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This personal narrative describes the results of a tragic gun accident involving my young son and his close friend. In this autobiographical narrative, I trace the effects of youthful offender laws on my family and explain how our state's juvenile justice system transformed our family's lives for over three years. In addition, as both a participant and a sociologist observer, I show how race and class have conditioned the accident's outcome. As Griffith and Smith's (2005) work on mothering for schooling illustrates, social class greatly affects the relationship between school and family.

In our case, largely because of my training as a researcher and my husband's background in education and psychology, we were able to make the juvenile justice system work as positively as possible for our son. And, because of my privileged position as an academic, I am now able to make visible the effects of youthful offender laws on one youthful offender and his parents.

This study examines the connections between subculture theory, symbolic interaction and the work of David Matza with a special focus on exploring alcohol consumption by young adults in the UK. We apply Matza ideas of the “techniques of neutralization,” “subterranean values,” and “drift” within an ethnographic study on alcohol to suggest that young people's “calculated hedonism” can be understood as a strategy of agency in the context of a subcultural setting. This article adds to the literature of symbolic interaction, subculture and the discipline of sociology by critically focusing on the work of David Matza from its reception in the 1960s to today as a central element of the new paradigm of cultural criminology. For us the sociological imagination is “alive and well” through Matza's advocacy of naturalism whereby he sought to integrate the work Chicago School under Park and Burgess with his assessment of the so-called Neo-Chicago School. In the literature Matza's work is often defined as symbolic interactionist we see his ambition in a wider sense of wanting sociology to recover human struggle and the active creation of meaning. Our approach is to understand the calculated hedonism of young adult use of alcohol through their humanity.

This chapter provides insight into unique experiences of and provides special considerations for working with rural African American high school and college students. The Emerging Scholars (ES) program has evolved over 17 years as the coordinators built relationships with rural and underserved communities. By examining this model, other programs will be provided with ideas, and the complexity, challenges, and opportunities of the work will be highlighted.

Building programs connecting rural and university teams and communities is neither easy nor prescriptive. By considering specific needs of students, families, schools, and universities, and geographical, political, historical, and cultural contexts, sustainable programs can be developed.

Additionally, this chapter includes a personal narrative from a graduate of the program who now works as an ES staff member. This perspective adds depth and a personal examination of the program's impact. Finally, the chapter concludes with a list of questions and considerations in building, enhancing, or maintaining campus–community partnerships in support of African American rural students.

Information technology (IT) is an important enabler of organization models (OM) and of innovative strategies, as it fosters information integration and streamlines information flows. Two case studies offer evidence about the strategic use of IT innovation (i.e., digital signature) to foster successful OM and partnerships in health care, while results from a survey and some case studies show how institutional reforms can foster the diffusion of mature technologies (i.e., ERP) as an adaptive strategy of health care organizations. Leadership and clear vision lead to consistency between OM and technology and foster the exploitation full benefits associated with innovation.

Purpose – Urban youths’ agency to represent their realities through media has been largely unexplored in the youth development literature. In this qualitative case study of an after-school youth media program in the Bay Area, expressions of youth agency and the role of audiences are explored during the process of producing videos for public consumption.

Methodology – As participant observer of 14 ethnically diverse youth participants aged between 15 and 18 years over 18 months, I documented (a) the kind of agencies participants engaged in and (b) the impact of live and imagined future audiences on youths’ creative processes. Analyses of field notes, semi-structured interviews, and media projects were conducted using thematic analysis to inductively generate emerging categories.

Findings – Themes included an agentive sense of self-efficacy, commitment, and responsibility, as well as perceived contributions to local audiences and an emerging collective identity. The youth demonstrated their increased sense of a social or civic duty to realistically represent youth of color to familiar and unfamiliar audiences.

Implications – This case study demonstrated how one youth media organization fostered agency through youth authorship, production, distribution, and local community dialogue. By documenting the impact of audiences from conception to public reception, this study provides valuable insight into the agentive process of publicly “performing” a commitment to complete a social change video project.

Contribution – This chapter underscores the value of performance within youth development programs and the critical component of audiences as one form of authentic assessment in order to foster individual and collective agency.

Extensive ethnographic research with wives of professional athletes revealed that in certain sport families, the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship is among the numerous unique marital and occupational stressors these wives confront in their everyday life. Many wives believe they must compete with their mothers-in-law for their husbands’ attention, love, and support. This chapter makes a case for their use of the intersecting and complementary processes of “control management” and emotion management, which involve a variety of interactional strategies, in maintaining these relationships. Although these self-management processes tend to further entrench the wives in the subordinate status to which they are relegated in this male-dominated occupational world, they learn to skillfully use these processes as they struggle to preserve their marriages, support their husbands’ careers, and maintain a well-defined sense of self.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

The study examines health care inequities in viral load testing among hepatitis C (HCV) antibody-positive patients. The analysis predicts whether individual and census tract sociodemographic characteristics impact the likelihood of viral load testing.

This a study of 26,218 HCV antibody-positive patients in Orange County, California, from 2010 to 2020. The case data were matched with the 2017 American Community Survey to help understand the role of neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics in testing for viral load. Multivariable logistic regression was used to predict the probability of ever testing for HCV viral load.

Thirty-six percent of antibody-positive persons were never viral load tested. The results show inequalities in viral load testing by sociodemographic factors. The following groups were less likely to ever test for viral load than their counterparts: (1) individuals under 65 years old, (2) females, (3) residents of census tracts with lower levels of health insurance enrollment, (4) residents of census tracts with lower levels of government health insurance, and (5) residents of census tracts with a higher proportion of non-white residents.

This is a secondary database from public health department reports. Using census tract data raises the issue of the ecological fallacy. Detailed medical records were not available. The results of this study emphasize the social inequality in viral load testing for HCV. These groups are less likely to be treated and cured, and may spread the disease to others.

This chapter is unique as it combines routinely collected public health department data with census tract level data to examine social inequities associated with lower rates of HCV viral load testing.

This chapter examines in-service teachers’ transformed perspectives and practices for educating emergent bilinguals resulting from graduate study in a bilingual education graduate program in Chicago. This examination is contextualized in consideration of emergent bilinguals relative to the changing face of P-12 classrooms and gaps in teacher education. Findings from autoethnographic and discourse analytic inquiry suggest that teacher preparation in bilingual education (1) prepared and empowered in-service teachers to meet the academic, social, and cultural-linguistic needs of emergent bilinguals in their classrooms and (2) fostered a conscious inner transformation in in-service teachers that resulted in new ways and purposes of interacting with emergent bilingual students, their families, and colleagues. Findings also suggest that although there is institutional progress in meeting emergent bilinguals’ needs, it is incremental and insufficient. There are three major deficiencies: (1) new and increased teacher education standards lack the required specialized coursework in the education of emergent bilinguals; (2) teacher preparation of emergent bilinguals is inadequate; and (3) teacher preparation programs resist requiring specialized coursework in teaching emergent bilinguals.