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Problem-solving sociology attempts to use the traditions of sociological research to solve real-world problems, and uses the attempt to grapple with real-world problems as a way to reformulate understandings of society and renew or reinvent those traditions. This book provides advice for how to turn an interest in solving major social problems into research projects that begin to do so. The book provides suggested methods and tools, models of successful problem-solving research conducted by established scholars as well as by undergraduate and graduate students, defenses against some common objections, and an exploration of where this kind of work fits in contemporary sociology.

Social structures can be fruitfully studied as networks of social relationships. These should not be conceptualized, and examined, as stable, acultural patterns of ties. Building on relational sociology around Harrison White, the book examines the interplay of social networks and meaning. Social relationships consist of dynamic bundles of expectations about the behavior between particular actors. These expectations come out of the process of communication, and they make for the regularity and predictability of communication, reducing its inherent uncertainty. Like all social structures, relationships and networks are made of expectations that guide social processes, but that continuously change as the result of these processes. Building on Niklas Luhmann, the events in networks can fruitfully be conceptualized as communication, the processing of meaning between actors (rather than emanating from them). Communication draws on a variety of cultural forms to define and negotiate the relationships between actors: relationship frames like “love” and “friendship” prescribe the kinds of interaction appropriate for types of tie; social categories like ethnicity and gender guide the interaction within and between categories of actors; and collective and corporate actors form on the basis of cultural models like “company,” “bureaucracy,” “street gang,” or “social movement.” Such cultural models are diffused in systems of education and in the mass media, but they also institutionalize in communication, with existing patterns of interaction and relationships serving as models for others. Social groups are semi-institutionalized social patterns, with a strong social boundary separating their members from the social environment.

Cultivating Democracy is the first study of its kind of the world’s largest democracy that shows how the values of republicanism are essential for successful democratic practice. In 1950, after independence, India constituted itself as a sovereign democratic republic. While democracy indicated the character of the vertical representative nature of the relationship between citizens and state, the term republic outlined the horizontal relationship of fraternity between people and an active engagement by citizens. The discussion of Indian politics in this book thereby attends to both its institutional form and its democratic culture and shows how the project of democracy is incomplete unless it is also accompanied by a continual cultivation of active citizenship of republicanism. This book is an anthropological study of the relationship of formal political democracy and the cultivation of active citizenship in one particular rural setting in India, studied from 1998 to 2013. It draws on deep ethnographic engagement with the people and social life in two villages, both during elections and in the time in between them, to show how these two temporalities connect. The analysis shows how an agrarian village society produces the social imaginaries required for democratic and republican values. The ethnographic microscope on a single paddy growing setting allows us to examine how the various social institutions of kinship, economy, and religion are critical sites for the continual civic cultivation of cooperation, vigilance, redistribution, inviolate commitment, and hope—values that are essential for democracy.

As environmental crises loom, this book makes an argument for radical changes in the ways in which people live in order to stave off a dystopian future. A possible way forward is radical sustainable development, which emphasizes environmental and social justice concerns that are at once transformative, or egalitarian toward total liberation, and regenerative, or restorative to heal the health of people and the planet. Radical sustainability is distinguished from weak sustainability—a critique of the neoliberal, sustainable development project that, in practice, prioritizes economic growth over people and the planet—using theories from ecofeminist, environmental justice, and postcolonial scholars. The prevailing notion of sustainable development has remained ineffective at reducing environmental degradation and social inequalities. To gauge possible solutions to these problems, the book examines two alternative, community-scale, socioecological models of development with small environmental footprints and more egalitarian social practices. Methods employed are qualitative, cross-national, and comparative. The cases are an urban ecovillage in the Pacific Northwest, United States and a Cuban urban farm in Havana. These cases are important reminders that elegant, low-cost solutions already exist for environmental harm mitigation as well as social equity and adaptation. Findings highlight that each case uses community-oriented, low-tech practices and integrates ancestral, Indigenous, and local ecological knowledges. They prioritize social and ecological efficiency and subsume economic rationality towards those ends. While neither is a panacea, both provide examples for how communities can move toward stronger forms of sustainable development and empower readers to imagine, and possibly build, more resilient futures.

This book explores the intellectual history, nature, and consequences of commodification. While many use the term “commodification,” few realize that it was only introduced in the 1970s by Marxist scholars in Britain and the United States. However, while Marxists initially used commodification to challenge capitalism, subsequent scholars used it mainly to criticize certain markets and certain forms of exchange. The result is what this book identifies as moral and pragmatic critiques of commodification. In contrast, this book follows the materialist critique and, subsequently, argues that commodification entails the subjugation of use value, or usefulness, to market value, or the ability to generate profit. To capture this process, the book distinguishes between formal, real, and fictitious commodification. While capitalism depends on commodity production, the extent of commodification can differ, depending on market regulation and public provision. The book examines a range of neoliberal policies that promoted (re)commodification, including privatization, liberalization, and deregulation. The primacy of profits over needs has major consequences on how social needs are satisfied. The book identifies twelve consequences that have troubling effects for social reproduction and the environment, including the exclusion of those who cannot pay, the focus on highly profitable wants at the expense of less profitable but socially more relevant needs, collectivization of costs, and speculation. Given the negative effects, the book also discusses limits of commodification and argues that the ecological limit is the most dramatic one. In order to avoid catastrophic decommodification, the book proposes an alternative that is based on the maximization of use value rather than market value.

Seeing Justice examines the way criminal justice in the United States is presented in visual media by focusing on the grounded practices of visual journalists in relationship with law enforcement. The book extends the concept of embodied gatekeeping, the corporeal and discursive practices connected to controlling visual media production and the complex ways social actors struggle over the construction of visual messages. Based on research that includes participant observation, extended interviews, and critical discourse analysis, the book provides a detailed examination of the way these practices shape media constructions and the way digitization is altering the relationships between media, citizens, and the criminal justice system. The project looks at contemporary cases that made the headlines through a theoretical lens based on the work of Michel Foucault, Walter Fisher, Stuart Hall, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Nick Couldry, and Roland Barthes. Its cases reveal the way powerful interests are able to shape representations of justice in ways that serve their purposes, occasionally at the expense of marginalized groups. Based on cases ranging from the last US public hanging to the proliferation of “Karen-shaming” videos, this monograph offers three observations. First, visual journalism’s physicality increases its reliance on those in power, making it easy for officials in the criminal justice system to shape its image. Second, image indexicality, even while it is subject to narrative negation, remains an essential affordance in the public sphere. Finally, participation in this visual public sphere must be considered as an essential human capability if not a human right.

After the rapid rise of digital networking in the 2000s and 2010s, we are now seeing a rise of interest in how people can disentangle their lives from the increasingly pervasive networks of digital communications. This edited volume contributes to the turn toward digital disconnection research by bringing together an interdisciplinary group of authors with expertise in various forms and philosophies of disentangling. By “disentangling” we mean disconnection not just from media but from a digitalized world, a world in which places and landscapes are increasingly structured around digital connectivity. People increasingly look for strategies that will let them reject, avoid, and rework the pervasive media demanding they remain connected at all times. How might we facilitate autonomy from tendrils of digital surveillance, revalue places over dematerialized flows, and unravel digital dependency? Who gets to disconnect and who does not? How do natural cycles such as sleep and death relate to disentangling? Can we clarify the means and objectives of “digital detox”? Can we map the failures, glitches, contradictions, and paradoxes that plague digital connectivity? What does our willing and unwilling entanglement in digital networks say with regard to social resilience and cultural resistance? The book’s three sections start with questions about ethics and justice associated with the power geometries of digital (dis)connection, then move on to consider digitally entangled lives and afterlives, and conclude with a look at the ambiguities of (dis)connection in time-spaces of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beyond Interdisciplinarity examines the broadening meaning, heterogeneity, and boundary work of interdisciplinarity. It includes both crossdisciplinary work (encompassing multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary forms) as well as cross-sector work (spanning disciplines, fields, professions, government and industry, and communities in the North and South). Part I defines boundary work, discourses of interdisciplinarity, and the nature of interdisciplinary fields and interdisciplines. Part II examines dynamics of working across boundaries, including communicating, collaborating, and learning in research projects and programs, with a closing chapter on failing and succeeding along with gateways to literature and other resources. The conceptual framework is based on an ecology of spatializing practices in transaction spaces, including trading zones and communities of practice. Boundary objects, boundary agents, and boundary organizations play a vital role in brokering differences for platforming change in contexts ranging from small projects to new fields to international initiatives. Translation, interlanguage, and a communication boundary space are vital to achieving intersubjectivity and collective identity, fostering not only pragmatics of negotiation and integration but also reflexivity, transactivity, and co-production of knowledge with stakeholders beyond the academy. Rhetorics of holism and synthesis compete with instrumentalities of problem solving and innovation as well as transgressive critique. Yet typical warrants today include complexity, contextualization, collaboration, and socially robust knowledge. The book also emphasizes the roles of contextualization and historical change while accounting for the shifting relationship of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, the ascendancy of transdisciplinarity, and intersections with other constructs, including Mode 2 knowledge production, convergence, team science, and postdisciplinarity.

Unconventional Combat illuminates the generational transformation of the U.S. veterans’ peace movement, from one grounded mostly in the experiences of White men of the Vietnam War era, to one increasingly driven by a younger and much more diverse cohort of “post-9/11” veterans. Participant observation with two organizations (Veterans For Peace and About Face) and interviews with older men veterans form the backdrop for the book’s main focus, life-history interviews with six younger veterans—all people of color, three of them women, one a Native Two-Spirit person, one a genderqueer non-binary person. The book traces these veterans’ experiences of sexual and gender harassment, sexual assault, racist and homophobic abuse during their military service (some of it in combat zones), centering on their “situated knowledge” of intersecting oppressions. As veterans, this knowledge shapes their intersectional praxis, which promises to transform the veterans’ peace movement, and provides a connective language through which veterans’ anti-militarism work links with movements for racial justice, stopping gender and sexual violence, addressing climate change, and building anti-colonial coalitions. This promise is sometimes thwarted by older veterans, whose commitment to “diversity” often falls short of creating organizational space for full inclusion of previously marginalized “others.” Intersectionality is the analytic coin of today’s emergent movement field, and the connective tissue of a growing coalitional politics. The veterans that are the focus of this book are part of this larger shift in the social movement ecology, and they contribute a critical understanding of war and militarism to progressive coalitions.

The book examines a number of emerging family-relations practices engaged in contemporary China. In doing so, it draws attention to new patterns of behavior and expectations related to transformation of the family since the advent of marketization. It also shows why exploration of family-related themes is important in understanding the nature of society, the forces that underpin social relationships more broadly, and the basis and nature of social change. It fills a gap in the literature by examining such heretofore unrecognized topics as the practices related to giving a child a surname. It also examines the previously unrecognized migratory movement of rural and small-town grandparents who join adult children who have relocated to urban areas for employment, providing childcare so that both of the child’s parents can earn an income—thus becoming part of the massive “floating” population that characterizes China’s workforce today. Three other aspects of family life that are underexplored in the literature are also examined—namely, spousal intimacy, divorce, and remarriage and cohabitation in later life. In all of these cases empirical material is refracted through new insights and theoretical developments. Research for this book is based on semistructured in-depth interviews with 178 men and women. The interviews were conducted between 2015 and 2017 in Beijing, Changshu, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Hefei, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong.