Welcome to the Sociology Research Guide! Use this guide to access University Library resources most useful for researching Sociology topics.
If you'd like more help, use the Ask a Librarian link on the right to speak to someone about your research, or try the How-To page for DIY research help. We're here to help you!
Ways of Belonging: Undocumented Youth in the Shadow of Illegality
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Hart-SLSA Prize for Early Career Academics, Socio-Legal Studies Association Ways of Belonging examines the experiences of undocumented young people who are excluded from K-12 schools in Canada and are rendered invisible to the education system. Canadian law doesn't mention the existence of undocumented children, and thus their access to education rests on discretionary practices and is often denied altogether. This book brings the stories of undocumented young people vividly alive, putting them into conversation with the perspectives of the different actors in schools and courts who fail to include these young people. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Francesca Meloni shows how ambivalence shapes the lives of young people who are caught between the desire to belong and the impossibility of fully belonging. Meloni pays close attention to these young people's struggles and hopes, showing us what it means to belong and to endure in contexts of social exclusion. Ways of Belonging reveals the opacities and failures of a system that excludes children from education and puts their lives in invisibility mode. An interview with the author (https://www.qmul.ac.uk/clpn/news-views/book-interviews/items/interview-with-francesca-meloni-about-her-book-ways-of-belonging-undocumented-youth-in-the-shadow-of-illegality.html)
Disability Worlds
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In Disability Worlds, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City's wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children's lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, and artists in larger struggles for recognition and rights. Disability consciousness, they show, emerges in everyday politics, practices, and frictions. Chapters consider dilemmas of genetic testing and neuroscientific research, reimagining kinship and community, the challenges of "special education," and the perils of transitioning from high school. They also highlight the vitality of neurodiversity activism, disability arts, politics, and public culture. Disability Worlds reflects the authors' anthropological commitments to recognizing the significance of this fundamental form of human difference. Ginsburg and Rapp's conversations with diverse New Yorkers reveal the bureaucratic constraints and paradoxes established in response to the disability rights movement, as well as the remarkable creativity of disabled people and their allies who are opening pathways into both disability justice and disability futures.
Gender Explained
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Now in paperback: A world-leading expert and clinical psychologist team up to "accurately capture the pulse of the conversation about gender in the United States, expand awareness and knowledge about gender, and educate readers about common myths and misinformation."--Library Journal, starred review Gender is everywhere. Politicians argue over it, educational systems struggle to define it, and our friends, neighbors, and children explore it. More than ever before, young people are questioning their gender identities and redefining the role of gender in their lives. How should our society--and we as individuals (parents, teachers, friends)--respond? In Gender Explained, Diane Ehrensaft, PhD, and Michelle Jurkiewicz, PsyD, separate medical fact from fear-mongering falsehoods and answer these questions: What should parents do when their child starts experiencing gender dysphoria? Which sports teams should transgender youth play on? How should schools teach young people about gender? And most important: What is gender-affirming care, and when should an individual have access to it? With clear, expert guidance, this book is a safeguard against political vitriol, and it offers urgent protection for those among us who are transgender and/or nonbinary. Far more than an introduction to gender creativity, it is an invitation to develop compassion for everyone along the gender continuum.
Behind Their Screens
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How teens navigate a networked world and how adults can support them. What are teens actually doing on their smartphones? Contrary to many adults' assumptions, they are not simply "addicted" to their screens, oblivious to the afterlife of what they post, or missing out on personal connection. They are just trying to navigate a networked world. In Behind Their Screens, Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, Harvard researchers who are experts on teens and technology, explore the complexities that teens face in their digital lives, and suggest that many adult efforts to help-"Get off your phone!" "Just don't sext!"-fall short. Weinstein and James warn against a single-minded focus by adults on "screen time." Teens worry about dependence on their devices, but disconnecting means being out of the loop socially, with absence perceived as rudeness or even a failure to be there for a struggling friend. Drawing on a multiyear project that surveyed more than 3,500 teens, the authors explain that young people need empathy, not exasperated eye-rolling. Adults should understand the complicated nature of teens' online life rather than issue commands, and they should normalize-let teens know that their challenges are shared by others-without minimizing or dismissing. Along the way, Weinstein and James describe different kinds of sexting and explain such phenomena as watermarking nudes, comparison quicksand, digital pacifiers, and collecting receipts. Behind Their Screens offers essential reading for any adult who cares about supporting teens in an online world.
Holding It Together
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America runs on women - women who are tasked with holding society together at the seams and fixing it when things fall apart. In this tour de force, acclaimed Sociologist Jessica Calarco lays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo. Holding It Together draws on five years of research in which Calarco surveyed over 4000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with women who bear the brunt of our broken system. A widowed single mother struggles to patch together meager public benefits while working three jobs; an aunt is pushed into caring for her niece and nephew at age fifteen once their family is shattered by the opioid epidemic; a daughter becomes the backstop caregiver for her mother, her husband, and her child because of the perceived flexibility of her job; a well-to-do couple grapples with the moral dilemma of leaning on overworked, underpaid childcare providers to achieve their egalitarian ideals. Stories of grief and guilt abound. Yet, they are more than individual tragedies. Tracing present-day policies back to their roots, Calarco reveals a systematic agreement to dismantle our country's social safety net and persuade citizens to accept precarity while women bear the brunt. She leads us to see women's labor as the reason we've gone so long without the support systems that our peer nations take for granted, and how women's work maintains the illusion that we don't need a net. Weaving eye-opening original research with revelatory sociological narrative, Holding It Together is a bold call to demand the institutional change that each of us deserves, and a warning about the perils of living without it.
Make Your Own Job
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A sweeping new history of the changing meaning of work in the United States, from Horatio Alger to Instagram influencers. How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change--not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven't seen commensurate rewards. Make Your Own Job explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as "self-realization." Policy experts embraced the new ethic as a remedy for urban and Third World poverty. Every social group and political tendency, it seems, has had its own exemplary entrepreneurs. Historian Erik Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious--and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. From the advent of corporate capitalism in the Gilded Age to the economic stagnation of recent decades, Americans have become accustomed to the reality that today's job may be gone tomorrow. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to "make your own job" keeps hope alive.
Visit the Library's How-To page for DIY research support. Watch short videos, engage in interactive tutorials, or download pdf guides about various parts of the research process.
