Talk of interest to COR community…

“Fool Me Once: Disproportionality and Vulnerability to Trust among Black Families in an Affluent School District”

KAROLYN TYSON
Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair,
Department of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Friday, February 7, 2020
10:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m., Education 2001

Abstract: Sampson Hills is an affluent and predominantly white suburb in the Northeast, with a small but established black population. Although it is a “destination district” — a place to which families move for access to high-quality material goods and services, including high-performing schools — black children have endured educational exclusion for decades. What explains this longstanding pattern, particularly in a setting that presumably offers greater opportunities for educational success and social mobility? To address this question, I focus on disproportionality in special education and explore the paradox of how some parents’ trust of schools can contribute to unfavorable outcomes for their children. Based on data from a community ethnography of Sampson Hills, I argue that low-resourced parents are _vulnerable to trust_. I show that in unequal power relationships, individuals with lower power and limited resources are at greater risk of manipulation, yet more compelled to trust, particularly in situations in which the decision holds enormous consequences. To understand ongoing mechanisms of educational inequality, I advance the idea of _vulnerability to trust_, arguing that vulnerability is a position of _structural disadvantage_ and not simply a position one assumes voluntarily as a way to inspire trust.

Bio: Karolyn Tyson is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. Her main fields of interest are sociology of education, social psychology, and social inequality. Dr. Tyson’s publications have addressed such topics as how schools reproduce social inequality and the role of the schooling experience in the development of attitudes toward school. Her overall program of research centers on understanding how cultural, structural, and individual-level factors affect school achievement and contribute to unequal educational outcomes.

A talk of interest to COR community…

“A Patchwork of intra Schengen Policing: Border games over national identity and national sovereignty”

Professor Maartje van der Woude, Leiden University

Time: 12-1:15 pm
Day: Friday, January 31
Location: The Jennifer Buher-Kane Conference Room (SSPB 4250)

ABSTRACT: The Schengen Agreement was meant to create a “borderless Europe”. Yet, from the outset on, countries have had a very ambivalent relationship to what Schengen stood for politically –  an enhancement of the economy – and what it meant in practice: not being able to properly monitor the movement of flows of people across intra-Schengen borders. By drawing from the work of Wonders (2008; 2016) on the flexibilization of state power which interlinks with Mofette (2018) and Valverde’s (2009) work on jurisdiction and interlegality as well as with the ideas around conscious incompleteness of agreements and regulation, the talk will discuss how member states of the European Union (EU) as well as national enforcement agencies have been consciously using the interplay between the normative regime on the European level and the normative regime, implementation and execution thereof on the national and local level. By using the discretionary space in rules and regulations to the best advantage of their unique interests, the different national and local actors involved in intra-Schengen cross border monitoring all seem to be involved in a complicated border game evolving around the demarcation of boundaries: the actual creation of boundaries to keep out the “crimmigrant” other and to preserve cultural homogeneity, but also the less visible process of sometimes actively creating and sometimes actively crossing boundaries between different jurisdictions and legal mandates.

BIO: Maartje van der Woude is Professor of Law and Society at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and holds her chair in the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society. She is also affiliated with the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo and the Center for the International Comparative Study of Criminology at the University of Montreal. Her work examines the politics and dialectics of terrorism/crime control, immigration control and border control and the growing merger of all three, also referred to as the process of crimmigration. She is currently working on a 5-year research project – “Getting to the Core of Crimmigration” – that was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

A talk of interest to COR community…

“Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering”

Josh Seim, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California

Date:    Friday, January 17th
Time: 12:00-1:15pm
Location: The Jennifer Buher-Kane Conference Room (SSPB 4250)

ABSTRACT: What is the role of the 911 ambulance in the American city? The prevailing narrative provides a rather simple answer: saving and transporting the critically ill and injured. This is not an incorrect description, but it is incomplete. Drawing on field observations, medical records, and his own experience as a novice emergency medical technician, Josh Seim reimagines paramedicine as a frontline institution for governing urban suffering. Bandage, Sort, and Hustle (2020, University of California Press) argues the ambulance is part of a fragmented regime that is focused more on neutralizing hardships disproportionately carried by poor people and people of color than on eradicating the root causes of agony. Whether by compressing lifeless chests on the streets or by transporting the publicly intoxicated into the hospital, ambulance crews tend to handle suffering bodies near bottom of the polarized metropolis. Seim illustrates how this work puts crews in recurrent, and sometimes tense, contact with the emergency department nurses and police officers who share their subjects. These street-level relations, however, cannot be understood without considering the bureaucratic and capitalistic forces that control and coordinate ambulance labor from above. Beyond the ambulance, this book motivates a labor-centric model for understanding the frontline governance of down-and-out populations.

BIO: Josh Seim is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. He is broadly interested in the governance of poverty and suffering, and this has led him into the sociologies of medicine, punishment, and more. Professor Seim’s research has appeared in American Sociological Review, Punishment and Society, and other journals. His book, Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering, was recently published by the University of California Press. Research for this book was recognized by the American Sociological Association this past August. Dr. Seim received honorable mention for both the 2019 ASA Dissertation Award and the 2019 Roberta G. Simmons Outstanding Dissertation in Medical Sociology Award.