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This paper examines the Art Institute of Chicago – a nationally recognized museum – as a white sanctuary, i.e., a white institutional space within a racialized social system that serves to reassure whites of their dominant position in society. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how museums create and maintain white spaces within the greater context of being an institution for the general public.

The empirical analysis of this study is based on collaborative ethnographic data collected over a three-year period of time conducted by the first two authors, and consists of hundreds of photos and hundreds of hours of participant observations and field notes. The data are analyzed using descriptive methods and content analyses.

The findings highlight three specific racial mechanisms that speak to how white spaces are created, recreated and maintained within nationally and internationally elite museums: spatiality, the policing of space, and the management of access.

Sociological research on how white spaces are maintained in racialized organizations is limited. This paper extends to museums’ institutional role in maintaining white supremacy, as white sanctuaries.

This paper adds to the existing literature on race, place and space by highlighting three specific racial mechanisms in museum institutions that help to maintain white supremacy, white normality(ies), and serve to facilitate a reassurance to whites’ anxieties, fears and fragilities about their group position in society – that which helps to preserve their psychological wages of whiteness in safe white spaces.

In Virginia, former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder accused the state’s library agency of racism for “its slow pace in processing and publicly presenting records from his tenure as the nation’s first elected Black governor” (Associated Press, 2020). The State Librarian responded that this was just a lapse in protocols and framed it as a budget issue and staff turnover. However, “Library of Virginia has been processing papers from his gubernatorial successors before finishing work on his” (Associated Press, 2020). Recently, the Alabama State Department of Archives and History acknowledged their participation in systemic racism, epistemicide, and their history of privileging White voices over those of Alabama African-Americans.

Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a way of knowing (Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, & Bertolini, 2020). Conceptualization and analytic application of epistemicide has an established tradition in a number of social science fields, but information scientists have only recently acknowledged epistemicide (Oliphant, 2021; Patin et al., 2020; Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, Bertolini, & Grimm, 2021). Building from our recent identification of the existence of epistemicide within the IS field (Patin et al., 2020), this work challenges the information field to become an epistemologically just space working to correct the systemic silencing of certain ways of knowing.

This chapter examines the four types of epistemic injustices—testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular—occurring within libraries and archives and argues for a path forward to address these injustices within our programs, services, and curricula. It looks to digital humanities and to reevaluations of professional standards and LIS education to stop epistemicide and its harms. This chapter demonstrates how to affirm the power and experience of Black lives and highlight their experiences through the careful acquisition, collection, documentation, and publishing of relevant historical materials. Addressing epistemicide is critical for information professionals because we task ourselves with handling knowledge from every field. There has to be a reckoning before the paradigm can truly shift; if there is no acknowledgment of injustice, there is no room for justice.

For many predominantly white arts institutions in the United States, the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the summer of 2020 prompted externally initiated calls for equity work. Many of these organizations crafted equity statements, engaged in trainings, and made public displays of their intent to do different and better – however, many did not follow through on those promises (Heidelberg, 2020). While many organizations have indeed engaged in fakequity or “equity talk with no action” (Okuno Consulting, 2017), this may not explain every instance of stalled or incomplete equity action within the arts sector. In the case of fakequity, the remedy is to actually do the work of creating a more inclusive and equitable organization, rather than simply talk about it. However, if there are root causes for stalled equity action aside from fakequity, then organizations are left without guidance on how to identify and address that cause/those causes and move forward. This case examines the primary research question: what organizational practices contribute to stalled equity efforts other than fakequity? Investigating this question led to a secondary research question: what conditions help organizations move beyond stalled equity efforts? In order to address this question, I conducted a single-case study (Yin, 2014) of a midwestern museum to offer a contextualized understanding of identifying and addressing organizational elements that contribute to false starts in equity work within predominantly white arts institutions.

Since Michael Burawoy’s 2004 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, there has been a growing interest among sociologists in “public sociology.” Though controversial in the discipline, public sociology parallels several other “engaged” forms of sociological inquiry, such as service-learning, collaborative research, participatory research, civic engagement, action research, and others. While forms of public sociology are growing among sociologists, there is little linkage with the symbolic interactionist tradition in the discipline. The ethnographic case study presented here attempts to make a link between public sociology and symbolic interactionism. Beginning in 1994 to the present, the author has been involved in the formal and informal recognition efforts of the Pee-Dee Native-American tribe in the author’s home state of South Carolina. The Pee-Dee finally gained state recognition in 2006. The struggle on the part of the tribe to gain state recognition began formally in the early 1970s. The central social issue for the tribe has always revolved around their perceived lack (primarily on the part of the dominant group) in terms of cultural and historical identity. The paradox for the tribe is found in the contradictions between their actual lived historical experience, beginning in colonial times, and the historical interpretation, on the part of earlier historians of the southeast, that the smaller tribes simply “vanished” after 1775. The paradox is also furthered by the stereotypes of what constitutes “real Indians,” which, in many ways, inform the formal recognition requirements by the state. The chapter begins with an exploration of the historical, colonial context, followed with the ethnographic story of my time with the Pee-Dee in the field and our struggle to collaborate on finding a working interpretation of the tribe’s historical and cultural existence as a people. The chapter ends with some thoughts on how a critical symbolic interactionism can promote a successful public sociology project.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on race and place.

The approach used by the authors is to combine an overview of sociological debates on place within a framework that makes the case for a relational approach to race, space and place.

The overview provides an account of place in sociology, of the relationality of race and place, and the making of race and place in sociological work.

The Introduction sets the papers in context, providing a short account of each of them; it also aims to present an argument for attention to race and place in sociology in a setting characterized by racism and reaction.

When William Faulkner sent off his manuscript of Sanctuary in 1929 to the publisher Cape and Smith, Harrison Smith responded, “Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail.” From its very inception, Sanctuary, Faulkner's shocking novel of a young co‐ed initiated through rape and murder into the criminal world of hoodlums, was controversial. When Smith sent Faulkner the galleys, the author decided to revise the manuscript. This revised version of Sanctuary, published in 1931, went on to become his most scandalous and, not coincidentally, his best selling work. While The Sound and the Fury and Light in August languished and went out of print, the horrific tale of Temple Drake and the gangster/thug, Popeye, generated sustained sales as well as a flurry of popular interest in the young writer from Mississippi.

Through an analysis of texts and interviews with sanctuary providers from sanctuary incidents in Canada, this paper first details how sanctuary is made possible by pastoral and non-state sovereign powers. It then argues at least three stories of law are instantiated in sanctuary discourse. Law is at times arbitrary and unpredictable. In other instances, a ‘higher’ law authorizes sanctuary. Law is also a broader game in which lawyers are relied upon and sanctuary becomes a tactic to ‘win’. These legal narratives work together to constitute sanctuary and are instantiations of pastoral and sovereign powers at the level of the subject.

This study was conducted to analyse the socio-ecological problems faced by the Suhelwa Wildlife Sanctuary and understand its potential and challenges for developing ecotourism following Triple Bottom Line (TBL) principles. The study also benchmarked best ecotourism practices across the globe to create an ecotourism plan that would provide alternative livelihood and help in sustainable management of the area by reducing poverty, dependency on forests and biodiversity protection.

Suhelwa Wildlife Sanctuary was chosen because this area has several socio-ecological crises with limited livelihood options, and there is an urgent need for alternative livelihood opportunities in the form of ecotourism. The study followed an ethnographic approach through observation, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. Content and thematic analysis was conducted through Atlas Ti9.0 software for data analysis. Subsequently, benchmarking best ecotourism practices through a literature review was done to develop an ecotourism action plan.

The First finding was related to the study area divided into three themes: problems, potential for ecotourism development, and challenges for ecotourism development. The second finding was related to benchmarking best practices and suggesting an action plan.

This work studied an area not sufficiently acknowledged by academicians and policymakers concerning ecotourism development. The work also benchmarks the best practices for ecotourism and proposes a sight-specific ecotourism action plan in accordance with TBL.

Purpose – This chapter examines some of the dilemmas involved in policing immigrant communities.

Methodology – The chapter is based upon the relatively limited research literature on policing immigrant communities, an ongoing review of the contemporary dynamics of this issue in cities and states using the Internet, and original research in Chicago where a large and rapidly growing immigrant Latino community offers examples of most of the observations made by others.

Findings – The chapter first examines some of the barriers limiting the ability of local police to work effectively in heavily immigrant areas. It then describes how these barriers are exacerbated by the presumed presence of significant concentrations of unauthorized migrants as well as legal residents. Demands that local police in the United States become more involved in enforcing immigration laws have become a point of great contention because this involvement runs at cross-purposes with community policing and other strategies to engage more closely with the community.

Research implications – The magnitude of this conflict is illustrated by current debate over “sanctuary cities.” These are communities where local officials have resisted the enforcement priorities of the federal government, and have continued to emphasize the role of the police in serving all residents.