June 2015
Meghan A. Burke, Illinois Wesleyan University, $8,000, Summit: New Frontiers in the Study of Colorblind Racism. The award will support a conference bringing together scholars, a campus community, and a local community to invigorate new directions for research on contemporary racism. The conference seeks to push the concept of (and the research agenda on) colorblindness in new directions, and should be effective in getting young scholars involved in this research. The “summit” conference is expected to lead to an edited volume of groundbreaking new research, a toolkit for educators teaching about contemporary racism and the creation and dissemination of a public sociology brief about the relevance of this work for nonprofits, policymakers, and activists.
Martha Crowley and Stacy De Coster, North Carolina State University, $7,992, Emotion Management by African American Consumers. This study will instead investigate the emotion work that African American consumers must do to manage the feelings of service workers as they navigate the racist microaggressions that permeate consumer settings. The project will draw on semi-structured interviews to advance our understanding of emotion work and African Americans’ use of agency to navigate microaggressive contexts, while examining variations associated with age, gender, and social class. The review panel noted that research in the field of emotional labor has been dominated by studies of white middle-class women; an intersectional analysis is sorely needed, and this project promises to fill the gap.
Danielle Kane, DePauw University, and Ke Li, Indiana University, $7,910, The Gendered Transition to Adulthood in Urban and Rural China. Kane and Li’s project will investigate gender and geographic differences in the transition to adulthood in China, as well as the role played by the natal family in navigating this transition, through interviews conducted in two locations. The project aims to globalize our understanding of emerging adulthood through an in-depth investigation of a non-Western case while helping to specify the links between socioeconomic change and beliefs about the timing and ordering of markers of adulthood. It will fill a gap in the research literature since most previous work has been done through surveys.
Daniel Schneider, University of California-Berkeley, and Kristen Harknett, University of Pennsylvania, $7,596, Employment Precarity and Family Well-being: Evidence from San Francisco’s Predictable Scheduling and Fair Treatment of Retail Employees Ordinance. San Francisco recently passed an ordinance that will require some employers to provide hourly workers with advance notice of work schedules and the opportunity to move from part-time to full-time work. This pilot study will assemble a team of undergraduate and graduate students to interview affected workers with children about the intersection of their work and family lives. It is the first wave of a longitudinal qualitative study to assess how the new ordinance may affect family life and will also lay the groundwork for a quantitative assessment using existing administrative data or original survey data. The research will advance our understanding of how predictable scheduling legislation affects the lives of workers in San Francisco and inform national debates in the wake of the emergence of a broader movement across the country.
Christopher Wetzel, Stonehill College, $8,000, The Dynamics of Gaming Legalization. While gaming has become a relatively acceptable form of recreation throughout the United States, the challenges associated with normalizing various types of wagering have differed across states. This project will use in-depth interviews and archival research to compare three state cases: Massachusetts, a state that allows casinos, lotteries, and pari-mutuel wagering; Nevada, a state that still prohibits lotteries but permits casinos and pari-mutuel wagering; and Hawaii, one of two states that does not allow any gaming. The project includes a connection to pedagogy. The research promises to enhance our sociological understanding of morality and moral politics; the paradoxical impacts of neoliberalism and attempts to increase state revenue through gaming, individualizing economic risk in the process; and the race, class, and gender dynamics of the three state case studies of gaming legalization.
December 2015
Hillary Angelo, University of California-Santa Cruz, $7,995, Global Problems, City Solutions: The Urban Sustainability Imperative and its Consequences. In the first decades of the 21st century non-governmental organizations, governments, and planning organizations have placed their hopes in cities as the places where a global sustainable future can and will be forged. This proposed research project will examine urban sustainability planning in California to understand the relative influences of structure and values on planning outcomes, and to explore how experts respond to demands to solve problems that are beyond their control. It will create an original database of climate action plans from 500 California cities, supplemented with interviews of urban planners in selected cities, in order to explain how structure and norms interact in expert decision-making. This interaction transforms cities in ways underestimated by political economic accounts of urban change and overlooked by norms- and values-focused explanations of policy outcomes.
Reginald A. Byron, Southwestern University, $6,784, Discriminatory Race and Gender Termination from Low-Wage Work. Even in the wake of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the anti-discrimination acts that were modeled after it, race-based hiring discrimination, sexual harassment, and exclusion of pregnant women have continued. Much of the scholarly literature has focused on contemporary hiring discrimination and sexual harassment, leaving a wide gap in our knowledge about why some workers are unfairly pushed out of the workplace despite legal protections. This mixed-methods research project seeks to shed light on the range of discriminatory race and gender based terminations from low-wage jobs by analyzing both dismissed and upheld complaints of employment discrimination from five state fair employment agencies. It will go beyond a simple tabulation of instances of discrimination to examine how employers attempt to legitimize firing members of racial minority groups and women from low-wage employment and whether these forms of legitimation affect adjudication outcomes in employment discrimination cases.
Angela Jones, Farmingdale State College, and Michael Yarbrough, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, $4,000, LGBTQ Scholarship and Politics after Marriage Equality. Sociologists influenced early theories of homosexuality and helped push scholars to think more critically about the social construction of sexuality more broadly and contributed to early theories around gay community and social movements. Sociological influence tapered off as queer theory gained momentum in the humanities and came to dominate LGBTQ studies. This funding will support the participation of sociologists in leading roles at a conference in October 2016 that will stage important debates about the inclusion of LGBTQ people in broader society and racial, class, and other forms of diversity within LGBTQ communities. The conference organizers view the post-marriage equality era as a pivotal moment in LGBTQ studies and activism, and it is crucial that sociology is prominently featured in what promises to be a watershed moment in intellectual and political history. The project includes a plan for disseminating products of the conference via a web and video archive and publication of an edited volume.
Tiffany D. Joseph, Stony Brook University, $8,000, Race, Documentation Status, and Socio-Political Exclusion: The Growing Racialized Citizen-Noncitizen Divide in American Life. Latinos are the largest ethno-racial minority in the United States and comprise a large percentage of immigrants. Consequently, documentation status has great importance for this group amid discussions of immigration reform. In recent decades, public policies have become harsher towards noncitizens, making it legal to discriminate on the basis of documentation status. Little is known about how the intersection of documentation status (de jure discrimination) and de facto discrimination based on race and ethnicity qualitatively shapes Latino immigrants’ lives. This study explores these issues through a focus on how the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—which excludes most noncitizens—influences Latino immigrants’ healthcare access. FAD funding will support interviews of Latino immigrants, healthcare professionals, and immigrant health organization employees. The findings promise to enhance our understanding of how legal constructions such as documentation status intersect with the social construction of race and ethnicity to reproduce social exclusion and inequality.
Shelley McDonough Kimelberg and Gabriel Shira, University at Buffalo, $8,000, Diversity in the Classroom: Measuring the Racial Preferences of Urban Parents. Despite substantial literature highlighting the role that race plays in the school selection process, few studies have attempted to quantify parents’ preferences concerning racial diversity in the school setting. This study will address that gap by measuring the school racial composition preferences of parents of young children in Buffalo, NY. It will do so utilizing an innovative adaptation of the Farley-Schuman showcard method, an instrument whose use is well documented in studies of neighborhood racial-composition preferences. The innovation in this study is to create a hypothetical classroom by replacing houses with desks and move the study online so that parents indicate their preferences in privacy via computer. The research will also attempt to disentangle racial preferences from other beliefs about urban public schools by introducing variation in hypothetical school test performance and student poverty rates into the design.
Alexandra Marin, University of Toronto, $7,934, When Relationships Fade: Theorizing and Measuring Dormant Ties. Relationships change, and ties that were once significant sometimes fade or disappear. However, as the PI points out, “a relationship that fades is not the same as a relationship that never existed.” Just as active social ties represent means for accessing resources, support, and instrumental aid, dormant ties represent a latent cache of these same possibilities. Without understanding dormant ties we can neither gauge the full potential for support and resource access held within individuals’ social networks nor describe the process of reactivating ties. This project seeks to develop a theoretical understanding of dormant ties and an empirically informed measure of dormancy. The researchers will interact with respondents using wedding photos to catalog lists of relationships for quantitative analysis. They will also complete follow-up interviews to elaborate dimensions of dormant network ties.
Caitlin Patler, University of California-Davis and University of California-Irvine, $8,000, Collateral Consequences of Immigration Detention: The Impacts of Long-Term Detention on Children and Households. Sociologists have examined the causes and consequences of the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, yet few studies document the growth and consequences of a parallel system: mass detention of immigrants. This well-designed and focused study on an important issue builds on existing sociological literature, and yet extends the analysis to the special case of “non-criminal” immigrant detention and its impact on families and communities. It includes a focus on mixed-immigration status families and recognition that the consequences of incarceration extend beyond immediate families to communities. FAD funding will support follow-up interviews with spouses and children of current and former detainees whom the PI has previously surveyed and interviewed. This project promises to advance research on immigrant detention and re-entry and to inform current policy debates on these critical issues.
