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Who are the Stars at Your University?

By Janis Prince Inniss

I will never forget the day Dr. Levine told me that Lillian Rubin was coming to teach at Queens College. I couldn’t believe that he knew her! Or that she would be teaching at my school and I could take a class with her. In terms of today’s music celebrities, he might as well have said that Rihanna, Dua Lipa, or Ariana Grande was going to grace Kissena Hall. Before that conversation, I had read Dr. Rubin’s book Intimate Strangers and marveled at what seemed to be her ability to get into people’s heads and to explain issues that, as a 22-year-old, I was beginning to notice. Even the name of the book captured my attention as I struggled to understand intimate relationships.

Who is Afraid of CRT?

By Myron Strong

Sociologists Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons recently wrote article for the Brookings Institution noting that the term “critical race theory” (CRT) has been mentioned 1,300 times in less than four months on Fox News. They attribute this to critical race theory becoming a new boogie man for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present.

This boogie man is getting bigger in some of the media and state governments who spread misinformation and propaganda. This plays on the fears of many whites who have not been given the tools to process change, and lack the proper understanding of the historical context for the circumstances of people of color.

Bridgerton: Groundbreaking or Same Old Stereotypes?

By Janis Prince Inniss

You’ve probably seen Bridgerton, the sexy Shondaland Netflix standout. If you haven’t, the first eight episodes of the series premiered in December 2020 on Netflix. The series is based on eight books written by Julia Quinn, featuring stories of romance in the Regency era.

This first season focuses on the “market launch” of the eldest daughter of the white Bridgerton family: Daphne is 21 years old and therefore ready to occupy her most important functions and only possible roles as wife and mother. Set in London in 1813, the show centers on Daphne as she and other young women vie for the affections and proposals of men, young and old.

Emerging From the COVID Cocoon

By Janis Prince Inniss

Should I sit inside or pool side? Wear a mask or not? Hug people? Fist bump? Elbow bump? These are some of the questions I am mulling more than a week before attending a Fourth of July party. This is a significant event because it marks my return to visiting friends since the COVID-19 pandemic began last year.

You are Your ID, or are You?

By Karen Sternheimer

As I waited in the security line to return home at an airport recently, a large banner with the words “You are Your ID” was impossible to miss. While just an ad for CLEAR, a biometrics company that uses facial recognition software to verify identity, those words stung that morning.

Why was I so sensitive? I had lost my driver’s license while on a hike two days earlier and was pretty upset. I had gone back to the trail three times to try and find it with no luck. I looked through the car multiple times and any place else it might have fallen where I was staying, including the recycling, and even the refrigerator and pantry.

On one of the attempts to retrace my steps, I got caught in a pretty harrowing thunderstorm and had to run back to the car after a I saw a large bolt of lightning. As I ran, I told myself that the danger I had placed myself in was hardly worth it. A driver’s license can be replaced; it is just a thing; it is not part of me. I had not lost a piece of myself, despite feeling like I had. I had trouble focusing on anything else for the next two days, and reminded myself over and over that “I am not my ID.”

A Generation of Homecomers: Alfred Schutz and the Experiences of “Boomerang Children”

By Daniel Davison-Vecchione, PhD candidate in Sociology, University of Cambridge

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven many people in their twenties and thirties in high-income OECD countries to move back in with their families because of job losses and financial costs. A September 2020 Pew Research Center report found that most people aged 18 to 29 in the US now live with their parents – the first time this had been the case since the Great Depression. Similarly, a 2019 Office for National Statistics report in the UK found a 46% increase over the last two decades in the number of people aged 20-34 living with parents.

Millennials and older members of Generation Z have been hit by two global recessions in the space of two decades, and are especially vulnerable to short-term layoffs because they are disproportionately in precarious, low-income employment. They find themselves jumping from one rental to the next, only to end up back in the family home, hoping to save up money and move out again. Despite returning to what they expect to be familiar ground, such “boomerang children” often feel curiously alienated or out of place in their hometowns.

Finding New Normality, From Micro to Macro

By Karen Sternheimer

As COVID cases fall in much of the United States, many pandemic-era restrictions are beginning to loosen. From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) revised mask guidelines to local ordinances allowing businesses to fully open, many of us are working on discovering a “new normal” as we go from pandemic to post-pandemic living.

This readjustment takes place at a number of levels, from individual and family at the most micro level, to workplace and community at the meso level, and state, local, and federal policy level at the macro level. These shifts help remind us that we are part of a larger interconnected social system, one which the pandemic served to highlight.