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Refusing modern medicine in favor of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is an increasingly popular choice. Yet while it may seem like an individual choice, it is in fact a social process that reflects patterns of privilege and social networking. As I will show, individual experiences matter, but not as much as how individuals interpret those experiences in the context of their social lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the U.S. private sector of elder care services, specifically related to gendered, immigrant care economies and the home care industry. We interviewed 45 immigrant Filipino women who have been care workers for older adults with chronic health conditions in Southern California for at least 10 or more years. Our major findings pertain to the new forms of domestic servitude in this sector. This phenomenon is exemplified by the 1) complex combinations of oppression and privilege given the social location of both the care recipient and care provider; 2) a unique and highly undervalued labor of companionship; and 3) the formation of a triangular relationship occurring between the care worker, care recipient, and home care agency. These findings underscore the continued consequences of economic globalization alongside new relations of oppression and privilege as global inequalities intersect with the privatization of the U.S. welfare state. We argue that they require an extension of intersectional theory to incorporate the nuances of the immigrant elder care economy in the U.S today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores racialized narratives present in the discourse of preppers, a sub-culture of Americans who are preparing for emergencies, disasters, and the collapse of society due to concerns about environmental, social and economic risk. I situate prepping as a racial project, and argue that prepping serves to reinforce white dominance through a variety of color-blind racial narratives that serve obscure the power of relatively privileged Americans who, despite relative privilege, feel powerless in the face of risk society. Strategies used to evade the topic of race includes omission of race during discussions that are generally believed to be racialized (such as police violence), belief in the ultimate responsibility of the individual at all costs, religiously front-loaded racism, in which physiological (and thus fixed) categories are downplayed to emphasis cultural differences that can be considered a matter of choice, and narratives about a return to civil America, in which civility stands in for whiteness, masculinity, and other forms of social privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parental housing support has been extensively studied in Western societies, while the attention to China emerged in recent years. Highlighting the role of housing wealth in the stratification system, this paper contextualizes intergenerational housing support studies in contemporary urban China. Firstly, through reference to a methodological shift in U.S. stratification study, it evaluates housing asset in China as an increasingly visible social privilege. The second section presents a historical review of Chinese housing system and inequality to further highlight the social differentiation embedded in the post-transitional housing system. Subsequently, a critical review of current literature on parental housing support leads to an argument of the potential existence of social privilege replication within the housing sector, followed by a section suggesting the recent availability of survey data. At last the author situate the issue in the current structural forces that are shaping Chinese society and stratification and invites for further contributions to this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the sociopolitical privilege for free black people in New Orleans, Louisiana during the Colonial to reconstruction period. It says that slaves and free blacks had been allowed to navigate their opportunity and freedom on New Orleans. It mentions that people in New Orleans are accounted for the high numbers of free people of color as black people had been provided with partnerships and opportunities.

This paper exemplifies the kind of contribution visual communication scholarship can make to the rapidly growing field of critical tourism studies. From the combined perspectives of social semiotics and critical discourse analysis, we start by recognizing how mediatized texts and the social practices of which they are a part can be tremendously powerful in reconstituting substantial areas of social life. On this basis, we examine the visual representation and production of space/place in a corpus of over 100 tourist advertizing images. Our analysis shows how the visual texturing of space is a key resource in tourism marketing and which establishes a powerful regime of (un)truth about luxury, exclusivity and privilege. This is established through a combination of key semiotic resources (e.g., the frequent depicition of unnamed, feminized, neocolonial places) and other design strategies (e.g., the exaggeration of exclusion through the absence of people and through perceptual effects of "emptiness" and order). Our concern is that this particular visual-spatialization of tourism discourse also works to (re)produce an elitist ideology of class distinction and social inequality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most organizational settings, status hierarchies are based on individual merit and performance. However, in the same settings, non-merit based systems of privilege also exist whereby unearned advantages and benefits accrue to people with privilege. In the U.S., where the structure of most organizations is that of a meritocracy, privilege obviously has a negative connotation because it is counter to organizational values to allow one category of people to have an unearned or non-merit based advantage over another. Therefore people with privilege are unlikely to acknowledge their unearned and consequently unfair advantage. This research used two experimental laboratory studies to examine how privilege recognition or lack thereof influenced the attitudes and behavior of people with privilege. Results indicate that when people with privilege do not acknowledge that they have benefited from an unearned advantage, they are more likely to discriminate against those without privilege, they perceive their social system to be fairer, and they evaluate those without privilege more negatively. When people with privilege acknowledged their unearned advantage, they considered how situational circumstances hindered the performance of others without privilege, evaluated them less negatively, and engaged in less discriminatory behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two contemporary white men’s movements:the mythopoetic movement, and the white supremacist movement. While one is violent and extremist, and the other seemingly intellectual and non-threatening, both are part of a broad backlash to critiques of racial and gender oppression. Examining such divergent movements provides a broader picture of this varied backlash defending the institutionalized culture of privilege. Both movements reassert a narrow definition of white masculinity, and defend white male privilege. This paper explores the varied ways in which these two movements address the intersections of race, gender and class in their discourses and respond to widespread critiques of race and gender oppression by reasserting essentialist race and gender hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering research and practices at the intersection of intercultural, global, and international communication and media studies, this paper reviews some of the ways in which media scholars in the English-speaking world have incorporated cross-cultural project-based learning into their media courses, and what both students - and their professors - have learned about inclusivity, power, and privilege in the process. The paper questions what it means for scholars in the West to engender a global mind-set, and explores the challenges and benefits of this effort for the future media studies scholars and media-makers who are our students.Lynn Clark is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mass Communication and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media and former Chair of teh Popula Communication Division. Lynn is author of the book From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 2003/2005), which received a Best Book award from the National Communication Association. She is also co-author of Media, Home, and Family(Routledge, 2004), editor of Religion, Media, and the Marketplace (Rutgers University Press, 2007), and co-editor of Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media (Columbia University Press, 2002). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]