Parents from stigmatized and disadvantaged migrant groups often fear losing their children to Child Protective Services (CPS). Based on ethnography with Norwegian Somalis, this paper examines how such fears arise. We work abductively from a specific puzzle, which is that the fear of losing children to CPS is widespread among Norwegian Somali parents despite the fact that their children are not disproportionately removed from their homes. In developing an explanatory model, we found that the fears connect intimately to stigma , both collective ethnoracial stigma (Goffman's “tribal stigma”), and a more individual (and intra‐group) stigma of failed parenthood (“blemishes of individual character”). Vis à vis the recent structural critiques of Goffman's Stigma , we show the value of zeroing in on interaction order processes . CPS fears arise through the following dynamic: Because of collective stigma and adversities, Somalis seek the own, where bonding social capital is helpful. For the same reason, children become a “totemic lifeline.” In tight‐knit social networks, child removal stories proliferate and yield pervasive CPS fears. These stories serve ritual purposes: deference, moral support, solidarity, and restoration of self. Child removal stories, and silence about “softer” forms of CPS engagement, also relate to management of the individual (intra‐group) stigma of failed parenthood. While these processes belong to the interaction order, the approach that we propose only temporarily brackets structure. Such a move, we argue, sets us in a better position to, in the next turn, theorize how institutional/structural forces influence local stigma processes.
This article offers a praxeological respecification of stigma. I argue that the term “stigma” is a category term and glossing device, used to gather together and stand in for a diverse range of interactional experiences, including, but not limited to, degradation, discrediting, discrimination, marginalization, and being demeaned. To understand stigma, we must turn from theorizing the concept to examining the lived and situated practices it glosses. The argument for this praxeological respecification unfolds in three stages. First, I argue that “stigma” does not name a discrete attribute or entity, but is a term used to denote and gloss a heterogeneous set of social experiences. Second, I show that these experiences are produced and made accountable in and through interaction. Third, I argue that our analyses must recover the Gestalt contexture—the praxeologically produced contextual whole—through which participants in an interaction see what is happening as stigmatizing or otherwise. This is an immanent, not theoretical, undertaking. Attempts to frame these experiences through the application of external explanatory frameworks often obscure the very dynamics under investigation. I conclude with a brief analysis of an extract from a publicly available interactional case: a live‐streamed panel discussion on HIV stigma, available on YouTube. In this setting, stigma appears not as an abstract structure or inner experience, but as a public, contested, and reflexively managed feature of social life.
What happens when stories refuse coherence? This article examines ambiguous loss among mothers of combat soldiers, focusing on how prolonged waiting and uncertainty infiltrate everyday life, eroding sensemaking. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, it explores how mothers experience the contraction of time and space—manifested in suspended routines, disrupted temporal orientation, and diminished physical and emotional safety. We present narratives that defy conventional formats and ask how meaning is constructed when coherence is refused and cultural frameworks of meaning seem irrelevant or unattainable. Interpreted through Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology and Veena Das's work on the everyday aftermath of violence, the analysis shows how trauma becomes embodied and spatialized. Building on trauma studies and anthropology, the paper argues that ambiguous loss generates both interpretive and ethical crises that challenge dominant cultural scripts, revealing how violence ruptures life projects and destabilizes the ordinary. But, rather than framing these accounts as “failed” sensemaking, they are read as refusals to impose closure within systems that prescribe resolution.
Scholars have long examined the intersection of consumption and culture. Other studies note the ways that U.S. Christianity overlaps with consumption culture. This study focuses on the ways this intersection manifests on TikTok by exploring the ways that performances of white womanhood act as a conduit to sell products and messages. We identify three distinct tactics used by content creators. Our analysis reveals that each of these strategies relies on gendered and racialized performances that uphold an idealized version of white Christian womanhood. Our findings suggest that Christian women in this online space embody a white commodified self.
We compare two types of situations involving monitoring of car driving: a driving instructor overseeing a trainee driver and a safety driver overseeing the performance of autonomous vehicle (AV) software. Our focus is on instances of monitoring that precede (1) interventions that are aborted before impacting the driving and (2) actual interventions on the driving in these two different settings. We find that in both cases the monitoring party “waits and sees” whether each type of “driving agent” will notice the impending trouble and adjust the driving appropriately. However, there are also marked differences: In the case of a driving instructor, the monitoring and intervening is a socially accountable event that may be responded to by the trainee driver, while in the case of an autonomous vehicle there are no such considerations, resulting in a difference in how the monitoring activity is embodied.
Since 2013, we have organized an annual Sociology Festival bringing together students, faculty, and local sociologists to share experiences and socialize. This article analyzes the festival as a social experiment based on observations, student-produced texts and podcasts, and interviews after the 2023 event. Drawing on theories of social interaction, especially Goffman, and research on festivals and fun, we explore how beer, sociology, and student-staff distance create a demanding social situation. This hybridity leads to a re-keying of the festival frame and "deferential evasion," by which participants collectively leave early in a way that respects the event's organizers.
Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with transgender and nonbinary people, we found that respondents' gender identities or displays shifted day-by-day and audience-by-audience. The first describes respondents shifting their identities and displays based on feeling their way through gender while the latter describes feeling out an audience. These shifts are nonexclusive to trans and nonbinary people. Instead, we offer new tools for symbolic interactionists by theorizing the impermanence of identity as a generic social process. Examining such impermanence reveals how people feel their way through facets of the self and audiences to quell the possibility of experiencing social inequalities in interaction.
This study employs a qualitative meta-synthesis to explore how racial slurs function as mechanisms of symbolic violence and racial governance against Turks in Iran. Drawing on interviews conducted in 2017 and 2024, the analysis shows how slurs, often framed as jokes, operate across schools, workplaces, media, and digital spaces, embedding exclusion into daily life. These slurs discipline Turkish identity, reinforcing a linguistic and cultural hierarchy that privileges Persianness. Building on Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence and Butler's notion of performativity, the study argues that slurs are not just reflective but constitutive acts that regulate national belonging and racialization. Adapting Alcoff's idea of "ethnorace," it reveals that Turkishness in Iran is racialized through language, regional affiliation, and perceived disloyalty to Persian national identity. This racialization is deeply gendered: Turkish men are stereotyped as aggressive, while Turkish women are romanticized as obedient and domestic, sustaining patriarchal-nationalist norms. Extending frameworks of stigma and colorblind racism beyond Western contexts, the study shows how non-phenotypical markers of difference produce durable systems of exclusion, normalizing racism through humor, denial, and institutional complicity.
While identity research has given sustained attention to marginality, intersectionality, and the effects of power on identity, the formal interactional dynamics through which identities are constituted remain limited. I present identity entanglement as a useful framework for better understanding and articulating the relational complexities of identity. Using social pattern analysis, I examine intersectional, liminal, and antithetical identities through prior research, the media, and historical accounts, and model these marginal identities through the entanglement modes that characterize their interactions. In doing so, I develop a typology that provides new analytic tools for understanding the formal and nuanced dynamics of identity and marginality.
The qualitative literature criticizing REBs suggests that researchers should develop an approach to research ethics that does justice to their daily practice of fieldwork. In this article, I contribute to this exploration by presenting three cases of negotiating research ethics while researching transgressive social worlds. These cases are related to political tension while researching cannabis shops, privacy issues while using visual methods to research an anarchist community, and contentions with a research participant while researching academic fraud. In the description of these cases, I highlight the essential role of performing integrity, which is an interactive and dynamic social process in which researchers present themselves as reliable and credible. In the cases that I present here, there were instances of misalignment, which triggered an internal conversation on the part of the researcher, who subsequently reflected on possible aligning actions. This article discusses how performing integrity and (re-)aligning activities differ by audience and by research phase.
Distance-based orientation describes how pejorative labels may serve as anchor points for political identity. Existing research on political labeling has largely emphasized stigmatization, overlooking how labels may acquire durability and orienting capacity without losing pejorative force. Drawing on publicly circulating discourse, we trace positioning typologies around the label "Bibist" that render it an interactional achievement through repeated positioning rather than semantic transformation. This analysis extends personalized affective politics beyond top-down populist strategy, showing how political actors orient themselves relationally to a persona-based anchor rather than to traditional partisan ideology.
In this paper, we use Goffman's notion of "face work" to examine how pipeline engineers perform and present their working selves as competent experts. Our analysis identifies various faces and face work tactics, including a focus on professional judgment, actively selling one's expertise relative to others, protective self-deprecatory strategies, and positioning self as part of an organization. This face work mostly reflects a focus on the individual that is out of step with typical explanations of structure and agency in studies of engineering work and disaster causation. In only rare cases did engineers effectively hide behind their organization in presenting their working selves.
Play is often dismissed as trivial, yet it is a fundamental and adaptive aspect of human and mammalian life. This paper develops a sociological theory of play, treating it as a total social fact that spans biological, psychological, and social dimensions. Drawing on classical and contemporary sociology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and ethnography, I argue that play varies along two central dimensions: autotelic motivation-whether the activity is engaged in for its own intrinsic pleasure-and structural formalization-the degree to which rules, resources, and social arrangements shape the encounter. This framework accounts for a wide range of activities, from solitary and parallel play to games, sports, and collective cultural practices, while explaining variation in affective engagement, temporality, and relational dynamics. The paper further explores implications for studying childhood development, adult play, and highly ritualized or formalized activities, highlighting opportunities for integrating interdisciplinary research. By situating play as both serious and consequential, this work advances a positive sociology attentive to the pleasures and sociality that sustain human life.
