Contexts

Former Budapest mayor Gábor Demszky talks with scholar James Jasper about his life as a publisher of samizdat literature before 1989, and his life as mayor afterward. Demszky also grimly assesses Hungary’s future under Fidesz.

Scholar Melissa M. Wilcox provides a historical overview of the development of self-chosen terminology among same-sex attracted and gender-nonconforming people in the twentieth and twenty-first century, particularly in Western Anglophone cultures. She explains why certain terms are preferred over others, as well as when and why the preferred terms have changed.

Six experts, Sutapa Basu, Anne T. Gallagher, Denise Brennan, Elena Shih, Kari Lerum, and Ronald Weitzer, examine human trafficking and whether rescue efforts really help.

Beginning where W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic The Philadelphia Negro ends, sociologist Marcus Anthony Hunter considers the history of public housing in Philadelphia during the New Deal era. Focusing on black activism, black politics, and neighborhood change during the New Deal era, he shows that Black residents have long been citymakers, forces for progressive change

Public contention over recent changes in New York City’s streetscape, allocating more space and priority to pedestrians and cyclists, illuminates an underlying conflict between a belief system regarding motor vehicles as central to American life—the windshield-perspective assumptions here termed Motorism—and dissenting beliefs questioning the rationality of automotive monoculture. New York-based writer Bill Millard argues that during the twentieth century, Motorism attained a level of dominance thorough enough to be unrecognized and unquestioned in most locales; though it encounters enough opposition to be visible as an ideology only in a few places (particularly New York), its ill effects on the environment, the economy, health, and other values are increasingly apparent, suggesting that the New York “streetfight” has social ramifications extending well beyond New York.

Sociologist Brian J. McCabe explains how homeowners are often more involved in their neighborhoods, but their participation doesn’t always make for stronger communities.

Sociologist Katie L. Acosta explores the centrality of family in lesbian, bisexual and queer Latinas’ lives and the efforts they make to integrate their families of choice and origin into one supportive kin network

Many people purchase fair trade certified products because they trust that doing so makes a difference in the lives of small producers around the world. Sociologists Nicki Lisa Cole and Keith Brown discuss how changes to certification policy have modified the meaning of fair trade in a way that has troubling implications for small coffee farmers.

Borrowing from Herbert Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest,” the documentary film Survival of the Fastest aired just before the 2012 Olympic Games. It recycles the outmoded notion that race is an extant biological category that determines physical and intellectual outcomes. Sociologist Matthew W. Hughey discusses how such archaic racist assumptions are repackaged in the media spectacle of contemporary sporting and the glossy veneer of documentary film.

Sociologist Margaret K. Nelson explores how Hollywood has portrayed the use of assisted reproductive technologies. She argues that these new technologies have the potential to transform the nuclear family as we know it; however, popular films glorify romantic love and traditional family structures.

Sociologists Xi Chen and Keith Kerr explore Hui-Muslim double identities.

How can we explain the exponential increase of the cesarean section in the U.S. in recent decades? Drawing from 130 in-depth interviews with women, obstetricians, midwives, and labor and delivery nurses, sociologist Theresa Morris explains the epidemic that affects the lives, health, and families of every woman in America.

Sociologists Vincent J. Roscigno and George Wilson discuss workplace “reforms” that undermine public sector workers’ rights.

Family scientist Kevin Roy reviews the books So Rich, So Poor and Ain’t No Trust. The books examine the consequences of welfare reform policy for low-income families and the next steps in dealing with rising social inequality.

Sociologist Piotr Konieczny focuses on the issue of Wikipedia’s reception in the world of academia: in the background of slowly growing acceptance of it as an educational tool, why is a significant portion of the researchers and instructors still uneasy with it?

Sociologist Syed Ali provides an analytical, autobiographical essay on gentrification in one of the “hottest” neighborhoods in Brooklyn.