Everyday Sociology Blog

What is a Ghetto?

By Karen Sternheimer

When I ask students this question, they often dance around the answer. “A place where low-income people live,” is a common response. “Somewhere that isn’t very nice,” is another. But when I ask where this term comes from, few know.

The term is one we might avoid now, as ghetto might be seen as a derogatory word used to describe a low-income neighborhood in the central part of a U.S. city. Sometimes the term is also used as an adjective to describe people, often negatively.

Home, Interrupted

By Karen Sternheimer

I recently recived a phone call from a former neighbor, someone who lived next door to me for many years while I rented an apartment. She called to tell me that she received an eviction notice after more than 20 years in the apartment.

She let me know that she was in the midst of experimental treatment for an aggressive form of cancer that had spread, and didn’t have the full amount for rent at the start of the month. A few weeks later, though, she sent the balance to the landlord. The property management company let her know they would not accept the late payment, and proceeded with the eviction process.

Meaning Making and Health

By Karen Sternheimer

Peter Kaufman’s recent post about his experience with stage IV lung cancer is an important reminder that our bodies—particularly as they appear and function at this moment—and our overall health, are temporary.

And yet we often perceive them to be permanent. Why?

We make sense of our health collectively; even the way in which we define illness is rooted in social interactions. As sociologists Peter Conrad and Kristen K. Barker explain in their article "The Social Construction of Illness," culture plays a role in how we view and respond to a condition, and people experience their condition in a social context.

A Sociology of My Death

By Peter Kaufman

I’m dying. I don’t mean this figuratively—like I’m dying of thirst or dying to visit Hawaii. I mean it quite literally. I have incurable, stage IV lung cancer.

I was diagnosed in June 2017, a few months after my fiftieth birthday. My only symptom was a nagging, dry cough, but by the time the disease was detected the cancer had metastasized throughout my body. Since then I have had numerous treatments and interventions. Some of these worked quite well, allowing me to resume most of my normal activities; others were not as effective, resulting in adverse side effects, extreme discomfort, and, in one instance, a week-long stay in the hospital. My current treatment plan showed great initial promise but now, after just a few weeks, the tumors started growing again.      

For me to have lung cancer—indeed any form of cancer—is the epitome of a tragic irony. I have never smoked or tried illegal drugs, and I’ve never even been drunk. I’ve pursued clean living, good nutrition, and regular exercise in part to avoid the sort of medical misfortune that I am now experiencing. As a kid I played sports all day long. At sixteen I swore off junk food. At eighteen I became a vegetarian. In my twenties I ran marathons and did triathlons, and, in my thirties and forties when my aching knees no longer let me run, I swam or biked most days. About six months before my diagnosis I completed a one-day workout that simulated two-thirds of an Ironman triathlon, swimming 2.4 miles, then biking 120 miles (with 5,000 feet of climbing). A few weeks later I recorded my fastest one-mile swim time ever. I was incredibly healthy . . . until I wasn’t.

Being a Temporary Foreigner

By Karen Sternheimer

As C. Wright Mills noted in The Sociological Imagination, one of our tasks as sociologists is to “make the familiar strange.” Traveling to a foreign country—especially one where you barely speak the language—is a great way to undertake Mills’s advice.

Travel highlights how many little things we take for granted while interacting with others. The most obvious barrier is speaking the same language. While we English speakers of the world are uniquely privileged because so many people speak our language, or at least some of our language, not everyone does.

Bridging Divided Values?

By Jonathan Wynn

Our national political divide seems to be widening. Our opinions have diverged, and we seem to have developed an ever increasing “us and them” national character. This summer I read four books on the topic, varying in their political and intellectual perspectives.

Sociologists have long been interested in our how our values (moral beliefs) and norms (the rules and expectations by which a group guides the behavior of its members) shape our culture. From Max Weber to Talcott Parsons, we are justifiably curious about how culture bends our beliefs into actions. We have a pretty good sense for how culture serves to push people into groups through accentuating differences. We have less of a handle on how to bring people from different belief systems together.

Social Networks and Diversity in College

By Colby King

With the beginning of another fall semester, I have been thinking about the opportunities college presents to students. If you are a student who is working to make the most of your opportunities on campus, you may very reasonably be focused on earning good grades, or on avoiding accumulating much loan debt. But, I want to underscore a particular opportunity that college presents to students that I hope you do not overlook: the opportunity build a diverse social network.

I have been thinking about these issues because last spring, I was chosen as the recipient of Bridgewater State University’s Honors Outstanding Faculty Award. This was a really nice honor, and as part of the award I was interviewed for the Honors Program student blog, The Paw. In that interview I was asked about what advice I might have for students. I drew on my responses in that interview, and the speech I gave for that award in writing this essay. You can see the whole interview on the blog here.

Inequality and the Cashless Economy

By Karen Sternheimer

What if you had money, maybe not a lot of money, but you couldn’t use the money you did have to buy some things you need or pay your bills? And what if you had to pay in order to access your money?

For some people, this is a day-to-day reality if they are unbanked or underbanked; people who either don’t have a bank account or a credit or debit card. Think about all of the things that you buy without cash, whether online or in person, and would not be able to because you don’t have a card. This lack of access is an important measure of inequality in an increasingly cashless economy.

Race and Studying Abroad

By Jonathan Wynn

Have you been traveling this summer? If you have, I’m sure that you packed your sociological imagination with you. Last month I participated in a Study Abroad trip with a group of first year students who were all either first-to-college or global majority students. We traveled to the Dominican Republic so the students could do an intensive cultural exchange and service learning course.

These students are part of a program to improve racial and ethnic diversity in our Honors College here at UMass Amherst, and I taught Intro to Sociology with them last fall. Similar to honors programs (as well as high school college prep courses) study abroad programs are, generally, a primarily white experience. Only about 5% of students who study abroad are black. Our International Programs Office recognizes this disparity, and assists and supports the program my students participated in because of this inequity.

Labor

By Todd Schoepflin

What do you see when you look at the picture below? Perhaps nothing is remarkable about this part of my home. I experienced a lot of pain in my back and knees after constructing the tiny patio on which two chairs and a table sit. The chairs are mainly for my wife and me. A small tree used to be in this space. I don’t like to kill trees, but it occurred to me that if we removed the tree we could have a nice area to relax. To be honest, it also a comfortable place to sit with a good vantage point for people watching. Not sinister people watching, just observations of people that I am compelled to make in my lifelong quest to understand what makes people tick. It's also a pleasant space for coffee drinking and book reading.

My wife designed our small retreat. After consulting her father for accurate measurement, she determined we needed 25 paver stones, and that’s what we purchased from Home Depot. We aren’t very bright at times, so we showed up with her Kia Sportage to haul the stones and six 50-pound bags of sand. We failed to think ahead, or, you know, do the math to realize that each stone is 40 pounds and that equals 1,000 pounds plus 300 pounds of sand. My brother-in-law bailed us out with his pickup truck. He helped me unload the materials.

The following day, my father-in-law served a dual role as supervisor and co-worker. He instructed me to dig out the area and to make it as level as possible so that we could lay the stones. He returned a few hours later, and, after correcting for a few of my errors (notably, I dug out too much dirt) we finished preparing the ground for the stones. He directed me to set down stones one at a time, usually telling me to pick a stone up if it wasn’t yet level and then signaling to put it in place again after he adjusted the surface.