The most trending sociology papers of 2019

The top 50 papers (out of 29663 papers) published in 2019 in the category ‘Sociology':
https://ooir.org/trend.php?category=sociology&year=2019

American Project, an Ethnography by Sudhir Venkatesh

This 2002 ethnography was published by Harvard University Press,

High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post–World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the “projects” soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, American Project is the first comprehensive story of daily life in an American public housing complex.
Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have only viewed from a distance. Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book re-creates tenants’ thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an indifferent city bureaucracy, their daily confrontation with entrenched poverty, their painful decisions about whether to work with or against the street gangs whose drug dealing both sustained and imperiled their lives.
American Project explores the fundamental question of what makes a community viable. In his chronicle of tenants’ political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter.

Read a preview from Goodreads.

Mitchell Duneier's, Ethnography Slim's Table

Mitchell Duneier from Princeton's sociology department spent 4 years as an ethnographic observer at the Valois Cafeteria in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood.  His work became a 1994 book called Slim's Table.

From the U of Chicago Press, 

At the Valois "See Your Food" cafeteria on Chicago’s South Side, black and white men gather over cups of coffee and steam-table food. Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist, spent four years at the Valois writing this moving profile of the black men who congregate at "Slim’s Table." Praised as "a marvelous study of those who should not be forgotten" by the Wall Street Journal,Slim’s Table helps demolish the narrow sociological picture of black men and simple media-reinforced stereotypes. In between is a "respectable" citizenry, too often ignored and little understood.

From the NIU Library reviews, Slim's Table Destroys Black Male Stereotypes by Rosalind Morgan.

Despite its general similarities to these previous sociological studies, Slim's Table departs from tradition in both its focus and its conclusions. Duneier concentrates on a category within the black population which has received little attention — aging working-class males. He argues that they constitute a caring community whose moral values contradict popular stereotypes about contemporary African-American society.

 Duneier bases his conclusions on intensive observation of the regular customers at Valois, a cafeteria located in Hyde Park, which is bordered on three sides by the largest contiguous African-American community in Chicago and on the fourth side by Lake Michigan. Valois' patrons include blacks from Hyde Park and adjacent neighborhoods as well as lesser numbers of whites from Hyde Park and students from the University of Chicago.

The title of the book refers to the table at the cafeteria which for more than a decade served as a daily meeting place for a core group of black men. Among these regulars are Jackson, a retired crane operator and longshoreman; Harold, a self-employed exterminator; Cornelius, a retired meter inspector; Ted, a film developer for Playboy; and Earl, an administrator with the Chicago Board of Education. Duneier provides character sketches of these patrons, but their interactions with Slim, a local mechanic, and his relationship with other regulars — white as well as black — form the center of the study.

From the LA Times bookreview,

This is only part of the message of Mitchell Duneier’s “Slim’s Table.” This wonderfully thoughtful book also is a documentary about a loose-knit group of older, working-class black bachelors who spend a significant amount of their time in each other’s company at a restaurant called Valois near the University of Chicago. These men are given voice in Duneier’s book in a setting that is alien to most middle-class Americans. The finest moments of this lucid book are when Duneier allows the men at Slim’s table to speak for themselves. You hear opinions on the state of morality in their world. You get to know these men and understand them in a way that no newspaper article or television special could encompass. You might even be drawn to the society of Valois at Slim’s table.

Working Class Heroes

Chicago's Southwest Side

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520235434/working-class-heroes

Chicago's Southwest Side is one of the last remaining footholds for the city's white working class, a little-studied and little-understood segment of the American population. This book paints a nuanced and complex portrait of the firefighters, police officers, stay-at-home mothers, and office workers living in the stable working-class community known as Beltway. Building on the classic Chicago School of urban studies and incorporating new perspectives from cultural geography and sociology, Maria Kefalas considers the significance of home, community, and nation for Beltway residents.

Unequal City by Carla Shedd

Unequal City by Carla Shedd, a sociology professor at Columbia University

Chicago has long struggled with racial residential segregation, high rates of poverty, and deepening class stratification, and it can be a challenging place for adolescents to grow up. Unequal City examines the ways in which Chicago’s most vulnerable residents navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law. In this pioneering analysis of the intersection of race, place, and opportunity, sociologist and criminal justice expert Carla Shedd illuminates how schools either reinforce or ameliorate the social inequalities that shape the worlds of these adolescents.
Shedd draws from an array of data and in-depth interviews with Chicago youth to offer new insight into this understudied group. Focusing on four public high schools with differing student bodies, Shedd reveals how the predominantly low-income African American students at one school encounter obstacles their more affluent, white counterparts on the other side of the city do not face. Teens often travel long distances to attend school which, due to Chicago’s segregated and highly unequal neighborhoods, can involve crossing class, race, and gang lines. As Shedd explains, the disadvantaged teens who traverse these boundaries daily develop a keen “perception of injustice,” or the recognition that their economic and educational opportunities are restricted by their place in the social hierarchy.
Adolescents’ worldviews are also influenced by encounters with law enforcement while traveling to school and during school hours. Shedd tracks the rise of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and pat-downs at certain Chicago schools. Along with police procedures like stop-and-frisk, these prison-like practices lead to distrust of authority and feelings of powerlessness among the adolescents who experience mistreatment either firsthand or vicariously. Shedd finds that the racial composition of the student body profoundly shapes students’ perceptions of injustice. The more diverse a school is, the more likely its students of color will recognize whether they are subject to discriminatory treatment. By contrast, African American and Hispanic youth whose schools and neighborhoods are both highly segregated and highly policed are less likely to understand their individual and group disadvantage due to their lack of exposure to youth of differing backgrounds.

Compliments of Chicagohoodz

Compliments of Chicagohoodz is not a sociology book per se, but it details the history and meanings of Chicago Street Gang art.  It might be a useful source to examine Chicago deviant subculture.

Here's a conversation with the authors, Jinx and Mr C.

Beauty Pageants and Racism from Asha Rangappa

As detailed in historian Blain Robert's book, Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women, the beauty industry and pageants have a long history of racism.

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife.

Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

And from Asha Rangappa on this twitter thread:

The pageant had a rule that contestants be “of the white race,” — a rule that was lifted in 1950, but state and local officials continued to enforce it. Secondary pageants, like Miss Black America, emerged in 1968 to protest the exclusion of black women. Vanessa Williams was the first black woman to win the Miss America title...in 1984. (The first black contestant, Miss Iowa, first competed in the Miss America pageant in 1971.)

Some of us from Eurocentric cultures, like India (and I know many of my black and brown sisters will sympathize), had a double-whammy: Even within non-white cultures, “fairness” is a prized commodity. In Indian, culture, for example, I am considered “too dark” (read: ugly).
That’s why, when someone who deviates from the “beauty ideal” wins a pageant, it’s actually meaningful for many communities. I wrote about this when Nina Davaluri became the first Indian-American to win Miss America in 2013. How insane is the quest for “whiteness” in being beautiful? Well, in India, at least, there is this really fun brand called “Fair n’ Lovely.” It’s a beauty product that skin-shames women into being whiter. This ad tells you how to make your mom proud: https://youtu.be/SeePv5TvQEg

Race and Census Categories 1890-1990

Compare census categories to the historical developments at the time and the associated racism.

Use Pew timeline of changing census categories.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.1993.9993773#.Uzb_PK1dXS4

School Shooting Data from Naval Center for Homeland Defense

Data for school shootings

https://www.chds.us/ssdb/category/graphs/

Course Evaluation

Please click on the following link and complete the course evaluation (I will also embed the evaluation in the post below). All responses are anonymous and I would really appreciate your honest and thoughtful input. After everyone is finished with the survey, there will be sometime to share your input with me personally. Thanks so much!

First, here is an evaluation about my class.