For many, reflexivity is a core tenet in qualitative research. Often, scholars focus on how one or two of their socio-demographic traits compare to their participants and how it may influence field dynamics. Research that incorporates an intersectionality perspective, which brings attention to how people’s multiple identities are entwined, also has a long history. Yet, researchers tend to pay less attention to how we strategically draw on our multiple social positions in the course of field work. Drawing on data I have collected over the past several years and extending recent sociological work that goes beyond a reflexive accounting of one or two of researchers’ demographic characteristics, I argue that each researcher has their own ethnographic toolkit from which they strategically draw. It consists of researchers’ visible (e.g. race/ethnicity) and invisible tools (e.g. social capital) and ties qualitative methodologies to research on how culture is strategically and inconsistently used.
Ethnographic research consists of multiple methodological approaches, including short- and/or long-term participant observation, interviews, photographs, videos, and group field work, to name a few. Yet, it is commonly practiced as a solitary endeavor and primary data is not often subject to scholarly scrutiny. In this paper, I suggest a model in which to understand the different ways in which ethnographies can be transparent – naming places, naming people, and sharing data – and the varied decisions ethnographers have made with regard to them: whether to name a region, city or specific neighborhood, name primary participants or public officials, and to share interview guides, transcripts, or different kinds of field notes. In doing so, this paper highlights how decisions regarding transparency are part of an ethnographer’s methodological toolkit, and should be made on a case-by-case basis depending on the who, what, where, when and why of our research.
Transparency is once again a central issue of debate across types of qualitative research. Work on how to conduct qualitative data analysis, on the other hand, walks us through the step-by-step process on how to code and understand the data we’ve collected. Although there are a few exceptions, less focus is on transparency regarding decision-making processes in the course of research. In this article, we argue that scholars should create a living codebook, which is a set of tools that documents the data analysis process. It has four parts: (1) a processual database that keeps track of initial codes and a final database for completed codes, (2) a “definitions and key terms” list for conversations about codes, (3) memo-writing, and (4) a difference list explaining the rationale behind unmatched codes. It allows researchers to interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions about what data are focused on, why, and how to analyze it. To that end, the living codebook moves beyond discussions around intercoder reliability to how analytic codes are created, refined, and debated.
The discipline is at a crossroads. Will sociology answer ASA past president Aldon Morris' call for an emancipatory sociology? Or will sociology, as Morris puts it, “continue pretending to be an aloof, objective, detached science”? Recently, Hirschman and Garbes issued a call for an economic sociology of race, wherein they contend that race and racism are not central to economic sociology and that economic sociologists don't engage with contemporary race scholarship. In this paper, I assess and build upon their call. I argue that while the article importantly calls for understanding race and racism in economic sociology, in practice, it—used here as an example of a broader pattern within economic sociology—re‐centers whiteness and men, reifies elitism, and erases marginalized scholars and their contributions. I set forth an alternative perspective. To rise to the Du Boisian challenge, scholars need to critique racialized modernity as Itzigsohn and Brown importantly argue. We must also root our sociological consciousness, citation practices, and conversations in existing, yet marginalized, research. Failure to do so means future research risks reproducing inequities in the discipline and continuing to marginalize the very people, theories, and research that an emancipatory sociology is meant to address.
By documenting the erasure of W.E.B. Du Bois’s scientific contributions to sociology, Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied was a catalyst for scholars to rethink how we teach and understand social theory and a call to recognize the racialized origins of our discipline. How can we incorporate these insights into our teaching beyond a token addition of Du Bois to classical theory courses? Drawing on comments from anonymous student evaluations and completed assignments including essay exams, final papers, and end-of-year reflections from one classical theory course, the authors argue that teaching classical theory requires teaching about race, ethnicity, and gender and outline three pedagogical principles. First, we assert that it starts with the syllabus. Second, we demonstrate how incorporating theorists’ biographies situates them in their sociohistorical contexts. Finally, active learning observational assignments reveal how research is a scholarly conversation and demonstrate the enduring importance, and limitations, of classical theories and theorists. Together, these pedagogical tools show how the classical theory canon is racialized. By providing conceptual and logistical tools scholar-teachers can use to incorporate race, ethnicity, and gender in classical theory courses, we highlight how issues of race and gender should not be relegated to substantive courses. Instead, they are central to understanding and teaching the foundations of sociology.
Utilizing data from the UNWTO, IMF, World Bank, and UNESCO, this article analyzes the global structure of travel and its deep asymmetries, revealing that travel is not global but is highly concentrated among a handful of countries. Furthermore, I find that the effects of globalization are neither universal nor consistent but depend upon the identities of countries involved and their relationships with one another. This article conceptualizes travel as a result of the relationship between country attributes within a given country-pair. More specifically, it investigates the relationship between travel and relative inequalities, institutional connections, and cultural wealth. I find that measures of inequality and cultural wealth differ depending on the relationship between country-pairs while institutional connections are significant across models.
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