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 […]
Viral Justice grows out of my contention that viruses are not our ultimate foe. In the same way that COVID-19 kills, so too ableism, racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism work to eliminate unwanted people. Ours is a eugenicist society: from the funding of school districts to the triaging of patients, “privilege” is a euphemism for […]
“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 […]
Matthew Clair: Ethnography, Sociology as a Collective Endeavor, and Inequalities in the Legal System
Matthew Clair is a pathbreaking sociologist whose research broadly investigates how cultural meanings within our institutions reflect, reproduce, and challenge inequality and injustice. We first got to know Matt as a professor in an undergraduate sociology theory course at Stanford (for Janna) and as a scholar in law and society (for Tiffany). Through this serendipitous […]
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 […]
Excerpt reprinted with permission from Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life by Elijah Anderson. Published by the University of Chicago Press. Copyright 2021. All rights reserved. I was born in the South on what used to be a plantation. My grandmother, a sort of village doctor who never accepted […]
Dorothy Roberts is a preeminent scholar, activist, and public intellectual whose work breaks through disciplinary molds to inform our knowledge of policing, family welfare systems, bioethics, and medicine. We were deeply honored to sit down with her for an interview, where she shares how her childhood and life experiences shape her principles for abolition in […]