University of California Press Blog

Martín Sánchez-Jankowski Wins C. Wright Mills Award

UC Berkeley Sociology Professor Martín Sánchez-Jankowski has devoted his career to studying the very thing he once tried to escape—poverty.

Born to indigenous and mestizo migrant laborers in Sonoro, Mexico, Sánchez-Jankowski moved to Michigan with his family when he was a child.

"Obviously when you live in (poverty), you want to get out of it," he said, but added that he knew his background would inform his professional and scholarly direction in the future.

Sánchez-Jankowski is the author of the recent UC Press title Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods, about urban poverty in Los Angeles and New York.

The book was recently named the 2008 recipient of the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), an honor presented annually to a book that "demonstrates dedication to a search for a sophisticated understanding of the individual and society.”

Sánchez-Jankowski spent extended periods of time living in the neighborhoods he studied over the course of nearly a decade.

UC Press Executive Editor Naomi Schneider said the book "gives a whole different portrait" of urban neighborhoods by looking at community institutions that work, like barbershops and beauty salons, as opposed to examining what makes urban neighborhoods dysfunctional.

"(It's) a corrective to the way we see urban ghettos," she explained.

Cracks in the Pavement is one of a dozen UC Press books that have won the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award. UC Press has been honored with the award seven times in the past 10 years, and 12 times overall since the award was instated in 1964.

The 2007 recipient was UC Press title Brewing Justice, by Daniel Jaffee, which analyzes the fair trade industry through the lens of Mexican coffee farmers.

The award is named after sociologist C. Wright Mills, a social and political activist known for revolutionizing American sociology during the 1950s.

Schneider, who has sponsored eight winning titles, attributes the continual recognition to the progressive nature of the UC Press sociology list.

"(Winning books) often look at the disenfranchised and they try to give voice to people who are ignored in our society," she said.

While Sánchez-Jankowski says he was influenced by the namesake of his recent award, particularly by Mills' book The Sociological Imagination, he said he felt a stronger connection to political scientist Harold Lasswell.

When Sánchez-Jankowski was in graduate school, Lasswell took him out to lunch and asked him about his plans for the future. He encouraged Sanchez-Jankowski to plan out his research following his dissertation, so that when the burgeoning sociologist grew old, he would be able to sit down and write a book about all that he had learned.

Sánchez-Jankowski is still following that plan, currently studying rural poverty in the same way he studied urban poverty—by living among those who experience it. He will be spending the next several years hopping back and forth between Fijian indigenous communities and Native American reservations in Arizona and South Dakota.

While he said it was too soon to draw any conclusions from his ongoing research, he observed that "in the process of trying to help people get out of poverty, we destroy their understanding of who they are and being traditional."

Like the work of C. Wright Mills, Sánchez-Jankowski's research is influential in both the academic and public realms. For example, a book he wrote about gangs is used by both prosecutors and defense attorneys.

"I always intended (my research) to be a help for people," Sánchez-Jankowski said. "(Sociologists') job was always to enlighten the world with what's going on inside it."

UC Press Podcast Featuring Bryant Simon

We are pleased to announce that Episode 21 of the UC Press podcast series is now available. In this episode, Chris Gondek of Heron and Crane Productions interviews Bryant Simon as he talks about the politics and culture behind the Starbucks company in his upcoming book Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America from Starbucks.

You may subscribe to the monthly podcast feed that contains the individual episodes using your RSS aggregator or directly via the iTunes store.  You can listen to individual author interviews from the episodes at our podcast page.

Listen to an interview with Bryant Simon, author of Everything but the Coffee.

Bryant Simon on Coffee Culture

When Starbucks first started out, a $4 coffee was virtually unheard of. However, as Bryant Simon observes in Everything but the Coffee and on his Red Room blog, $4 at Starbucks went farther than just a morning wake-up—it bought admission into an elite world. There, you were not just another lowly worker who needed a boost to get through the day. Instead, reflected in the glass of the pastry case was a person interested the arts, global issues, and the environment, a cultured person of values and standards—and carrying a Starbucks cup broadcast this to the world. Suddenly our coffee said something about us, and who wants to be a lonely single espresso when you can be a tall extra-hot flavorful macchiatto? People bought the idea—and the coffee, and Starbucks soon popped up around the globe. Simon finds that, far beyond building brand loyalty, Starbucks reached into the hearts and souls of its customers to build emotional and social bonds with them, and fulfilled deep unmet needs for community, status, and identity. Simon also explores how Starbucks' popularity contributed to its decline in cultural cachet, and how it is working to reclaim its status and meet the needs of a new generation of consumers. Continue the conversation with Bryant Simon on his Red Room blog.

The Living Legacy of West Virginia Coal Mining

Ever since companies began extracting coal from the West Virginia hills, coal mining has been a way of life in many parts of the state. Generation after generation of miners descended into the earth in the morning and emerged again at twilight, covered with coal dust. This work fueled the American economy for many decades, but it also inflicted deep wounds on the region. Protesters have campaigned against the environmental costs of mining methods like mountaintop removal, including a recent high-profile protest during which actress Daryl Hannah and others were arrested, putting West Virginia coal mining in the international spotlight.

There are human costs as well, and according to West Virginia University’s Dr. Michael Hendryx, these costs far outweigh the economic benefits to the region. On June 26, Steve Curwood, host of the Public Radio International program Living on Earth interviewed Hendryx, the author of a new study that assesses the economic toll of coal mining on a community. Hendryx's research in West Virginia shows that 10,000 excess deaths occur per year in mining areas than in non-mining areas. He estimates that the actual dollar value per year of those lost lives is between $42 and $80 billion, while the coal industry brings only about $8 billion yearly to the region. The study attributes these excess deaths to higher rates of poverty, environmental exposures, and pollution in mining communities. Listen to the interview and read a transcript at the Living on Earth website.

In a region long defined by the coal industry, mining work is increasingly hard to find, as new methods require fewer workers. In some areas, left economically crippled by the changing times, life is marked by chronic poverty, that passes through the generations like the mining jobs once did. Ken Light and Melanie Light, in the documentary tradition of James Agee and Walker Evans, visited West Virginia's forgotten towns and rambling hills, interviewing and photographing the people there. The Lights collected stories from retired miners, a city mayor and a coal industry employer, a snake handler, a grandmother who supported her family by restoring and reselling discarded items, and other remarkable residents of all perspectives and backgrounds. In their book Coal Hollow, the people of the West Virginia coal mining legacy tell their own stories, in their own voices, and together they paint a stark and moving living history. This video segment includes some of the striking images from the book, an interview with photographer Ken Light, and indigenous music and interview excerpts recorded by Melanie Light.

Daniel Geary Interviewed on Behind the News

Daniel Geary, author of Radical Ambition, C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought was recently interviewed on Behind the News with Doug Henwood.  From the KPFA Website: "Behind the News covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Shows typically consist of some opening comments by host Doug Henwood on the recent news, followed by two or three interviews with authors, activists, academics, and other knowledgeable sorts."

Behind the News with Doug Henwood - May 30, 2009 at 10:00am

Click to listen (or download)

Breaking the Chain: How Businesses Can End Slavery

Years ago, historian Ron Soodalter came across an account of slavery in modern-day America. Digging further, he learned the disturbing truth: slavery is thriving all over the world, including the United States. Soodalter, who has written extensively about slavery, recently joined Kevin Bales, leading expert on modern slavery and president of the organization Free the Slaves, to write The Slave Next Door and help put an end to human trafficking. As Bales explains above, companies, governments, and individuals all play important roles in the business of slavery, and must work together to eliminate it.

Citing a U.S. State Department study, Bales and Soodalter estimate that between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the US and enslaved every year. Some are tricked, promised a job or education abroad; others are stolen from the streets and forced to work in squalid and dangerous conditions for the rest of their lives. There are slaves working in almost every industry: in agriculture, construction, factories, restaurants, and brothels, and in people's homes. A few manage to escape, but most do not. In a two-part post on the Human Trafficking Project blog, Soodalter places slavery as “the second or third most lucrative criminal enterprise of our time, after drugs, and maybe guns." (read more here and here). With an estimated 27 million victims worldwide, slavery is a silent scourge—few perpetrators are ever caught, and few victims have the opportunity to tell their stories. 

In the above video, also posted on the Human Trafficking Project blog, Bales explains how businesses and consumers fit into the pattern of slavery: “If you’re buying and selling [a product that uses slavery]… you’re involved." He describes how companies can form effective antislavery networks: “It’s all about teamwork. The consumer works with the company. The company works with the government. The government works with the antislavery organizations...We all get together and we can solve this problem.” In The Slave Next Door, Bales and Soodalter give a powerful voice to modern-day slavery, and show how to achieve a slavery-free future.

Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture

Allison J. Pugh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Pugh's latest book, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture was published by UC Press in February 2009. For more information on Pugh and work, please visit her website and her blog, Care Work Live. In her blog entry below, she talks about how recent economic woes effect parental spending.

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By: Allison J. Pugh

Apparently, the age of consumption is over.  Time Magazine is proclaiming this the era of the New Frugality.  The New York Times conducted a poll reporting that 71 percent of Americans say they've cut back on luxuries.  The Wall Street Journal contended there was "good reason" to believe that America's turn to thrift will outlast the recession.

To be sure, the recent economic dislocations are profound.  There is no doubt that many people are cutting back where they can.  But what counts as "luxuries"?  What are viewed as the basics, the fundamental priorities for a strapped budget?  What is consumption for, anyway?

For the children I observed for three years in Oakland, Calif., spending on things as mundane as GameBoys or Magic cards served as critical markers of belonging in their social worlds.  Had they seen that recent movie the girl sitting nearby just mentioned?  Could they talk about that kind of Lunchable, what came on the tray, what it tasted like?  Had they been to Marine World? Kids continually had to negotiate their way in and out of conversations that formed a sort of "economy of dignity," a system of fleeting moments of belonging.

What did they do when they did not own or had not experienced whatever everyone else was talking about?  Most children had multiple strategies for handling those incidents, strategies that I explore in my book Longing and Belonging.   While they could manage those difficult moments, however, children up and down the class ladder also disliked them intensely as felt instances of deprivation.

Parents felt the ensuing pressure, and in most cases, even under dire economic conditions, responded by making sure children had what they needed to participate in the social world at school.  I visited with one mother who bought her daughter a full bedroom set, even though she herself was sleeping on the floor.  Even when financial necessity forces parents to reshuffle creditors, they often put their child's desires first.

At the same time, when parents talked to me about their buying habits, what they reported was not quite as straightforward as those news reports of cutting back on "luxuries" suggest.  Affluent parents would tell me how little they bought, maintaining that they were not materialistic or spendy.  Low-income parents would tell me how much they bought, how they could really take care of their child's needs and desires.  Both seemed to view their kids' consumer desires as the psychological need to be normal.  Is that a "luxury"?  Only to those few parents who actually did resist, who had the convictions or biographies that inured them to the social risks of their children's difference from others, risks that their children bore on their own at school or in the neighborhood.

We don't know exactly how most American households will respond to the changing economic tides, where they will reduce, where they will not.  The spending data are not yet in, despite the trend pieces and poll data.  But without change in the root causes of spending on children -- the risks and fear of difference, the paramount importance of commodities in determining normalcy, and thus belonging -- parents may be reserving the New Frugality for themselves while for their children resorting to some of the Old Consumerism.

National Day of Silence

On April 17th, Kate Harding of Salon.com wrote an article called "No One Will Miss You," highlighting the 13th Annual National Day of Silence "to bring attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment and effective responses." In the article, Harding mentions a few teens who took their lives after being repeatedly taunted and ridiculed by their peers and even school adminstrators.

Harding also quotes The New York Times blogger, Judith Warner and C.J. Pascoe, author of Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (UC Press, June 2007). Harding writes:

"Judith Warner wrote about both Carl Walker-Hoover and Eric Mohat, a 17-year-old who shot himself after a bully flat-out suggested he should, adding 'no one will miss you.' And once again, the tormenters were focused on the victim's failure to conform to gender norms, so the bullying manifested as vicious homophobia. 'Eric liked theater, played the piano and wore bright clothing, a lawyer for his family told ABC news, and so had long been subject to taunts of "'gay,' 'fag,' 'queer' and 'homo.'" As Warner puts it, 'The message to the most vulnerable, to the victims of today's poisonous boy culture, is being heard loud and clear: to be something other than the narrowest, stupidest sort of guy's guy, is to be unworthy of even being alive.' She quotes one teenage boy who told author C.J. Pascoe, ' To call someone gay or fag is like the lowest thing you can call someone. Because that's like saying that you're nothing.' Pascoe herself, who spent 18 months studying the culture in a Northern California high school, says that the boys there 'have the sense that to be a man means something and is incredibly important ... To not be a man is to not be fully human and that's terrifying.' To not be a man is to not be fully human. To be gay is to be nothing. In case anyone was unclear on the connection between homophobia and misogyny, there you go."

Read the article "No One Will Miss You" in it's entirety.

Read the article "Dude You've Got Problems."

Podcast with Neil Smelser, Author of The Odyssey Experience

On April 21, 2009, Deborah Harper, President of Psychjourney, interviewed Neil J. Smelser. Smelser is University Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis, Problematics of Sociology, and Social Paralysis and Social Change, all from UC Press. He is also the author of The Odyssey Experience: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys, which was published by UC Press in February 2009.

Listen to the audio interview with Smelser on psychjourney.com

Download and listen to the Smelser podcast

Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today

Ron Soodalter is a historian, folklorist, and lecturer. He is also the author of Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader, and has written articles on the historic and modern slave trade, the Civil War, and the American West. A respected Lincolnian scholar, he serves on the Board of the Abraham Lincoln Institute. Most recently, he teamed up with Kevin Bales in authoring The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today, which will be published by UC Press in May 2009. Below, he talks about his research and the inspirations for his book on slavery.

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By: Ron Soodalter

As a student of history, I’d always assumed – as do most Americans – that slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. It was only after writing most of a book on the ante-bellum slave trade that I stumbled on an account of slavery – in present-day America! My first response, a common one, as it turns out, was denial: “No way. Slavery hasn’t existed here since Lincoln’s time.”

Only after extensive research did I discover that slavery has always existed on this continent, from the days of its European discovery right up to the present day. Slaves can be found – or more accurately, not found - in all 50 states, working on construction crews, as fruit pickers and domestics, factory, restaurant, and sweatshop laborers, and victims of sexual exploitation. They are hidden in plain sight, lured here by traffickers, who promise them opportunity – an education, a better job, a chance to support or send for their families back home. Some are smuggled across the border by a single “coyote,” while many more enter through our airports daily, with papers provided by crime families or syndicates, and sometimes our own government. Once inside the country, their dreams disappear, and a life of slavery begins.

Nor are U.S. citizens exempt from this affliction. The number of children and young people at risk of being taken from their own cities, towns and neighborhoods, according to the feds, is in the hundreds of thousands. It really is that insidious. 

This is the kind of knowledge you can’t “unlearn”; the only question is, what do you do with it once you have it? My friend Kevin Bales and I determined that the most effective path was to write a book, to make available to the reader information that took us considerable time and experience to acquire. Focusing specifically on our own country proved to be a daunting task for us both, but one which eventually gave us a complete picture of all aspects of slavery in today’s America. There is a world of difference between being aware of slavery on an intellectual level and actually meeting and speaking with people whose lives have been forever changed by it. It was humbling, and it brought a visceral awareness to the project. And it gave a whole new dimension to my view of America’s historic slavery; while I had studied and written about it for years, the impact had always been buffered by the distance of time. Since coming to know survivors, and those who work daily to help them, I will never be able to look at slavery in the same way again.

The book that came out of our experience, The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today, is part tell-all, part how-to-fix-it, and part stories of actual slavery. And it lays out a plan for Americans – for you and me – to take an active part in the fight against slavery. It’s not as daunting a task as you might think. Heck, just by reading these few paragraphs, you now know more about slavery in our country today than most Americans!

We tend to think of ourselves as the country where slavery has no place; it will take a lot of work and dedication to make it so. The first step is to learn as much about it as possible, so that you’ll recognize it, and know what to do about it.