Scholars have argued that institutions privilege “good” victims of gender-based violence – those deemed sympathetic, morally upstanding, and worthy of public support. We extend existing research by synthesizing theories of good victimhood and theoretically distinguishing victims’ credibility in relation to the crime from their worthiness in relation to the state. Both credibility and worthiness are tied up in expectations of normative femininity. We then show how these processes operate in the case of victim compensation law, the only direct public benefit for crime victims. Our historical analysis reveals how policymakers proposed four restrictions to limit compensation to “good” victims, corresponding with victims’ credibility on the one hand, and worthiness on the other. With respect to credibility, eligible victims needed to present visible, embodied harm and could not have engaged in conduct that may have “contributed” to their victimization. With respect to worthiness, eligible victims were required to sever romantic ties with perpetrators and cooperate with police. By delineating credibility and worthiness as distinct components of good victimhood, we clarify how ideas of good victimhood infused specific eligibility restrictions in victim compensation law, while also equipping scholars with theoretical tools to understand logics of exclusion beyond our case.
Land is not simply a geological formation that exists apart from its interpretations embedded in sociality. Land receives robust meanings by virtue of its place in history, recognizing contemporary resonances. While scholars treat the reading of place as culturally generated, the process through which this occurs needs expansion. In this, ecology, history, and sociology are intimately linked in how past space-based events are brought to present concern. Based on seven years of ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, I examine how American Civil War enthusiasts treat the battlefields that they visit, describe, and preserve. I point to four ways in which Civil War battlefields become sites for memory-making and interactional domains. First, places are texts to be read for their imparted significance. Second, they allow for imagined histories through exploring blood-soaked land on which soldiers fought and died. Third, through group visits, the meanings of place depend on the existence of community. Finally, to preserve land in the face of competition by other claimants, organizations must “save” the land as touristic venues with institutional support. This analysis embraces Robert Zussman’s (2004) call to study people in places.
In this paper, I critically engage with Becker’s seminal work on marijuana consumption, challenging the notion of “becoming” a user as a straightforward process of taste acquisition. Drawing on the personal narratives of 38 current and former marijuana users, I show that “becoming” a marijuana user constitutes a dynamic state of tension rather than a linear trajectory with a terminal endpoint. In light of these tensions, even experienced users—despite having undergone the social processes that render an ambiguous activity coherent—face the ongoing threat of “unbecoming.” I contend that such destabilizing processes extend beyond marijuana use, highlighting how people's taken-for-granted relationships with experiential objects—sustained through processes of reality maintenance—risk lapsing into unfamiliarity. This study thus contributes to our understanding of experiential breaks and ruptures, offering insights into the fragility of the continuity underlying the world of common sense.
Many mixed-race Asians in the United States (those who are a mixture of Asian and non-Asian ancestries) have successfully constructed multiracial identities based on their acknowledgement of the personal significance of all of their ancestral heritages. However, American society continues to have difficulty fully recognizing such multiraciality because of the continued prevalence of monoracialized discrimination. As a result, mixed-race Asians are pressured to personally associate with only one of their ancestries and may also have difficulty identifying with specific ethnic heritages because they face discriminatory exclusion by monoracial members of their heritage communities who question and challenge their cultural authenticity. Such external monoracialization can fragment their multiracial identifications by causing them to suppress or reject certain ancestries and leave them with an incomplete sense of self or by making their disparate ethnic heritages appear incompatible and irreconcilable. Based on extensive interviews with a diverse sample of mixed-race Asians in the United States, this paper examines how they resist the identity fragmentation caused by monoracialization and maintain the integrity of their multiracial identities by prioritizing internal definitions of self and asserting their multiraciality to others, engaging in various cultural heritage activities, and challenging those who doubt their ethnic authenticity. By laying claim to all of their ethnic ancestries as essential components of who they are, mixed-race Asians are able to construct multiracial selves that make them feel “whole” and “complete.”
Sociological research on women evangelicals has tended to focus on how they exercise agency within a gender traditional context. But what happens when it becomes untenable to stay, such as in cases of abuse? This article draws on interviews with survivors of abuse in evangelical contexts to understand the pathways and experiences that brought survivors to leave. We theorize embodied contradictions between religious identity and bodily experiences in the wake of abuse as central factors in survivors’ decisions to leave. We argue that leaving after abuse involves a shifting interpretive relationship to the body, sparked by the recognition that continuing to live with embodied contradictions is untenable. We discuss two processes by which our participants came to see the embodied contradictions they were living as unsustainable and demonstrate how coming to this recognition initiated a shift from an interpretive relationship to their bodies associated with the male gaze, patriarchal authority, and feminine submission to one that emphasized bodily autonomy and self- authorship.
This article uses an organizational perspective to highlight the role of power in making inclusion meaningful at a non-denominational evangelical congregation. Using qualitative data, I analyze non-religious organizational processes that affect power relations among members in organizational settings. I identify two complementary strategies for coordinating collective action that make inclusion meaningful in practice. The first strategy Politicizes Inclusivity by instituting recurrent public deliberations on inclusivity and diversity. The second strategy uses a set of Inclusive Power Arrangements that empower the voices of marginalized members in the everyday workings of the church. Finally, I show how the success of these strategies in producing racial and socioeconomic diversity created such a strong feeling of trust that members readopted them even after realizing that LGBT inclusion involved different challenges. Findings extend fundamental theoretical assertions about studying inclusivity in religious organizations and address issues relevant to the persistent problem of tokenism.
Research on social well-being has predominantly focused on urban contexts, while limited knowledge exists about how well-being is shaped in Indigenous communities of the Global South. To address this gap, this study poses the question: What dimensions are considered relevant for generating social well-being in Indigenous contexts? To answer this, a longitudinal qualitative study was conducted in Indigenous communities in Oaxaca, using semi-structured interviews carried out at two points in time (N = 112), with participants from different ethnic groups. A thematic analysis was employed to identify the patterns people consider important for achieving well-being. The findings show that well-being in these contexts is multidimensional. On the one hand, material dimensions such as education, employment, and income are salient. On the other hand, subjective components such as life satisfaction, emotional balance, and, most notably, spirituality also emerge as central. One of the central findings is the importance of community well-being, which, unlike in other contexts, is articulated through ontological aspects, including ancestral knowledge and collective practices. Reciprocity, mutual aid, and connection with nature are fundamental not only to collective but also to individual well-being.
In qualitative research, few tasks are more foundational—and more frustrating—than coding and analysis. The process of deciding which data to focus on, how to code it, and when to move from descriptive labels to analytical claims can feel like a leap in the dark. Drawing on the pragmatist tradition of examining social action as creative problem solving, this article introduces a structured but flexible framework—the goal-obstacle-strategy-implications (GOSI) model—for making that leap more navigable. Reclaiming grounded theory’s commitment to theory generation, GOSI encourages researchers to analyze how people pursue provisional goals, confront obstacles, experiment with strategies, and generate consequences in context. The framework provides a practical and portable method for identifying patterned variation across cases, surfacing how structural constraints and social positions shape action over time. By foregrounding action as situated, adaptive, and recursive, GOSI moves analysis beyond surface description toward grounded, process-based explanation. It also formalizes a comparative logic for theoretical sampling, helping researchers iteratively refine emerging concepts while collecting data. More than a coding technique, GOSI offers a methodological reorientation—one that clarifies the micro-macro link, makes space and social location analytically visible, and supports asset-based accounts of agency under constraint. It also contributes to ongoing debates about how qualitative scholars can theorize structure without reducing people to passive reflections of it. In doing so, the framework revives grounded theory’s original ambitions while offering new tools for meeting the challenges of contemporary fieldwork.
This article analyzes the decision-making process of legal actors through an interactionist perspective. Based on interviews from Cook County, Illinois, I show how state attorneys utilize a moral script characterized by three key elements in handling cases: responsibility, proactiveness, and responsiveness. These state attorneys rely on this model not only to justify giving leniency in plea deals, but also when describing their own actions. The reported entanglement between self and others leads the attorneys to be less willing to grant mercy in cases where the self cannot be extended to others through role-taking prompted by social interaction. This study advances courtroom research by demonstrating that perceptions of deservingness are shaped by interpretive and moral factors that transcend fixed demographic categories.
Conventional wisdom assumes that people participate in democracy because they care about politics. However, this is not always the case. This article illustrates how civic associations mobilize diverse publics to participate in democracy, even when individuals lack prior politicization (political knowledge, interest, and efficacy). This article draws on 550 hours of ethnographic fieldwork across four years and in-depth interviews with 90 members of two civic associations. It identifies three distinct mobilization pathways: politicized, issue, and indirect. It also contributes to the literature on political participation, learning, and inequality in two ways. First, it provides an alternative to identity-based accounts of mobilization by focusing instead on the role of motivations. This approach illuminates the underlying processes and mechanisms that facilitate political participation. Second, it contributes to scholarship conceptualizing mobilization as a process rather than a static trait by distinguishing between initial and continued mobilization. This offers an opportunity to examine how motivations change. Longitudinal ethnographic methods provide crucial insights into the mobilization process as it unfolds in real time over many days, months, and even years. These findings have practical implications, pointing towards avenues to better realize democratic ideals by closing participation gaps and mobilizing a more diverse public.
Clinicians in Hospice and Palliative Medicine (HPM) specialize in caring for terminally ill patients, a population often regarded as representing the “failures” of medical intervention. This unique context challenges conventional definitions of success in medicine, which prioritize cure and longevity. Drawing on extensive qualitative data from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how HPM clinicians navigate these challenges by shifting their definition of success to a process rather than an outcome. These clinicians rely upon the strategy of “hewing” to achieve success, which includes discovering and crafting shared, achievable goals with clinical stakeholders—patients, families, and colleagues. By examining how these clinicians construct and negotiate their professional project, this study sheds light on how clinical practices shift when confronted by the intractable problem of death. This article introduces the concept of hewing to describe how HPM clinicians coordinate patients, families, and colleagues around shared goals under conditions where standard definitions of medical success fail.
As the number of children exposed to war and political violence grows worldwide, the question of how such exposure will shape the life course is increasingly urgent. Drawing on in-depth life history interviews with 79 men and women who experienced the Bosnian war and genocide (1992–1995) as children, we examine how they narrate, interpret, and ascribe meaning to their experiences in adulthood. We highlight how these processes are shaped by gendered family dynamics and cultural discourses that render some wartime experiences speakable and others unspeakable. Our analysis reveals that more than 20 years after the war, gender and trauma remain deeply entwined through culturally patterned norms and communicative practices within families. Gendered narratives and discourses, including the essentialization of war as a masculine domain, continue to frame how individuals understand and express trauma. For women, these discourses help rationalize their exclusion from discussions of the past and prompt the minimization of their own trauma. For men, narratives of heroic masculinity centering on archetypical “brave soldiers” exacerbate feelings of stigma and shame, creating a formidable barrier to help-seeking behavior. These findings underscore the long-term impact of gendered silence and storytelling in shaping both personal and intergenerational understandings of trauma.
Legitimacy is an overlooked precondition for a tactic’s availability within social movement repertoires. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 37 Movement for Black Lives activists in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, this article identifies a three-step process through which activists legitimize riots. First, activists reclassify riots as protest by lumping them with revered tactics, thereby splitting them from criminality. Second, activists engage in moral legitimation: they acknowledge the harm riots can cause to Black communities but frame them as justified counterviolence to state repression. Third, activists use instrumental legitimation. Despite potential reputational risks, they argue that riots impose costs on capitalism, delegitimize the state and lend credibility to subsequent nonviolent protests. By tracing how activists legitimate a controversial movement tactic, this article argues that legitimation work shapes tactical availability. This challenges views of the repertoire of contention as a fixed toolkit from which activists choose tactics they regard as strategically effective or aligned with their collective identities.
How do nature and community formation intersect in quintessentially urban New York City? In this ethnographic case study of Central Park, I show that park-based communities act as a rich source of affective social capital in the lives of their members. This sort of social capital is oriented around emotional ties and psychological support between group members, and often crosses demographic lines, distinguishing it from more traditional economic/rational choice and hierarchy reproducing models of social capital. Further, affective social capital and park communities themselves are not purely human creations, but rather the result of a process of cocreation, where humans and beyond human entities (lakes, rocks, landscapes, etc.) together facilitate experiences and interactions that nurture the parks’ social groups, groups that go beyond humanness as a boundary to the social world. To explain these phenomena, I offer a theory of transcendence based on the park’s social context as a “third place,” physical context as a greenspace, and normative/emotional context as a product of communal place-making to explain how park communities bridge demographic gaps and cocreate this affective social capital in collaboration with the natural entities they are enmeshed with.
Around the world, young people are concerned about climate change, but some are also mobilizing to address the challenge. How do those young people collectively navigate these worries while taking climate action? Drawing primarily on ethnographic data, this article investigates the relationship between the stories young climate activists tell and the activists’ emotion culture of cultivated hope. In the emotion culture of cultivated hope, which structures expectations around emotional expression, activists first acknowledge shared feelings of anger, fear, and sadness and then transition to an emphasis on the ways collective action is an important generator of hope. This article examines how this emotion culture shapes the stories these activists tell. Unpacking the relationship between storytelling and emotion culture provides an opportunity to explore how emotion culture structures social interaction and, moving beyond the emotions of a single individual, seeks to understand how groups articulate shared feelings about climate change.
This study examines how a Jewish coming-of-age ritual—the bar/bat mitzvah—serves as a point of intersection between sacred practices and secular aspirations. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of seven families from non-Orthodox congregations in Silicon Valley, the research highlights how the bar/bat mitzvah serves both as a religious milestone and as a structured rehearsal for adulthood. Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and innovative video diaries, the study reveals the multidimensional role of the bar/bat mitzvah. Families and religious institutions collaborate to transmit class-specific cultural capital—interpersonal and performative fluency, resilience and discipline, and leadership and social management competencies—through the preparation and execution of the ritual. Aside from transmitting Jewish values, the bar/bat mitzvah equips adolescents with competencies that extend beyond religious settings, preparing them to navigate broader social, academic, and professional domains. The communal nature of bar/bat mitzvah celebrations, marked by shared rituals and public recognition, also serves as a vehicle for transmitting the values and competencies associated with upper-middle-class life in American Jewish communities. By demonstrating how sacred rituals align with secular aspirations, this study contributes to qualitative sociology by reframing religion as a dynamic site of cultural reproduction and social adaptation.
Rapport is an orienting principle in qualitative research. It is a capacious concept which, in practice, is deployed by researchers in a wide variety of ways. Despite its definitional ambiguity, in interview-based studies, researchers often link rapport to obtaining more open and honest – and thus high-quality – data. While rapport has been critiqued in the ethnographic tradition, these critiques have not extended to the particularities of interview-based studies. I offer two critiques of rapport as an orienting principle in interview-based studies. First, I question the assumption that rapport is an unmitigated methodological positive and consider instances when it may not be particularly useful or may even be detrimental to data collection. Second, I argue that the privileged position rapport occupies as an ideal-type of researcher-participant relationship risks foreclosing other types of researcher-participant relationships. The overemphasis on rapport may serve to harm data transparency and epistemic accountability. I argue for de-centering rapport as an orienting principle for interview-based studies.
How do political activists who live and work in high-risk contexts experience adversity? How do they make sense of the diverse institutional obstacles, strategic risks, and situational deprivations surrounding their work and lives? This article introduces the notion of relational adversity to capture how different adversarial factors in the diverse arenas activists inhabit intersect with and co-constitute each other. To validate and develop our framework, we analyze 160 narrative accounts of human rights activists in Colombia, Egypt, Kenya, and Mexico and examine concrete configurations and patterns of adversity found among different types of activists. By considering how structural constraints, institutional deficits, and opponent repression connect with the social location of individual activists, routine practices and personal concerns, and with their bodily and cognitive state, the article advances a relational and experiential treatment of political activism that complements structural and strategic approaches and does better justice to the lived reality of contentious mobilization.
Drawing upon an 18-month ethnography at an exotic dance venue we refer to as “Playpen,” we show the significance and centrality of the body in drawing symbolic boundaries as constitutive of internal hierarchies during a weekly event colloquially referred to as “Latina Night.” In order to make race and racialization among Latinas, a group which has always been considered an ethnic group composed of any race, we foreground the uses of nationality as a primary marker of differentiation amongst Latina dancers, revealing how processes of racialization are instrumentalized as forms of capital and distinction. Central to the boundary-forming mechanisms amongst dancers are embodiment and the racialization of Latinidad itself, including its proximity and distance to Whiteness and Blackness. Findings show the types of racialization negotiated in and through aspects such as music, body adornment, body size, girth and ideas of fatness or thinness, body adornment, and elements such as country of origin identifiers. Implications of this research return us to thinking through race/racialization, embodiment, and symbolic boundary maintenance as a critical tripartite seldom explored in previous research on Latinidad.
Political street art is a critical medium through which protestors attempt to mobilize others to their causes. Scholars have argued that they often do so through iconographic, textual, and compositional choices that situate a movement’s adherents and opponents in dyadic, morally charged conflicts. By shifting focus from representations of dyadic to triadic relations, I introduce a distinct set of strategies through which the makers of political street art frame conflicts to align the goals of their social movements with the interests of spectators. I argue that character triads, or representations of three actors in a single work of art, are useful cultural tools for implicating bystanders in bilateral conflicts because of two tropes with broad resonance – those of the “common enemy” and “mutual friend.” Based on a qualitative analysis of triadic networks observed in political street art in newly independent Lithuania, I demonstrate how protestors used these triadic tropes to communicate the global significance of a Soviet crackdown on Vilnius. By embedding third-party spectators directly into narratives of conflict between a “hero” (pro-sovereignty Lithuanians) and “villain” (Soviets, under Gorbachev’s command), they constructed relational motives for these bystanders to build, break, or solidify alliances with Lithuania and the USSR; expanded the scope and scale of their political struggle; amplified the moral imperative of Lithuania’s success; and rendered victory by the underdog a realistic outcome.
