Category Archives: University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Academia, Public Sociology, Uncategorized, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Statement on Graduate Student Strikes

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We, the graduate students in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, stand in solidarity with our fellow graduate students who are demanding a fair, equitable level of compensation. Over the last few weeks, we have seen graduate students stretching coast to coast, from Harvard University to UC Santa Cruz, use their collective voices in the name of justice. Despite our work being integral to the very functioning of the university, too many administrations exploit our labor through unjust compensation and poverty wages. The demands our fellow graduate students are making are a necessary first step to ensure that they can continue their duties as employees while simultaneously producing scholarship as students. So, to those engaging in this struggle, we want you to know that we see you, we are inspired by you, and we stand in solidarity with you.

In solidarity,

UT-Austin sociology graduate students

Academia, Crime, Law and Deviance, Gender and Sexuality, Uncategorized, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

On the Market: Sam Simon

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Our “On the Market” series is back, featuring UT-Austin graduate students who are on the job market! This series provides sociology graduate students a space to share their research and exchange advice and insights about the job search process.

This installment features Sam Simon, a doctoral candidate and Urban Ethnography Lab fellow:

Tell us about your research. What are you working on?

In my dissertation, I examine the role that hiring and training practices at police departments play in patterns of racist police violence. I spent last year conducting field work at police hiring units and training academies and interviewing police officers, and am now working on publications and writing the dissertation. In other work, I have studied the sexist and racist organizational structures of Hollywood talent agencies, how civilians are taught to conceptualize and use violence at firearms training schools, why women and racial minorities attrite from STEM fields at disproportionate rates, and how gender shapes access to workplace amenities.

How did you prepare for the process of going on the market (preparing materials, selecting the right job openings, sending out applications, etc.)?

I participated in the job market workshop that Ken organized for students the summer before I started applying to jobs, and sought out feedback on my materials from friends in academia and my advisors. I also gave a practice job talk in several settings to gain experience in front of an audience who have expertise in different methodological and substantive areas.

How do you stay organized when it comes to the job market?

I created an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of job postings that I may be a fit for, listed in order by deadline. In the Excel sheet, I list the institution, department, specialty area they are hiring in (i.e. Criminology, Race/Ethnicity, Gender, etc.), link to the job posting on ASA’s website, submission link, job ID (from ASA’s postings), what materials are required, how letters should be submitted (some require your recommender sends them directly via email), the name of the search committee chair if it was listed, and any other notes. I color-coded the Excel sheet to designate the status of my application: green means I applied, white means I did not apply, yellow means I got an interview, and red means I was informed that I would not be going further in the process. I granted access to this Excel sheet to my letter writers so they could reference it, if needed.

To find out about jobs, I primarily used the ASA job bank, but was also subscribed to the ASA job listserv, and checked emails from ASA sections and other sociological organizations (like SSS and ESS) for job listings.

How are you balancing all of your responsibilities this semester?

Good question! I have designated 2 days roughly every 2 weeks to devote to job applications. On those days, I sit at a coffee shop and crank out the applications that are due that month. The rest of the time, I work on my dissertation, publications, or my research assistant responsibilities.

What is it like being on the market at ASA? What are the keys to success?

I found that being on the market at ASA was not all that different than when you are not on the market. The primary difference was that I was more strategic about which panels I attended based on if I wanted to meet someone presenting, I participated in the ASA job fair, I attended a panel about preparing a job talk, and I prioritized attending receptions and other social events in order to network. Some people go all out at ASA and set up a ton of meetings based on which institutions are hiring. That’s one way to do it, but it was not my approach.

How are you practicing self-care?

During graduate school generally, it has been critical that I spend time pursuing non-academic interests and hobbies. I am the creative director of a dance team in Austin, which has been fantastic both creatively and socially, I lift weights almost every day, and I take the weekends completely off (with a few exceptions) to spend time with friends and relax. Taking weekends off has helped both my mental health and my work, actually – my writing on Monday is significantly better because I take time to think about and experience other things, which I then often bring into my work.

What is your biggest piece(s) of advice for those going on the market next year or in the next few years?

The best advice that I have received is to remember that most of this is beyond your control, so not to spend too much time obsessing or worrying. Spend time preparing your materials in advance so you have plenty of time to make edits, sign up for practice job talks even though it’s nerve-wracking, and seek out support from faculty and fellow students.

Academia, Teaching, University of Texas at Austin Sociology, Work, Occupations and Organizations

On the Market: Robert Ressler

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Our “On the Market” series is back, featuring UT-Austin graduate students who are on the job market! This series provides sociology graduate students a space to share their research and exchange advice and insights about the job search process.

This installment features Robert W. Ressler, a doctoral candidate and Population Research Center Trainee:

Robert reflects on his previous experiences on the market and discusses the insights that he has gained. When asked about his advice for graduate students going on the academic job market, he writes:
Keep up the hard work, and go easy on yourselves. Honestly, looking back over the last two years I can acknowledge that things have not necessarily gone “according to plan,” but also that plans and priorities change. Just like everything else, the tenure-track system is rigged in favor of those with the most resources (social, cultural, and economic), so I’ve felt like it’s important to remember to pursue opportunities that reflect the reasons that I went to graduate school to begin with: to make a meaningful impact in the communities to which I belong. I moved away from Texas during my last year of graduate school for my husband to pursue a job opportunity, finished my dissertation from afar because it was a requirement for a fellowship from the department, graduated (!!), learned a lot, and began working in new places that I would never have predicted. While I’m still applying for jobs in search of what feels like an ever elusive tenure-track position, I’m also teaching adjunct at Gonzaga University, continuing my research projects in partnership with working groups at UT, contracting for an educational nonprofit in the midst of a program evaluation, and will be picking up teaching an online course at Washington State University next spring, too. All of these opportunities came about not because of my applications, but because of personal and professional connections to communities that had a need that I could fill. During these past two years I’ve also started singing in a community choir, explored a new city, and made some wonderful new friends.
I still feel like a sociologist, and still see myself as an academic researcher and teacher, and plan to continue pursuing this career. In that endeavor I’m maintaining my participation in professional organizations, and I’m still publishing new work (a recent article in Social Science Research on Latina/o enrollment in early childhood education, for example, can be found here). That one took nearly five years from running the first models to publication! Last cycle I had a few on campus interviews that I received very positive feedback over, and my C.V. is constantly improving, so I am trying to remain optimistic for this year. I’ve expanded my application pool this year, and have currently applied to 24 positions and counting in Sociology, Public Policy and Administration, and Human Development and Family Sciences. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, right?
Some practical advice that’s gotten me even this far would be to consider all the opportunities that are available to you, try not to hold yourselves to someone else’s metric of success (but do try to get a sole-authored publication ASAP), find and maintain positive working and professional relationships with your advisers (mine have been a life-line; don’t settle for anything less), and remember that each of us is on our own unique journey.
Public Sociology, University of Texas at Austin Sociology, Work, Occupations and Organizations

Katherine Hill’s research featured in Work in Progress

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UT Austin sociology doctoral candidate Katherine Hill has written about her dissertation research findings for Work in Progress on the experiences of people with disabilities who work in the gig economy.

She writes:

During the recent government shutdown, approximately 800,000 workers went without pay. Some government workers turned to gig work to make ends meet: Twitter is filled with stories of workers who began driving for Uber or Lyft during the shutdown as a stopgap measure.

Government workers are not alone in turning to gig work to make ends meet. The government shutdown is one example of systemic failures that leave many Americans without a safety net. In an ongoing study, I find that people with a disability also turn to gig work to get by. People with disabilities do gig work because they need a flexible job that allows them to stop working when they can no longer work that day, and to take breaks as needed. […]

Many gig workers experience income volatility, not knowing how much they will earn in a given week and unable to meet their expenses as a result. Additionally, gig workers are not given benefits like paid sick leave, and they are only paid for the time spent completing a task. For example: rideshare drivers are not paid to drive to the passenger when picking them up or to wait for the passenger if they are running late. […]

Despite financial hardships and health issues, many of the people I interviewed said that they will continue to do gig work, for one main reason: for most, there is no other option. Even Jonathan, recovering from multiple heart surgeries, said, “I figured if I can sit in front of the TV, then I can sit in the car and drive. It hurts my chest a lot to drive. But I still do it because there’s nothing else.”

To read the full piece, see Work in Progress.

Katherine Hill is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also a Population Research Center trainee and Urban Ethnography Lab Fellow. Her research examines issues of inequality at the intersection of work and organizations, race and identity, and health and healthcare. Katherine’s dissertation uses mixed methods to examine the material and cultural characteristics of the gig economy that contribute to inequality. 

Ethnography, Latin American Studies, Political Sociology, Power, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Alex Diamond writes about Colombia’s peace process in NACLA

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UT Austin sociology PhD student, Alex Diamond, recently published a piece for North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) (available in both English and Spanish) on the impact of mining and energy megaprojects on Colombia’s peace process.

He writes:

El Orejón, an isolated rural community in the northern Colombian department of Antioquia, is slowly emptying out. A few years ago, 88 people lived on family farms on the valley walls above the Cauca river. Only 48 remain. The neatly cultivated plots of corn, beans, coffee, sugar cane, and yuca of the families still there stand out from the abandoned lands that the jungle is gradually reclaiming. But in contrast to the classic model of rural communities abandoned by the state, the Colombian government has invested significantly in El Orejón, a crucial area for Colombia’s peace process.

El Orejón was the site for the 2015 demining program that marked the first collaboration between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), before being chosen during negotiations of the peace accord as one of 11 hamlets in the municipality of Briceño to launch the pilot coca substitution program in 2017. Little more than two years ago, coca plants covered the hillsides above the river. Now the plants are gone, pulled out voluntarily by local campesinos seeking a transition to legal agriculture.

As El Orejón declines, a settlement across the river, complete with tennis courts and swimming pools, has emerged in the last ten years. This is the camp for workers who are constructing Hidroituango, the largest hydroelectric dam project in the history of Colombia, which lies directly below El Orejón. Public Enterprises of Medellín (EPM), the public-private partnership that is building Hidroituango, has recently come under fire for illegal and irresponsible construction practices with disastrous consequences. In May 2018, a tunnel built to divert river waters during the construction blocked up for weeks and then subsequently burst, leading to massive flooding that displaced 25,000 people in downstream communities.

But the displacement in El Orejón and other communities near the project has nothing to do with flooding or engineering mistakes. Instead, these communities speak to a deeper and less discussed aspect of the Hidroituango project: the way it has disrupted local livelihoods, primarily by limiting their access to the river. This exclusion goes hand in hand with coca substitution and the peace process. Together, they comprise a broader process of pacification in the region that at first deployed violence, and now peace, to serve elite interests at the expense of campesino ways of life. […]

To read the full op-ed, see NACLA.

Alex Diamond is a Sociology PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. His research seeks to understand the local experience of the post-peace agreement transition in rural areas of Colombia with a long history of insurgent control. Based on interviews and in-depth ethnographic participant observation in the northern Antioquian village of Briceño, his work centers on three major themes: the implementation of the peace accords, particularly the parts that are related to coca substitution and rural reform; the intersection between the peace process, rural dispossession, and mining and energy megaprojects; and the emergence (or lack thereof) of campesino resistance and organizing.

Ethnography, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

UEL Speaker Series “Transnational Ethnography: Interconnected Lives and Social Processes”

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By Ruijie Peng

Four distinguished scholars from outside of the University of Texas are visiting the Department of Sociology in the Fall and Spring semesters of 2019/2010 to participate in the graduate student-organized speaker series “Transnational Ethnography: Interconnected Lives and Social Processes.” This series features scholarly research that uses qualitative, especially ethnographic approaches, to study transnational processes and social lives. Their projects span across a wide range of contexts, such as Latin America, North America, East and South Asia. They explore how histories, politics, and human experiences in different national and social contexts are interconnected in the age of globalization and large-scale human movements. These projects not only expand the scope of phenomena more commonly studied in single-country contexts, but their unique methods also bring innovative transnational perspective to social science in general.

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In the Fall 2019 semester, two speakers are visiting to give the following talks and workshops:

Rebecca Tarlau,  September 26, 2019

Pennsylvania State University

Talk: “Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education”

September 26, 2019, 12:00 pm

RLP 1.302D

Rebecca Tarlau is an Assistant Professor of Education and Labor and Employment Relations at the Pennsylvania State University. Her work examines how class, race, and gender hierarchies are reproduced through schools, as well as how social movements use education to contest these inequalities. Rebecca’s forthcoming book, Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education (Oxford University Press), explores the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and the attempt to transform public education across the country. This work analyzes the micro-politics of grassroots educational reform, that is, the strategies activists use to convince state actors to adopt their initiatives and the political and economic conditions that affect state-society interactions. Her current research project compares teachers’ movements in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, examining the conditions and strategies that enable teachers and their unions to transcend narrow economic interests and participate in broader struggles for social justice.

Bin Xu, October 8, 2019

Emory University

Talk: “Chairman Mao’s Children and China’s Difficult Past: Generation and Memory.”

October 8, 2019, 12:00 pm

RLP 1.302E

Workshop: “Reflexivity and Reflections: Two International Ethnographies”

October 8, 2019, 3:00 pm

The Ethnography Lab, RLP 3.214F

RSVP through email (TBD)

Bin Xu is an Associate Professor of Sociology and China Studies at Emory University. His research focuses on collective memory of revolutionary China, cultural sociology of civic life, disaster research, and social movements. His award-winning book, Compassionate Politics: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China, examines the unprecedented wave of self-organized civic engagement involving hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. Currently, he is working on a book project, Chairman Mao’s Children and China’s Difficult Past: Generation and Memory. The book examines the memory of China’s “zhiqing (知青)” (short for zhishi qingnian, the “educated youth”) generation—the 17 million urban, secondary school graduates were transferred to settle in villages, semi-military corps, and state farms in the 1960s and 1970s.

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In the Spring 2020 semester, two speakers are visiting to give the following talks and workshops:

Abigail Andrews, February 13, 2020

University of California-San Diego

Talk and workshop titles TBA

Abigail Andrews is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at the University of California-San Diego, and the co-director of Mexican Migration Field Research and Training Program in UCSD. Her research interests are in gender, migration, state power, and grassroots agency. She particularly focuses on the struggles of marginalized groups in Mexico and the United States, including indigenous peasants, deportees, and undocumented immigrants. Her well-acclaimed book, Undocumented Politics: Place, Gender, and the Pathways of Mexican Migrants (University of California Press 2018), examines the communities’ struggles for rights and resources across the U.S.-Mexico divide.

 

Hae Yeon Choo, April 13, 2020

University of Toronto

Talk and workshop titles TBA

Hae Yeon Choo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research centers on gender, citizenship, transnational migration, and urban sociology to examine global social inequality. In her empirical and theoretical work, she employs an intersectional approach to social inequalities, integrating gender, race, and class in her analyses. Her latest book, Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea, is a multi-sited and comparative ethnographic research that offers an account of how inequalities of gender, race, and class affect migrants’ practice of rights through studying three groups of Filipina women in South Korea. Her previous works include “The Cost of Rights: Migrant Women, Feminist Advocacy, and Gendered Morality in South Korea” (Gender & Society 2013), and “The Transnational Journey of Intersectionality” (Gender & Society 2012).

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In addition to a public lecture, each speaker will host a workshop session with graduate students on conducting transnational ethnographic research to study globalization, migration, political mobilization, and racialization. These workshops will cover processes such as conceptualizing research questions; negotiating access to study sites; conducting multi-sited fieldwork; collecting and organizing data; critically analyzing data; using intersectional and/or transnational feminist frameworks throughout the research processes; and diffusing research findings to the broader public to initiate positive social transformations.

The “Transnational Ethnography” speaker series is part of an ongoing student-led initiative in the Urban Ethnography Lab called “Ethnographic Approaches,” which was established with the support of the Academic Enrichment Fund. In the 2018-2019 academic year, the “Critical Criminology” speaker series brought prominent scholars from across the U.S. to campus, including Nikki Jones (UC-Berkeley), Cecilia Menjívar (UCLA), and Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera (GMU).

This speaker series is organized by hosted by UT Austin graduate students Chen Liang (PhD student) and Ruijie Peng (PhD candidate). It is hosted by the Urban Ethnography Lab and generously supported by the Academic Enrichment Fund, Asian Studies Department, Center for Asian American Studies, Center for East Asian Studies, Center for Mexican American Studies,  LLILAS and POSCO Chair in Korean Studies Endowment. If you need more information or would like to volunteer to support the events, please contact the student organizers Chen Liang (chenliang1224@utexas.edu) and Ruijie Peng (ruijie.peng@utexas.edu).

 

Ruijie Peng is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Ruijie researches labor, gender, race and ethnicity, political economy, development, global and transnational sociology. Her current research is a 15-month ethnographic study of home support and women’s labor against the backdrop of rural-urban migration in southwest China.

 

Academia, Uncategorized, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Shannon Cavanagh, Gloria González-López Receive President’s Teaching Award

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In January, UT Austin Sociology faculty Shannon Cavanagh and Gloria González-López were awarded the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award for the 2018-19 academic year. They were honored last Friday evening at a dinner with UT Austin President Greg Fenves.

Associate Professor of Sociology Shannon Cavanagh receives 2018-19 President’s Associates Teaching Award from UT Austin President Gregory Fenves
Professor of Sociology Gloria González-López receives 2018-19 President’s Associates Teaching Award from UT Austin President Gregory Fenves

Professors Cavanagh and González-López are two among eight UT Austin faculty who received the award this year. According to a university news release:

The award recognizes the university’s educational innovators who demonstrate exceptional undergraduate teaching in the core curriculum, including signature courses, and engage with curriculum reform and educational innovation.

“These eight faculty members have dedicated themselves to teaching and mentoring,” said Gregory L. Fenves, president of UT Austin. “They build connections with their students and strive to unlock their potential with knowledge and creativity.”

This is the first time that two faculty members from Sociology have received the award during the same year. Moreover, among this year’s awardees, ours was the only department represented by more than one faculty winner.

Political Sociology, Power, Sociology of Gender, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Maro Youssef in Carnegie on Gender and Radicalization in Tunisia

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UT Austin sociology doctoral candidate Maro Youssef and co-author Hamza Mighri have written an op-ed for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Women’s Groups and Radicalization in Tunisia.

They write:

Tunisian women’s associations aim to lead efforts to prevent radicalization among women, but insufficient funding and inter-organizational divides hamper their efforts. […]

As much as what drives the radicalization of young men, economic disparities, high unemployment and disenchantment with the democratic transition also drive women’s radicalization. […] More broadly, women’s associations also see women’s inclusion in society as key to preventing marginalization that could lead to extremism. By lobbying for gender equality and representation, cultivating civic engagement, and providing women with better economic opportunities, women’s organizations thereby reduce the risk of radicalization. […]

The role of women and feminist associations in tackling the roots of radicalization through combatting violence against women, improving access to education, providing opportunities for entrepreneurship, and encouraging participation in the political process through civil society or politics is crucial to solving Tunisia’s security problems in the long run.

To read the full op-ed, see Carnegie Empowerment for International Peace.

Maro Youssef is a doctoral candidate in sociology at The University of Texas at Austin and a Fulbright-Hays Fellow.  Her research is on gender, democratization, and social movements in the Middle East and North Africa.

Crime, Law and Deviance, Gender and Sexuality, Immigration, Latin American Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Spring 2019 Speaker Series “Critical Criminology: Feminist Approaches to Crime, Law, and Deviance”

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Three distinguished scholars from outside the University of Austin are visiting the sociology department this semester as part of a graduate-student organized speaker series called “Critical Criminology: Feminist Approaches to Crime, Law, and Deviance.” This series showcases professors who use ethnographic methods to study aspects of the criminal-legal system, an area more commonly explored through quantitative datasets and methodologies.

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Jan. 30-31
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and President of the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS). She studies Mexico-U.S. relations, organized crime, immigration, border security, and human trafficking. Her books include Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations,Energy, and Civil War in Mexico (2017) and Democracy in“Two Mexicos”: Political Institutions in Oaxaca and Nuevo León (2013). She currently analyzes Mexican immigration in the United States for a project called Mexican “Illegal” Immigration in the U.S.: A Human Problem.

Cecilia Menjívar, Feb. 27-March 1
Cecilia Menjívar is Professor and Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Her work has made substantial contributions to Latin American Studies, particularly within the fields of immigration, family, gender, and violence. She has authored and co-authored a number of books, including Immigrant Families (2016), Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala (2011), and Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America, and was recently honored with the 2017 Feminist Criminology Best Article Award.

Nikki Jones, March 25-27
Nikki Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the experiences of African American men, women, and youth with the criminal justice system, policing, and violence. She is author of The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption (2018) and Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence (2010), and winner of the William T. Grant Award for Early Career Scholars, as well as the New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Women and Crime and Division on People of Color and Crime.

In addition to presenting research findings, each scholar is hosting a workshop session with graduate students on the use of feminist and ethnographic methods to study crime, law, and deviance. These workshops cover processes such as conceptualizing research questions; gathering and organizing data; conducting data analysis; using critical race and/or feminist frameworks to guide the research process; and disseminating findings to a broader public in service of promoting social change.

The series is part of an ongoing student-led initiative in the Ethnography Lab called “Ethnographic Approaches,” a series established with the support of the university’s Academic Enrichment Fund. This series helps sustain the Lab’s momentum by regularly bringing ethnographers from other institutions to campus, including, recently, Kimberly K. Hoang (Chicago), Gianpaolo Baiocchi (NYU), and Silvia Pasquetti (Newcastle).

The “Critical Criminology” speaker series is organized by UT Austin sociology PhD candidates Shannon Malone Gonzalez and Katie Kaufman Rogers. It is hosted by the Urban Ethnography Lab and generously supported by LLILAS, the Academic Enrichment Fund, and the Sociology Department’s Fem(me) Sem and Crime, Law, and Deviance Workgroups.

Family Sociology, Gender and Sexuality, Political Sociology, University of Texas at Austin Sociology, Work, Occupations and Organizations

New book by department alum Caitlyn Collins

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By Jamie O’Quinn

Caitlyn Collins, a UT Austin sociology PhD  and now Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, is making waves with her brand-new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving. This cross-cultural analysis is based on her dissertation research and explores the interconnectedness of motherhood, work, and the state across four countries: Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United States.

Image result for making motherhood work
Princeton University Press

Caitlyn’s recent New York Times op-ed, “The Real Mommy War is Against the State”, details more about the book:

“In the course of my interviews, I discovered that American working mothers generally blame themselves for how hard their lives are. They take personal responsibility for problems that European mothers recognize as having external causes. The lesson here isn’t for overwhelmed American parents to look longingly across the Atlantic; it’s to emulate the Swedes, Germans and Italians by harboring the reasonable expectation that the state will help ….

‘Balance’ is a term that came up relentlessly in my conversations with women in the United States. But framing work-family conflict as a problem of imbalance is merely an individualized way to justify a nation of mothers engulfed in stress. It fails to recognize how institutions contribute to this anxiety.

The stress that American parents feel is an urgent political issue, so the solution must be political as well. We have a social responsibility to solve work-family conflict. Let’s start with paid paternal leave and high-quality, affordable child care as national priorities.”

Caitlyn’s call for us to use the sociological imagination and shift our focus from the individual to the institutional when it comes to parenting, gender, and labor is crucial in this current political moment. The stakes for paid parental leave are higher for communities of color since they already face systematic marginalization in the workforce, and state-funded social programs and services seem to occupy a more precarious space than ever in the weeks following the reopening of the U.S. government.

Caitlyn will be visiting the department on April 25th to discuss the book and will hold a workshop for graduate students in the Urban Ethnography Lab from 10-11:30am on how to conduct international ethnographic research. Please email me at joquinn@utexas.edu if you would like to RSVP for the workshop!

Jamie O’Quinn is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and the manager of the Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research investigates state and institutional efforts to regulate young people’s sexualities. You can follow her on Twitter at @JamieOQuinn1.