Claiming Citizenship focuses on Indian American civic and political activism in the U.S. public sphere around U.S.-based and India-based issues. Indian Americans are a rising political force whose patterns of activism do not follow the unified model of mobilization of other powerful American ethnic groups. They have multiple types of advocacy organizations: those mobilizing around an Indian American identity; a South Asian American identity; organizations for Indian Americans of Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist backgrounds; organizations representing Indian American Democrats and Republicans; and even combinations of these such as the Republican Hindu Coalition that mobilized around Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016. There are also generational differences between second-generation members and the immigrant generation. Unified ethnic mobilization is rare and does not take place through a single professional advocacy organization, or even through well-coordinated campaigns.
The book examines the dialectical process through which immigrants conform to the structures and cultures of the society they have immigrated to, but also work to transform it to accommodate their unique needs. It shows the relative roles played by domestic and international influences on the political mobilization of immigrant groups in the United States as well as the importance of social media in shaping these mobilizations. Claiming Citizenship presents an excellent template to understand how religion, national identity, race, and pan-ethnicity interact in ethnic politics, in addition to examining the role that generational status plays in determining some of these patterns.
There has been an outpouring of research on populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and extreme right movements in Europe. Much less studied, however, is the growing political conservatism in the American academy and how it relates to populist sentiment. The Academic Trumpists addresses a gap in the research literature by looking at the impact of Trumpism on conservative faculty. It compares 109 professors who publicly support Trump to 89 conservative professors who oppose Trump. All 198 function as public intellectuals who advocated publicly their views.
Drawing on recent research in the sociology of intellectuals and Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical field perspective, this book offers a fielding political identities and practices framework to show how these two groups of professors (Trumpists and anti-Trumpists) differ in where they teach, their intellectual orientations, their scholarly productivity, their political rationales, where they network with think tanks, scholarly professional associations, and government agencies, and their stances on key controversies surrounding the Trump presidency (Covid-19, the two impeachments, the November 2020 election lost, and the January 6 mob assault on the United States Capitol). The academic Trumpists embrace the right-wing populist wave mobilized by Trump and the conservative critics resist this move. This polarization of views between these two groups of conservative professors is enduring and rooted in two distinct social networks that connect their positions in the academic field to affiliations with conservative think tanks that reinforce their respective political identities and radical right-wing anti-establishment thinking in America more generally.
This book will appeal to readers interested in the politics of higher education, the sociology of intellectuals, political sociology, and research on conservative and right-wing populism politics in America today.
Learning how to organize and manage research is important for both the researcher and for advancing research. However, graduate students are often trained in theories, methods, and disciplines, but rarely in the organizational, administrative, and metacognitive skills required to manage research projects. Moreover, several disciplines are decrying a reproducibility crisis, with a concerted academic push toward open-access approaches. By clearly organizing research, graduate students and researchers can ensure that they are able to account for their methodological, theoretical, and other research decisions: to reviewers, to funding agencies, and to support the development of new ideas and exciting offshoots of projects.
Project Management for Researchers tackles the how, what, and why of project management. It offers step-by-step guidance on choosing tools and developing a personalized system that will help the reader manage and organize their research so that steps and decisions are documented for accountability and reproducibility. Readers will find worksheets they can adapt to their own needs, priorities, and research as well as practical tips on issues ranging from emails to scheduling. Suitable for work across methods, experience levels, and disciplines and adaptable for those working alone, with others, or as team managers, this book will guide readers between various research stages–from planning, to execution, to adjustment of research projects big and small.
Uba, Katrin and Cassandra Engeman. 2024. Defenders of the Status Quo? Energy Protests and Policy (In)Action in Sweden. Social Forces, soae166. DOI:10.1093/sf/soae166
indicators of democracy
The spread of democracy across the Global South has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country’s citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the policies they put forth? In Indicators of Democracy Diana Graizbord exposes the complex, often-hidden world of the institutions that are meant to ensure democratic accountability and transparency. Taking the case of Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), Graizbord provides a deep theory of what happens when democratic aspirations intersect with technocratic ambitions. Analyzing what it takes to establish and sustain monitoring and evaluation as a form of official state expertise, Graizbord is able to put forward the contours of technodemocracy—a democratic political project that hinges on the power of experts to shape politics in unexpected but profound ways.
