SSSP GLOBAL DIVISION NEWSLETTER, SUMMER 2023 Division Chair Dr. Nikhil Deb (2021 – 2023) Assistant Professor of Sociology California Polytechnique State University, San Luis Obispo ndeb@calpoly.edu Newsletter Editor Debadatta Chakraborty PhD Candidate in Sociology University of Massachusetts Amherst debadattacha@soc.umass.edu IN THIS ISSUE - Message from the Chair - 2023 Global Division Award Winners - SSSP 2023 Global Division Sessions - Graduate Student Spotlight - Member’s Recent Publications Message from the Chair Dear Global Division Members, I hope this message finds you all well amidst the ongoing changes in the global landscape. Even as we continue to grapple with the effects of a prolonged global pandemic, our attention has been drawn to the war in Ukraine, which highlights the desperate struggle among world powers to assert control over the world's political and economic systems. Additionally, we are witnessing popular mobilization on a global scale, as was seen in events in Iran. This will be my final newsletter as the leader of our division. I would like to express my gratitude to Debadatta Chakraborty, our outstanding newsletter editor, for her efforts in putting this edition together. In this issue, we have a wide range of topics, including a spotlight on a graduate student and a recap of our division's sessions at the annual meeting in Philadelphia in August. Most notably, we are proud to announce the recipients of our division's Outstanding Book Award and Student Paper Award. The selection committee received numerous nominations, and the chosen recipients have made exceptional contributions to the field of global studies and social problems. Congratulations! I am delighted to share that we received an outstanding pool of nominations for the book award this year. After careful consideration and multiple rounds of discussions, we have finalized the selection of our deserving awardees. Congratulations to all of them! Before I conclude, I would like to address an important matter. Associations like The Society for the Study of Social Problems are currently facing challenges in retaining members following the pandemic. I encourage each of you to actively promote the SSSP and the Global Divisions to others. As you know, the strength of the SSSP lies in its focus on social justice and its commitment to forging alliances beyond the academic sphere. Please take note that the Global Division is holding its business meeting via Zoom on Friday, July 14, at 1:00 pm PST (Zoom link: https://calpoly.zoom.us/j/2296008892). I will send a reminder email with the Zoom link closer to the date. In closing, I want to express my warmest regards to all of you. Take good care, and I hope to have the pleasure of seeing some of you in Philadelphia! Sincerely, Nikhil Deb Chair, Global Division, SSSP 2023 Global Division Award Winners Student Paper Award - Winner Demetrius Miles Murphy - Affirming Blackness in a Colorblind Nation: How Brazilians Negotiate Racial Ideologies and Ethnoracial Categories in Response to Police Killings of Afro-Brazilians Demetrius Miles Murphy is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. He earned his B.B.A. in Management Consulting and Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame and his M.A. in Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. His research interests lie in the areas of race and ethnicity, urban sociology, economic sociology, and sociology of culture. He focuses on flourishing, the Black class structure, and Black placemaking. He has two ongoing lines of research. One research line investigates Blackness and responses to anti-Blackness in Brazil. The latest manuscript from this line of research explores police killings and racial ideologies in Brazil using social media data. His primary line of research is his dissertation, Remaking Black LA: Black Flourishing in the Anti-Black Metropolis. It examines how Black people across the class spectrum create and experience flourishing in Los Angeles. Student Paper Award – Honorable Mention Syeda Masood - I am born on the land of Pakistan. I am Pakistani: Terric nationalism among Hindu Pakistanis Syeda Masood is a PhD candidate at Brown University and a Global IAS fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Central European University. Her research interests include race and ethnicity, empire, and the connections between U.S. and British empires with modern states of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius. Her article “I am born on the land of Pakistan. I am Pakistani.”: Terric nationalism among Hindu Pakistanis, has been published recently in Ethnic and Racial Studies. Outstanding Book Award Co-winners – Kasia Paprocki & Jordanna Malton Kasia Paprocki (The London School of Economics and Political Science) - Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh. Cornell University Press, 2021. Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh offers an in-depth analysis of the global politics of climate change adaptation and how they are both forged and manifested in this unique site. Frequently described as the ‘world’s most vulnerable country to climate change’, the oversimplified specter of a major country slipping underwater has yielded a crisis narrative that erases a complex history of landscape transformation and intense, contemporary political conflicts. Colonialism, capitalism, and local agrarian struggles have so far shaped the country’s coastline more than carbon emissions. Today, both national and global elites ignore this history, while crafting narratives and economic strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities in the name of climate adaptation. The book draws on over two years of multi-sited ethnographic and archival fieldwork with development practitioners, policy makers, scientists, farmers and rural migrants, to investigate the politics of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh from multiple perspectives and scales, offering an in-depth analysis of the global politics of climate change adaptation and how they are both forged and manifested in this unique site. Jordanna Malton (American University) Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism. Cornell University Press, 2022. A Man among Other Men examines competing constructions of modern manhood in the West African metropolis of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Engaging the histories, representational repertoires, and performative identities of men in Abidjan and across the Black Atlantic, Jordanna Matlon shows how French colonial legacies and media tropes of Blackness act as powerful axes, rooting masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification. Through a broad chronological and transatlantic scope that culminates in a deep ethnography of the livelihoods and lifestyles of men in Abidjan's informal economy, Matlon demonstrates how men's subjectivities are formed in dialectical tension by and through hegemonic ideologies of race and patriarchy. A Man among Other Men provides a theoretically innovative, historically grounded, and empirically rich account of Black masculinity that illuminates the sustained power of imaginaries even as capitalism affords a deficit of material opportunities. Revealed is a story of Black abjection set against the anticipation of male privilege, a story of the long crisis of Black masculinity in racial capitalism. Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention Zachary Levenson (Florida International University) Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City. Oxford University Press, 2022. In Delivery as Dispossession, Zachary Levenson explains why nearly three decades after apartheid, the South African government continues to evict Black people on a mass scale. Drawing on a decade’s worth of ethnographic fieldwork, his book provides a fine-grained analysis of both land occupation and eviction in contemporary Cape Town. The government “sees” new occupations as threats to its housing delivery program, but it only seeks the eviction of some occupations, while tolerating others. But how does it make this determination? Levenson argues that the state’s vision should not be our point of departure, but is an outcome to be explained in its own right. He shows that how residents see the state affects how they self-organize land occupations, which in turn affects how the state sees them. But rather than advancing this argument at a high level of abstraction, he develops it through a comparative ethnographic account of two roughly simultaneous occupations in the same township. Delivery as Dispossession will be of interest to urban sociologists wondering why democratic states evict on a mass scale; to political sociologists interested in the relationship between self-organization and urban policy; to social theorists concerned with the relational theory of the state; and to legal analysts interested in the judicialization of politics. SSSP 2023 SSSP Annual Meeting Global Division Sessions Division-Sponsored Sessions Friday, August 18, 12:30pm (Eastern Time) Session 013: Social Justice in the Global South Room: Freedom F Sponsor: Global Organizer & Presider: Debadatta Chakraborty, University of Massachusetts Amherst Description: The key theme of this session is how we can conceive of and advocate for social justice on a wide range of issues, in the global south. The papers in this session cover a range of topics from racialized human rights violations caused by US’s secretive war in Somalia; to the use of social media narratives for understanding racialized police violence in Brazil; to the socio-ecological consequences of land grabbing in Brazil due to a nexus of corporate agro-industrial businesses from global north with local governments in global south; gendered money, socio-economic relational work and labor in matrimonial disputes in India to the communal inversion of civil society in Oaxaca, Mexico. Papers: “The Secret U.S. ‘War on Terror’ in Somalia and the Question of Reparations,” Jason C. Mueller, Kennesaw State University. “Affirming Blackness in a Colorblind Nation: How Brazilians Negotiate Racial Ideologies and Ethnoracial Categories in Response to Police Killings of Afro-Brazilians,” Demetrius Miles Murphy, University of Southern California, Winner of the Global Division’s Student Paper Competition. “Soy, Land Grabbing and Deforestation. The Case of Brazil,” Álvaro Germán Torres Mora, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Gendered Money and Relational Work: Women’s Money and Labor in Matrimonial Disputes in India,” Upasana Garnaik, The University of Texas at Austin, Winner of the Gender Division’s Student Paper Competition. “The Makings of ‘Ungovernable Oaxaca’: Learning from the Communal Inversion of Civil Society in Southwestern Mexico,” Pratik Raghu, The New School. Saturday, August 19, 8:30am (Eastern Time) Session 041: The More Things Change...: Neoliberalism and Globalization v. Humanity Room: Freedom F Sponsor: Global Organizer: Brian Gran, Case Western Reserve University Presider & Discussant: Michelle Gotto, Case Western Reserve University Description: The more things change…As socio-economic-political leaders strongly embrace new and old forces of neoliberalism and globalization, many people’s needs and futures are discounted. Authors participating in this session will tackle climate change, energy crises, the pandemic, and changing economies to consider ongoing utilities of human rights, geopolitics, and the state. Papers: “COVID-19 Vaccination in Palestine/Israel: Citizenship, Capitalism, and the Logic of Elimination,” Nicolas R. Howard, Old Dominion University and Emily Schneider, Northern Arizona University. “Extreme Weather Events and Neoliberalization of Climate Change in Bangladesh: The Case of the 2022 Sylhet Flood in Bangladesh,” Nira Amoona and Nikhil Deb, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. “Maintaining Presence or Retaking Control? The Role of State in the Era of the Knowledge Economy,” Su Yeone Jeon, University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania. “Natural Resources, Energy Transitions, Geopolitics, and Globalization,” Paul S. Ciccantell, Western Michigan University, David A. Smith, University of California, Irvine and Elizabeth Sowers, California State University Channel Islands. Joint-Sponsored Sessions Saturday, August 19, 10:30am (Eastern Time) Session 052: First and Second Generation Immigrant Students and a Sense of Belonging Room: Freedom F Sponsors: Educational Problems & Global Organizers: Myron T. Strong, Community College of Baltimore County Nikhil Deb, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Presider & Discussant: Myron T. Strong, Community College of Baltimore County Description: There is increasingly interest in the role that being first and second-generation plays in both feelings of acceptance and the cultural capital of students. This is further complicated when students are first or second generation citizens or immigrants. The papers in this session will focus on how all these factors and more affect their sense of belonging. The goal is that better institutional tools can develop to address systematic exclusion and to create and support programs are design to support these students. Papers: “‘Home Is Where I Stand’: How Chinese International Students Understand and Practice Cosmopolitanism,” Weirong Guo, Emory University. “A Space to Belong: An Exploratory Study of Belonging and Social Activism among Young People from a Refugee Background,” Craig Mortley, University of Connecticut and Adam Saltsman, Worcester State University. “Assimilation or Marginalization? Education of Refugee Children in the Texas Panhandle,” Nicole Kraus and Ming Xie, West Texas A&M University. “Recognizing and Responding to the Untold Stories: How COVID-19 Affected Community College Students’ Decision to Withdraw,” Paoyi Huang, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY and Robin G. Isserles, CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College. Saturday, August 19, 12:30pm (Eastern Time) Session 059: CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Gender, Sexualities and Immigration in Global Contexts Room: Independence D Sponsors: Global & Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities Organizer & Presider/ Discussant: Rafia Javaid Mallick, Georgia State University Description: The session explores the evolution of intimacy in the context of global capitalism and probe the intersections of sex, love, gender, labor, mobility and immigration. Papers: “‘Women Were Really Being Kept Out ... So We Determined to do Something about It’: The TimelineJS Story of Gender Balance on Iowa Boards and Commissions,” Ezra J. Temko, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. “Circumcision and Colonial Reason: Critical Reflections on Genital Modifications and the Commodification of the Female Genitalia,” Fae Chubin, University of Tampa. “Reifying Rationality by Rationalizing Reality: Intersectional Masculinity and the Alchemy of Legitimacy,” Jonathan N. Redman, University of California, Irvine. “Sexuality in Conflict: How Transnational Bisexuals Negotiate Moral Boundaries and Collective Identity amid Sexual Division in China,” Ann Jiang, The University of Chicago. “The Sociology of Symbolism and the Black Experience in the Catholic Church,” Junior R. Hopwood and Desirae N. Mead, Grambling State University. Sunday, August 20, 8:30am (Eastern Time) Session 081: Theorizing Injustice from/in the Global South Room: Independence D Sponsors: Global & Social Problems Theory Organizer, Presider & Discussant: Andrew J. Shapiro, The Graduate Center, CUNY Description: Despite growing calls to decolonize the academy, much scholarship continues to center the Global North as its unexamined default. In a world where (post)colonial subjects bear the brunt of global injustice, those same subjects are too often excluded from theorizing about the oppression they face. This session works to decenter the Global North in favor of theorizing injustice from/in the Global South. Papers in this session offer new and expanded frameworks for thinking about global inequality, ones that work to portray colonized people on their own terms while also attending to the harms wrought by US, Western, and Northern imperialisms. Papers: “Gendered-Racial Capitalism: Implications for the Global Capitalist Crises,” Debadatta Chakraborty, University of Massachusetts Amherst. “National Food Heritage Policy and Transnational Authority: Reproducing the Hegemony of Origin Food Schemes through Expert Discourses,” Matthew J. Zinsli, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Universidad San Francisco de Quito. “Mind the Gap: Investigating the Presence of Colonial Attitudes among Global Development Workers,” Yeabsira T. Mehari, Harvard University. “‘I am Born on the Land of Pakistan. I am Pakistani’: Terric Nationalism among Hindu Pakistanis,” Syeda Q. Masood, Brown University, Honorable Mention in the Global Division’s Student Paper Competition. Graduate Student Spotlight Álvaro Germán Torres Mora, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Álvaro Germán Torres Mora is a 4th year PhD student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Alvaro’s concentration is Political economy. Previously Alvaro completed a master's degree in Development studies at the University of Helsinki, and a Bachelor of Laws at the National University of Colombia. Alvaro’s research summary: Colonization strategies implemented in Latin America have left long term social impacts. The Iberian empires did not seek to create a social basis for economic growth in their colonies, where settler elites aligned with the Crown and resisted liberal reforms. These elites often benefited from colonial restrictions on trade, which limited the formation of a business class strong enough to overthrow them. Colombia is not an exception. As early as the nineteenth century establishment of the Colombian Republic, the state used public lands to pay its external debt. and promoted settlement through land colonization, building a rural structure dominated by large land-holders. Land appropriation forms used in colonial times, and later, monopolistic practices over land heavily restricted middle and small property, which left long term conflicts and a large mass of landless peasants, shaping one of the most unequal land distributions in the world. This traditional unequal structure has recently been challenged by a boom of commodities such as sugarcane and palm oil, which requires a shift to large-scale land use, worsening the effects of the armed conflict through land dispossession. In this research Alvaro plans to study to what extent colonial institutions shape contemporary land inequality and conflict in Colombia, and how rural elites react to the expansion of global capitalism in order to protect their interests. Alvaro’s purpose is to study the land distribution in the early stages of the Colombian republic, along with other relevant extractive economic institutions. He expects to analyze how current patterns of inequality and conflict in Colombia are explained by its early institutions such as property rights and slavery, and what is the role of rural elites in perpetuating these conditions. For this, he hypothesizes that rural elites have kept a weak state in order to ensure their privileges at expense of majorities. Property rights have been granted to rural elites based on their influence and have been denied to the vast majority of farmers, thus jeopardizing socioeconomic development. This has resulted in perpetuation of inequality, which in turn has led to one of the longest civil conflicts in the world. Member’s Recent Publications • Harpaz, Yossi. 2022. One foot on shore: An analysis of global millionaires' demand for U.S. investor visas. British Journal of Sociology. 73(3): 554-570. • Harpaz, Yossi and Ikhlas Nassar. 2022. Crossing Borders, Choosing Identity: Strategic Self-Presentation among Palestinian-Israelis Travelling Abroad. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 45(12): 2340-2361. • Harpaz, Yossi. 2022. Democratic Decline Drives Millionaire Migration. Henry Global Mobility Report 2022. • Murphy, Demetrius Miles. 2022. Aquilombamento, Entrepreneurial Black Placemaking in an Anti-Black City. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. 8(2):235–49. • Salvaggio, Marko. 2022. Reimagining the climate crisis as a social crisis. Pp. 96-106 in Global Agenda for Social Justice 2, edited by G. W. Muschert, K. M. Budd, H. Dillaway, D. C. Lane, M. Nair, and J. A. Smith. Bristol: Policy Press. • Salvaggio, Marko. 2023. Climate crisis or social crisis? Transforming Society. Featured Blog Post. Bristol University Press.