Reproduction Of Inequality Research Articles

Review of: How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America

How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food Inequality in America joins the ranks of a flourishing sociological scholarship that examines how food is implicated in the (re)production of inequality. Drawing on data from one hundred and sixty interviews with parents and teens and ethnographic participant observations with four racially and economically diverse families living on the US West Coast, Fielding-Singh offers readers her “earnest attempt to expose and explore a largely hidden truth: that parents across society undertake sacrificial, complicated, and frustrating work to feed kids.” The book is a compelling read, in part because Fielding-Singh—a biracial, second-generation South Asian American woman having grown up eating well, but also eating “junk”—chooses to write herself into the story. In the preface she notes, “For a scientist there can be safety in hiding behind a third-person voice and vulnerability in exposing one’s own subjectivity through a first-person narrative.” The author chooses the latter, chronicling the birth of her first child, the way she ate growing up, and her family’s experiences fostering children. Fielding-Singh acknowledges the advantages and limits of her point of view, and in doing so encourages the reader to see her rendering of her reserach participants' lives as thoughtful, and ultimately fair and balanced.

Higher Education and the Marriage Market: Educational Attainment, Educational Homogamy, and Inequality

The purpose of this article is to examine if educational homogamy patterns are associated intergenerationally, the extent to which today’s couples are homogamous, and how this translates into levels of family income and financial and overall well-being. To examine these relationships, 28 years of longitudinal data from the British Columbia Paths on Life’s Way project are employed. First, changes in marital status, educational completion, and homogamy are examined with the goal of defining these constructs more precisely. Through descriptive statistics, the relationship between educational attainment and related homogamy levels of Paths respondents and their parents is established. Then, the technique of correspondence analysis is used to determine the relationship between assortative mating and the nature and extent of inequality experienced by Paths respondents. Findings reveal that educational homogamy and its intergenerational associations exist and the extent to which it exacerbates inequality in terms of family income levels, contributions to registered investment plans, and physical, mental, and financial well-being in the sample. The findings of this article highlight the value of a post-secondary education in relation to marriage strategies, and the reproduction of inequalities.

From inequalities to territorial inequalities. An approach to the agency of the territory

In recent decades, the study of inequalities has become a central theme in the research agendas of the social sciences. As a result of this interest, there is currently an abundant production in which a diversity of forms of interpretation, measurement and conceptualization coexist, which, in turn, present different and, in some cases, opposing theoretical approaches. In parallel with these debates, there has recently been a progressive concern for understanding the socio-spatial or territorial dimension of social inequalities. However, until now, most disciplines, with the exception of geography, have given little importance to the territory or geographic space where these inequalities are developed and reproduced. Based on a theoretical-documentary research, the intention of this paper is to present a general approach to the relationship between inequalities and territory, starting with two fundamental questions: what are the implications for the analysis of inequalities of recognizing the agency of the territory, ¿and what role does the territory play in the production and reproduction of inequalities? In conclusion, the need to recover the idea of "territorial agency" is emphasized, since the territory should not be seen as a mere support or passive scenario where inequalities develop. This notion makes it possible to understand the inequalities/territory dialectic and to observe it as an active mediator in the configuration of these inequalities. 

Advanced Strategic Platform for Inclusive Research Environments (ASPIRE): a tool for change

In recent years, organisations have been striving to adopt a proactive approach towards reducing discrimination and enhancing inclusion. Research performing organisations, in particular, have made substantial investments and adopted a number of policies, programmes and interventions to combat gender inequality. Despite the progress achieved, gender equality in research and higher education institutions deems to be particularly difficult to attain, with the same challenges remaining prevalent for decades. Among the contributors to the perpetuation of gender inequality in academia, is the inability of gender equality initiatives to challenge gendered norms. Partly because the focus of such initiatives remains on normative constructions of gender, and their implementation is based on the assumption of culture change through instrumental drivers. Consequently, as long as success and impact of equality initiatives remains solely associated with the introduction of new policies, rather than the transformation of entrenched behavioural and culturally-prescribed norms, significant, continuous and integrated change is unlikely to occur. To address these issues, the Advanced Strategic Platform for Inclusive Research Environments (ASPIRE) offers an innovative and evidence-based framework aimed at accelerating meaningful change in attitude and behaviour towards diversity and facilitating inclusive research environments. ASPIRE encourages the focus of enquiry to expand from the (re)production of inequalities and adoption of solutions that centre on improving staff statistics and performance metrics, to long-term interactive processes of change that can generate structural and embedded impact on organisational culture. ASPIRE provides a dynamic web-based platform for implementation, adoption and sustained Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) practice. It goes beyond the current EDI approaches by taking a holistic and intersectional perspective, that does not only address issues of gender, but accounts for other personal characteristics that contribute to unique experiences of discrimination. It appropriately guides and measures the implementation of EDI initiatives across institutions, linking such measurement with indicators of change in attitudes and culture, and providing recommendations for future and further action.

The racial state and the violent (re)production of educational inequality

AbstractThis article defines and situates the concept of the racial state within the sociological literature on educational inequality. Currently, much of the sociology of education literature fails to engage with theories of the state or does so in undertheorized ways. Drawing on theories of the racial state and forms of state violence, this article contributes to literature in political sociology, race and racism, and education. It does so by arguing that the U.S. is a racial state that violently produces and reproduces educational inequality through structural, symbolic, and institutional violence. In charting a research program for a racial state analysis of educational inequality, it provides examples of each kind of state violence and provides suggestions for future research, which may be termed a political sociology of education. The article concludes by noting the value of the state violence framework presented for sociological studies of state authority and comparative work that looks across geographical and historical contexts.

Safe drinking water for small low-income communities: the long road from violation to remediation

Small, low-income communities in the United States disproportionately lack access to safe drinking water (i.e. water that meets regulated quality standards). At a community level, the literature has broadly claimed that a major barrier to safe drinking water access is low technical, managerial, and financial (TMF) capacity. At a broader structural level, the environmental justice literature has shown that historical neglect of low-income communities of color has resulted in numerous water systems without the financial and political resources to meet water quality standards. This study investigates the contemporary processes by which distributive injustices persist in California’s Central Valley. The study uses key informant interviews with a range of stakeholders, including employees at the state, county and community, non-profit organizations, and engineers, to understand why sustainable water quality solutions for small low-income communities remain such a challenge. The interviews are structured around a decision chain, which builds out the specific steps needed to go from a maximum contaminant level violation to remediation. The resulting decision chain makes visible the multiple steps at multiple stages with multiple actors that are needed to arrive at a solution to substandard water quality. It shows the numerous nodes at which progress can be stalled, and thus functions as a behind-the-scenes look at the (re)production of persistent inequalities. The complexity of the process shows why having the TMF capacity needed to get to a safe water system is not a reasonable expectation for most small community water systems. Inequalities are continually being produced and cemented, often by the very steps aimed towards remediation, thus making persistent disparities in safe drinking water access a de facto state-sanctioned process that compounds a discriminatory historical legacy.

Environmental Inequality in the American Mind: The Problem of Color-Blind Environmental Racism

Abstract Despite research showing that public beliefs about the distribution of resources in society is a crucial factor in the reproduction of inequality, we do not know what Americans believe about environmental inequality or what factors structure those beliefs. Results of a novel national survey (n = 1000) show that Americans poorly understand environmental inequality, often view inequalities as fair, and are only marginally supportive of a range of key policy tools. Regression analyses reveal that the dominant factor explaining Americans’ views of environmental inequality is what I term color-blind environmental racism. Color-blind environmental racism refers to a specific manifestation of color-blind racial ideology, wherein belief in a post-racial society obfuscates and justifies environmental racism and reduces support for policy solutions. Given the pervasiveness of color-blind environmental racism in the American mind, it is likely a substantial cultural barrier facing the environmental justice movement, from local siting disputes to the passage of federal policy. Future research should build on this study to further explore the roles of public opinion and color-blind environmental racism as barriers to achieving environmental justice.

Inequality reproduction, higher education, and the double major choice in college

Inequality reproduction, higher education, and the double major choice in college

Should I Start at MATH 101? Content Repetition as an Academic Strategy in Elective Curriculums

How do undergraduates make their first course decisions, and are these decisions fateful? Drawing on serial interviews (N = 200) of 53 students at an admissions-selective university, we show that incoming students with disparate precollege experiences differ in their orientations toward and strategies for considering first college math courses. Content repeaters opt for courses that repeat material covered in prior coursework, whereas novices opt for courses covering material new to them. Content repeaters receive high grades and report confidence in their math ability, whereas novices in the same classes receive lower grades and report invidious comparisons with classmates. These strategies vary with students’ socioeconomic background and prior exposure to institutions of higher education, suggesting the role of content repetition in maintaining class disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pathways. Findings encourage researchers to resist equating content repetition with remediation, attend to the agentic and social-psychological dimensions of academic progress, and recognize that elective curriculums create conditions for the performative reproduction of academic and socioeconomic inequalities.

Gendered Diverging Destinies: Changing Family Structures and the Reproduction of Educational Inequalities Among Sons and Daughters in the United States.

The prevalence of nontraditional family structures has increased over time, particularly among socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Because children's socioeconomic attainments are positively associated with growing up in a two-parent household, changing family structures are considered to have strengthened the reproduction of social inequalities across generations. However, several studies have shown that childhood family structure relates differently to educational outcomes for sons than for daughters. Therefore, we ask whether there are gender differences in the extent to which changing family structures have contributed to the college attainment gap between children from lower and higher socioeconomic backgrounds. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts to estimate extended Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition models that take into account cross-cohort changes in the prevalence of family structures and heterogeneity in the effects of childhood family structure on college attainment. We find that the argument that changes in family structures contributed to diverging destinies in college attainment holds for daughters but not for sons. This result is due to the different changes over time in the effects of childhood family structure by gender and socioeconomic background.

Are bullying and reproduction of educational inequality the same thing? Towards a multifaceted understanding of school violence

Violence is considered a major concern in society, specifically regarding school. In this article, the concept of school violence is explored. Different categorisations and manifestations of violence are presented, and the dividing lines between them are discussed. The questions highlighted in the article include the following: How is school violence defined, and what are the taxonomies of school violence? How and in what ways is school violence theorised and comprehended? The ways in which violence are characterised and comprehended vary between decades, contexts, disciplines and scholars. In general, violence is usually defined and can manifest itself through physical, relational, verbal, cyber and sexual expressions, and through systemic, structural, symbolic and objective forms. The former manifestations relate to more explicit and direct types of violence, which are also more often related to and included in the concept of school violence, while the latter manifestations focus on less visible and subtle forms. Definitions of violence are numerous yet highly overlapping, making school violence a complex and far from unambiguous concept that is problematic to define. Yet, the concept would benefit from including structural and symbolic forms of violence to avoid treating school violence as an individual issue at the expense of societal power relations underpinning school violence.

“All I do is present what is given to us as the facts”: Progressive sex education and the reproduction of inequality in public school classrooms

In the context of controversial sex education curriculum, this research uncovers complexities of teaching sex education in Ontario, Canada. Based on ethnographic observations of four public school sex education classes and interviews with teachers, I show that these sex-ed teachers tend to engage several strategies or key dimensions of “progressiveness” in order to navigate the difficult work of teaching this curriculum. They use facts, teach choice, and promote diversity. I also show how systems of gender, sexual, class, racial, and ethnic inequalities are reproduced alongside their progressive efforts. This research highlights educators’ strategies for teaching this content as well as the taken-for-granted inequalities that persist in education, despite best intentions.

The measure of a fan: Social patterns of voracious sports following in Canada.

Sociological studies on the manifestations and reproduction of inequality through cultural consumption have focused on few domains of culture and have mostly neglected intensity in consumption. Using large-scale survey data about professional sports following in Canada, we investigate how socioeconomic position is associated with intensity of professional sports following ("voraciousness"). Our multinomial logistic regression analyses suggest that social class, gender, and geography are predictors of voraciousness in each of the major professional sports leagues. Our latent class analysis (LCA) reveals seven sports following profiles marked by differences in range and intensity of following. We find that the most voracious sport followers are also the most omnivorous but are not distinctively the most privileged group. Findings suggest a distinct sport following profile of the predominantly male and economically dominant group in the field of social classes and point toward groups of sport followers with different styles of aversion and passing knowledge, perhaps in a type of deployment of Bourdieu's (1984) disinterested aesthetic. Overall, however, gender and region appear to be stronger predictors of voraciousness in sports following than social class in the Canadian context.

When Environmental Inequality Racialized: Historical Evidence from Providence, Rhode Island

The authors use multiple logistic regression techniques to investigate whether individuals’ occupation, nativity, race, and ethnicity predict residential proximity to large-scale energy infrastructure in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1880 and 1930. Results indicate that in 1880, environmental risks associated with urban energy infrastructure fell most heavily on working-class immigrants; by 1930, those risks disproportionately affected the city’s small population of African American and Latinx residents. Across this 50-year span, environmental inequality racialized such that Providence’s gas lines effectively came to describe the city’s sharpening color line. The article concludes with a discussion of how a historical perspective can help clarify the dynamic relationship between environmental risk and urbanization in the (re)production of racial, ethnic, and economic inequality.

Educational capital/ level and its association with precarious work and social vulnerability among youth, in EU and Greece

Employability is undoubtedly critical for life chances, while is affected by the Economic Cries. During the last decade as well as in the begging of the new one, both the field of labour market and the working conditions have greatly affected by the impact of the back-to-back Crises, including the 2008 Economic Crisis and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The abovementioned jointly with the mega-trend towards the digital economy have resulted in major modifications in the labour market, causing (among others), the gradual expansion of precarious work.The present paper deals with the association among the educational capital, the precarious work and the social vulnerability, among Youth. Based on both secondary quantitative-data analysis and primary qualitative research, the paper briefly analyses the relevant state-of-play in the EU, while it focuses on the Greek case. Issues related to the correlation between educational capital/ level and precarious work, the reproduction of socio-economic inequalities via education, the role of skills mismatch in the employment status and prospects, the parameters and characteristics of precarious employment and its impact to young people’ life course and life chances (including social vulnerability and in-work poverty risk), are raised, among others.

New insights on the persistence and reproduction of educational inequality and injustice: Towards a synthesis of Nussbaum's capabilities approach and Bourdieu's theories

Education is one of the most powerful means by which to advance equality, equity, and justice, yet it is also one of the most powerful mechanisms by which inequality, inequity and injustice are reproduced. Although academics have developed various ways for understanding these phenomena, the dichotomy between agency and structuralism persists, and is often regulated by people's capabilities ‘to do and to be’, and the social and psychological constraints on agency. These shortcomings have stimulated us to reconsider their interactions. The aim is to explore how we may more insightfully understand the mechanisms that reproduce injustice and inequality in education by bringing together sociology and normative philosophy using Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach and the theories of Pierre Bourdieu.

Ensino em tempo integral e segmentação da oferta: análise dos programas ETI e PEI na rede pública estadual de São Paulo

ABSTRACT The article analyzes the implementation of two Full-Time Teaching Programs in the state public education system of São Paulo, seeking to understand their effects on the dynamics of the system with a focus on expanding the segmentation of educational offer and educational inequalities. For that, we resorted to the analysis of documents that guide the programs, interviews with former secretaries and members of the State Department of Education, as well as producing, from the microdata of the School Census (2019), graphs, tables and maps to understand the organization of each of the programs. The data show that, although they originally had different proposals, the two programs are currently similar in terms of supply and service conditions, better than those found in other schools in the chain. Thus, it is possible to verify the segmentation of the offer on the network, induced by the Programs, which can contribute to the reproduction of educational inequalities.

Beyond tokenism and objectivity: theoretical reflections on a transformative equity, diversity, and inclusion agenda for higher education in Canada.

Universities, the sites for objective knowledge, apolitical and legitimized to contribute to human and intellectual capacity, find themselves in a tenuous position on issues of merit, equality, and fairness. On one hand, social forces have demonstrated how universities have been institutions for the production and reproduction of systemic inequality. On the other hand, universities maintain that they are well positioned, as part of their institutional renewal practices, to address contemporary calls for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI). Since universities are now eager to embrace EDI principles, it is appropriate to demonstrate their historical failures and provide some recommendations towards institutional renewal. Drawing on critical pedagogy, the paper examines selected academic contributions and knowledge claims that have reproduced systemic inequality, specifically on the discourse on human classification. The broader question is whether universities are simply going through the motions and hope EDI is a fad or are serious about institutional renewal and transformative changes. The study offers some ideas on how universities can pursue transformative changes grounded on EDI principles.

Mandatory detention for criminal convictions: The reproduction of racial inequality throughU.S.immigration law

AbstractSince the late 1980s, immigrants convicted of certain criminal offenses have been subject to mandatory detention during their deportation proceedings. Due to court backlog and complicated cases, noncitizens mandatorily detained in this way can be held for years at a time, without any legal right to a bail hearing. While political rhetoric and policy aims of the past three decades have painted so‐called “criminal aliens” as a highly dangerous group from whom the American public needs protecting, the criminal convictions that invoke mandatory detention and likely deportation are actually quite diverse, in large part due to the expansion of the “aggravated felony” ground of deportation to include a wide variety of less serious crimes. Drawing from 40 interviews with lawyers and other legal actors in New York City's detained immigration court from 2017 to 2018, this article explores the effects of aggravated felony–based mandatory detention. I argue that in doubly punishing immigrants who have already served time for criminal convictions, the immigration system funnels criminalized noncitizens—particularly those from poor Black and Latinx communities—toward deportation, perpetuating inequality and upholding existing racial hierarchies.

A Tryst with Alternative Pedagogies: Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire

Apart from the dissemination of skills and knowledge, education is also meant to be a tool of social and political empowerment, freedom, inclusiveness and enrichment of each individual’s existence in society. However, proponents of alternative educational approaches have pointed to the ‘self-defeating’ nature of traditional schooling systems wherein students have limited influence over educational choices and are required to follow set rules and meet certain predetermined standards. Furthermore, they aver that educational systems aid the reproduction of inequality in society. This article engages with the unique and forceful pedagogical models proposed by Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire, which constitute two important strands in critical pedagogy. It coaxes us to take a fresh look at the restrictive nature of institutionalised education.