The point, after all, is to change the world.
“Knowledge is power” is a truism that the surveillance state has taken to extremes. Technological advances have opened an unprecedented level of information-gathering and hyper-localized knowledge about where people are, what they are doing, and who they are doing it with, pushing social control to new frontiers. Effective resistance in our era requires a strategy […]
Abstract: This article reviews the historical examples of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Soviet Revolution of 1917, focusing on police and armed bodies policy. The article reviews relevant literature as a primary source of evidence. I depart from the idea that progressive movements today have forgotten that these two historical examples gave us […]
Abstract Street vendors are usually immigrants or people of color who organize and mobilize an enterprise to serve their own ethnic communities working long hours for very little profit (Portes 1981; Wilmot 2014). A great deal of academic literature views street vendors as part of the informal economy solely as vendors with only a few […]
The fact that social media data are public, are known to be public, and sell themselves partly on their public nature has allowed anyone with a purpose —e.g., academic researchers, government agencies, and private firms— to access and collect data, confronting few, if any, formal ethical challenges. Regulations differ between social media platforms and across […]
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 […]
In 2014, a group of 200 to 300 people gathered to block three buses delivering unaccompanied children from Central America that was on its way to a local border patrol station. Protestors held American flags and signs that read “Stop illegal immigration” and repeatedly shouted, “Send them back!” Immigration officials eventually turned the buses around […]
When we started graduate school at Berkeley in 2020, many things were uncertain. We were part of the first, and quite possibly the last, cohort to start entirely virtually in the Sociology department, during a tumultuous historical period where one crisis seemed to bleed into the next in a compounding effect – an ongoing global […]
In 1974, I arrived at Stony Brook University as a sociology PhD student. I chose Stony Brook because Lewis Coser was a prominent conflict theorist on the faculty. Those theorists were hard to find because sociology was still under the enormous influence of structural functionalism. I was interested in conflict and change because I had […]
Introduction: When we decided to pivot the Berkeley Journal of Sociology to public sociology, we had to take stock of what was done before us. To guide us in our own project of relaunching a public sociology journal platform, we sought out resources for academic social scientists to translate their research to the public in […]
Abstract How can documentary strategies advance sociological insights beyond academia? This photo-essay analyzes the process of producing the documentary film “Una Escuela llamada América” with immigrant children in Arica – the northernmost city in North Chile, only 20 kilometers south from the frontier with Peru. We reflect upon the documentary’s production and its relationship with […]
In theory, being arrested by the FBI and charged with insider trading would be a bad thing to happen to someone running for Congress. Such was the situation upstate New York incumbent Chris Collins found himself in a few months before the 2018 election. And yet Collins, the first representative to endorse Trump, went on […]