Managing More than Poverty When Living With Addiction: Parents’ Emotion and Identity Work

In this article, I qualitatively explore the emotion and identity work of parents living with addiction to drugs or alcohol and accessing social assistance, specifically Ontario Works, in Toronto, Canada. Through narrative and discourse analysis of in-depth interviews, I show how parents (re-) produce or (re-) negotiate their identities as mothers and fathers in relation to feeling rules constituted in three broader, cultural discourses about family relations, addiction, and poverty: welfare dependency; intensive mothering; and families as a safe haven. I argue that this emotion and identity work is necessitated by how these feeling rules collude or clash with parents master status of addict entrenched in their relationships with social assistance policy and caseworkers and perceived by others too. I conclude with a consideration of the social policy and justice implications of my findings, including the need to overturn the stigmatization of addiction and poverty.

Black and Indigenous Inequality in Mexico: Implications for Multiracialism and Intersectionality Research

In recent decades, an increasing number of Latin American countries have included ethnoracial questions on their censuses, giving rise to unprecedented data on monoracial and multiracial forms of classification. In Mexico, the government launched a count of its black population for the first time in the nation’s history in 2015, in addition to its long-standing practice of enumerating its indigenous population. Most recently in 2018, it conducted a survey, again asking about both black and indigenous identification. Within this short time span, the black population grew from 1.8 percent to 5.9 percent, becoming a sizable, statistically visible minority. A large majority of black individuals also identified as indigenous, revealing an important form of dual-minority multiracialism. In this article, we analyze these unprecedented data, detailing the size, composition, and growth of these populations. We use the Mexican case to illustrate the potential implications of measuring ethnoracial inequality using single- versus dual-category approaches. We find that black disadvantage is considerably more pronounced when explicitly allowing for multiracial classification. Methodologically, our findings contribute to nascent conversations about how to incorporate the new social and statistical realities of multiracialism in inequality analyses. Theoretically, we expand the multiracialism literature from its traditional focus on part-white mixtures, to a focus on overlapping minority classification. Finally, we build on theories of intersectionality, which generally focus on intersections of oppression across multiple “master statuses” (e.g., race, class, and gender), by also examining intersecting oppressions within the single master status of race.

Becoming White in a White Supremacist State: The Public and Psychological Wages of Whiteness for Undocumented 1.5-Generation Brazilians

This study draws on in-depth and longitudinal interviews with twenty-nine 1.5-generation Brazilian immigrants, all of whom can pass as white and experienced illegality in young adulthood. I argue that they benefit from what W.E.B. Du Bois calls “the public and psychological wages of whiteness”. That is, white and white-passing, undocumented 1.5-generation Brazilian men and women can largely navigate public space without being stopped, questioned, arrested, detained and/or deported. Additionally, they benefit psychologically—as they gain confidence due to perceived whiteness, even as their immigration status would render them vulnerable to exploitation in the labor market and deportation. These public and psychological wages of whiteness can facilitate social and material gains. I argue that there are three mechanisms by which they experience the wages of whiteness. First, whiteness brings assumed innocence. Second, white racial solidarity with other whites facilitates opportunities and protection. Third, some 1.5-generation Brazilians actively construct whiteness to accrue the public and psychological wages. These findings challenge the master status perspective of illegality and underscore the importance of an intersectional framework for understanding immigrants’ varied experiences with illegality, bringing to light the quotidian, gendered practices and identities that sustain the structures of white supremacy.

The Legal Status Divide among the Children of Immigrants

Over the past thirty-five years, federal immigration policy has brightened the boundaries of the category of undocumented status. For undocumented young people who move into adulthood, the predominance of immigration status to their everyday experiences and social position has been amplified. This process of trying to continue schooling, find work, and participate in public life has become synonymous with a process of learning to be “illegal.” This essay argues that despite known variations in undocumented youths by race, place, and educational history, undocumented status has become what Everett Hughes called a “master status.” The uniform set of immigration status-based exclusions overwhelms the impact of other statuses to create a socially significant divide. The rise, fall, and survival of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a policy offering qualified youths a temporary semilegal status, have underlined how closely access and rights hew to the contours of contemporary immigration policy.

Reliability of MTurk Data From Masters and Workers

Previous research has supported the use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for online data collection in individual differences research. Although MTurk Masters have reached an elite status because of strong approval ratings on previous tasks (and therefore gain higher payment for their work) no research has empirically examined whether researchers actually obtain higher quality data when they require that their MTurk Workers have Master status. In two different online survey studies (one using a personality test and one using a cognitive abilities test), the psychometric reliability of MTurk data was compared between a sample that required a Master qualification type and a sample that placed no status-level qualification requirement. In both studies, the Master samples failed to outperform the standard samples.

Stir it up: how master-apprentice relationships affect the similarity of product offerings in high-end restaurants

This work explores the determinants of decisions by former apprentices to present product offerings similar to those of their masters. Using a quantitative study of 194 international chefs, this article argues that there is a negative association between the degree to which a master rebels against the rules and conventions of a field and master-apprentice similarity. It also shows that master status and a creative professional’s career stage during an apprenticeship moderate the association between master rebellion and master-apprentice similarity. The work concludes by outlining some implications for the career development and creativity of creative professionals and the emergence of new styles.