Our growing Sociology list has a global outlook featuring high-quality research across emerging and established areas in the field, such as digital sociology, migration, gender, race and ethnicity, public sociology, and children and families.
Our series include Gender and Sociology, Global Migration and Social Change, Sociology of Children and Families, Sociology of Diversity and Public Sociology.
We publish leading journals in the field, including Emotions and Society in association with the European Sociological Association's (ESA) Research Network on Sociology of Emotions (RN11) as well as Families, Relationships and Societies and the Journal of Gender-Based Violence.
Why are some political leaders hated? Examining the public responses to the major party candidates in the 2016 Presidential election in the United States, we analyze the animus directed towards Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. We argue that candidates with celebrity reputations and who have been previously well-known are particularly likely to be targets of intense discursive abuse. Hatred becomes part of the identity of that part of the population that considers them as threats to democratic order. Partisans draw upon Trump’s persona from the 1980s as a vulgar celebrity whose real estate business was corrupt as well as his well-publicized questioning of Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Despite the fact – or perhaps because – Trump was once a liberal democrat, the rejection is visceral. Hatred for Hillary is transferred from the long-standing distaste for her husband, coupled with sexist sentiments directed at middle-aged women. Significantly, the dislike for both candidates during the election was sexualized, as was true for both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. We speculate that President Joe Biden, lacking a contentious backstory, will be spared some of the hatred that other politicians receive.
The US government has deported thousands of US military veterans as part of the racist system of criminalization and incarceration. This chapter examines the shared countermemory project with which deported veterans establish their claims of belonging in the United States. The very existence of deported veterans explodes many US cultural schemes around veterans and the military. Drawing on materials produced by deported veterans, interviews, and fieldwork, I show the tensions and struggles between this shared and social autobiographical memory work and the dominant schema through which veterans, immigrants, and deviance are commonly understood. The ways that deported veterans co-construct and use autobiographical memories in response to challenges posed to their mnemonic authority stretch official collective meanings of military service and the nation. I consider the complexities of studying this countermemory work in the context of hegemonic US militarism and complicity with US imperial violence and offer questions that open possibilities themselves contained in the memories of deported veterans.
In this chapter, the author argues that past and recent political changes since the fall of communism have influenced the narrative of the Shoah. New memories have been manipulated and have created new historical canons. Memories in the western world were always divergent from those being told in the former communist countries where a Russian memory has been imposed. It was hardly possible to speak or write about the suffering of Jews. All victims were Russified and have become innocent Soviet citizens. With recent political changes new stories have replaced the old ones. In the new political climate, many groups contest the victimhood of others, while victimhood has become part of the search for a non-communist identity. The ensuing nationalist narrative is often supported by the state or dominant political narratives and defined as the only one “correct” view that replaces what is considered to be a distortion. These politics hinder a pluralist attitude where the past can be contradictory. Examples come from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic states. The author has interviewed survivors of Sobibor and the article is inspired by these interviews.
Few places are more notorious for civil rights-era violence than Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. Yet in a striking turn of events, Philadelphia has become a beacon in Mississippi’s racial reckoning in the decades since. Examining two commemorations around key anniversaries of the murders held in 1989 and 2004, this chapter engages commemorations as potentially structure-transforming events drawing on William Sewell’s eventful temporality to explain the differences in how those two commemorations unfolded. In particular, the chapter suggests that commemorations are most likely to be transformative when conditions for positive intergroup contact are met. This includes collaboration on a common goal, equal status within the commemorative planning process, the support of relevant political and cultural authorities, and opportunities for informal interactions, often through storytelling. More broadly, this chapter suggests that interracial efforts to commemorate racial violence should be conceptualized as instances of intergroup contact, highlighting the often-overlooked interactional dynamics of the commemorative planning process and extending arguments about the relationship between storytelling and social change.
This book is focused on exploring the ways that scholars interpret contentious memories and social conflicts over the past. Mnemonic conflict takes a variety of forms and manifests at various levels of social life, including the personal, testimonial, subcultural, and societal. We are especially interested in how these different levels interact. Contributors address a variety of cases and contentious issues rooted in different parts of the world and different periods of time. Each contributor details their particular “interpretive lenses”; each offers their version of analytic reflection by carefully illustrating how they come to grasp the meanings of contentious memory in their research. Some provide a more personally reflexive approach while others have focused more on unpacking the nuances of their methodological and theoretical contributions. However, all the authors illustrate the strengths of their interpretive vision and thereby provide a model that readers can use to understand contentious memories and conflicts over the past. This book illustrates how we can interpret contentious memory to develop a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of the ways that conflict and power dynamics play out over time, take dramatic form, and involve meaning at the most fundamental level.
With memory politics playing an increasingly central role in political and social life, there has been a shift in the American commemorative landscape towards sites that attempt to critically confront America’s history of racial violence, exemplified by The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, created by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum focuses on the most contentious and painful aspects of America’s past, which have usually only been touched upon as a prelude to the triumphalist narrative of the success of the Civil Rights Movement. Unlike other US memorial museums, The Legacy Museum confronts controversial aspects of the US’s past in very material and demanding ways, asking individuals to acknowledge their role in past and present racial injustice and placing white Americans in the position of what Michael Rothberg has called the “implicated subject.” This chapter analyses The Legacy Museum’s confrontation of America’s racist past in the context of the current social-political moment in the US and within the larger global commemorative trend of memorial museums as a form of reckoning with contentious pasts and futures.
This chapter presents a self-reflexive and self-critical account of the author’s scholarship on second and third generation Holocaust descendant memory contextualized within the Israeli commemorative landscape. Focusing on the evolution of the author’s epistemological and ideological interpretive lens, the chapter explores the way the author’s three scholarly trajectories were shaped by the following: critical constructivism and hegemony theory; critical perspectives on trauma theory and pathologization; and the author’s personal positioning as Holocaust descendant protective of survivor family silence and authenticity. Vignettes from ethnographic participant observation at a support group for second generation Holocaust descendants and ethnographic interviews with second and third generation descendants are presented, illustrating scholarship from each trajectory, followed by a self-critical analysis of the way each interpretive lens constituted the resultant scholarship. Implications are raised pertaining to the politics of memory and memory scholarship and the way the politics of memory is forever entangled with formative ideological and emotive moral missions. Moving beyond the micro case study of Israeli politics of memory to broader epistemological and ethical questions, the chapter problematizes the way subjective moralistic scholarly and personal positions shape our analytical lens.
This chapter provides an overview of how and why narratives that shape national collective memory of past atrocity neglect gender – a neglect that many find shocking given the ubiquity of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in all recorded wars and mass atrocities. These silences transform into contemporary inequalities as who a society remembers and values as a victim shapes access to resources such as education, financial support, and social capital. I suggest ways for scholars to remedy this oversight in research on gender and cases of contentious memory, and how to integrate a feminist lens in various stages of the research and writing process. This includes oversampling strategies, choosing subjects, qualitative data collection strategies, and approaches to analyzing data, including the analytical vitality of listening to the silences and gaps present in qualitative data. Finally, I address the personal cost for the researcher who adopts a feminist interpretive lens when studying gender and memorialization in the context of mass atrocity and SGBV. Gendered gaps in collective memory projects have significant consequences, including devaluing women’s place in the nation and delimiting their roles in the future (regarding leadership opportunities, decision-making positions, economic prosperities, and governing posts).
This book is focused on exploring the ways that scholars interpret contentious memories and social conflicts over the past. Mnemonic conflict takes a variety of forms and manifests at various levels of social life, including the personal, testimonial, subcultural, and societal. We are especially interested in how these different levels interact. Contributors address a variety of cases and contentious issues rooted in different parts of the world and different periods of time. Each contributor details their particular “interpretive lenses”; each offers their version of analytic reflection by carefully illustrating how they come to grasp the meanings of contentious memory in their research. Some provide a more personally reflexive approach while others have focused more on unpacking the nuances of their methodological and theoretical contributions. However, all the authors illustrate the strengths of their interpretive vision and thereby provide a model that readers can use to understand contentious memories and conflicts over the past. This book illustrates how we can interpret contentious memory to develop a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of the ways that conflict and power dynamics play out over time, take dramatic form, and involve meaning at the most fundamental level.
This chapter examines contentious memory production through a comparative analysis of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. We first outline an interpretive lens that shifts the analysis of genocide as a singular act to a relational process which reveals contention is entangled throughout the conceptualization of genocide, the agency of social actors, and narration of the larger context of genocide, especially in the post-genocidal phase. In applying our interpretive lens to our two cases, we suggest that the temporal and spatial boundaries of genocide expand beyond the initial collective physical destruction in the short-term to a long-term process of boundary making around trust, accountability, memory-making, and forgetting. Further, the public narration of genocide develops with attention to four often temporally linear, historical macro-episodes: colonization, nation-state formation, internal polarization, and post-genocidal (re)narration. Throughout these periods, powerful social actors work to abrogate claims about their accountability for acts of physical violence. By analyzing contentious memory production with our interpretive lens, we argue knowledge production about genocide must focus on accountability as it is ultimately what separates acknowledgement from denial.
