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This review integrates and builds linkages among existing theoretical and empirical literature from across disciplines to further broaden our understanding of the relationship between inequality, imprisonment, and health for black men. The review examines the health impact of prisons through an ecological theoretical perspective to understand how factors at multiple levels of the social ecology interact with prisons to potentially contribute to deleterious health effects and the exacerbation of race/ethnic health disparities.

This review finds that there are documented health disparities between inmates and non-inmates, but the casual mechanisms explaining this relationship are not well-understood. Prisons may interact with other societal systems – such as the family (microsystem), education, and healthcare systems (meso/exosystems), and systems of racial oppression (macrosystem) – to influence individual and population health.

The review also finds that research needs to move the discussion of the race effects in health and crime/justice disparities beyond the mere documentation of such differences toward a better understanding of their causes and effects at the level of individuals, communities, and other social ecologies.

We report on an ethnographic study of four established music scenes in which Latino music is produced, performed, experienced, and celebrated in Houston, Texas: conjunto, mariachi, salsa, and Latin jazz. This paper builds upon previous work that has examined emergent music scenes in Houston by incorporating three distinctly interactionist concepts – the scene, idioculture, and place – to illustrate established scenes. Our examination demonstrates that authenticity is a distinctly sociological concept, one that provides valuable insight into understanding the meanings that music has for the everyday actor.

Music is an important feature of human group life. A wide range of journals, books, and other academic avenues pertaining to the study of music now exist to address its increasing scholarly significance. Although the primary theme in the literature seems to be the description and analysis of the role of music in daily life, the time has come for more theoretical examinations of the way music contributes meaning to individuals and the groups to which they belong (DeNora, 2003). Our goal as editors of this special issue is to apply the symbolic interactionist optic to the sociological study of music. We hope to build upon the earlier interactionist work of scholars such as Kotarba and Vannini (2006) through the concepts of identity, technology, and music communities. In the present section, we explore the relationship of music and identity.

Vaccinating adults who are involved with the carceral system, particularly those aged 55 or older, is crucial to containing the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA, particularly as variants continue to emerge and spread. In this Viewpoint, the authors discuss the reasons why improving access to COVID-19 vaccine and boosters among community supervised adults, especially the aging population, is critical to mitigating the public health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study concludes by providing recommendations to enhance vaccine and booster uptake in this population, as the pandemic continues.

This is a Viewpoint paper regarding mitigating the spread of COVID-19 by improving access to vaccine and boosters among community supervised adults, especially the aging population.

A key population that has been overlooked in vaccination efforts are older adults involved in the carceral system who are living in the community (i.e. “community supervised” or people on probation or parole). Older adults on probation and parole are at high risk for SARS-CoV-2 transmission and severe disease due to numerous factors at the individual, community, social and structural levels.

Implementation of recommendations presented in this Viewpoint will mitigate COVID-19 risk among a population that has been marginalized and overlooked, yet has been the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The USA has a rapidly aging prison population that, combined with their poorer health and living conditions, is at extreme risk for COVID-19. The purpose of this paper is to compare COVID-19 mortality trends in the US prison population and the general population to see how mortality risk changed over the course of the pandemic. The authors first provide a national overview of trends in COVID-19 mortality; then, the authors assess COVID-19 deaths among older populations using more detailed data from one US state.

The authors used multiple publicly available data sets (e.g. Centers for Disease Control and prevention, COVID Prison Project) and indirect and direct standardization to estimate standardized mortality rates covering the period from April 2020 to June 2021 for the US and for the State of Texas.

While 921 COVID-19-related deaths among people in US prisons were expected as of June 5, 2021, 2,664 were observed, corresponding to a standardized mortality ratio of 2.89 (95%CI 2.78, 3.00). The observed number of COVID-19-related deaths exceeded the expected number of COVID-19-related deaths among people in prison for most of the pandemic, with a substantially widening gap leading to a plateau about four weeks after the COVID-19 vaccine was introduced in the USA. In the state population, the older population in prison is dying at younger ages compared with the general population, with the highest percentage of deaths among people aged 50–64 years.

People who are incarcerated are dying of COVID-19 at a rate that far outpaces the general population and are dying at younger ages.

This descriptive analysis serves as a first step in understanding the dynamic trends in COVID-19 mortality and the association between age and COVID-19 death in US prisons.

The goal of this study is to explore an immediate step in understanding the lived experiences of under-represented students through metaphor construction and possibly collect more in-depth data through photograph-based interviews.

This article introduced photo-elicitation based narrative interviews as a qualitative methodology while interviewing fourteen undergraduate community college students mostly from underrepresented groups (URGs). At the beginning of each interview, the authors probed the participants with 8 photographs chosen by the research team to represent a diverse set of experiences in engineering. The authors conducted a thematic analysis of the interview data.

The findings suggested that the inclusion of photo-elicitation often catalyzed consumption of representations, images, metaphors, and voice to stories passed unnoticed; and finally produces more detailed descriptions and complements semi-structured narrative interviews.

This study advances the scholarship that extends photograph driven interviews/photo elicitation methodology while interviewing marginalized population and offers a roadmap for what a multi-modal, arts-based analysis process might look like for in-depth interviews.

The use of photo-elicitation in our research enabled a deeper, more poignant exploration of the URG students' experience of navigating engineering. The participants were able to relate to the photographs and shared their life narratives through them; hence, use of photographs can be adapted in future research.

Our research revealed that PEI has excellent potential to capture marginalized narratives of URGs, which is not well explored in educational research, specially, in higher education. In our research, PEI promoted more culturally inclusive approaches positioning the participants as experts of their own narratives.

The study presented in this paper serves as an example of qualitative research that expands methodological boundaries and centers the role of power, marginalization, and creativity in research. This work serves as a unique and important contribution to the photo-elicitation literature, offering a critical roadmap for researchers who are drawn to photo elicitation/photograph driven interviews as a method to explore their inquiry.

In considering my academic history as a professor both in marketing and management, I hope to demonstrate that it is possible to research challenging and interesting topics in a variety of guises.

The presentation is primarily chronological but also, to some degree, selective. I have focused on my research activities but not forgotten the importance, at least to me, of both academic administration and indeed a broader set of interests in more general terms.

While there is inevitably a significant degree of path dependency in my academic career, I have also been quite keen to explore more broadly both the boundaries of my subjects and the application of various different research methods. I have been particularly fortunate to have worked with some excellent academic colleagues and stimulating doctoral students.

I believe there are a twin set of implications for other academics; however, I would emphasise that there is no single right way. For me it has been important to pick topics which are of interest to others and at the same time try and demonstrate some distinctive value added in my approach.

I hope that those who are earlier in their career will take heart from two principles, one being to do one’s best to be in interesting places and the other to work closely with colleagues who have challenging and different perspectives.