Micro, Meso, and Macro Processes in Identity Change: The 2020 Cooley-Mead Award Address

2021 ◽  
pp. 019027252110465
Author(s):  
Jan E. Stets
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Identity Change ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Micro Level

I discuss how social psychologists can think about identity change as a nested phenomenon. Identity change occurs at the micro level, but it is embedded in meso and macro levels of social reality. I use changes in the religious identity in the United States as an example of how we can conceptualize identity change in this way. This approach enables us to broaden the scope of social psychological work to be more inclusive of the various social forces at all levels of social reality that impact the human processes we study.

scholarly journals God in the Barrio?: The Determinants of Religiosity and Civic Engagement among Latinos in the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Allen Gershon ◽  
Adrian D. Pantoja ◽  
J. Benjamin Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Church Attendance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Generational Status ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Church Participation

AbstractIt is often assumed that Latinos in the United States are deeply religious, and that this religious identity plays an important role in shaping their political beliefs and behaviors. A more controversial though unexplored proposition is that Latinos may not be as religious as is commonly believed and that forces beyond their religiosity play more prominent roles in shaping their political engagement. Relying on data from the 2006 Latino National Survey, we examine secularism — measured by church attendance — and civic engagement among Latinos. Our efforts are to analyze the social forces that shape levels of religiosity and find that generational status plays a significant role. Additionally, we further find that while church attendance declines among later generations, second and third generation Latinos have higher levels of civic engagement than their first generation peers, indicating that a decline in church participation does not depress political participation among later generations of Latinos.

Millennial Missionaries

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Dugan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Gender Essentialism ◽  
Craft Beer ◽  
Catholic University ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
Religious Landscape

This book is an ethnography of millennial-generation Catholic missionaries. The Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) began hiring young adults to evangelize students on college campuses in 1998. Since then, FOCUS missionaries have developed a style of Catholic evangelization that navigates between strict and savvy interpretations of Catholic teaching in contemporary US youth culture. The Catholicism that FOCUS missionaries embrace and promote grew up with them and amid their middle-class American norms—missionaries own iPhones, drink craft beer, and create March Madness brackets. Born in the 1990s, millennial missionaries in their skinny jeans and devotional tattoos, large-framed glasses and scapulars embody an attractive style of Catholicism. They love saints and have memorized the “Tantum Ergo,” are fluent in college-student slang, but reject hook-up culture in favor of gender essentialism dictated by papal teachings. Missionaries rely on their social capital to make Catholicism cool. Many of their peers have been characterized as defectors from religious institutions. Yet, underneath the rise of “nones” is a story of increased religious piety. This book studies religion in the United States from the perspective of proud Catholic millennials. As they navigate their Catholic and US identities, these missionaries propose Catholicism as uniquely able to overcome perceived threats of secularism, relativism, and modernity. How, why, and with what implications is this Catholicism enacted? These questions, which point to power struggles between US culture and religious identity, drive this book. Through their prayers and evangelization efforts, missionaries are reshaping Catholic identity and shifting the religious landscape of the United States.

Force, Fraud, and Coercion—What Do They Mean? A Study of Victimization Experiences in a New Destination Latino Sex Trafficking Network

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 456-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Copley Sabon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Eastern United States ◽  
Latina Immigrants ◽  
Strict Interpretation ◽  
New Destination

In response to increasing Latino new destination migration in the United States, Latino sex trafficking networks have emerged in many of these areas. This article examines victimization experiences of Latina immigrants trafficked by a regional network operating in the Eastern United States drawn from law enforcement records and interviews with legal actors involved in the criminal case. The stories shared with law enforcement by the Latina victims gives insight into their lives, experiences in prostitution, and the operation of a trafficking/prostitution network (all lacking in the literature). Through the analytical frame of social constructionism, this research highlights how strict interpretation of force, fraud, coercion, and agency used to define “severe forms of trafficking” in the TVPA limits its ability to recognize many victimization experiences in trafficking situations at the hands of traffickers. The forms of coercion used in the criminal enterprise under study highlights the numerous ways it can be wielded (even without a physical presence) and its malleability as a concept despite legal definitional rigidity. The lack of legal recognition of the plurality of lived experiences in which agency and choice can be mitigated by social forces, structural violence, intersectional vulnerabilities, and the actions of others contributes to the scholarly critique of issues prosecuting trafficking cases under the TVPA and its strict legal definitions.

Impacts of Liberation Pedagogy: The Case of Workers' Education

1983 ◽  
Vol 165 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hakken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Paulo Freire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Education Programs ◽  
Worker Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
Liberation Pedagogy ◽  
The Impact

Some perspectives with which to evaluate the impact of the pedagogy of liberation on worker education programs in England and the United States are suggested. The pedagogy of liberation is often associated with the work of Paulo Freire and occasionally with that of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. After some initial discussion of the nature of liberation pedagogy, the problems involved in assessing its effectiveness, are discussed in reference to specific worker education programs in England and the United States. The analysis of workers' education involves discussion of the pedagogy which informs particular programs and the social psychological dilemmas which often face the worker/students involved in workers' education. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the research on workers' education for liberation pedagogy.

scholarly journals Situational Breakdowns Beyond Protest Violence

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-168
Author(s):  
Anne Nassauer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Context Factors ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Micro Level

Chapter 9 explores whether the books’ findings hold in other contexts by examining other instances of surprising outcomes. First, the chapter discusses the outbreak of violence in uprisings after police shootings of African American citizens in the United States, such as Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015. The first section takes a detailed look at the role of background and context factors (such as symbolic and systemic racism) and situational patterns in uprisings turning violent. Then the chapter discusses successful and failed armed store robberies. Here the surprising outcome is not violence but armed criminals failing to get the money from an unarmed store clerk. Findings suggest similar patterns of situational breakdowns in these occurrences as in protests and uprisings. Overall, the chapter discusses the crucial importance of the micro-level of social phenomena: if routines of both collective and individual social events are disrupted, surprising outcomes occur.

What’s Stopping Them?

2018 ◽  
pp. 120-157
Author(s):  
Nicholas Carnes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Collar ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal Networks ◽  
Basic Logic ◽  
Recruitment Process ◽  
Root Cause ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
New Recruits ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter aims to shed light on the gates that keep workers out of office in the United States. Elections themselves appear to be the root cause. The analysis focuses on the two features of elections that seem to be behind the micro-level inequalities documented in Chapter 3, namely, the high and rising burdens associated with campaigning and the insular world of candidate recruitment. The practical anxieties that keep individual workers from running appear to stem from the very nature of elections in a representative democracy. The encouragement gaps that workers experience seem to arise from the basic logic of the candidate recruitment process, the fundamental challenges that lead many recruiters to simply look for new recruits within their own mostly white-collar personal networks.

Reverberations for American Indians, Native Hawai’ians, and Group Rights

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Minow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Usually left out of discussions of school desegregation, the historic treatments of American Indians and Native Hawai’ians in the development of schooling in the United States was a corollary of conquest and colonialism. As late as the 1950s, forced assimilation and eradication of indigenous cultures pervaded what was considered the “education” of students in these groups. The social, political, and legal civil rights initiatives surrounding Brown helped to inspire a rights consciousness among Indian and Native Hawai’ian reformers and activists, who embraced the ideal of equal opportunity while reclaiming cultural traditions. Between the 1960s and 2007, complex fights over ethnic classification, separation, integration, and self-determination emerged for both American Indians and Native Hawai’ians. Their struggles, crucial in themselves, also bring to the fore a challenging underlying problem: are distinct individuals or groups the proper unit of analysis and protection in the pursuit of equality? The centrality of the individual to law and culture in the United States tends to mute this question. Yet in this country as well as elsewhere, equal treatment or equal opportunity has two faces: promoting individual development and liberty, regardless of race, culture, religion, gender, or other group-based characteristic, and protection for groups that afford their members meaning and identity. Nowhere is the tension between these two alternatives more apparent than in schooling, which involves socialization of each new generation in the values and expectations of their elders. Will that socialization direct each individual to a common world focused on the academic and social mobility of distinct individuals or will it inculcate traditions and values associated with particular groups? Even in the United States, devoted to inclusive individualism, the Supreme Court rejected a statute requiring students to attend schools run by the government and created exemptions from compulsory school fines when they burdened a group’s practices and hopes for their children. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court respected the rights of parents to select private schooling in order to inculcate a religious identity or other “additional obligations.”

The End of Empires

2021 ◽  
pp. 523-540
Author(s):  
John A. Hall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Future Prospects

This chapter describes social forces that have led to the end of empires. Attention is given to pre-industrial empires as well as to those, whether land- or sea-based, of the modern world. The factors analyzed derive both from the empires themselves and from contemporary social science. Particular concentration is given to internal “corruption,” the loss of necessary elite unity, overextension, geopolitical rivalry with other great powers and—especially in modern circumstances—nationalism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the position, character, and future prospects of the United States.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-152
Author(s):  
Kathleen E. Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Ethic Of Care ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Social Inequities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relational Outcomes

This concluding chapter argues that the stories in this book are about people working to strengthen family relationships, but that in many cases they also represent shared discovery of commitment to an ethic of care for those outside of their intimate circles. It stresses how most respondents recognized their privilege and expressed a desire for their Camino to translate to daily interactions with distant others and contemplation of larger social problems. At the same time, distancing memories may undermine such effects. This chapter suggests that respondents’ stories, taken as a whole, push us to think more deeply about the social forces that stand in the way of positive relational outcomes from shared transformational travel. The conclusion moves beyond the Camino, identifying efforts to promote inclusivity in opportunities for travel for transformation in North America and highlighting differences in access to spiritual practices in the United States that could foster relational intimacy. It stresses efforts to build opportunities for travel for transformation with the potential to promote understanding of social inequities and injustices.

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