mapping of support for women’s equal rights in 34 African countries and assesses diverse theoretical explanations for variability in this support. Contrary to stereotypes of a homogeneously tradition-bound continent, African citizens report high levels of agreement with gender equality that are more easily understood with reference to global processes of ideational diffusion than to country-level differences in economic modernization or women’s public-sphere roles. Multivariate analyses suggest, however, that gender liberalism in Africa may be spreading through mechanisms not typically considered by world-society scholars: Support for equal rights is largely unrelated to countries’ formal ties to the world system, but it is stronger among persons who are more exposed to extra-local culture, including through internet and mobile phone usage, news access, and urban residency. Forces for gender liberalism are conditioned, moreover,...

Talking about Torture: How Political Discourse Shapes the Debate

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Talking about Torture: How Political Discourse Shapes the Debate

Law and revolution: legitimacy and constitutionalism after the Arab Spring

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Law and revolution: legitimacy and constitutionalism after the Arab Spring

Guantánamo's Legacy

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The military detention facility at the Guantánamo Bay naval base is the most enduring manifestation of the US “war on terror.” It is also materially and symbolically central to US torture, war crimes, and other egregious violations of law in the post-9/11 era. Since the first detainees arrived in 2002, Guantánamo has been the subject of controversy and debate, as well as a key setting for legal challenges to government policies. This article traces the legacy of the prison and the military commissions across four administrations. It demonstrates that the lack of a common understanding or shared narrative about what Guantánamo means or has meant is a product of entrenched partisanship that characterizes contemporary US politics more broadly. Guantánamo's confounding legacy reflects the lack of a national consensus about the role of laws and courts as guarantors of even the most basic rights.

Review of “An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States”

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Review of “An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States”

Sequential Standoffs in Police Encounters With the Public

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Research on interactions involving police officers foregrounds the importance of their communicative practices for fostering civilians’ perceptions of police legitimacy. Building on this research, we describe a pattern of conduct that is a recurrent source of trouble in such encounters, which we call sequential standoffs. These standoffs emerge when two parties persistently pursue alternative courses of action, producing a stalemate in which neither progress in, nor exit from, either course of action appears viable. They are routinely resolved by officers (re)casting civilians’ pursuit of one course of action as constituting resistance to the officers’ proposed course of action, and thus as warranting officers’ use of coercive violence to resolve the stalemate. In some cases, however, officers resolve standoffs cooperatively using sequentially accommodative methods. We consider how these findings advance approaches to communicative dilemmas in policing, and their broader significance...

How truth wins in opinion dynamics along issue sequences

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

How truth wins in social groups is an important open problem. Classic experiments on social groups dealing with truth statement issues present mixed findings on the conditions of truth abandonment and reaching a consensus on the truth. No theory has been developed and evaluated that might integrate these findings with a mathematical model of the interpersonal influence system that alters some or all of its members' positions on an issue. In this paper we provide evidence that a general model in the network science on opinion dynamics substantially clarifies how truth wins in groups.

The Counterterrorism War Paradigm versus International Humanitarian Law: The Legal Contradictions and Global Consequences of the US “War on Terror”

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the “war on terror.” What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism...

The Afterlives of Torture: The Global Implications of Reactionary US Politics

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

None

Before and After the Arab Uprisings

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Before and After the Arab Uprisings

The Moral Panic of Islamo-gauchisme in Service of a Colorblind Approach to Racism

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Moral Panic of Islamo-gauchisme in Service of a Colorblind Approach to Racism

Darryl Leroux. Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Darryl Leroux's Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity from University of Manitoba Press.

Rhetorical Dance of Belonging: Chamaole Narratives of Race, Indigeneity, and Identity from Guam

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article is based on an investigation of identity formations of a mixed-race mestisa/mestisu group from Guam, locally known as Chamaole, who are descendants of both native Chamorros and White Americans ( haole ). Using a hybrid research methodology, the author analyzes Chamaole encounters with ambiguity in interviews with three Chamaole authors and poets: Jessica Perez-Jackson (“Half Caste”), Lehua M. Taitano (excerpts from A Bell Made of Stones ), and Corey Santos (“Chamaoli”). An analysis of their works and their interviews reveals patterns of cultural, genealogical, racial, linguistic, and political conflicts between Chamorros and White Americans since the US occupation of Guam. The article articulates how Chamaoles overcome race-based prejudices, celebrate Chamorro resistance, and reckon with White supremacy, showing that tensions resulting from US colonialism in Guam are magnified in Chamaole experiences....

Cover Art

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This cover was created by G. Reginald Daniel. The image is by Ashlea Gillon (Ngāti Awa, Ngāpuhi, Ngāiterangi).

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A list of articles in this special issue on mixedness and Indigeneity in the Pacific.

Exploring Mixedness in Fiji: Navigating Mixed-Race Identities for Individuals of Indo-Fijian and Indigenous Fijian Descent

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores the shifts and negotiations of racial, ethnic, and national identity for persons of mixed Indo-Fijian and Indigenous Fijian descent. The study provides a detailed historical overview of the racialization of politics and identity in Fiji and the subsequent politicization of mixed race. Drawing on narratives of identity and belonging gathered from multiple individual and group interviews with ten participants in Fiji, the article juxtaposes this historical framework with the lived reality of mixedness in contemporary Fiji. Framed within the field of critical mixed race studies, this research identifies and interrogates how identity constructions are challenged, accommodated, and reinforced through the participants’ lived experiences of mixedness and how this relates to Indigenous identity. The article seeks to provide a new layer of analysis at a time when identity politics remain critical in Fijian society. Drawing on models of mixed identity developed...

Editor's Note

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction to the special issue. We remember and honor the founding editor and inaugural editor in chief of JCMRS , G. Reginald Daniel.

Whiria Tū Aka: Conceptualizing Dual Ethnic Identities, Complexities, and Intensities

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Indigenous ethnic grouping Māori did not exist prior to Pākehā arrival in Aotearoa New Zealand. Instead, Māori identified as members of hapū (kinship group, subtribe), and membership was always related to concepts inclusive of whakapapa (genealogy, ancestry, belonging, and self-identification). In addition, Māori often intermarried with members of other hapū and, therefore, have a long history of “mixedness.” In fact, re-tellings of whakapapa have always acknowledged and honored the mixedness that occurred as a result of unions between different hapū members. In these ways, Māori have always celebrated our complex mixed identity positionings. Since colonization, a new “mixedness” has occurred between Māori and Pākehā settlers in Aotearoa. This article interrogates Māori/Pākehā notions of “mixedness,” including being white coded, kiri mā (white skin), white Māori, socially assigned as Pākehā, or half-caste. It discusses the ways these...

Billie Allan and V. C. Rhonda Hackett (eds.). Decolonizing Equity

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Billie Allan and V. C. Rhonda Hackett's edited volume Decolonizing Equity from Fernwood Publishing.

“But Aren’t We All Mixed Race?”: The Politics of Mixed-Race Identity and Belonging in Papua New Guinea

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mixed-race people in Papua New Guinea (PNG) have long been socially acknowledged as a distinct ethnic group—a group whose individual members sometimes also oscillate between being subsumed by, included within, or excluded from other racial categories like Asian, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and White. It is perhaps this ability to shift between what are often perceived as fixed racial categories that leaves some mixed-race people having to justify, negotiate, or explain the breakdown of their ethnic heritage to strangers, friends, and colleagues, some of whom think it is enlightened to say things like, “But aren’t we all mixed race?” or “Are you sure that’s what you are?” or the far less benign “You’re nothing but a mixed-race bastard.” This article examines historical and contemporary ideas about mixed-race identity in PNG in terms of both the privilege and oppression that members of this category experience. It stresses that racial identity in PNG is strongly connected...

Samira K. Mehta. The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Samira K. Mehta's The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging from Beacon Press.

Mixed-Race Kanak in “a World Cut in Two”: Contemporary Experiences in Kanaky/New Caledonia

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article interrogates how the profound history of spatial segregation across colonial, racial, and cultural lines appears in contemporary narratives of mixed-race people in Kanaky/New Caledonia (K/NC). By tracing the moments that specific spaces, such as “the city” and “the tribe,” are mentioned in these narratives, the article shows how the colonial divide structures selves, relations, spaces, and society and manifests itself in discussions with self-identified métis/ses Kanak-White people, especially in the context of the formal decolonization process K/NC is going through. The research draws primarily on interviews with self-identified métis/ses Kanak-White people that took place a few months before the 2018 referendum for independence. The primary question this article seeks to answer is: how does French colonialism spatially determine the lives of métis/ses in K/NC? For this purpose, it analyzes how métis/ses Kanak-White people navigate the variety of spaces they inhabit...

About the Contributors

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bios of the contributors to this special issue on mixedness and Indigeneity in the Pacific.

Mixed Race, Mixed Identities, and Indigeneity: Context and Theory

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the opening piece of this special issue of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, “Mixedness and Indigeneity in the Pacific,” Zarine L. Rocha provides context and theory for the issue’s unpacking of mixed race, mixed identities, and Indigeneity.

Tainted Tap: Flint’s Journey from Crisis to Recovery

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Tainted Tap: Flint’s Journey from Crisis to Recovery

Revisiting Marx on Race, Capitalism, and Revolution

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Did Karl Marx have a theory of race and capitalism? Not exactly, but he theorized on these issues over four decades and much of what he wrote still speaks to us today. At a time of global and U.S. struggles for liberation in the face of a deeply racialized fascist threat, these writings are worth revisiting.

Cultural Reception and Production