The defunding of public higher education has dramatically impacted public universities in the United States, and schools with racially marginalized student bodies are most likely to feel the crunch. Yet, scholars have directed little attention to the on-the-ground racial consequences of limited public postsecondary funding for students. In this article we ask: How is the defunding of public higher education reflected in the organizational practices of a university serving historically underrepresented students? And how do resource constraints affect racially (and often economically) marginalized students’ access to core university services? We draw on a year-long case study of a University of California campus serving a majority Latinx and low-income student body, including ethnographic observations and interviews with administrators, student-facing staff, student activists and organizers, and Black and Latinx students. Our findings identify defunding as a contemporary mechanism through which racial disparities in postsecondary educational experiences are maintained.
Recent months have brought powerful demands for reform, divestment, and abolition of municipal police departments, but campus police are typically overlooked. We argue that contemporary university policing is shaped by three types of “creep:” the tendency for policing to move into previously unpoliced contexts, take on more expansive roles, and adopt an increasingly aggressive stance—or, carceral creep, mission creep, and conflict creep. We draw on qualitative data from case studies of two schools in the University of California system to ask: How do campus police activities produce risk, both physical and psychological, for racially marginalized individuals? We detail the mechanisms producing risk for racially marginalized individuals in four contemporary campus police activities: routine policing, protecting the conservative provocateur, managing the large student protest, and responding to the active attacker. We show that even when university police and leadership purport best intentions, these activities can create harm for racially marginalized populations on campus.
There is an extensive body of literature detailing the forces behind and experiences of alienation in capitalist societies. However, the interest in alienation became parochial and balkanized by the 1970s, just as capitalism entered a period of hyper-financialization. To reconstruct a unifying concept of alienation that can address this era of financial capitalism, we propose a temporal theory of alienation as futurelessness. We argue that alienation is best conceived as a deficient relationship to the future in which people’s senses of possibility ossify or dissipate. This future-denial may result from inclusion in and exclusion from the institutions of financial capitalism. Moreover, these processes of inclusion and exclusion can be voluntary and involuntary. We then provide examples of each of these four expressions of alienation: commercial exhaustion, imaginative marginalization, therapeutic nowism, and pragmatic denialism. We conclude by proposing that a sociology of possibility may help us understand the systemic sources and character of alienation, as well as its negation.
Emerging adulthood is a period of high ambition and a high likelihood of failure. The process of managing failure in the transition to adulthood requires narrative work. Normative expectations for ambition make failure a cultural problem for emerging adults to solve. For poor and workingclass emerging adults, popular narratives of failure often pathologize them as youth-gone-bad or youth-gone-sad and undermine their ability to produce narratives of ambition. Nevertheless, they will respond to the pressure to tell an ambitious story. Drawing on four waves of life history interviews over a three-and-a-half year period with 23 poor and working-class emerging adult women, I show how they tell life stories using available institutional resources to narratively manage failure by responding to popular explanations for their failure and attempting to maintain claims to ambition. I distinguish between career, practice, and care institutions, which shape the possibilities for overcoming failure through narrative agency. This narrative institutionalism contributes to a better understanding of emerging adulthood and the cultural demands that poor and working-class youth must contend with over time. 2One period of life that is increasingly characterized by both ambition and failure is emerging adulthood (Waters et al. 2011). Scholars have identified several widely available explanations for failure among today's middle class 18-to 34-year-olds. They include lengthy periods of selfexploration (Smith 2009), economically-motivated returns to their parents' home (Newman 2012), and extended exposure to a higher education system that leaves graduates temporarily adrift and unprepared for independence (Arum and Roksa 2014; Clydesdale 2015). These "standard stories" (Tilly 1999) provide middle-class emerging adults with a normative framework to make sense of failure without minimizing their ambitious status; it is "helicopter parents" who have failed to let their children grow up, or the economic downturn that has cost the labor sector jobs, or a higher education system that has run amok-not the young adults boomeranging and drifting-who are to blame (Newman 2012). By contrast, poor and workingclass men and women who struggle to successfully enter adulthood encounter pathologizing narratives to explain their failure (Newman 1999b).As scholars have begun to examine more closely how today's 18-to 34-year-olds experience emerging adulthood, they have shown that coming-of-age experiences, and how young people interpret them often vary according to race, class, and gender. Whereas middle class millennials have access to standard stories of delayed ambition, poor and working-class young adults often adopt, respond to, and manage narratives of deviance, disability, and disorder when they account for their own and their peers' failure to achieve normative adulthood. These include stories of personal irresponsibility, criminal behavior, mental illness, and emotional trauma
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