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1 – 4 of 4Charter schools are an increasingly popular form of publicly funded school choice. Racially framed as a policy to narrow academic achievement and opportunity gaps, charter schools…
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Charter schools are an increasingly popular form of publicly funded school choice. Racially framed as a policy to narrow academic achievement and opportunity gaps, charter schools disproportionately serve Black and Latinx students. In 2016, “lifting the cap” on the number of charter schools allowed in Massachusetts became an intensely fought ballot referendum. Drawing on racial formation and resource mobilization theories, I argue that resources developed and mobilized in political campaigns or social movements have analytically relevant racial dimensions. They are “racial resources” or value-producing entities that are imbued with meaning about race categories, racial systems, and/or racial ideologies. The anti-expansion’s interracial coalition was a decisive factor in the campaign, because the coalition implemented a shared decision-making structure to develop a more robust and ideologically consistent strategy for mobilizing their racial resources. These resources include a local base of racially diverse spokespeople who brought key cultural resources – legitimacy, authenticity, and trust – to the campaign, as well as race-conscious and race-neutral message framing.
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Prevailing explanations of the US secession crisis trace the latter’s origins to slavery and slaveowners’ interests. The central problem with all such explanations, however, is…
Abstract
Prevailing explanations of the US secession crisis trace the latter’s origins to slavery and slaveowners’ interests. The central problem with all such explanations, however, is that the Whig Party, the party of the largest slaveowners, opposed secession until the mid-1850s. Why did southern Whigs and their planter base resist secession through the political crisis over slavery only to fold by 1861? Drawing on archival electoral returns by precinct, party newspapers, speeches, and personal correspondence from antebellum Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, I argue for an institutional and sequential approach to the secession crisis that does not take social actors’ individual interests as given, but rather as naturalized and denaturalized in the back and forth struggle of political parties to advance competing solutions to the problem of preserving slavery.
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This piece is a review of the animal selfhood literature in sociology, organized into four main parts. First, I review the sociological literature of human–animal interactions, in…
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This piece is a review of the animal selfhood literature in sociology, organized into four main parts. First, I review the sociological literature of human–animal interactions, in which sociologists claim that animals possess selves. Second, I review how sociologists have referred to the self, from which I construct five criteria of selfhood, including self as attribution, self-awareness, intersubjectivity, self-concept/reflexivity, and narration. Third, I address how animals have selves using these criteria, drawing on sociological and ethological evidence. Fourth, I critique the animal interaction sociologists’ specific claims of animal selfhood, including their epistemological failure to distinguish between human accounts of animal subjectivities and animal subjectivities, and their empirical failure to show how animals act toward themselves. Ultimately, I conclude that animal selves, particularly in an elemental Meadian sense, are potentially real, but in most cases are unobservable or unverifiable phenomena.
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