Sociology Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
A Misfits Perspective: The Lived Experiences of Mothers of Disabled Children
(University of Oregon, 2021-04-27) Warden, Kathryn; Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
This dissertation explores the lived experiences of mothers of disabled children. Through qualitative methods, including 39 in-depth interviews and two years of participant observation, this project examines Latinx and white mothers’ perspectives on disability and lived experiences navigating spaces on behalf of and alongside their disabled children. The project employs a misfits framework, based on the theorizing of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. Within a misfits perspective, disability arises when the environment does not support or sustain an individual’s embodiment. A social relational model of disability, misfits locates disability in the interaction between atypical bodies and inaccessible environments. The primary research questions developed through thematic analysis of the interview data, field notes, as well as the existing literature. This manuscript analyzes themes in mothers’ disability definitions and influences on the development of those definitions. Mothers understand disability as a natural manifestation of human biodiversity. Mothers perceive their disabled children as capable, valuable, and inherently the same as other, non-disabled children. According to these mothers, the problems of disability primarily arise because the world does not accept or support their children. Mothers develop these critical perspectives on disability through experiences of misfitting and fitting. A second research aim examines mothers’ advocacy experiences in the special education system. Mothers’ advocacy results from their children’s experiences of educational misfit. Mothers’ advocacy focuses on creating fit for their children. When mothers’ challenge educational norms, they experience misfit, themselves. This project also explores unique aspects of the misfit experienced by Latinx-immigrant mothers who advocate on behalf of their children in education, medical, and public disability systems. Characteristics of Latinx-immigrant mothers’ own non-majority embodiment may lead to misfit when environments are inaccessible or unsupportive. By applying a misfits analysis, this dissertation seeks to contextualize mothers’ lived experiences and disability perspectives within a largely, inaccessible world. Mothers feel their children’s disability-based misfit and sometimes misfit themselves as they navigate hostile spaces. Findings demonstrate that mothers experience types of disablement, like misfit, similar to their disabled children. The manuscript concludes with scholarly and policy-based recommendations.
Open Access
Activism or Extractivism: Indigenous Land Struggles in Eastern Bolivia
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Shenkin, Evan; York, Richard
This dissertation is a study of the tensions between the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) political party, nongovernmental organizations (NGO), and indigenous social movement struggles for territorial autonomy. This study takes a multiscale approach by examining (1) the emergence of competing indigenous leadership organizations, (2) state repression of civil society groups, and (3) strategic indigenous-NGO alliances to preserve Native Community Lands (Tierra Comunitaria de Orígen, TCOs). At the community level, the study examines new organizations of state-aligned indigenous groups that represent extractive interests and threaten social movement cohesion. At the national level, this paper analyzes the controversial road project in the Isiboro-Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS) and similar state efforts to erode legal protections for native lands in the interests of extractivism. Analyzing the academic and public debates over indigenous politics in the Amazon, this study explores the struggle between the state and lowland indigenous groups over popular hegemony and the ability to shape international perception over indigeneity, socialism, and resource exploitation. The findings support lowland indigenous social movement claims of state repression but situate this criticism within a path dependent world system dominated by global capital.
Open Access
After the Crossroads: Neo-liberal Globalization, Democratic Transition, and Progressive Urban Community Activism in South Korea
(University of Oregon, 2013-07-11) Park, Kwang-Hyung; McLauchlan, Greg
The main purpose of this study is to understand the historicity of the dynamics of socio-economic changes and the characteristics of social and political mobilization in the case of progressive activists' ongoing search for new strategies of progressive urban community politics in Seoul, South Korea, after the historical conjuncture of democratization and neo-liberal globalization. This study is conducted through participant observation, interviews, and post-fieldwork historical research. By adopting the concept of "multiple-layeredness" as the underlying perspective, this study aims to capture the complexity and hybridity of past and recent socio-economic transformations. The progressive community activists are products of historically specific circumstances of state repression and radical social movements in the 1980s and the 1990s, and the influences of their past activist experiences are visible in their community activism. Historically, the state has been implicated in popular mobilizations for the national goals of economic development and democratization, which resulted in two-party domination in local politics. Under this unfavorable political condition, the community activists seek to acquire their places in public institutions through local elections and to organize grassroots resistance against local "growth machines" by mobilizing various social ties.
Open Access
Alien Femininities: Transcending Gender through Drag in an Aesthetically Restrictive Culture.
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Herrera, Andrea; Pascoe, CJ
In this dissertation, I conceptualize femininities not as a static category of gender performance, but as a set of shifting configurations of dress, cosmetics, bodily comportment, and behaviors inflected by race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, body size/shape, and facial beauty. Non-cisgender-male drag queens who embody exaggerated forms of femininity defend their contested participation in drag culture by defining drag as a multi-gender queer culture based on the staged exaggeration of quotidian gender, against mainstream definitions of drag as the cross-gender performance of a (cis) man dressing up as a (cis) woman. Because these queens are subject to sex-gendered double standards for the intracultural legitimation of their temporary accomplishment of the queer gender Drag Queen, many queens incorporate stylistic elements based on aliens and other fantastical creatures as a form of aesthetic overcompensation to preempt critiques from audiences and cis male drag queens. The embodiment of alien femininities also enables the participants in this research to temporarily transcend cultural restrictions on aesthetics and self-presentation, especially those based on quotidian gender, which they conceptualize through a framework of trans-inclusionary gender essentialism. Through this discourse of gender, participants and I consider together the political potentialities of femme, a quotidian queer gender, and alien femininities, a temporarily-embodied queer gender, excavating a ripple-effect theory of social change in which feelings at the micro level animate interactional and (sub)cultural shifts at the meso level which then ripple outward and upward to restructure and, hopefully, help dismantle systems of normalizing power at the macro level.
Open Access
Anomie, egoisme, and the modern world : suicide, Durkheim and Weber, modern cultural traditions, and the first and second Protestant ethos
(University of Oregon, 1978-06) McCloskey, David Daniel, 1947-
Few have perceived that Durkheim entertained two distinct schemas of anomie and egoisme in his classic Suicide. I shall demonstrate that Durkheim shifted on his analytical axes from the notion that the absence of moral discipline generates modern suicides, to the more significant insight that anomie and egoisme are generated by the presence of extreme modern cultural sanctions. Absence/presence, too little/ too much--these are the key analytical axes around which Durkheim's two schemas of suicide revolved. Resting on his image of human nature (homo duplex) as inherently egoistic and insatiable, the first schema concerns the absence of legitimate moral constraint over the pre-social ego in the modern transitional crisis. The second schema, which shifted the original burden of insatiability from the organic half of human nature to modern culture, concerns the presence of cultural sanctions which absolutize individualism and d.rives for "progress and perfection." Only selected parts of the first schema have been perceived and pursued so far by sociologists. In the second schema, all four suicidal types are seen as the "exaggerated or deflected forms of virtues." Both anomie and egoisme proceed from common sources; they differ in their prime mode of expression .. Anomie is active; egoisme passive. When extreme individualism and drives for "progress and perfection" are turned against the external world, we see anomie--the "infinity of desires'--and the collapse of the will in frustration, as seen in suicides in the economic arena. This ethos,is supported by what I shall call the "Anglo Utilitarian Cultural Tradition." Further, when these twin sanctions for absolute individualism and legitimate insatiability are turned inward against the self, we witness egoisme--the "infinity of dreams'--and the collapse of the will and imagination in frustration and exhaustion seen in suicides of artists, poets, and intellectuals. This ethos of angst and the "journey into the interior," in which suicide becomes a vocation, is sanctioned by what I shall call the "Romantic-Idealistic Cultural Tradition." Finally, these ironic and destructive outcomes of some of our highest aspirations are then linked with Weber's work in the sociology of religion and culture. As an "infinity of desires" sanctioned by a dominant modern cultural tradition, anomie is interpreted as the secularized outcome of Protestant "inner-light," "inner-worldly asceticism." As an "infinity of dreams" sanctioned by another dominant contemporary cultural tradition, egoisme is interpreted as the secularized outcome of Protestant "inner-light," "inner-worldly mysticism." These twin expressions of our highest callings and heroic ideals are chronic forms of the "moral anarchy" and "diseases of the infinite" plaguing the modern world. Durkheim's moral philosophy of "human finitude" and health as the "golden mean,'" lead us to recognize, then, that when our virtues are pushed to extremes, they also become, ironically, our special vices.
Open Access
Back to Production: Labor-Value Commodity Chains and the Imperialist World Economy
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Suwandi, Intan; Foster, John
Despite the complexities and decentralization that characterize global supply chains in today’s world economy, imperialist relations of exchange continue to prevail, due to the fact that the differences between wages of North and South is greater than the difference of their productivities. This dissertation examines the global exploitation of labor that mostly occurs in the global South, as a form of such imperialist relations, particularly under the domination of multinational firms emanating primarily from the core of the system. I start by laying out the theoretical and empirical groundwork for the labor-value commodity chains framework that puts labor, along with the question of control and class, at the center of its formulation. By incorporating a calculation of cross-national variation in unit labor costs in manufacturing—a measurement that combines labor productivity with wage costs in a manner closely related to Marx’s theory of exploitation—the labor-value chains framework is a means to operationalize exploitation within the framework of the labor theory of value. Findings show that the global organization of labor-value chains is a means to extract surplus value through the exploitation of workers in the global South, where not only are wages low, but productivity is also high. I then show the concrete processes of how global North capital, personified in multinational corporations, captures value from the global South by applying systemic rationalization and flexible systems as mechanisms to exert control over their dependent suppliers in labor-value commodity chains. The burden of such mechanisms is borne by the workers —the direct producers of commodities—employed by these dependent suppliers. Case studies of two Indonesian companies that supply to multinationals are presented to illustrate these phenomena at the point of production. This observation further suggests that labor-value commodity chains are a form of unequal exchange and thus reveal the imperialistic characteristics of the world economy. This dissertation includes both previously published and coauthored materials.
Open Access
Barriers to Sustainability: A Qualitative Cross-National Comparison
(University of Oregon, 2014-06-17) Ergas, Christina; York, Richard
In this dissertation, I make an argument for strong sustainability, which emphasizes environmental and social justice concerns, by distinguishing it from weak sustainability. I critique the global neoliberal sustainable development project, a weak form of sustainability that prioritizes economic growth, using Marx's theory of metabolic rift. However, I find this theory lacking in its ability to engage forms of oppression outside of class, such as gender. Because of this, I employ theories on gender and environment and environmental justice to explore systemic and cultural aspects of oppression. I use qualitative cross-national comparative methods to examine two alternatives to neoliberal sustainable development. The two cases working toward strong sustainability are an urban ecovillage in the United States and an urban farm in Havana, Cuba. I assess the viability of these projects and their strengths and weaknesses toward a rigorous theory of strong sustainability. I find that the structure of society matters in determining the opportunities for equity and sustainability projects. As postulated by metabolic rift theory, my cases suggest that capitalism is a structural barrier to sustainability, but eliminating capitalism is an insufficient condition for nations attempting to attain equity or environmental protection. While structural change is necessary, any discussion of structural power dynamics that fails to consider real people embedded in on-the-ground social power dynamics would be incomplete. Specifically, I find that in Cuba--a nation where capitalism was disbanded over fifty years ago in favor of more equal economic relations--gender equity is limited by cultural expectations of gender roles and government suppression of democratic processes. My findings suggest that if the goal is to create socially just environmental change, it must be done deliberately. The instituting of laws is important but insufficient because cultural factors may restrict minorities' participation in democratic processes. Inequality and disregard for the environment are culturally entrenched social processes that must be addressed simultaneously and with specialized attention in order for lasting change to occur. Goals toward economic restructuring, equality, and environmental reform should be methodically phased in with constant democratic discussion and progress assessment. This dissertation contains previously published and unpublished co-authored material.
Open Access
Bound by Blackness: African Migration, Black Identity, and Linked Fate in Post-Civil Rights America
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Abedi-Anim, MeCherri; Gullickson, Aaron
This dissertation explores the identity formation of Ethiopian and Nigerian immigrants, their second generation children, and native born African Americans who reside in the Seattle metropolitan area. Using boundary formation theory, I argue that African immigrants and their second generation children are developing a shared sense of Black identity and racial solidarity (linked fate) with native born African Americans. This shared Black identity is illustrated through both Africans and African Americans’ recognition of one another as racial group members, the constraints on their Black identities, and their navigation of similar institutional and political contexts. I argue that this is highly suggestive of an expansion of the Black racial boundary, and the reconstitution of Black identity in the post-Civil Rights Era. Despite some boundary contraction within the Black racial category by some 1st generation Africans, the African 1.5 and second generation are engaging in boundary crossing particularly with African Americans through their bicultural identities. This process appears to be leading to the blurring of boundaries between the children of African immigrants and native born African Americans, especially through the 1.5 and second generations involvement and integration into African American social and professional organizations. Evidence presented in this dissertation suggests that there is a weakening of ethnic identity among the African 1.5 and second generation. This weakening of ethnic identity among the children of Ethiopians and Nigerians suggest subsequent generations of Africans born here in the United States will eventually be absorbed into an undifferentiated African American/Black category. Keywords: Ethiopians, Nigerians, African Americans, linked fate, Black identity, Africans
Open Access
Breastfeeding, inequality, and state policy in the United States
(University of Oregon, 2009-03) Edwards, Eric M., 1974-
Infant feeding has received insufficient attention in the social sciences. Breastfeeding is an important public health concern because it provides many benefits for infants, mothers, and the community. Breastfeeding rates in the United States increased from their lowest point in the early 1970s, but remain below the federal goals established by the Healthy People 2010 program. This is particularly the case for exclusive breastfeeding. Sociological and feminist theorists have identified several factors that influence breastfeeding, such as social class, race, and state support for lactating women. This research uses the National Immunization Survey, which contains a random sample of nearly 30,000 infant-caretaker pairs in the United States, to examine the affect of these factors on breastfeeding duration and intensiveness. Hierarchical linear modeling is used to analyze individual mothers within U.S. states to determine how class, race, and state-level policies affect breastfeeding rates. The models show that education level and income are strongly associated with both duration and intensity of breastfeeding. African-American and Hispanic women tend to breastfeed less than their white counterparts. State-level variables, particularly the number of lactation consultants employed in a state per 1000 live births, increase the likelihood of breastfeeding. The results of this research are used to suggest policy recommendations that may increase the duration and intensity of breastfeeding.
Open Access
Brogrammers, Tech Hobbyists, and Coding Peasants: Surveillance, Fun, and Productivity in High Tech
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Wu, Tongyu; Otis, Eileen
This project is based on an ethnography of Trifecta Tech (pseudonym) a major high-tech firm on the West coast of the U.S. Although a growing group of organizational theorists started investigating high-tech firms’ organizational model and management mechanisms, they are still limited by their neglect of two latest trends in the high-tech industry: the rejuvenation of the workforce through disproportionally recruiting young college-educated men and the masculinization of the organizational culture. Drawing on 46 in-depth interviews and 11 months of participant observation, this study argues that these two latest dynamics result in some significant organizational processes that have not been examined before, including the gamification of the workplace; the promotion of “playful” organizational culture that attempts to blur boundaries between work and off-work activities; and the reinforcement of masculinized racial hierarchy to facilitate managers’ division of labor.
Open Access
Bud-Sex: Sexual Flexibility Among Rural White Straight Men Who Have Sex With Men
(University of Oregon, 2019-01-11) Silva, Tony; Pascoe, CJ
I interviewed 60 rural, white, straight-identified men who have sex with men (MSM). I did so to answer three main research questions: How do rural, white, straight MSM understand their gender and sexual identity? How do their experiences with sexual flexibility relate to the ways in which they understand their gender and sexual identity? How do whiteness and rurality shape how they understand their gender and sexual identity? While participants shared a diversity of experiences, all aligned themselves with straight culture. Participants had varying levels of attractions to women and different sexual histories, but all identified as straight. Sexual identities are not simply descriptors for sexual orientation. They also indicate feelings of belonging in certain communities and cultures, and not belonging in others. My research shows that rural straight MSM are not closeted gay or bisexual men. They are straight men who occasionally enjoy sex with other men. Their narratives, I argue, highlight the difference between sexual orientation, sexual identity, and sexual culture. The ways participants had sex with other men—what I call bud-sex—both reinforced and reflected their alignment with straight culture. Enjoyment of straight culture, I argue, is the main reason the men I interviewed in this study identified as straight. None of them considered sex with men an important aspect of their identity. “Straight” was an identity that encompassed participants’ alignment with mainstream heterosexual institutions, such as marriage, and straight communities, to which they and most people they knew belonged. Collectively, these institutions and communities comprise straight culture. Participants considered straightness an identity, a way of life, and/or a community. Having sex with men was largely irrelevant to their sexual identity and how they understood their masculinity. Talking to them highlights how straightness is cultivated in a variety of institutions and contexts, and in numerous ways. Because participants grew up in and/or lived in white-majority rural areas, the rural straight culture to which they felt connected was by definition white. Their enjoyment of straight culture—and the institutions, communities, and ways of life attached to it—was central to their identification as straight and masculine.
Open Access
The Concept "Situation" as a Sociological Tool
(University of Oregon, 1941-06) Bales, Robert Freed
Open Access
Constructing sustainable agriculture at a Northwest farmer's market: Understanding the performance of sustainability
(University of Oregon, 2010-09) Pilgeram, Ryanne S.
In this project I explore the commitment to "social sustainability" within sustainable agriculture. Using participant observations at a Northwest farmers' market, interviews with market consumers, and interviews as well as farm tours with sustainable farmers, I examine the construction and practice of sustainability in a particular setting. The environmental issues tied to conventional agriculture are numerous and well documented; however, "social sustainability"--the extent to which sustainable agriculture provides a food system that is accessible, inclusive, uses fair labor practices, and is economically sustainable--is often less emphasized and more ambiguously defined (despite the emphasis by scholars and practitioners of sustainable agriculture that the movement is good for social justice). My project, therefore, uses critical feminist theory to explore how the ideals of social sustainability are put into practice by consumers and farmers of sustainable food in a society where social injustices are often embedded on both a structural and individual level. Emphasizing fanners' markets as the most important social space in which the values of sustainable agriculture are constructed, I use a local case study of a Pacific Northwest farmers' market, the consumers who shop there, and the farmers who sell goods there to understand how the values of social sustainability are put into practice. After reviewing the relevant literature and outlining the methods I use, I first discuss farmers' participation in the market and sustainable agriculture more broadly, using interviews and observations at different local farms to analyze how farmers see their commitment to sustainable agriculture as tied to forms of privilege and oppressions. Next, I use participation observation at the market itself to analyze how the space mediates the demands of "social sustainability" in a farmers' market system that is ultimately entrenched within a capitalist economy. Finally, I examine consumers' perceptions of the market, why they shop there, why they think more people do not shop at the market, and their definitions of sustainability; their responses reveal the complex ways that consumers define and understand sustainable agriculture.
Open Access
The Content of California White-Collar Union Contracts
(University of Oregon, 1962-06) Kleingartner, Archie
From the wealth of data which might be gathered on any particular subject, every social investigation must specify what material will be used and for what purpose it will be used. Any subject can be approached from a variety of different viewpoints, and, depending on the viewpoint taken, certain aspects will be brought into the fore and others only slightly treated or ignored. The subject of this study is white-collar unionism. The aspect of white-collar unions with which it will be concerned is the collective bargaining contract. In any union-management relationship, the written agreement can be viewed as a formal document which "consists of a statement of restraints upon managerial prerogatives and limitations on the freedom of employer conduct and, by its terms, substitutes bilateral rules of conduct for unilateral employer action."
Open Access
Criminalizing Our Way to Racial Equality? An Empirical Look at Hate Regulation
(University of Oregon, 2019-01-11) Marek, Heather; Norton, Matthew
Does regulating hate promote racial equality? This dissertation proposes a method for beginning an empirical examination into the benefits and burdens of anti-hate laws. Since prohibiting hate speech necessarily invokes the penal system, a promising approach involves measuring the effects of criminalizing similar conduct, i.e., hate crimes. The effects of criminalization are particularly important given the U.S. history of racialized and colorblind justice and some evidence indicating criminalization may harm racial minorities. Chapter 2 examines whether hate crime laws have the unintended consequence of promoting racial inequality by contributing to racial disparities in arrests. It finds that while police are more likely to recognize assaults as hate crimes when the suspects are white, African Americans are nonetheless significantly overrepresented among hate crime arrestees. Chapter 3 examines how race affects victim perception of potential hate crimes, and how this, in turn, affects police response. While research suggests people tend to have a preconceived notion of the quintessential hate crime in which African Americans are victims, it also shows a negative racial bias in which people ascribe greater culpability and are more punitive towards African Americans. This study looks at how people act under the real-world stresses of crime. Findings provide clear evidence of a tendency to label African Americans as hate crime offenders and to report them to police at significantly higher rates. Further, while African American suspects experience relatively high arrest rates generally, the magnitude of this effect is significantly greater for hate crimes. Chapter 4 explores the nefarious uses of hate crime laws, examining how they may be weaponized to inoculate police and undermine movements for racial justice. Specifically, it looks at the case of “Blue Lives Matter” legislation, which extends hate crime protections to police. Findings reject the officer safety rationale: States with BLM proposals do not differ significantly from other states in terms of violence against police. However, African American arrests do predict these bills, indicating they are a continuation of past police repression. Further research is needed to fully understand how officials enforce hate regulations, and the reverberations of this enforcement on society.
Open Access
Disaster Survivors’ Journey Back Home: An Ethnographic Study of the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire
(University of Oregon, 2024-12-19) Huang, Haisu; Harrison, Jill
This dissertation explores the lived experiences of wildfire disaster survivors, through ethnographic methods including 84 interviews and two-year participant observation. This dissertation extends sociological inquiry to an understudied population—rural communities—in the field of environmental justice, with a focus on the survivors’ decisions around home during and after the fire crisis. This dissertation focuses on how place shapes disaster experience, with attentiveness to variations based on class and place attachment. Although class backgrounds greatly influence the survivors’ recovery choices, they are not the only factors motivating the survivors’ responses and behaviors. This dissertation sheds lights on the possible non-economic reasons for their choices to increase the understanding of the vulnerability of the rural population. A central goal of this dissertation is to emphasize the importance of place as an axis that structures experiences and social relations in the context of disaster recovery. The rural place characters meant a different kind of social norm under which the survivors operated, largely shaped by how they were connected to place. Such varied connections to place in turn affect their perceptions of home, as in when home is safe or unsafe, when one should hold on to their home and when to give up, where to reestablish home after disaster, and ways to come up with creative solutions to home, such as informal housing like RV homes. This dissertation concludes that the survivors’ experience is culturally and structurally shaped and place specific. Its primary contribution is to foreground the meaning of home during climate crisis, connecting social inequalities in disaster recovery with the characteristics of place. The findings contribute to environmental sociology, rural sociology, and sociology of place, demonstrating how place shapes experiences of recovery and rebuild, and how gendered care, residence time, and the informality of housing in the rural space influence the experiences of evacuation and recovery.
Open Access
Drone Society: An Abductive Analysis of Civilian Drone Culture
(University of Oregon, 2024-12-19) Issar, Shiv; Aneesh, Aneesh
While Sociology has historically engaged with the transformative social experiences associated with technology since the Industrial Revolution, the study of civilian “drones” (or unmanned aerial vehicles) in their current societal ubiquity has surprisingly remained neglected. This dissertation addresses this gap by taking the under-examined practice of civilian drone operations as its object of analysis and conducting an in-depth inquiry into civilian drone culture. Through an abductive, multi-sited investigation of drone pilots’ experiences, this study provides a sociologically-informed understanding of the processes that structure the identities and social practices of civilian drone pilots, as well as their role in the shaping of technonatural knowledge within the rapidly expanding “Drone Society”. By doing so, this dissertation positions civilian drones and their pilots as central components within an emergent social order, extending them far beyond their militaristic contexts, regulatory concerns, and other technical domains. Through its research questions and an interdisciplinary approach, the dissertation examines the mechanisms that concern the process of “becoming” a drone pilot, the nature of work within the drone society, the relationship between precarity and the use of civilian drones, and finally, the influence of drone media (i.e., drone photographs, videos, and other data) on perceptions of both, built and natural environments. Analysis of data collected through 29 in-depth qualitative interviews, participant observation, and digital ethnography performed over a year reveals how civilian drone pilots construct and negotiate their identities within broader technocultural networks and how civilian drone culture is often marked by a spirit of collaboration, economic informality and the exchange of specialized forms of knowledge. This dissertation’s findings also furnish an examination of the gendered dimensions of drone operation, highlighting significantexclusionary practices that result from the masculinization of technical expertise and novel forms of precarity that civilian drone pilots are exposed to daily. Crucially, the analysis reveals how the use of drones and drone media creates dual perceptions of environments (on a physical and digital level), and how an interplay between physical and digital realities fosters new forms of spatial knowledge, awareness, and experience, thus reshaping how people perceive and engage with their surroundings. Collectively, these findings underscore how drones are redefining social organization, leisure, work, and epistemic practices, thus positioning them as influential actors in the contemporary sociotechnical landscape.
Open Access
Dying to Succeed: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Online News Reports About Affluent Teen Suicide Clusters
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) DeHaan, Tracy; O'Brien, Robert
The media is a social factor influencing suicide clusters. As a result, the AFSP and the CDC established guidelines for journalists in order to prevent suicide contagion and imitation. Compliance has been inconsistent. However, researchers have failed to explore the qualitative nature of how media reports are framed. Furthermore, research has not examined how online news reports may include features unique to the digital environment. One must also consider how other social factors affect the development of suicide clusters. Family, affluence, peers, and education may influence suicide clustering, especially amongst teens and young adults. Psychological factors, like imitation and contagion, should also be considered. This research examined online media reports and appended comments pertaining to three point suicide clusters involving teens and young adults (Cornell University 2009-2010 and Palo Alto, CA 2009-2010/2014-2015). Eighty-two online news articles and 2,500 comments were analyzed. The researcher conducted discourse analysis and a comparative case study using domains and themes derived from the data. Articles were checked for compliance to the preventative guidelines, and the qualitative nature of violations was explored. Descriptive statistics and timing of publication were used to describe the relationship between media framing and the development of suicide clusters. Comments were examined for both reflexive and oppositional responses to media frames. Data was also open coded for the consideration of other domains and themes. Findings suggested that while the media often failed to adhere to prevention guidelines, the online news reports do not seem to be a large factor in the growth of the point clusters under investigation. Instead, findings suggested that these online reports offer protective features including hyperlinks to prevention resources and scientific facts, as well as public comment spaces for coping and the creation of a collective will. Findings also suggested that other social factors including the affluent family, peer groups, and education might be equally influential. These factors alter levels of social integration and normative regulation, sometimes in an interactional manner. The researcher argued that social factors might lead community members to experience egoistic, fatalistic, and/or anomic suicidal tendencies. Furthermore, both imitation and contagion may be at play.
Open Access
Ecological Imperialism: A Holistic Analysis of the Guano Trade in Nineteenth-Century Peru
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Betancourt De la Parra, Mauricio; Foster, John
Theoretical studies of imperialism, dependency, unequal exchange, and world-systems have commonly overlooked the ecological foundation of cross-national trade and relations. More generally, in the social sciences the influence –or even the very existence– of external nature upon or beyond society has often been neglected, despite constituting the basis of economic flows. In addition, despite their valuable contributions, environmental sociology notions such as unequal ecological exchange remain undertheorized. Seeking to address these issues and drawing on data from archives in Peru, Great Britain, and France, as well as on primary sources available online and on an exhaustive analysis of secondary sources, this work provides a historical, sociological, and theoretical account of ecological imperialism (understood as the expropriation of the ecological wealth of one country by another) by means of examining a case study of the 19th-century guano (bird dung) trade between Peru and Britain. The lens in this study is derived from ecology in the natural sciences and historical materialism in the social sciences, drawing for their interface on Karl Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift, i.e. the loss of soil nutrients that are drained into cities where they are discarded as waste. This work gives a holistic understanding of the siphoning of Peru’s nutrients into Europe and the United States, provides firsthand archival evidence about the atrocious living conditions of the guano diggers in Peru (chiefly Chinese bonded laborers), and emphasizes environmental conditions as much as social relations vis-à-vis center-periphery dynamics. This way, this study shows how the guano trade can enhance our understanding of the ecological, social, and unequal development effects of imperialism, both historically and today; how further analyses of socioecological phenomena can be carried out; and the importance of history for comprehending current socioecological inequalities within and across nations.
Open Access
Energy Justice and Foundations for a Sustainable Sociology of Energy
(University of Oregon, 2012) Holleman, Hannah; Holleman, Hannah; Foster, John
This dissertation proposes an approach to energy that transcends the focus on energy as a mere technical economic or engineering problem, is connected to sociological theory as a whole, and takes issues of equality and ecology as theoretical starting points. In doing so, the work presented here puts ecological and environmental sociological theory, and the work of environmental justice scholars, feminist ecologists, and energy scholars, in a context in which they may complement one another to broaden the theoretical basis of the current sociology of energy. This theoretical integration provides an approach to energy focused on energy justice. Understanding energy and society in the terms outlined here makes visible energy injustice, or the interface between social inequalities and ecological depredations accumulating as the social and ecological debts of the modern energy regime. Systems ecology is brought into this framework as a means for understanding unequal exchange, energy injustice more generally, and the requirements for long-term social and ecological reproduction in ecological terms. Energy developments in Ecuador and Cuba are used here as case studies in order to further develop the idea of energy justice and the theory of unequal ecological exchange. The point is to broaden the framework of the contemporary critical sociology of energy, putting energy justice at its heart. This dissertation contains previously published and unpublished co-authored material.