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This research explores the lived experiences and life choices of voluntarily childfree women in the United States. The purpose of this study is to investigate why women choose voluntary childlessness as well as to examine how they come to make a childfree decision. Drawing on indepth, semi-structured interviews with voluntarily childfree women, this paper discusses the selfreported reasons women decide not to bear children. Although this is a working paper in the early stages of data inquiry, preliminary analyses suggest that one of the ways voluntarily childfree women account for their childlessness is by the means of trauma narratives. As the women discuss the experience of traumas throughout their life course, they underscore conceivable reproductive risks and uncertainties--physical, social, and psychological ones. Moreover, they describe beliefs of untenable sacrifice and loss of self with regard to having children. The childfree women's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors emphasize how childbearing and childrearing affect personal well-being. Their reproductive decision-making processes are related to a variety of past and ongoing social, cultural, and psychological experiences, all of which inform the women's resistance to circumstances that accompany the possibility of, for example, dependency, loss, instability, or unpredictability. Grounded in a social psychological and social constructionist framework, I argue that the childfree women talk about, negotiate, and justify contested identities to self and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines recent institutional innovations aimed at improving workplace conditions among the paid in-home care workforce. The ranks of care workers who serve the elderly, young children, and people with disabilities are rapidly expanding, and civil society and government actors are adopting new strategies to ensure that these workers receive the pay and treatment guaranteed to them by law. In recent years, worker organizations and labor unions have won new policies, such as Domestic Workers' Bills of Rights, yet a disconnect persists between rights on paper and labor conditions in household workplaces. This paper explores one initiative that seeks to mend that disconnect: the creation of a local government agency in New York City charged with promoting rights enforcement among paid care workers. Through interviews with staff of worker organizations and government offices, I analyze the strengths and weaknesses of this institutional innovation. Preliminary findings suggest that this model offers promising but limited tools for defending workers' rights in home-based care. Some limitations may be overcome by further reforms, but others are more formidable, such as the dilemma of regulating individual households who directly hire care workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of female demining teams in simultaneously creating gender equality and environmental justice. By focusing on literature on the gendered body by Butler and Foucault, this study analyzes how women deminers utilize their bodies to shift gender norms in regions where traditional gender expectations are important. This paper also relies on Bourdieu's concepts of social and cultural capital to better understand the material changes that occur on the ground for women deminers. Using the HALO Trust as a case study with supporting data from an interview with a former employee, I analyze the organization's structure and mission to include women in the workforce. Relying on representative, capacities, and cultural forms of justice and their frameworks, this paper explores how demining efforts that include women, like those of HALO's, can be considered feminist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study expands on sociological concepts of transborder ties through a case study of Armenian diaspora members in the United States and Canada. Building on migration scholars who note that ties to the homeland do not dissolve after an individual migrates, this paper asks the questions of if and how transborder activism can promote feelings of belongingness amongst several generations of immigrants and explores how to qualitatively measure the effectiveness of activism done by nonlocal individuals. This paper draws on virtual ethnographic interviews that were conducted in the span of the 20182019 academic year with Armenians in the diaspora. The respondents of this study hold membership ties to diaspora youth organizations, such as the Armenian Youth Federation (AYF), and others are participants of Birthright Armenia, creating a diverse sample of Armenians who can speak to the experience of being in the homeland. This study is particularly important as it seeks to better understand how the Armenian 2018 Velvet Revolution was successful in being peaceful. By relying on literature that focuses on the role of globalization and technology, the responses in this study help to explain the impact of social media's role in influencing international social movement participation. This paper intersects concepts of social theory, politics, anthropology, and technology to add to current immigration dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although more women enter formerly maledominated fields, they remain underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This paper examines how adolescent's social environment, defined as friends in class and other (nonfriend) classmates, influence genderspecific STEM choices. We study if boys and girls are influenced differently by the math achievement of the environment and by the gender normative ideas of their environment. We used three waves (N = 726) from the CILS project, which surveyed adolescents in secondary education in the Netherlands at age 15 (2011/2012) and after secondary education at age 1718 (2014 & 2015). Using multinominallogistic regression analyses, results show that the likelihood of choosing STEM fields over nonSTEM fields increases when friends in class are better in mathematics, but decreases when friends in class have a higher comparative advantage in mathematics (are better in mathematics compared to languages). A higher math achievement of nonfriend classmates decreases the likelihood of choosing biology over nonSTEM fields, but their higher comparative advantage in mathematics increases the likelihood of choosing biology. We conclude that both the average math achievement and the comparative advantage in mathematics of students' environment matter for STEM choices, but that the environment's achievement does not explain gender differences in STEM fields. Moreover, friends and nonfriend classmates are different aspects of students' social environment as they influence students' STEM choices differently. Lastly, a more traditional gender normative environment impedes girls from entering STEM fields, suggesting that gender stereotypes of STEM fields as masculine are influential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing primarily on in-depth-interviews with 1.5-generation Brazilian immigrants who migrated to Massachusetts during the 1980s and 90s, this paper examines how race, class, and (il)legality shapes their post-schooling transitions and work experiences. While some scholars argue that illegality can become a master status during adulthood, I analyze how situational whiteness, middle class roots, and (il)legality work together to shape 1.5-generation Brazilians' post-schooling lives in important ways. I find that their positions of power in race and class hierarchies gives them access to important financial resources and networks that can help them overcome barriers to mobility due to illegality. Their networks and financial resources can also help them avoid downward trajectories when they face challenging life events, such as teen pregnancy, dropping out of high school, or deportation. Furthermore, although few 1.5- generation Brazilians identify as white, many can pass as white, at least in certain situations, leading them to report that their everyday interactions in white spaces, including work contexts, are easier for them than for their darker-skinned peers. Finally, many 1.5-generation Brazilians, who were only able to migrate on tourist visas and overstay because of their middle class roots, have been able to adjust their status to become lawful permanent residents and citizens - opening up important education and work opportunities for them in adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the banknotes the Cuban postrevolutionary government canceled, and overall the 1961 currency reform, arguing they were conceived to give shape to a revolutionary, fidelista figured world of power that extended and legitimized Castro's rule. The author first analyzes the Cuban currency reform, considering its financial, political, and symbolic impacts, further discussing in detail the visuality of each of the banknotes in Series 1961. She finally concludes that from the conception of the reform to the design of the notes were strategies of logistics that, as Chandra Mukerji argues, helped to define a new, revolutionary social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social connections with others can have a profound impact on mental health, particularly in adolescence. However, it is unclear if the relationship between social network integration and depressive symptoms in adolescence has an enduring effect on mental health into adulthood, or if the mental health benefits and strains of peer contexts in adolescence are left behind as individuals move into subsequent stages of the life course. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent and Adult Health (Add Health, N=14,003, 50.95% white, 50.99% female) and growth curve models, we examine how two dimensions of integration in social networks, popularity and expansiveness, predict trajectories of depressive symptoms from adolescence to adulthood. We find that popularity is associated with lower depressive levels, particularly in respondent's early twenties, but that this benefit then tapers off so that benefits of prior popularity are no longer experienced by adults in their early 30's. Expansiveness, however, is associated with an enduring benefit to mental health, associated with trajectories showing lower levels of depressive symptoms into adulthood, especially for men. Overall, this study indicates that social integration among peers can have lasting positive benefits to mental health long after individuals leave adolescent social settings and that practitioners and researchers should further consider how connections with peers in adolescence can have an enduring relationship with pathways of adult mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, politicians across western welfare states and ideological positions have taken a keen interest in voluntary social work based on two sets of expectations. Firstly, volunteers are expected to provide a different, less bureaucratic kind of care than public sector employees. Secondly, volunteering is expected to widen the horizon of the participant and produce social capital, generalized trust, civic virtues and, thus, thriving liberal democracies. For politicians in financially challenged welfare states in search of innovative welfare solutions at low costs, volunteers have thus gained political momentum. Third sector scholars argue that this political interest increases the instrumentalization and professionalization of third sector organisations and potentially eschew the organisational focus towards the needs of the volunteers rather than beneficiaries, as volunteers equals legitimacy and funding. Despite such concern, only few studies examine how the political agenda translates into certain ways of organising voluntary social work and affect intra-organizational interaction. Based on an ethnographic study of a cross-sector project where volunteers provide virtual tutoring for ethnic minority pupils, this article contributes with knowledge on these interconnected dynamics. A key finding is, that the organization, in response to a competitive institutional environment, integrates New Public Management techniques which, together with the technological setup of the organisation, produces a bounded, efficient and activitycentred interaction between volunteers and beneficiaries. While not meeting the moral expectations towards volunteering, the author argues that this bounded organisational practice enabled the unequal positions as "resourceful volunteer" helping an "at-risk youth" to be superimposed by the roles as "on demand service-provider" and "user". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are gay men of color less likely to perceive that they are connected to the LGBT community? If so, what predicts engagement or disengagement with this particular community? This paper analyzes how gay men's level of connectedness to the LGBT community differs by race using survey data that includes LGBT individuals from all 50 states, county types, and races. I also seek to understand what may be driving the relationship between race and level of connectivity. This paper finds that Black gay men are the only group who is significantly less connected to the LGBT community when compared to other gay men of differing racial categories. We find that the most prominent predictors driving this association is the belief that one's racial identity is more important than ones sexual identity, along with how "out" the respondent is to those that they associate with. These results from this paper point to the difficulties in managing two marginalized identities, especially when those identities are largely in conflict with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the LDS Church (Mormon) as an entry point for investigating the ways in which the new racism operates within contemporary religious institutions. Discourse analysis is used to identify the frames through which racial concepts and racial inequality are perpetuated. Despite the LDS Church's claim that is "universal" and that race no longer matters, this study identifies three key discursive frames through which race and racism continue to operate as core organizing features of U.S. Mormonism. The broader theoretical implications of this study for the sociology of religion and for understanding ongoing processes of U.S. racial formation are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I consider a construct ("stereotypes") and an associated activity ("stereotyping") that have become central to much social psychological research on intergroup relations, as well as being prominent resources for everyday people in designing their actions and interpreting the actions of categorically-identifiable others. Specifically, I examine some ways in which stereotypes and stereotyping are treated as morally accountable by social psychologists, their research participants, and participants in everyday interactions, and how each of these groups of people may work to manage the implications of this moral accountability. I focus in particular on what can learned about stereotypes by closely examining their deployment in everyday interactions - in contrast to currently dominant experimental approaches that tend to strip stereotypes of the social context of their expression, and the moral accountability associated therewith. My analysis applies a conversation analytic approach to recorded interactions from radio call-in shows to demonstrate some ways in which the "accuracy" (for participants) of particular stereotypes is produced as an important factor in the interactional negotiation and contestation of the moral implications possible instances of stereotyping. In addition, I consider some possible exceptions to the apparent importance accorded to the accuracy of stereotypes, including "positive stereotypes", "self-stereotypes", and the use of stereotypes in producing jokes or humour. I conclude by suggesting, based on this analysis, that a holistic understanding of stereotypes and stereotyping requires attention to the social-moral contexts in which they are produced, and the participant-administered accountability associated with these contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have found that whites have become increasingly tolerant of minority neighbors, even if they still prefer a majority-white neighborhood, while blacks have always preferred diverse neighborhoods. But, are the motivations for wanting neighborhood diversity the same? This study combines a year of ethnographic fieldwork with in-depth interviews with 30 people in a racially diverse neighborhood in Milwaukee, WI to examine this question. The study found that white and black residents reasons' for valuing diversity differed by race in ways that were structured by experiences of inequality in the Milwaukee metropolitan area as a whole. White residents valued diversity as a symbolic good that bolstered their identities as progressive and cosmopolitan. By contrast, black neighbors appreciated neighborhood diversity because it was one of the few places in the city that afforded them everyday tolerance and decency. The findings suggest that the broader context of structural racial inequality that creates disparate embodied experiences of urban places contributes to racial differences in reasons for liking integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public rhetoric suggests that unauthorized immigrants use criminal measures to take advantage of American society, including marrying US citizens for papers. Meanwhile, academic research on marriage often emphasizes rationaldecision makers driven by socio-economic factors. Both the public rhetoric and this academic literature, then, suggest that unauthorized immigrants may "marry for papers" because of the economic gains to be had. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 1.5-generation unauthorized Brazilian young adults, I do not find support for these contentions. Raised in the United States, 1.5-generation Brazilians are opposed to marrying strictly for papers, even though legalization could bring opportunities for socioeconomic mobility. They stressed that marrying for papers felt "wrong" because it was unlawful and too much like an "arranged marriage." Furthermore, having been raised in the US with upwardly mobile aspirations, they largely saw young adulthood as a time of self-exploration. Many drew distinctions between their Americanized selves, whose focus was on careers, educational gains, and fun and their Brazilian peers who they perceived to prioritize marriage and children. Ultimately, their discussions demonstrate their incorporation in US society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "supply chain revolution" first swept through manufacturing, then basic services such as customer support. Today the cutting edge lies with complex functions essential to professions such as law, medicine, and science-a phenomenon dubbed "knowledge process outsourcing," or KPO. This paper reports upon an ethnographic study of a Filipino KPO vendor that contracts with academic publishers to handle various stages of the publication process. During the author's fieldwork, this firm experienced two intertwined crises. On one hand, a struggle with publishers over the quality of its copyediting of scientific papers; on the other, a struggle with copyeditors to squelch discontent and forestall a unionization movement. The firm's partial (in both senses of the term) resolution of these crises illustrates how publishing firms increasingly sweat labor in the global south to streamline science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks how insecurity fares in comparison to other forms of control in generating effort among employees by investigating how craft control, direct supervision, automation, on-the-job training, participation and insecurity impact relationships with management, voluntary effort and effort restriction. We use content-coded data on 212 work groups to investigate how various approaches to control influence levels of voluntary effort and effort restriction, in part through their impacts on satisfaction, commitment and hostility. Findings from OLS and logistic regression demonstrate that investment in long-term relationships with workers produces more favorable outcomes for employers and employees, while insecurity generates reductions in commitment and increases in hostility comparable those associated with direct supervision. Insecurity has no discernible impact on voluntary effort. A negative impact on work avoidance is apparent, but only after controlling for levels of commitment and hostility - suggesting that unintended negative impacts on relational processes undermine potential benefits of insecurity for employers. In other words, insecurity is generally ineffective as a means of control due to countervailing impacts on workplace relations and, we argue, a decoupling of sustainable effort from keeping one's job. We conclude that investment in workers is a superior strategy for eliciting effort, although competition and short-term profit orientations may limit employers' capacity and/or inclination to pursue it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Girls and women in Western culture are socialized to see sex as an expression of love. Although girls and women feel sexual desire and enjoy the physical act of sexual activity, there is a strong cultural message connecting sex and love and chastising girls and women who have sex outside of committed relationships. In contemporary Western culture, we also expect love to be the foundation of marriage. Thus, in this paper my focus is to explore women's feelings about the importance of love in sexual relationships and sexual activity, the importance of sex in marriage. I conducted in-depth interviews with a diverse group of ninety-five women, most of whom were heterosexual, between the ages of twenty and sixty-eight. As part of a larger study on the development of women's sexuality and sexual agency, I asked women about the role of love in their sexual relationships and sexual activity, as well as the importance of sex in marriage. I find that most women associated love and sex and found sex more satisfying in relationships where they loved their partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

\Over the past three decades, urban areas of the Interior West and Pacific Northwest have experience what some commentators call the fourth great boom since the settlement of those regions a century ago. What fueled this boom is in many ways similar to past booms: a sudden influx of immigrants (both foreign and domestic) along with rapid job growth and spatial development to take advantage of housing prices and property values. But rather than promising endless land for suburbs and office parks, some cities have tried to contain growth, rebuild their centers and create a new urban identity based on medium- or high-density living; other cities, after seeing the consequences of unrestrained growth, have decided to reconsider their transportation and development options. These cities, in contrast to their counterparts in the Southwest and Sun Belt, could hold the key to how American urban areas can adapt and thrive in a century that will be dominated by ecological and economic concerns. Using a mixed methods approach of demographic data and media content analysis, this paper examines four cities in the American West - Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Denver - to gauge how transit, growth boundaries, and an emphasis on quality of life, outdoor recreation, and environmental health have led to sustainable population growth and economic prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have some very fundamental objections with the way the Europeans are doing these kind of risk models, and how they're setting their standards, and we know there's a kind of global battle going on between which one is finally going to dominate in the end. It's going to be the US system or the EU system. It permeates everything in the Codex, all the trade issues. Codex needs the science base. That's our mantra. …We cannot inject other factors in and say 'well, … because consumers don't like it we don't want to have this.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the global release of the World Wide Web in 1994, the migration pattern of the highly trained individuals from developing nations, often referred to as Brain Drain, has dramatically increased. Despite debates over the positives and negative consequences, there is mounting evidence that these migration flows are both a product, and a compounding engine, of asymmetrical global development. Rarely considered, though, is the role played by new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) like the Internet. However, contemporary trends do suggest a strong association between the global diffusion of new ICTs and the increase in migration from less-developed to advanced nations or what this paper refers to as Digital Brain Drain. Also, not considered is how Foreign Aid efforts like ICT for development, or ICT4D, initiatives may be inadvertently contributing to Brain Drain, and perhaps paradoxically neutralizing efforts to reduce global disparities like those promoted by the United Nations' Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To begin to fill the gap in the literature, this paper offers various intersectional lenses by which to frame the phenomenon of Digital Brain Drain and an analysis of current trends, while also suggesting a strategic research agenda to assist policy-makers address this important 21st century intersectional, problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having a good job and living in a nice community was not an unrealistic dream in the United States for the first half of the twentieth century. There was a golden age when U.S. companies built and nurtured the towns in which their workers lived. But that era began to decline in the early 1970s because of changes in the U.S. economy that allowed for more global competition and increased capital mobility. Through historical processes research an analysis of the end of the American Social Compact was applied to a small paper manufacturing community in Wisconsin. Following a series of corporate acquisitions, the community that was built to make and depend on paper is in decline. Workers and residents no longer have the leverage to make companies care about the communities in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular mainstream explanations for racial inequality and animosity often focus on the role that individuals play in their perpetuation, rather than institutions. Students are socialized in these kinds of arguments before entering the college classroom. These messages may run counter to sociological arguments regarding racial/ethnic inequality, which raises questions regarding how students relate to the material presented in these courses. This paper approaches student understanding by focusing on what students seem to be interested in, based on reflection papers from a sociological course on race/ethnic relations. I seek to better understand what subjects/topics students are drawn to, and the strategies they use to relate those topics to their everyday lives. Intersectionality, labor market discrimination, and educational disparities were prominent discussions among the papers. To varying degrees, students personalized course concepts to racial examples from their lives, but tended to avoid implicating themselves in the maintenance of racial inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This scoping paper explores issues around policy choices and child and family outcomes. It does so as part of a wider programme of work in the OECD on cash benefits and in-kind services. Our analysis is focused on two questions in particular: Can analysis of public expenditures and policy structures identify which factors underlie the variation of family and child well-being outcomes at country level? And, in methodological terms, how far can such an analysis take us utilising secondary analysis of pre-existing macro-level data. The paper has three core sections. In the first we outline some contextual data on spending and outcomes addressing the question of 'how much?' is spent on child and family focused cash and in-kind benefits. In the second, we consider the question of 'how' this spending is structured, examining key policy structures and how these might be included in analysis that interacts data on policy structures with data on the level of spending. We draw on fuzzy set ideal type analysis to assist our classification of countries into different types according to their family policy structures. In the third section we report the results of the analysis on the interactions between policy structures and levels of spending, considering whether interactions between the 'how' and the 'how much' of spending impact on key family policy outcomes in identifiable ways. Much of our pooled TSCS regression analysis points to limits in such an approach along with suggestions for future research that will allow these limitations to be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyzed the nature of sociological social psychology as reflected in the pages of Social Psychology Quarterly (SPQ), 1975-2005. We examined 1,037 papers published in SPQ during the 31-year time period. We analyzed trends in format, authorship, and research methods. We used cited reference searching to determine SPQ's top authors, top institutions, and most influential papers, as well as the top journals citing SPQ. We conclude that sociological social psychology has strength in diversity, but may face some challenges ahead. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through in-depth interviews and observations, I have begun to explore the meanings and implications of female coming-of-age rituals for the lives and experiences of the immigrant individuals, families, and communities who celebrate them in the United States. In particular, I ask: What can Filipino American debutantes and Mexican American quinceañeras tell us about the individuals, families, and communities who organize and participate in them? And, what can studying quinceañeras and debutantes reveal about how actors can transform ?culture?? This paper-in-progress explores how debutantes and quinceañeras are sites for the production of multiple and intersecting identities, including gender, race and ethnicity, class, and age, and can therefore help us better understand immigrants, the fastest growing proportion of the US population; as well as the processes by which by which we are shaped into gendered, racialized, socioeconomic, and national beings; and/ or how we might be able to change the conditions that disadvantage certain beings over others. Preliminary findings discussed include debutantes and quinceañeras as immigrant strategies for trying to survive and transcend ?multiple liminalities,? and experiences of limited economic and social mobility. Also discussed is the hypothesis that quinceañeras and debutantes are methods of culturally socializing younger generations, especially young women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various types of organizations are theorized as engaging in "development" work, some of which are intragovernmental, governmental, corporate, and nongovernmental. Organizations classified as nongovernmental are the most ambiguous; authors conceptualize different types of organizations into varying categories of analysis. The process of categorization of nongovernmental organizations by social scientists is important because it influences authors' conclusions about organizations' activities, values, and "impacts." Therefore, this paper is focused on providing an analysis of how social scientists conceptualize and measure all types of organizations that are not categorized as governmental or corporate, including nongovernmental organizations, nonprofits, social movement organizations, civil society organizations, volunteer associations, and others. The analysis effectively provides a summary of the literature that can then be efficiently critiqued in light of the growing importance of nongovernmental organization in world society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular images of neoliberal globalization have imagined unimpeded "flows" of people from country to country in the face of disappearing nation-states. As such, transit and stepwise theories of multi-stage migration processes have reproduced neoliberal economic and restrictionist political assumptions in applied and European research. This paper looks at the factors driving migration processes using in-depth personal interviews, legal case files, and human rights reports on five (Afghan, Ethiopian, Uzbek, Palestinian, Ivorian) refugees at the Eastern borders of Europe. I investigate dimensions that influence migration decisions and aspirations: time, law, intention, identity, and resources. This research finds that duration spent in a destination, changes in plans, varying national and ethnic identity, laws and state practices, and personal resources influence decisions to migrate onwards to secondary destinations. The argument largely develops theories of migration processes, as well expands research using immigrant life histories and explores the changing politics of refugee migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmented assimilation theory proposes immigrant children and children of immigrants must retain collectivistic orientations to their family and co-ethnic community to be buffered from downward assimilation. This framework assumes children migrate as members of an intact family unit and that individualism threatens adaptation and socioeconomic mobility, as it impedes community collectivism. My research prompts a re-examination of segmented assimilation by investigating the social adaptation of unauthorized Guatemalan Maya youth who arrive to the US as unaccompanied minors to work while their families remain in the country of origin. Youth struggle with poverty, fear of discrimination, and social isolation as they live and work in the US and maintain collectivist orientations to their families from afar. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with unauthorized Guatemalan Maya youngadult participants of a Los Angeles support group, this study suggests that although they lack the traditional supportive institutions of family and school, alternative resources for adaptation exist. I find that participation in psychotherapeutic culture equips youth growing up without parents or supportive social institutions with the rhetoric and behaviors of self-responsibility necessary for emotional, psychological, and financial stability, and aspirations for socioeconomic mobility. As youth become expressive individuals, their social commitments are not severed but move from the transnational family to the local community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have increasingly focused their analytical lenses in recent years on the role of nonhuman animals in the fabric of social life. This paper builds on this work by foregrounding the generative function of culture in defining relationships with animals. Based primarily on qualitative ethnographic and interview data, it presents an analysis of Alberta, Canada's province-wide rat control program that has allowed Alberta to boast a "rat-free" status for decades. I investigate the significance of this institutional rat control effort in Alberta's cultural life, and why being "rat free" is a meaningful distinction for Albertans. I will specifically argue that Alberta's rat control program has been shaped by the cultural context in which it has emerged, one in which whiteness and conservatism are culturally preeminent and defined by a potent nativist aversion to myriad forms of outside influence. In the process, I advance a framework for understanding multispecies relationships that draws on Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, which I call the environmental habitus. Using this formulation, I demonstrate the coconstitutive relationship between material human-rat interactions and the systems of cultural meaning within which they occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) has become a central feature in an alternative food movement that has the potential to resist many ills of a globalizing and industrializing food system. Additionally, many scholars and activists view CSA as a revitalization of civic engagement. However, much survey and interview research on CSA schemes reveals participants are aware of, but fail to use activist or civic discourses to describe their involvement. This study uses participant-observation data to move beyond categorical understandings of CSA participation and examines the meanings with which participants organize and understand an urban CSA scheme. By engaging in ongoing cultural work, the participants at Still Water Farms' CSA are able to emphasize communal bonds over market ties, and deemphasize market principles, such as a price mechanism. This work demonstrates the need to understand the categories conventional, alternative, market, and civic as cultural accomplishments on continua and variable across settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]