Departmental Papers (Sociology)

The Sociology Department faculty is highly diversified and conducts research on central sociological issues of theoretical and empirical relevance. It maintains strong international connections, and each year welcomes students and visitors from a number of foreign countries. Currently, the department ranks among the top ten in the United States based on faculty research and productivity.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 58
  • Publication
    Daddies and Fathers: Men Who Do for Their Children and Men Who Don't
    (1992) Furstenberg, Frank F
    This investigation builds on a longstanding interest in the patterns of family formation of young parents, particularly on a 20-year longitudinal study of teenage mothers and their children in Baltimore and a national survey of families, which followed children from early childhood to young adulthood.1 In both studies, how fathers establish and maintain bonds with their children was a central concern. This background of quantitative research grounds the insights and observations provided here from a select and not necessarily representative set of case studies of young black women and some of their male partners; these women and men all participated in a continuing follow-up study of families in the Baltimore research.2
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    American Bishops and Religious Freedom: Legacy and Limits
    (2016-11-01) Wilde, Melissa J
    This paper explores continuity and change in the American Catholic hierarchy’s promotion of and later reliance on religious freedom. With an analysis spanning more than 50 years, it first traces the pressures for reform that created the Declaration more than 50 years ago, demonstrating that American bishops were crucial actors in the Declaration’s existence and passage, and that this was the case because of the strong legitimacy pressures they were under as Roman Catholic leaders in a predominantly Protestant country. The paper then turns to a summary of how the Birth Control Mandate of the Affordable Care Act once again created pressures for legitimacy for the American Catholic hierarchy, pressures which were again articulated in terms of critiques of hypocrisy. It demonstrates that although the specific critique changed, accusations of hypocrisy remain central in discussions of the Catholic Church’s stance on the Birth Control Mandate in the Affordable Care Act.
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    What Happened When the Census was Redone: An Analysis of the Recount of 1870 in Philadelphia
    (1979) Furstenberg, Frank F; Strong, Douglas; Crawford, Albert G
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    Time to Pull the Plug on Urban Fossil Consumption: Review of Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
    (2016-05-17) Cohen, Daniel Aldana
    Andreas Malm's wonderful book, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, is about power. Since I'm a scholar who researches urban climate politics, I'm especially excited that Malm's analysis of power is so centered on urban politics. I'll explain what I mean by that, then suggest some interesting lessons from Malm's account that his arguments around contemporary climate politics have underplayed.
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  • Publication
    Cause for Alarm? Understanding Recent Trends in Teenage Childbearing
    (2008-01-01) Furstenberg, Frank F
    Teen pregnancy is back in the news. After 15 years of decline, the trend in teen birth rates ticked upward in 2006. Coupled with the ongoing media spotlight on the popular film Juno and the pregnancy of Britney Spears’ younger sister, we’re once again wringing our collective hands over kids having kids. But are these concerns really warranted? To what extent does teen pregnancy lead to mothers’ and children’s long-term poverty? Have policies adopted to deter early childbearing been effective in discouraging teens from having children before they are ready to shoulder the responsibilities of parenthood? To answer these questions, it’s necessary to put the issue in proper historical context, and to cast a sober eye on existing policies that were employed to keep rates of teenage childbearing low.
  • Publication
    The Urban Green Wars: Struggling for Working-Class Control of Cities is Crucial to Bringing Down Carbon Emissions
    (2015-12-01) Cohen, Daniel Aldana
    About half the planet's carbon dioxide emissions originate in urban areas: the cities and suburbs where a growing majority of humanity lives. To survive this century, we'll have to live together in new ways. Few issues are as fundamental to climate politics as this one. And few are as visceral: the urban is rapidly becoming one of the chief terrains of twenty-first century struggle.
  • Publication
    Will Marriage Disappear?
    (2015-09-01) Furstenberg, Frank F
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    The Family in the City
    (1999-12-31) Furstenberg, Frank F
    Almost by definition the concentration of poverty is associated with the concentration of family problems and less well functioning communities. Researchers have had no problem documenting that crime, drug abuse, mental health problems, and school failure are all disproportionately located in the poorer communities in the United States, especially in very poor neighborhoods. However, for the author, that correlation of low income communities and problem behavior or low achievement among children does not necessarily demonstrate that families and children behave differently because they grow up in low income communities.
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    The Rationed City: The Politics of Water, Housing and Land Use in Drought-Parched São Paulo
    (2016-01-01) Cohen, Daniel Aldana
    Specters of rationing haunt metro São Paulo. Water supplies have plunged to historic, dangerous lows. The idea of rationing has become a flash-point. The state’s center-right governor has insisted that rationing be avoided at all costs and the state’s profit-driven water utility has followed suit, even as dwindling water supplies are being opaquely and unequally distributed. To make sense of the situation, I propose, through an exploration of the crisis’s origins and recent developments that builds on over one year of ethnographic fieldwork, a new approach to ecological scarcity. It revitalizes, in a socioecological and crisis-sensitive form, Manuel Castells’s concept of collective consumption politics, with a focus on housing and land use. The question is how acute crises and longstanding socioecological struggles interact, from above and below. In São Paulo, this dilemma takes the form of housing movements’ and environmentalists’ longstanding estrangement, but prompted by crisis, some leaders are experimenting with cooperation. In an echo of the June 2013 bus fare protests, this fledgling coalition proposes a democratic version of rationing that goes beyond the distribution of water through pipes and that threatens broader power arrangements.