Award Winning Sociology Papers

Student Political Advocacy: Professors, Parents and Volunteer Service as Key Social Forces

Jenna M. Perkins — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:51:17 PDT

Many scholars claim that the current generation of college students tend toward disengagement from political activism. While the explanations focus on macro-level processes, they can be used to make predictions about variations in individual level political engagement. To test these explanations I surveyed by email a simple random sample of four hundred students enrolled at a small Midwestern College in the fall of 2009. My objective was to answer the question: what distinguishes students that become engaged in political advocacy from the counterpart who do not? Analyzing my results through logistic regression generated three significant empirical findings. Students who are currently engaged in volunteer service were found to have an increased likelihood of engaging in political advocacy. Both parents and professors were found to be important sources to generate engagement. Lastly, student’s belief of the relative value of public policy versus community service is mediate by students who are currently engaged in volunteer service. The results confirm, at this small campus, professors, parents and students involved in civic engagement value political advocacy. I propose this implies that political advocacy has evolved since the 1960s and has taken a new form evolving within the current historical context.

Style and Consumption Among East African Muslim Immigrant Women: The Intersection of Religion, Ethnicity, and Minority Status

Jennifer Barnes — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:19:22 PDT

What meanings do people attach to dress style and consumption, how do these meanings vary among cultures, and how do immigrants and other multicultural actors negotiate the different systems of meaning they encounter in different cultures? My research examines the dress choices and shopping behaviors of East African Muslim immigrant women to explore whether and how they understand dress and consumer choices in the context of ethnicity, Islam, and their relationships with non-Muslim Americans. I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nine East African Muslim women in their twenties living in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. I found that women use a personal Islamic framework to explain their style choices, though they also conceptualize dress as a collective attribute when positioning themselves relative to non-Muslims in the United States. These women frame their experiences in American stores as an experience of agency; they feel that knowledge of American fashion and consumerism demonstrates their belonging in or acculturation to non-Muslim American society. My findings suggest that the meanings these women assign to dress and consumption and the flexibility with which they can deploy these meanings depend on social relationships as well as personal religious views about style and consumption

Remedial Strategy or Subliminal Racism? A Comparative Study on the Origins of Affirmative Action Policies in South Africa and Malaysia

Chen-Yu Wu — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:34:14 PDT

In contrast to most countries with affirmative action policies, Malaysia and South Africa have both established policies whose intended beneficiaries make up the majority of their respective populations. Despite their many social and historical similarities, the rationales employed by both states to justify their affirmative action policies turned out to be extremely different: Malaysia's justifications were “retributive” in nature, whereas South Africa's justifications were “restitutive.” This comparative-and-historical paper seeks not only to determine the factors that caused these different outcomes, but also to provide an alternate perspective to existing scholarship on affirmative action policies, most of which focus on minority-beneficiary nations. I argue that the variations in outcomes can be traced back to their respective transitions to independence, which set in motion historical processes resulting in two fundamentally different societies in terms of how political and economic power were initially distributed and how it transformed to their present-day outcomes.

A Tale of Two Townships: Political Opportunity and Violent and Non-Violent Local Control in South Africa

Alex Park — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:34:13 PDT

A number of recent gains in social science have found that periods of violent civil disorder marked by chaos may actually exhibit an underlying order and a rationale on part of perpetrators in response to specific political conditions of the time. The conjecture is that violent control emerges as a grassroots effort to establish authority in areas experiencing a vacuum of central authority. Given those conditions, can these same theories of violence be applied to incidents of widespread non-violent control as well, where and when the political conditions are similar? Using a variety of accounts, from research conducted by human rights groups and media outlets and government data, this paper considers the actions of residents in two townships in South Africa during a twenty-day period of xenophobic violence in May 2008. While one township acted violently against its immigrant population, the other mobilized to protect its own immigrants. These actions are considered within a similar theoretical framework to demonstrate how both constituted an assertion of local control in the interests of residents during a time of political instability at the national level.