In case you missed it: Last week, I had two articles go up. For Defector, I argued in defense of prison abolition. For Bolts, I spoke to Florida voting rights advocates about our recent study on traffic stops and voter turnout. r/science seemed to like it.
I’m going to copy an idea from Andrés here and do a little rundown of some of the things I’ve read recently. I’m gonna keep it to stuff that I think is at least worth talking about, or stuff that might interest you. This post covers stuff I read in late 2022 through Jan 2023.
Visualizing Deviance
This book has become pretty central to my dissertation. I think it’s a great pairing with Stuart Hall and coauthors’ Policing the Crisis, which is the most famous account of how crime journalists create ideological consensus for criminalization. Ericson, Baranek, and Chan did an enormous ethnography of Canadian newsrooms (and this book is just the first of 3 books). The book covers a ton of ground, but probably their most interesting and important argument is that journalists see themselves as watchdogs who document deviance in an effort to reproduce their preferred social order. So while the role of deviance in reporting on individual crimes is obvious, other types of stories demonstrate how journalists police social and organizational life: abusive individual police officers, corrupt politicians, and bureaucratic whistleblowers all present opportunities for journalists to do their own kind of policing.
I had to get a copy from inter-library loan - you might struggle to find a digital version. I do think it’s worth the effort!
The Power Elite
C. Wright Mills was a pretty famous New Left intellectual who taught sociology at Columbia in the 50s, where I’m studying now. This book pretty much reads like a Bernie Sanders stump speech, and given that it was published during the McCarthyist effort to suppress Marxian intellectual thought, the extent to which Mills doesn’t distance himself from Marx is pretty interesting. With that said, if you’re deeply familiar with historical materialism, you might find the book to be kind of stale.
There are a couple things that make it worth reading, though. (1) It’s an argument against the now-abandoned liberal political theory of “pluralism,” which is interesting for a lot of the reasons that Policing the Crisis is interesting; it hews closely to Gramscian accounts of ideological hegemony. (2) Mills makes a historically specific case for considering how military elites made their way into the highest political offices. This is the kind of book where you should pick a few chapters to read and skip the rest.
All the News That’s Fit to Click and Metrics at Work
These are concise newsroom ethnographies conducted within the past decade or so. I’ve grouped them together because authors Christin and Petre co-published a journal article outlining some of their findings. Petre frames audience engagement metrics as a labor discipline technology, and she did fieldwork right as the New York Times was adopting Chartbeat. She found that reporters weren’t allowed access to it in the same way editors were because editors feared that hard numbers would undermine their authority over ‘what audiences wanted,’ which in journalism is a historically subjective professional determination. Christin found evidence that some French journalists were interpreting metrics as a sort of democratic indicator of audience interest, i.e., ‘do people even care about what we’re doing?’ I think that contradicts the lay understanding of metrics as a totally commercial thing. Super interesting work.
The Politics of Respectability and Black Americans’ Punitive Attitudes
Hakeem Jefferson has a new paper out at APSR this month on respectability politics. He argues: “group members view negatively stereotyped behavior as threatening to the image of the social group [...] Consequently, [...] adherents of respectability politics worry about fellow group members’ behavior and, therefore, support policies that punish or restrict negatively stereotyped behavior.”
Part of why I think this argument is important is that it’s tied to the arguments that tough-on-crime advocates are still using today, i.e., “Actually Black Americans want to fund the police, not defund the police.” To me, Jefferson’s article is a great pairing with this NYT op-ed from Hinton, Kohler-Hausmann, and Weaver back in 2016. They argued that the tough-on-crime consensus was the product of “selective hearing”: “Policy makers pointed to black support for greater punishment and surveillance, without recognizing accompanying demands to redirect power and economic resources to low-income minority communities.” So you could see this as following from the transmission of Black respectability politics into the (white) political mainstream.
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
I read this for a reading group I’ve joined focusing on the sociology of knowledge. I think the best part of this book is actually the introduction by sociologist Karen E. Fields (of Racecraft fame), who translated it into English from the original French. She frames the contribution pretty concisely: Instead of thinking about religion as a set of beliefs in supernatural activity that dupes irrational people, Durkheim analyzed it as a concrete set of social practices. She pretty much nails the interesting part of Durkheim’s argument, i.e., religious forces are an early form of collective consciousness as well as a way of understanding the world in the way that a scientist would. This throws a wrench in the gears of rationalists who want to claim science and religion are totally incompatible things.
This is a book where you could get away with reading just the Fields intro, and then Durkheim’s conclusion. From what I can tell a lot of his historical arguments about Australian aboriginal clans may be spotty, and they’ve got the classic European 20th century racism throughout.