Berkeley Journal of Sociology

To close out 2014, we’d like to highlight the ten most-read Berkeley Journal of Sociology articles of the year.

Comunista!, my dad exclaims as we are driving down US-1.  We’re in Miami, Florida, where I grew up, and someone has cut him off in traffic. My whole family is in the car, a silver Toyota Previa minivan–yes, the one that looked like an egg. My mother is in the passenger seat; my older siblings, […]

Professor Michele Goodwin is a renowned bioethicist, constitutional legal scholar, prolific writer, and podcast host. Her scholarship and advocacy have forged a path for justice in reproductive health and rights, civil liberties, and educational access. Even more importantly, her work scrutinizes the policing of bodies and identities in American law and interrogates the narratives that […]

Is neoliberalism dead at last? This is an urgent question that needs some provisional resolution – not just because of the proliferation of excellent scholarship on the variegated forms and consequences of global neoliberalism, but also because the question has political and strategic value in understanding capitalism as it is today. Scholars have been marking […]

In November 2022, FTX, the third largest crypto exchange platform collapsed and its CEO, Samuel Bankman-Fried, underwent trial in October 2023 for seven different charges of fraud. How did this happen? How could one of the main actors in the crypto industry not comply with U.S. laws? The answer is that there is no federal […]

Dr. Heba Gowayed is a distinguished scholar and public intellectual whose research and writing push the boundaries of ethnographic approaches in Sociology and illuminate the human experience of migration, displacement, and borders around the world. She is an outspoken voice for justice, whose advocacy and work have impacted many immigrant communities across multiple countries. We […]

A Case Study of the Proposed “Women’s Center for Justice” in NYC and Movement Efforts When one jail closes, it does not mean that another newer, more modern or more “progressive” cage should exist. Reformers have been working towards a proposed “gender-expansive” jail in New York City’s Harlem called the “Women’s Center for Justice.” The […]

The Problem Students of color, disabled students, and disempowered students are targeted and victimized by School Resource Officers (SROs). Students of color are subjected to violence and arrests by SROs, creating lasting harm in their lives, and further sustaining the school-to-prison pipeline. Much like with community law enforcement, studies suggest that SROs have been disproportionately […]

Introduction Who deserves to have a voice on issues that matter? In polarized debates on issues such as guns, abortion, and immigration, a constellation of activists contends to be heard and advocate for their point of view. To win attention, an activist strives to present themself as someone who deserves to be heard. Activists frame […]

As two Asian Americans in Sociology, we were so excited when we got the chance to interview Anthony Ocampo. A leading public voice on the lives and experiences of queer Filipino Americans, his writings fuse together personal narrative and sociological research that inspire our own life and work. In the following conversation, we discuss his […]

2023 marks the 50th anniversary of mass incarceration in the United States. This period also saw wide-ranging laws and regulations that diminish the rights and privileges for those convicted of crimes – including the right to vote. More than 19 million people in the United States have felony convictions triggering civil sanctions, which often includes […]

Last fall the Sentencing Project released Locked Out 2022, the fourth in a series of public reports on U.S. felony disenfranchisement prepared in a partnership with my academic research team (Uggen, Larson, Shannon, and Stewart 2022). Disenfranchisement here refers to the practice of denying voting rights to people convicted of felony-level criminal convictions. The United […]