Browsing by Subject "Sociology"

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(2011) Rapoport, Bernard
A study on the chains of strategic interactions between civilians and belligerent organizations over resources, in the midst of the Colombian armed confrontation (1990 – 2010)
(2017-08-10) Ponce De Leon, Alejandro; Auyero, Javier; Young, Michael P.
Based on interview and survey data, this document explores the logics of these interactions as well as their aggregate outcomes. Unlike customary accounts that portray civilians as mere subjects of belligerent’s power or receptors of their violence, the study of how belligerents and civilians solve what I coin as the “Resource Dilemma” reveals that, rather than passive actors, civilians are strategic in making a set of decisions, resort to social, cultural and economic capitals, and have the capacity to negotiate the terms of their subjection. As such, this document explores how, why and when civilians cooperate, negotiate, prevaricate, or resist with a belligerent organization’s demand for resources.
Analyzing group behavior from language use with natural language processing and experimental methods : three applications in political science and sociology
(2018-10-10) Brown, Christopher Henry; Beaver, David I., 1966-; Bannard, Colin; Beavers, John T; Erk, Katrin; Lease, Matt
This dissertation presents three independent research projects with the common goal of analyzing and understanding group behavior from naturally occurring text, applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) and experimental methods to the domains of political science, sociology, and cognitive science. The first project develops a case study examining a grassroots initiative to bring an Ohio anti-labor bill to state-wide referendum. Social media platforms like Twitter present new opportunities for researchers to listen in on natural conversations, but this data is unstructured and too large for qualitative or manual analysis. I demonstrate the use of NLP and Machine Learning tools to identify opinions and extract trends from this text data, while addressing pitfalls and biases of these methods. The second project describes issues with measuring impact and influence using traditional citation analysis, and demonstrates how incorporating full text data improves citation network models. Citation analysis arose to address the need to quantify, filter, and rank scientific publications as they outgrew any single researcher’s ability to comprehensively survey all literature relevant to their research. The problem is that most citation metrics are based solely on network metadata: they operate under the assumption that every citation connotes the same amount of influence as any other, completely ignoring text content. I investigate textual features and comparison metrics indicative of citation relationships, and use my citation prediction system to demonstrate that even simple methods can improve citation models beyond the typical binary cited-or-not network. Finally, the third project examines how individuals’ beliefs change upon receiving new information. Multiple factors affect this behavior, like reliability of the source, and believability or coherence of information, but there is no one-size-fits-all model describing how people are influenced by new information. I present a novel experimental design to measure belief and confidence change, and show that increased reliability of new information boosts confidence, and that higher confidence decreases likelihood of changing one’s beliefs. The results also suggest some counter-intuitive behaviors: reliability has no discernible effect on willingness to change one’s belief, disagreement is more influential than agreement, and prior confidence has a non-linear effect on how new information changes confidence.
Another time, another place : archival media content as temporal consciousness and collective memory
(2015-05) Britt, Terry Lynn; Bock, Mary Angela; Adut, Ari
Internet-based video streaming services have arisen in the past decade not only to provide new ways of engaging with current media content, but also with media content of the past, including news archives, movies, and television shows. This ability to “dial up” the mediated past almost at will with a broadband Internet connection suggests new ways for viewers of such content to use it in constructing temporal consciousness, which refers to how someone experiences and perceives time; and temporal frameworks related to the online content. Likewise, online media archives can be used in the formation and preservation of collective memory. Utilizing a targeted focus group study of 18-30-year-olds and their reactions and memories triggered by viewing selected archival news and entertainment content found online, the study contained within this master’s thesis proposes to explore elements of online media archives that might assist viewers in building a type of mediated temporal consciousness – time awareness and structuring through the consumption of media content – as well as collective memory. Consideration of these possible effects may better define the social value of media archives and their accessibility to future generations of potential viewers. Additionally, qualitative investigation of these concepts can help us to understand more about the mind’s ability to connect media content with personal experience and memory, as well as understand more about new media’s sociological and psychological significance as a depository for archival content. Without a method of preserving and presenting archival content, especially pre-digital content on aging, decaying source materials, large periods of time and history represented through news and other media content may become irrevocably lost.
Border as warzone : deviant mexicanidad, gamifying terrorism, and countersurveillance in digital space
(2022-09-22) Ramales, Mayra; Auyero, Javier
On August 3rd, 2019, a white supremacist drove from Fort-Worth, Dallas to the border in El Paso and shot and killed 23 people at a Walmart. The shooter would upload a manifesto onto a white supremacist's chat board shortly before the act, disclosing reasons why he felt the need to carry out the terrorist attack against Mexicans. What does the online discourse of these white supremacists show us about their move to transcend from online hate to real world terrorism? How does the construct of the border create a zone for war and destruction for these white supremacists who have gamified terrorism?
Casting a crime net, catching immigrants : an analysis of secure communities' effects on the size of foreign-born Mexican populations
(2013-12) Gutierrez, Carmen Marie; Kirk, David S.
Following the precedent decision to expand the power of immigration enforcement set by the Immigration and Nationality Act Section 287(g), the Department of Homeland Security developed its own partnership agreement with local police to increase detection and deportation efforts through its 2008 policy, Secure Communities (S-Comm). S-Comm represents the nation’s “largest expansion of local involvement in immigration enforcement in the nation’s history” (Cox & Miles 2013, pg. 93). Although slated to enhance public safety by removing “criminal aliens” convicted of serious offenses, S-Comm has broaden its scope to achieve attrition in the undocumented immigrant population more generally by also focusing on the removal of those who violate low-level and immigration laws, as well as those who have recently entered the U.S. illegally. Its implementation and enforcement procedures, however, have been found to disproportionately target foreign-born Mexican residents relative to other undocumented individuals, which may lead to negative consequences for S-Comm’s efficacy. Has S-Comm effectively reduced the size of the Mexican immigrant population in the U.S.? Exploiting the variation in the timing of its implementation as well as the disparate levels of its enforcement, my research extends a quasi-experimental design to investigate S-Comm’s effect on the size of local Mexican immigrant populations. Testing the influence of S-Comm’s implementation and enforcement will reveal the salience of passing laws that target unauthorized migration—an empirical contribution to previous work that has only assessed state and local policies. Moreover, such results may also enhance theoretical knowledge of punitive practices formulated to produce deterrence.
Educating the unique child : gender, sexuality, and homeschooling
(2016-05) Averett, Kathleen Henley; Williams, Christine L., 1959-; Umberson, Debra; Crosnoe, Robert; Gonzalez-Lopez, Gloria; Merabet, Sofian
Homeschooling in the United States has typically been portrayed as the province of fundamentalist Christians, who opt out of public schooling in order to protect their children from the influence of a secular, sexually permissive culture. Recently, however, homeschooling has also found its way into the discourse of those who argue the opposite: that American public schools, influenced by conservative Christian morality, are intolerant of, and inhospitable to, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender non-conforming youth. Why is homeschooling a proposed “solution” to two seemingly opposing problems? In this dissertation, I seek to explain this paradox by examining shifting and contested understandings of childhood within the homeschooling community in Texas, which has some of the least restrictive laws regarding homeschooling in the United States. I use survey data from 676 homeschooling parents, in-depth interviews with 46 of these parents, and ethnographic observation at homeschooling conferences to ask: What are the dominant stereotypes and discourses of homeschooling, and where do these originate? How has homeschooling arisen as a solution to two seemingly very different problems? How accurately do these discourses represent the political and religious views of homeschoolers in Texas? And finally, what motivates individual parents to homeschool? How do parents’ motivations compare to the dominant homeschooling discourses? I focus specifically on three important areas: 1) homeschooling parents’ conceptions of childhood, especially childhood gender and sexuality, 2) how these parents understand the role of government in education, and 3) how dominant expectations for mothering in the United States influence these parents’ homeschooling experiences. I argue that a study of homeschooling reveals a great deal not only about contested understandings of childhood, but about the shifting roles of parents, schools, and government in American children’s lives today.
Gino Germani, las redes intelectuales y la construcción de la teoría sociológica
(2010-02-06) Arbelaez, Carlos
MultipliCities : the infrastructure of African American literature, 1899-1996
(2012-12) Dean, Jeremy Stuart; Barrish, Phillip
MultipliCities: The Infrastructure of African American Literature, 1899-1996 explores intersections between black fiction and canonical sociology through two extended case studies focusing on the authors Richard Wright and Paul Beatty. The formation of disciplinary sociology in the early twentieth century had a profound influence on the production and reception of African American literature. Sociologists at the University of Chicago were among the first to teach black fiction and poetry in the academy, and institutionalized a social scientific framework for comprehending black culture. This framework, which assumes that black writing produces racial knowledge about black experience, continues to pressure contemporary African American authors through the demands of the publishing industry today. At the same time, though, African American authors throughout the twentieth century have resisted sociological expectations for their work and responded critically to the social scientific study of the black community more broadly. MultipliCities studies black writers whose fiction is specifically critical of sociological conceptions of black personhood and place. While Richard Wright's best-selling Native Son (1940) has been canonized as a type of sociological fiction, I read against this critical tradition for the ways in which his juvenile delinquent protagonist, Bigger Thomas, evades his production as a social scientific object. I locate further evidence for Wright's revision of sociological knowledge production in his final, posthumously published novel, A Father's Law (1960; 2008), in which the main character is a sociologist and a serial killer who violently deforms the mastery of the social scientific expert. In my second case study, I turn to contemporary novelist Paul Beatty's post-civil rights era novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996), which I read as a mock ethnography in its description of a postindustrial ghetto that exceeds the sociological imagination of the so-called "culture of poverty." Though rap music is often interpreted as evidence of the alleged impoverishment of inner-city black community, in my final chapter I read Beatty's "hip hop novel" as challenging the social scientific expectations for black popular culture that are part of the ongoing legacy of the canonical sociology of race.
Niches of Protestantism in Mexico : consequences of vacuums of political and religious influence
(2015-05) Davis, María G.; Rodriguez, Néstor; Woodberry, Robert Dudley; Butzer, Karl W; Charrad, Mounira M; Green, Penny A; Young, Michael P
Over the last hundred and fifty years, Mexico's religious landscape has been undergoing an unprecedented change. The Roman Catholic majority established since colonial times has been experiencing a steady decline in membership, while Protestant affiliation has been steadily growing in rural and urban areas. Although scholars have focused on different aspects of the growth of Protestantism since the 1960s, research that examines the early development of religious pluralism in Mexico has been limited. This research analyzes the interplay of structural and cultural factors as well as religious and political vacuums that promoted the early settlement and continued presence of Protestant groups in the states of Campeche, Tabasco, and Yucatán between 1880 and 1960. A comparative historical approach highlights how changes in political, economic, social, and cultural spheres in southern Mexico contributed to religious pluralism and why early Protestantism followed a different pattern of expansion than that observed after the 1960s. Environmental, demographic, and socioeconomic factors influenced where Protestants settled and how they expanded to areas where the spiritual and practical needs of communities were not being met and how the social ties individuals built within those communities influenced the creation of religious pluralism. Social network analysis underlines the importance of key actors, such as women and local pastors, in the development of niches of Protestantism particularly during the period of strong conflict between the state and the Roman Catholic Church and during the creation of a new national identity. Finally, the importance that some Protestant denominations gave to the individual, their internal organizational structure, and their ability to navigate the growing secular field was the last element that contributed to the creation of niches of Protestantism in southern Mexico. By including both quantitative and qualitative data, this dissertation provides a research methodology that could be tested quantitatively and be applied to other areas of Mexico in particular and of Latin America in general.
On Second Chances and Stratification: How Sociologists Think About Community Colleges
(Sage, 2014-10) Schudde, Lauren; Goldrick-Rab, Sara
Community colleges increase college access – extending postsecondary educational opportunities to students who otherwise may not have access, but they also exhibit low rates of program completion and transfer to four-year colleges. Sociological research on community colleges focuses on the tension between increasing educational opportunity and failing to improve equity in college completion across key demographics, like race and socioeconomic status. This paper provides an overview of sociology’s approach to understanding community colleges. We describe sociological theories, examine the contributions they make to the field, and discuss the discipline’s recent debates regarding community colleges. We conclude by highlighting research areas for further progress and discussing the role sociology could play in transforming community colleges.
Queering the clinic : LGBTQ in the doctor's office
(2019-05) Paine, Emily Allen; Umberson, Debra; Gonzalez-Lopez, Gloria; Pudrovska, Tetyana; Pedulla, David; Russell, Stephen
Lesbian, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, and queer (LGBTQ) people in the U.S. are in worse health than their straight and cisgender peers. Models of minority stress and structural stigma explain how stigma related to minority sexual and gender identity “gets under the skin” to diminish LGBTQ health across the life course. Underutilization of healthcare is one mechanism through which the LGBTQ health disadvantage is produced. Little is known, however, about what happens within everyday healthcare interactions to compel LGBTQ people to continue or avoid seeking care. In this dissertation, I examine the healthcare experiences of LGBTQ people least researched, yet also least likely to seek care: cis women; trans men; and non-binary people assigned female. I also address an urgent gap in knowledge about how healthcare settings in general and LGBTQ health settings in particular are shaping patients’ experiences, interpretations of, and decisions about care. To do so, I observe organizational processes and strategies for delivering affirming care at a LGBTQ health center over the course of one year. In addition to interviewing 50 patients, I interviewed 12 staff and 11 providers at this site (N = 73). In three articles that make up this dissertation, I triangulate analyses of data to reveal how stigma related to nonconformity, sexual and gender identity, and fatness is constructed—or alternately, avoided—through relational processes within health settings. Analyses also reveal how new sexual and gender schemas constructed and deployed within a LGBTQ healthcare organization affirm patients; yet these practices center some LGBTQ groups over others. In these articles, in addition to using theories of minority stress and stigma, I draw from and contribute to theories of gender and sexuality in medicine and organizations. All together, findings indicate barriers and facilitators to care for multiply marginalized minority groups, which hold implications for LGBTQ healthcare. Findings also suggest that future research into sexual and gender inequality should attend to embodiment, visible nonconformity, structural schemas at play within situated interactions, and how material-discursive factors trouble the implementation of discursive ideals within queer organizations.
Removal, isolation, and discipline in Texas schools : an ethnographic study of a 6th-12th grade disciplinary alternative education program
(2015-05) Dunning-Lozano, Jessica L.; Auyero, Javier; Crosnoe, Robert; Browne, Simone; Carrington, Ben; Hartigan, John
This dissertation investigates the school-level impact of punitive zero-tolerance education policies through an ethnographic study of the daily practices in place at a 6th - 12th grade Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP) in Texas. This is the first ethnography of a public DAEP in Texas, a product of zero-tolerance policy designed to punish and secondly to educate. The analysis draws from a rich set of data consisting of 27 months of participant observations, 12 of these months as a substitute teacher, 90 in-depth interviews with program staff, students, parents, student survey, and an archive of student disciplinary documents. The study addresses four research questions: 1) How does the penetration of the carceral arm of the criminal justice system into public schools affect the quality of education? 2) How is discipline accomplished in this program, specifically, what are its forms, how does it vary, what is the extent of its operation, and what are its effects? 3) How does this experience vary by race, gender, class, and citizenship status? And 4) How do these disciplinary practices impact teachers, students, and families? DAEPs have little state over site, a dropout rate five times higher than mainstream schools in Texas, and have become a more common academic transition point for boys, Latinos, black, and low-income youth. This in-depth study of a DAEP offers a nuanced understanding of the form, effects, variation, and extension of discipline within and beyond the program’s bounds, and contributes to our understanding of the micro-effects of punitive school policies on children, their families, and school authorities. Additionally, it examines one way the punitive state exerts discipline over marginalized youth populations through disciplinary school practices. Lastly, the dissertation provides the knowledge needed to improve the educational experiences of the most vulnerable youth populations.
Rock climbing culture in Austin, TX
(2015-05) McZeal, Corey James; Shapira, Harel, 1979-; Ekland-Olson, Sheldon
The sport of rock climbing has seen a boom over the last two decades. Interestingly, this boom has not been due to the extreme commercialization of the sport, but by the increasing availability of indoor climbing venues that allow individuals to foster the skills that allow them to eventually climb outdoors. While the demographics of climbers can vary by region, in Austin, Texas climbers tend to be middle class, male, and white. Throughout my research on the climbing culture in Austin I seek to discover what features of the sport lend themselves to appealing to such a particular demographic, and through ethnographic methods, in-depth interviews, and participant observation, I gain insight on their motivations. Additionally, climbing offers a peculiar mixture of pain, injury, and potential for serious injury, yet climbers see is as a "stress reliever." Throughout this thesis, I seek to discover how climbers manage this apparent contradiction, and what their participation in the sport can tell us about other aspects of their social existence.
Social Science Representations of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro: A Historical Perspective
(2008) Valladares, Licia
A sociological analysis of Ibn Khaldun's theory : a study in the sociology of knowledge
(1950-06) Wardī, ʻAlī; Moore, Harry E. (Harry Estill)
Ibn Khaldun is a great Moslem thinker of the fourteenth century (b. 1332, d. 1406 A. D.). Modern writers are inclined to consider him as a pioneer or a precursor in the science of society and the philosophy of history. Some of them consider him as the first sociologist in the history of mankind and even the founder of modern sociology. His Prolegomena, which is the primary subject of study in the present work, is regarded by one authority as one of the six important monographic works in general sociology. The aim of this dissertation is not to study either Ibn Khaldun or his theory in minute detail. In fact, other modern students have successfully achieved that task. The aim of this work is, rather, a different one. Our aim here is to see Ibn Khaldun in a different light, or, to use Mannheim's term, through a perspective which is greatly different from the customary one. Ibn Khaldun lived in a culture quite different from our present culture, and was accustomed to view the world within a frame of reference with which we are perhaps completely unfamiliar. The first duty that lies, therefore, before us, in order to be able to understand Ibn Khaldun, is to reconstruct his perspective or his frame of reference anew, and to try to look at the social phenomena through it. In this work, the space which is devoted to the discussion of Ibn Khaldun's theory per se is small in comparison to that devoted to the reconstruction of the perspective and the categories of thought according to which Ibn Khaldun and his fellow writers viewed their world. This work is, as its subtitle shows, a study in the sociology of knowledge. Ibn Khaldun is then taken as a point in case. He is studied primarily to show how his theory and the theories produced in his culture can fit into the general scheme of the sociology of knowledge as recently developed by modern sociologists.
Sociological Insight, Volume 1
(2009) University of Texas at Austin
Table of Contents: From the Editor / by Mazen Elfakhani (p. 8-13) -- ARTICLES -- The Effects of Religious Switching at Marriage on Marital Stability and Happiness / by Collin F. Payne (p. 14-30) -- A Tale of Two Townships: Political Opportunity and Violent and Non-Violent Local Control in South Africa / by Alex Park (p. 31-51) -- Sex Offender Recidivism in Minnesota and the Importance of Law and News Coverage / by Ashley Leyda (p. 52-66) -- "Been There, Done That": A Case Study of Structural Violence and Bureaucratic Barriers in an HIV Outreach Organization / by Dayna Fondell (p. 67-84) -- Style and Consumption among East African Muslim Immigrant Women: The Intersection of Religion, Ethnicity, and Minority Status / by Jennifer Barnes (p. 85-105) -- Pretty Dresses and Privilege: Gender and Heteronormativity in Weddings / by Alissa Tombaugh (p. 106-123) -- "That Synergy of People": The Significance of Collective Identity and Framing in a Gay-Straight Coalition / by Tristine Baccam (p. 124-140) -- RESEARCH NOTE -- Technological Prospects for Social Transformation: Sociology and the Freedom of Information / by Samuel J. Taylor (p. 141-147) -- BOOK REVIEWS -- Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures by Robin Leichenko and Karen O'Brien / by Ryan Masters (p. 148-150) -- Damaged Goods? Women Living with Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases by Adina Nack / by Meredith G.F. Worthen (p. 150-153) -- Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life by Steven M. Tipton / by Mieke Beth Thomeer (p. 153-155) -- Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home by Pamela Stone / by Betsabeth Monica Lugo (p. 155-157) -- Inventing Human Rights: A History by Lynn Hunt / by Daniel Ritter (p. 158-160) -- Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods by Martin Sanchez-Jankowski / by Lissette Aliaga-Linares (p. 160-162) -- Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality by Jessica Fields / by Amy Lodge (p. 162-165)
Sociological Insight, Volume 3
(2011) University of Texas at Austin
Table of Contents: From the Editor / by Diana Cho (p. 3-7) -- ARTICLES -- In the Aftermath of Atrocity: Theories of Genocide and the Practice of Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina / by Megan Sanders (p. 8-19) -- Made it to America, Now What? Understanding the Educational Achievement Differences among Latino Subgroups / by Natassia Rodriguez (p. 20-39) -- Silence and Collective Memory in the Assassination of Oscar Romero / by Isabel Jijón (p. 40-54) -- Medical Malpractice: Physician Perceptions and Print Media Perspectives on the Malpractice "Crisis" / by Matthew Edwards (p. 55-81) -- The Impact of Foreclosure on Crime in American Cities / by Caaminee Pandit (p. 82-109) -- Chilocco Letters: A Tale of Politeness and Asymmetrical Discourse / by Krystal Lawson and Kenneth Lawson (p. 110-121) -- Self-Empowered Girls in their Transition to College / by Andrea Hadjópulos (p. 122-145) -- The Soft Material Significance of Race: An Examination of White Stereotypes / by Kasey Henricks (p. 146-168) -- BOOK REVIEWS -- The Extended Case Method by Michael Burawoy / by Kristine Kilanski (p. 169-172) -- Unanticipated Gains by Mario Luis Small / by Caitlyn Collins (p. 172-174) -- Fanaticism by Alberto Toscano / by Amina Zarrugh (p. 175-177)
Sociological Insight, Volume 4
(2012) University of Texas at Austin
Table of Contents: From the Editor / by Christopher Robertson (p. 1-3) -- ARTICLES -- The Role of Moral Shocks in the Texas Anti-Death Penalty Movement / by Kate Roberts (p. 4-24) -- Cosmopolitan Romance in Nepal: An Investigation of Emerging Views on Marriage and Dating Held by Young Newari Women / by Rachel Williams (p. 25-39) -- Exploring Indicators of Social Incorporation: An Analysis of Volunteering among Hispanics in New and Old Migrant Destinations / by Luz Maria Carreno (p. 40-58) -- Capital Transformations in Boston Music Scenes / by Keri Hartman (p. 59-72) -- Learning to be Adults: The Effects of University Structure on Students' Transitions to Adulthood / by Maya Ange'le Reid (p. 73-95) -- Ideology in Social Movements: Contemporary Anarchism in Providence, Rhode Island / by Isaac Jabola-Carolus (p. 96-117) -- BOOK REVIEWS -- Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides by Sheldan Ekland-Olson / by Travis Speice (p. 118-119) -- Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright / by Maggie Tate (p. 119-121) -- Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns by Christine J. Gardner / by Hyun Jeong Ha (p. 121-123) -- Sociologists in Action: Sociology, Social Change, and Social Justice by Kathleen Odell Korgen, Jonathan M. White & Shelley K. White / by Ciera Graham (p. 123-126) -- Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys by Victor Rios / by Maribel Falcon (p. 126-129) -- BIOGRAPHIES
Sociological Insight, Volume 5
(2013-05) University of Texas at Austin