Books for understanding Iran and the Middle East

Posted on March 18, 2026 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase our books that offer context for the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran and responses throughout the region. All of our Middle East Studies titles are available here.

Disabling Relations: Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis, by Sona Kazemi, bears witness to disabled survivors of violence in Iran from war, incarceration, acid attacks, and torture.

How do we learn to defetishize disability in our everyday lives? In Disabling Relations, Sona Kazemi probes this and other questions that consider how processes and relations of patriarchy, imperialism, and religious fundamentalism, as well as class and ideology, rework the dialectics of disability in transnational contexts.

Read Sona Kazemi’s blog entry, Encountering Wounded Bodyminds

Proper Women: Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in Iran, by Fae Chubin provides an intersectional analysis of Iran’s feminist activism through an ethnographic study of an NGO-led women’s empowerment program.

Proper Women tells the unprecedented story of an NGO-led “women’s empowerment” program in Tehran that was created to serve young, impoverished Iranians and Afghan refugees. Fae Chubin recounts the well-intentioned efforts of cosmopolitan NGO administrators whose loyalty to liberal feminist principles of individualism, sexual autonomy, and anti-traditionalism complicated their objective of empowering marginalized women.

Read Fae Chubin’s blog entry, Complicating Female Empowerment in Iran

Contours of Israeli Politics: Jewish Ethnicity, Religious Nationalism, and Democracy, by Hannah M. Ridge, examines the effect of ethnic diversity and privilege within the Jewish Israeli population on public opinion and attitudes about identity and democracy.

There is no single Jewish ethnicity, and no single Jewish ethnic group constitutes a clear majority of Jewish Israelis. These intra-Jewish differences permit a social hierarchy within the “in-group” – Jewish Israelis – that privileges the Ashkenazi Jews of European descent over Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews of Middle Eastern backgrounds. The timely Contours of Israeli Politics focuses on the socio-political ramifications of this hierarchy within the upper stratum of Israeli society. 

Read Hannah Ridge’s blog entry, Examining Diversity and Privilege with the Jewish Israeli Population

Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Other Pariahs, by Jonathan Graubart, is a compelling diagnosis of the long-reigning pathologies and practices of Zionism and a prescription for reforming Jewish self-determination

Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism examines the liberal Zionist and Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives that developed in the decades following Israeli statehood. In his timely book, Jonathan Graubart, advances a non-statist vision of Jewish self-determination to be realized in a binational political arrangement that rejects Apartheid practices and features a just and collaborative coexistence of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. The book’s vision advances a distinct Jewish self-determination committed to cultural enrichment and emancipation, internationalism, and the fostering of new political, social, and economic channels for attaining genuine reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

Read Jonathan Graubart’s blog entry, Discovering a Liberating Vision of Jewish Self-Determination in an Age of Entrenched Apartheid and an interview with the author.

The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination, by Greg Burris, provides a window into the Palestinian freedom struggle, drawing on an analysis of Palestinian film and media.

Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid. Greg Burris employs the work of Edward W. Said, Jacques Rancière, and Cedric J. Robinson in order to locate Palestinian utopia in the heart of the Zionist present.

Read Greg Burris’ blog entry, Applying Black Radical Thought in Palestinian Film and Media.

Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut, by Ghassan Moussawi, provides the first comprehensive study to employ the lens of queer lives in the Arab World to understand everyday life disruptions, conflicts, and violence.

Disruptive Situations challenges representations of contemporary Beirut as an exceptional space for LGBTQ people by highlighting everyday life in a city where violence is the norm. Ghassan Moussawi, a Beirut native, seeks to uncover the underlying processes of what he calls “fractal orientalism,” a relational understanding of modernity and cosmopolitanism that illustrates how transnational discourses of national and sexual exceptionalism operate on multiple scales in the Arab world.

Read Ghassan Moussawi’s blog entry, Living Amidst Constant Disruptions that Keep Taking on New Forms.

Israel’s Dead Soul, by Steven Salaita, explains how Zionism became an exceptional ideology in the eyes of the West.

Israel’s Dead Soul explores the failures of Zionism as a political and ethical discourse. Steven Salaita argues that endowing nation-states with souls is a dangerous phenomenon because it privileges institutions and corporations rather than human beings.

Read Steven Salaita’s blog entry, The Unmaking of Israel’s Soul and the Making of Israel’s Dead Soul.

Filed under: american studies, cultural studies, Disability Studies, ethics, gender studies, health, History, immigration, Jewish, Labor Studies, LGBT studies, literature, Mass Media and Communications, philosophy, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, Religion, sexuality, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Do People Care about Women’s Sports?

Posted on February 19, 2025 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Jane McManus, author of The Fast Track, writes about how women’s sports are finally getting their due.

I got into sports writing because I wanted to cover the Knicks. I was a basketball player, born the year before Title IX became law, and sports were my birthright as much as the guys I played against on the basketball court at the Prospect Park YMCA.

Or so I thought.

In the 25 years I covered sports and played them, I began to see the dynamics I read about for the generation before — mommy tracking, being ignored in conference rooms, players offering to sign my notebook thinking I was a fan and not a journalist — applied to my generation as well.

How could that be? We were there for the same reasons as the men with press passes.

Being a woman in sports meant recognizing that I wasn’t exempt and that, even worse, neither was the generation that came after me. The same forces that impacted the media also applied to women’s sports. The underlying issues are social in nature and impact the economics of women’s sports as well.

This is a moment where an enormous cultural shift is changing. The NCAA women’s basketball tournament final drew a larger audience than the men’s, something that was inconceivable just five years ago. This is the time to document its rise, while acknowledging all the women’s talent that was ignored for so many years.

This story bubbled up over the years, and I tucked away patches of anecdotes to be part of a larger quilt. But I didn’t rely on my recollections. I spoke to dozens of people in and around sports, asking them what they saw. The same kinds of things came up. No matter the sport, industry, or country, women face the same crosswinds.

Too often they are made to think this is a personal issue, that they hadn’t advocated in the right way, or that people just didn’t care about women’s sports. In truth, the quiet hostility so many faced was written into actual contracts such as Collective Bargaining Agreements. So many have suspected this; I wanted to name what has actually held women’s sports back, and document some of the issues.

I shopped this story to a lot of publishers and one refrain I heard was, “What is the audience for women’s sports?” That resistance has kept projects like mine on the shelf for decades. Other shops wanted to aim the story at middle schoolers. At Temple University Press, editor Ryan Mulligan worked with me to tell the complete story and helped organize my reporting into the storytelling you see in its pages.

This was a story I had to tell. I was one of the few who could tell it. Women in sports and who work in sports deserve to have those quiet struggles recognized even as the crowds fill arenas and buy women’s jerseys.

What a great moment to witness.

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Digital Girlhoods

Posted on January 28, 2025 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Katherine Phelps, author of Digital Girlhoods, writes about tween girls and social media.

These days, social media itself is trending. Conversations abound surrounding the recent 12-hour TikTok “ban,” when the platform went dark the night of Saturday, January 18th, and came back online again for most users by Sunday afternoon. Few social media platforms have enjoyed the level of popularity that TikTok has had since 2020, when social distancing during the early days of COVID-19 resulted in more people on their phones more often. Fresh data from Pew Research Center and YouGov indicates that approximately 160 million Americans are regular users of the app, with 10- to 19-year-olds accounting for a full quarter of that number. This is the largest user demographic of TikTok in the United States, with American girls outnumbering American boys on the app.

Although this very brief national reprieve from TikTok heightened discourse around freedom of speech and expression on social media, concerns about the well-being of young people online have been raised regularly for several years, especially when it comes to girls. In 2023, which popular media dubbed “The Year of the Girl,” the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory calling for a warning label on social media, citing apps as a “major factor” in the mental-health crisis of American teens. And in a world first, in November 2024 the Australian Parliament passed the Online Safety Amendment, which bans anyone under the age of 16 from joining social media platforms. It remains to be seen how effective enforcement will be when the ban gradually goes into effect later in 2025.

Yet, research findings across disciplines are equivocal in their take on the impacts of social media on girls. Some findings suggest that social media magnifies gendered issues such as negative body image, bullying, disordered eating, poor mental health, and Internet addiction. Others indicate social media has much potential for empowerment, agency, joy, and creation, and is a space where girls can talk about issues relevant to their lives, express themselves, build community, increase self-esteem, have fun, learn digital literacy skills, and garner new interests. Notably, we have significantly less data on American girls under the age of 13 who use social media, as they are (theoretically) federally protected under COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). But tween girls are everywhere on social media and to date there has been little research that puts the voices of girls front and center in conversations about what social media means to them.

Digital Girlhoods explores this question of what social media means to American tween girls. My interest in the tween-girl demographic was sparked in 2013, when I stumbled upon a YouTube trend called “Am I Pretty or Ugly?”, in which tween girls ask their viewers to comment on their videos and indicate, as the question suggests, if they are pretty or ugly. The adult-centered panic and perturbation that reverberated in response to the trend left me wondering, why this shock and awe at girls asking this age-old question? I saw that the uproar around the trend was painting too simplistic a picture, and the response did little to question why tween girls were asking this question on a public digital platform.

I wanted to know more about the contemporary conditions of American girls living in the digital age. I studied nearly 300 of these Pretty or Ugly YouTube videos and conducted interviews with 26 tween girls (all between the ages of 10 and 13). Here are some things I learned.

  • Being pretty remains of the utmost importance to girls, especially as they connect it with being “liked.”
  • While some girls feel there is pressure to compare themselves to other girls, many articulate social media as a place to self-represent and build confidence.
  • Tween girls want to be seen and heard, and they don’t see themselves or their experiences accurately represented in popular media.
  • Girls define cyberbullying differently from how adult stakeholders and social research define it.
  • Tween girls are wary of strangers online; they greatly value privacy and primarily only communicate with people on social media that they know in “real” life, at school and at home, such as friends and family.
  • Tween girls understand the importance of boundaries and setting time limits on their phones, and they will often set and follow those limits themselves or with the help of a parent or guardian.
  • Tween girls both love and hate social media. They find aspects of it tiresome, distressing, or “drama-filled,” but they primarily use it for communicating with friends, expressing themselves, exploring interests, having fun, trying new things, playing with media production, and sharing their voices and ideas. Having grown up with it as a normal part of their daily lives, they have a hard time imagining what life would be like without it.

Social media reflects social life; it encapsulates the good and the bad. It can have negative impacts on well-being, spread misinformation, and cultivate unhealthy comparison. And it is also a place where tween girls create, connect with each other, build community, and figure themselves out via digital participation. If we are going to argue for the removal of girls from social media platforms for “their own well-being,” as adult stakeholders in tween girls’ lives we should look inward and examine our own relationships with these platforms and take the time to  hear girls when they tell us about their experiences online. They have plenty to say.

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Exploring the influences and causes of mass shootings in the United States

Posted on June 28, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Eric Madfis and Adam Lankford, coeditors of All-American Massacre, attempt to diagnose America’s mass shooting problem.

“What kind of society is this?” These were the last words screamed by a 64-year-old man before he began a shooting rampage at the 1979 Battle of the Flowers parade in San Antonio, Texas. He killed two women and wounded more than 50 people, including six police officers. 

The mission of our book, All-American Massacre, is to answer precisely this question: What kind of society is the United States, and what elements of contemporary American life contribute to our having the greatest number and highest share of public mass shootings around the globe? We asked scholars across a range of disciplines to answer this question. They took on this challenge to explore how gender, racism, media, politics, education, gun culture, firearm access, and mental health influence the causes of mass shootings in the United States. With a specific focus upon exploring how American culture, institutions, and social structures influence the circumstances, frequency, and severity of mass shootings in the United States, this book helps to clarify the unique nature and salience of mass shootings in contemporary American life. 

Sometimes a problem is so obvious that people can see it for themselves, without consulting experts. For instance, most Alaskans are probably aware that their state gets more snow than California. Sophisticated methods are not required to recognize the difference. America’s mass shooting problem is similar. Many people have recognized that something terrible has been happening in the United States, and that this particular type of tragedy does not seem to occur in other countries nearly as often. More and more data in recent years have demonstrated that America has far more mass shootings than anywhere else on the planet—one recent study found that we have approximately three times as many mass shootings as all other developed countries, combined.

All-American Massacre uncovers what America’s mass shooting problem tells us about the American social body and our country’s underlying ailments. The experts gathered in this book trace this prominent symptom back to its insidious causes, both fringe and mainstream.

Mass shootings have become more frequent and more deadly since the turn of the 21st century.  Research on mass murder, and public mass shootings in particular, has also increased exponentially during this time. However, little research specifically investigates why it is that the United States experiences such a large proportion of these devastating events. Most prior books have examined mass shootings in the United States with only passing consideration of the American context—as if these incidents could have occurred anywhere on the globe. Very little research has studied why these violent phenomena are so much more common in the United States and examined American culture, institutions, and social structures as interlocking sources of explanation. This is lamentable, as the American causes of mass shootings are multi-faceted but vitally necessary to understand in order to prevent future attacks. 

In this volume, contributors advance a variety of social and cultural explanations for the prevalence and overrepresentation of mass shootings in the United States. To that end, chapters explore: 1) American masculinity and gender norms as a way to better understand why so very many mass killers are male, 2) America’s history and legacy of white supremacy and how this contributes to hate-motivated mass shootings, 3) the role of American mass and social media in motivating mass killers and copycats, 4) the influence of American politics around firearm policy and the resultant impact upon the prevalence of mass shootings, 5) the role of American education in school mass shootings, and 6) the manner in which mental health and firearms policy contribute to America’s disproportionate mass shooting problem. 

We named the book All-American Massacre to reflect that nowhere else in the world has a mass shooting problem quite like America’s, and that these massacres may be better understood through the lens of American culture, institutions, and social structures. Shortly after choosing this title, we discovered that this is also the title of an unreleased horror film meant as a spin-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. As scholars who frequently think, write, research, and talk publicly about mass shootings, watching the rising number of incidents and deaths in recent years has indeed felt, at times, like being in a horror film. It is both our sincere hope and empirically informed view that more can be done to combat this threat. The United States is not inherently or inevitably predisposed to having more than our share of mass shooters. There is still reason for hope about reversing these trends. As concerned citizens and scholars, we are passionate about saving our nation from experiencing more of these terrible tragedies. Our country needs far more clarity, shared understanding, and desire to make progress on the issues covered in this volume. Otherwise, it will be a long time before we end this traumatizing cycle of horror and death.

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Looking at Religion, Politics, and COVID-19

Posted on March 8, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Paul Djupe and Amanda Friesen, coeditors of An Epidemic among My People, write about the impact of COVID-19 on collective action in religious communities.

If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people; If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. —II Chronicles 7:13–14 (King James Version)

A pandemic, unprecedented in nearly all of living human lifetimes, swept across continents starting in late 2019. By February 2021, total cases topped 100 million worldwide, with deaths numbering over 1.3 million. Understanding, explaining, and responding to this (preventable?) catastrophe has pitted science against ideology, pushed tensions among people of faith, and drawn sharp lines between people and their governments struggling to respond in reasonable ways with lives on the line. As social scientists interested in studying religion and society, we’ve been thinking and gathering data about the implications of the pandemic for our social institutions and individual behaviors as well as the reverse—how our social institutions shape responses to the pandemic. We see the pandemic response as a massive collective action problem—individuals need to cooperate with others and their governments at a time when the individual costs appear high in terms of restricted behavior, and the benefits are distant and collective.

Thinking about the pandemic in terms of collective action highlights core concerns in the social sciences regarding trust in others and in government, compliance with laws that are otherwise difficult to enforce, the availability and spread of accurate information, and the civil society forces that make or break effective governance. Though 1000s of articles have been published about the social science of COVID-19, we thought that a book-length treatment was necessary to mark this substantial moment in time. We were uniquely positioned to address these questions as many Americanist social scientists had secured funding, ethics approval, and organized plans to collect original survey data in a consequential presidential election year. Pivoting to ask about the pandemic in addition to religious and political inquiries provided a nimble responsiveness to events typically not available on the average academic budget. Yet, to fully understand the depth and breadth of these relationships, we needed experts across the social sciences of religion to tell the full story. One particularly rich data collection by the editors conducted in late March 2020 and then October 2020 was made available to our recruited authors who may not have access or funding to run their own studies. In this way, we were able to expand the number of voices interpreting our empirical results.

One of the values of this collection is the breadth and scope of how social scientists approach questions about religion and the COVID-19 pandemic. To keep the individual chapters in conversation with one another, we organized the chapters around three major themes. In the first part, we investigate the reaction of religious communities to pandemic public policies. Numerous churches, well covered in the media, defied state government public health orders, but how common was defiance in the broader population? What religious forces drove defiance?  Part II shifts gears to the courts and court of public opinion, exploring arguments of religious freedom versus public safety. Part III reverses the causal arrow to examine how the pandemic (and pandemic politics) affected group and individual religious choices, behavior, and beliefs.

Throughout, our contributors find a variety of novel insights that have not been aired elsewhere. Here is a sample. Much of the resistance to shut-down orders was linked to prosperity gospel beliefs, in which fervent belief recruited God’s protection from illness. And many religious adherents were more likely to adopt COVID conspiracy theories. Another finding is how Christian nationalists had little regard for protecting the vulnerable at the expense of liberty and the economy.

We looked for racial differences in congregational and clergy reactions given the frequent assertion that racial minority communities were hit harder than white communities. Surprisingly, we largely did not find disparate reactions organized by racial groups, and defiance to public health orders grew as people attended worship more across racial groups. We also saw that racial groups equally trust their clergy with their health, but African-Americans had less trust of medical professionals early in the pandemic.

Despite strong partisan lines drawn over restrictive public health orders, the public’s willingness to save people largely did not follow that pattern, though Trump remained a polarizing figure in related religious freedom cases. This is no surprise, in part due to his own rhetoric, but also because Christian Right organizations found common cause with Trump in the pandemic due to a connection to their historic commitments to law and order and against foreign threats.

An Epidemic among My People expands upon these findings, digging deeper into sources of pandemic information, the impact of the pandemic on religious behaviors, discussion of the legal battles, and more. Our goal was to provide a nearly comprehensive discussion of religion in public life.

Our Contributors: Daniel Bennett, Kraig Beyerlein, Cammie Jo Bolin, Ryan P. Burge, Angel Saavedra Cisneros, Ryon J. Cobb, Melissa Deckman, Joshua B. Grubbs, Don Haider-Markel, Ian Huff, Natalie Jackson, Jason Klocek, Benjamin Knoll, Andrew R. Lewis, Jianing Li, Natasha Altema McNeel, Matthew R. Miles, Shayla F. Olson, Diana Orcés, Samuel L. Perry, Jenna Reinbold, Kelly Rolfes-Haase, Stella M. Rouse, Justin A. Tucker, Dilara K. Üsküp, Abigail Vegter, Michael W. Wagner, Andrew L. Whitehead, Angelia R. Wilson, and the editors: Amanda Friesen and Paul Djupe, who also contributed chapters.

Amanda Friesen is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario and Canada Research Chair in Political Psychology (Tier 2).

Paul A. Djupe directs the Data for Political Research program at Denison University, is an affiliated scholar with PRRI, the series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple), and co-creator of religioninpublic.blog. Further information about his work can be found at his website and on Twitter.

An Epidemic among My People is available open access or for purchase

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Teaching Fear

Posted on January 11, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Nicole Rader, author of Teaching Fear explains how parents’ fear of crime influences how they (think they) protect their children.

Parents who watch the news regularly see images of kidnapping and homicide victims and hear about school and mass shootings. Most recently, parents were bombarded with images of four young college students at the University of Idaho who were brutally murdered while sleeping.  These horrific and fear-producing crimes make parents think twice about sending their children to school, activities outside the home, or anywhere. Parents teach kids how to protect themselves from crime when they are away from home and provide a variety of lessons about stranger danger. Studies have found that up to 70% of parents are afraid of crime for their children. A recent Gallup poll study found that one in three parents recently said that they were worried about their children being a victim of a school shooting. Fear of crime is high on the list of things parents worry about for their children.

Parents may be surprised to hear that most of their fears for their children are based on myths passed down from generation to generation and reinforced by the media. These myths emphasize a fear of strangers, a fear for young, white girls, and a belief that if one tries hard enough, victimization can be prevented.

Most parents are surprised to learn that strangers rarely hurt children. When children are victimized, they are typically victimized by a family member. 

Parents are also surprised to hear that children are rarely kidnapped, and a known offender typically takes those children who are kidnapped.

Finally, research has found that school shootings are sporadic and that children are actually safer at school than almost anywhere else, including the home.  

In other words, the reality of crimes against children looks quite different from what most parents have been taught to believe about crime and victimization. What this means for parents is that they often worry about the wrong types of crimes, people, and locations of crimes happening to their children. Crime myths, then, fuel fears of strangers, fears of kidnapping, fears of school shootings, and fears of public spaces, but, ultimately, when children are kidnapped or hurt by others, it is almost always a known person in a private location (like a home). 

Parents operating with misinformation make choices on keeping children safe by taking a litany of precautions that will have little payoff in protecting children from crime. Because of fears related to stranger danger, parents avoid public locations, restrict children from being alone outside (even in the front yard), track children on their phones, and expect constant communication with their children when they are unsupervised. This exhaustive list becomes the gold standard for protecting our children. 

What this list does not include are actionable items parents can take to arm their children with accurate knowledge about crime and victimization.  The conversations with children about how to talk to others if someone they know hurts them or how to seek help when they know about friends who are being hurt by loved ones are lacking by most parents. These conversations seem harder to most parents than talking about stranger danger.  

Teaching Fear examines where parents learn crime myths—from socialization agents like parents to school, and the media—and how these agents influence what parents teach their own children. I spent 20 years researching fear of crime and safety precautions, and did a deep dive into other research, public policy, and public opinion on crime to not only outline the problem of how we teach fear to children today, but also provides parents with the tools to “teach fear better.”  

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How Biopsychosocial Perspectives Help Explain Seemingly Unexplainable Crimes

Posted on February 16, 2022 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Chad Posick, Michael Rocque, and J. C. Barnes, coauthors of Fitting the Facts of Crime, write about the connections between gun availability, mental health, and masculinity in discussions about mass shootings.

The United States is no stranger to seemingly random acts of violence. Mass shootings, in which four or more are killed in a single attack on a public stage, are on the rise in both number of cases and number of victims per case in America. The question that most of us have when one of these highly publicized attacks happens is, “Why?” Why would someone shoot a school full of children? Why would someone shoot strangers at a concert? Why would someone target churchgoers? In the case of mass public shootings, they are defined as being unrelated to other forms of crime, such as gang violence or robberies. This means that the motivation and causes of mass public shootings remain cloudy.

As criminologists, we are often called upon for answers to questions about why such crimes occur. People have also not been shy to offer their opinions. It’s guns. It’s mental health. It’s racism. The perpetrators are just bad eggs or sociopaths.

For us, explaining these vicious crimes means moving beyond simplistic, all-or-nothing approaches. While it is attractive to try to isolate the one or two most “important” causes of mass public shootings, if we truly want to understand them, so that we can prevent them, we have to look at all relevant factors and how they intertwine in complex ways. And there is no better way to approach these questions than using the biopsychosocial perspective we promote in Fitting the Facts of Crime: An Invitation to Biopsychosocial Criminology.

One of the approaches we took in the book was to show how traditional, sociological perspectives are able to help us understand particular crime and justice patterns, but how, at the same time, they are incomplete. This is no less the case for mass public shootings. Let’s take a look at some of the more common social/environmental factors that the scholars and policy-makers often point to as causes of these attacks.

Guns

While there is debate about just how much mass public shootings are concentrated in the US, it seems reasonable to conclude that more attacks of this nature occur in America than elsewhere. This begs the question of what it is about the US that makes such attacks more likely to take place here?

One prominent factor that is mentioned in the news media and in scholarship is guns. The U.S. has a lot of guns. Some estimates indicate that there are nearly 400 million guns in this country; more guns than people. And since mass public shootings require access to guns, it is reasonable to wonder whether more guns leads to more mass public shootings.

There is a growing amount of research on the relationship between guns, gun control, and mass public shootings. Research has found that the public tends to favor gun control if they live near the site of a mass shooting. Some work has found that in places where gun laws are less strict, there are more mass shootings. Other research has examined how different gun laws influence mass public shootings. Several studies have shown that banning large capacity magazines, or magazines that hold more than 10 bullets, is associated with reduced mass shootings. Two of these studies showed that requiring a license to buy a handgun is also related to fewer mass shootings.

Interestingly, however, not every scholar is convinced that gun availability and gun control are significantly related to mass shootings. In fact, studies that show the importance of gun licenses and large capacity magazine bans have shown that other measures (such as assault weapons bans) do not affect mass shootings. In a recent study, conducted by one of us, the data have shown that gun availability by state is unrelated to incidence and severity of mass public shootings. While one study showed that gun ownership was strongly associated with mass public shootings internationally, guns are clearly not the only factor that explain these attacks. What is missing?

One factor to consider is that underlying individual characteristics make some people more likely to carry, and use, a gun. Genetic differences account for some of the variation in why one person will carry a gun and another will not. Researchers are also coming closer to identifying specific genetic differences associated with neurotransmission that explain gun carrying behavior. It may, then, be the combination of gun availability in society, coupled with individual characteristics, that lead to gun carrying and mass shootings.

Mental Health

Another controversial but widely discussed factor used to explain mass shootings is mental illness. After two particularly deadly mass public shootings in 2019, then President Donald Trump stated “Mental illness and hatred pulled the trigger. Not the gun.” This statement was met with immediate backlash from those arguing that mental illness is not a “predictor” of mass shootings.

Research focusing on public attacks has found that mass public shooters are disproportionately mentally ill. For example, in his dataset, Grant Duwe found that 61% of mass shooters suffered from a mental illness, which is far higher than estimates for the general population. While it is notoriously difficult to assess mental illness from open sources (commonly used to collect data on mass shootings), other research has confirmed that there are disproportionate rates of mental illness in populations of mass shooters.

Once again, though, this risk factor is certainly not sufficient to explain mass public shootings. The vast majority of those with mental illness will never commit gun crimes, let alone a mass public shooting. Additionally, we know that those with serious mental illness are actually more likely to be victimized by gun crimes than to commit them.

Interestingly, and related to our next factor, gender is related to mental illness and mass shootings. Research has shown that women have higher rates of mental illness than men across countries. Yet women almost never commit mass public shootings. Data show that women tend to be less than 6% of all mass public shooters.

Clearly, mass shootings cannot be reduced to mental illness, though it does appear to be an important factor. Mental illness is influenced by genetic factors and it may be that individuals who experience certain social stressors in conjunction with genetic predispositions are more likely to engage in mass shootings compared to others in society. Once again, this highlights the importance of considering the interconnected nature of biology and the social world.

We agree with the summary statement in a recent study examining the link between mass killers and neurodevelopmental disorders, “These extreme forms of violence may be a result of a highly complex interaction of biological, psychological and sociological factors.”  

Masculinity

As just mentioned, mass public shooters are overwhelmingly men. In Duwe’s data, roughly 99% of mass public shooters were men. In other research with less restrictive definitions, this figure is lower, but still above 90%.

Unlike the other issues we have discussed, there is little dissensus on the finding that mass public shooters are almost always male. Some research—but not much!—has attempted to understand this pattern. In some work, masculinity is identified as a primary factor. Some scholars suggest that mass shootings may be viewed as a “masculine” way to regain control that has been lost. The theory is that when certain men feel they have been denied masculinity, they react in particularly deadly ways. However defined, though, denial of masculinity is clearly more prevalent than mass public shootings.

Masculinity, gender, and sex, may be more relevant in mass shootings that target women or families. But attacks motivated by grievances against women only represent about 34% of mass public shootings, according to some work. Thus, other factors are likely at play.

Furthermore, while female mass public shooters are rare, they do occur. For example, one recent study of 18 female mass public shooters found that they were more similar to male mass public shooters than female general murder offenders.

Masculine identity is not simply due to parental or peer socialization—although that can certainly add to how one views themselves and society. It is an outgrowth of evolutionary processes that extend far back into our ancestral past. Efforts to promote the positive aspects of masculinity while tempering the negative aspects—often called toxic masculinity—will require concerted effort and a thorough understanding of the complex bio, psycho, and social aspects of human nature.

Putting it Together

In our view, gun availability, mental health, and masculine identity are all contributing factors to mass shootings in the U.S. The holy grail of behavioral science is to identify necessary and sufficient causes of a human behavior. Yet none of these factors fit that profile—although gun access is necessary to commit a mass shooting, having access to a gun is not a sufficient explanation. And as we outlined above, it not necessary to suffer from a mental illness nor is it necessary to have toxic masculinity.

When necessary and sufficient causes are elusive, behavioral scientists face a more complicated reality. All risk factors must be included, studied, and considered. This includes factors beyond simple socialization explanations. Instead, we must consider that humans are the product of millions of years of evolution, genetics, and socialization. To focus on only one aspect misses the others and, for us, will result in ineffective policy. In Fitting the Facts of Crime, we lay out what we see as the most promising approaches to understanding these types of crimes and offer policy suggestions we believe can help us prevent crime and intervene if necessary.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, cultural studies, Education, ethics, gender studies, health, law & criminology, Mass Media and Communications, race and ethnicity, sociology, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

A Q&A with Temple University Press’ new Editorial Assistant, Will Forrest

Posted on September 22, 2021 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we get to learn more about Temple University Press’s new editorial assistant, Will Forrest, who joined the Temple University Press staff this week.


You are “returning” to the Press having worked here as a student. Can you talk about your experiences at the Press?

I first worked as an intern for TUP during my senior year as an undergraduate, mostly working on rights and contracts. I was amazed at the variety of responsibilities I was handed and their importance. It was not your typical mindless gofer intern busy work. I loved my time as an intern and got a feel for nearly every aspect of what it takes to publish a book. I am overjoyed to return as an editorial assistant!

What book(s) do you like to read/are you currently reading?

I am currently reading By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age by Paul Boyer. History is probably my biggest love, and oddly enough, I have been interested in the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war for most of my life (although the Soviet Union did not exist when I was born). I am also rereading Anthony Heilbut’s The Gospel Sound, his look at the vibrant and often underappreciated world of African-American gospel music. It might be my favorite book on American music.

Has any single book made a particularly strong impression on you? (What and why or how)?

Many of my strongest responses to books came early in my life, and the book that I credit with really sparking my interest in writing and storytelling is Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. It was the first book I remembered reading where I felt like I identified with the character, understood that he was speaking from a unique point of view, and made me feel less isolated. It launched me into reading Blume’s other books as well as other stories about teenagers and young adults. I still find that I especially like reading novels and consuming other media about young people, and my creative ideas are often filled with young people working things out.

You have an interest in playwriting. Can you tell us about that?

I have loved theater for most of my life, and writing has also been a major part of my life, but it wasn’t until around college that the two began to dovetail. I like the freedom and sparseness of writing plays compared to other forms. Most of my play ideas end up being rooted in history one way or another, and often my plays are places to string together seemingly separate interests and ideas I have. I actually have a play I wrote being read online at Temple this fall called Window of Vulnerability about nuclear war planning and its psychological impact on ordinary people during the Cold War.

When and how do you read?

I am a very undisciplined reader. I typically read in the evenings after most of my daily business is done, and read essentially until I get tired or disinterested, whichever comes first. Even if I am very engaged by a book I don’t usually feel the urge to finish it right there and then, and I sometimes then end up reading multiple books at a time. 

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

I would venture to say that many of my books on the Cold War might surprise some given the event took place before I was born. One that might surprise most people, especially people of a certain age, is Richard Zoglin’s biography HOPE of Bob Hope. It’s natural to wonder why any young person would be interested in the life of a comedian known for being a conservative square who performed well past his prime and toured the world with the USO. But American entertainment history is a major interest of mine, and like him or not (and some of his early movies aren’t bad), there are few entertainers as important to 20th century America as Bob Hope.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?

To be honest, I never really identified much with superheroes or superhero/comic culture in general aside from watching some of the films. I used to wear a Superman t-shirt that I won in a crane machine on the NJ boardwalk when I was much younger, and I suppose I still think he’s pretty cool. I also like Superman because he’s not as omnipresent as the Marvel heroes in today’s culture.

What Temple University Press book has particular meaning to you (and why)?

This is an unusual and obscure choice, but it is a book the Press published in 1974 called Broadcasting in Africa: A Continental Survey of Radio and Television. When my brother, who shares many of the same historical interests I do, found out I worked for the Temple University Press and that they had a library of their catalog, one of the first things he asked me about was this book. He wanted to know if they had it because it is very hard to find and one of the only books written during the era on the topic. It was this experience that made me realize the unique vision of TUP to publish pioneering works on topics that are not often written about, and it crystallized that the books TUP publishes are interesting to many diverse groups, including my brother.

What Temple University Press book would you recommend to someone?

I think Mary Lou Nemanic’s recent Metro Dailies in the Age of Multimedia Journalism is an incredibly important read for anyone who cares about truth. As local newspapers shutter around the country in the face of the digital revolution, especially in smaller communities, local stories and viewpoints slowly start to disappear from the nationwide conversation along with their invaluable investigations. Local dailies are often the first papers to report on what will become major national stories, and when they fall on hard times, things start to fall through the cracks.

What book will you read next?

My backlog of books to read is quite extensive. I have Peter Guralnick’s biography of Sam Cooke entitled Dream Boogie on my shelf, and as a huge fan of Cooke, that era of American music, and Guralnick’s other books, I will devour it. I also just bought Vincent J. Indonti’s African Americans Against the Bomb and am very excited to read it.

What three writers would you invite to a dinner party?

Even though I read largely non-fiction, I think great fiction storytellers might make better dinner party guests because of their natural inclination towards dreaming worlds and listening to their characters. So I would invite Judy Blume and Elena Ferrante, two of my favorite living novelists (I hopefully will have learned Italian to speak with Elena) as well as Sarah Ruhl, a playwright I admire very much. I would pay homage and hopefully we would spend the evening talking about everything other than their work. I’m also not much of a cook, so if any of them have any specialties or feel inclined to provide courses, I would be ecstatic.

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, civil rights, cultural studies, drama, Education, History, literature, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, transnational politics | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Election books

Posted on October 28, 2020 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, in anticipation of the upcoming election, we showcase titles on political campaigns and voting.

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century, by Keneshia N. Grant
Examines the political impact of Black migration on politics in three northern cities, 1914-1965

Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics, by Susan Herbst
How American politics can become more civil and amenable to public policy situations, while still allowing for effective argument

Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy, edited by Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele
How and why women run for office

Gender Differences in Public Opinion: Values and Political Consequences, by Mary-Kate Lizotte
Explores the gender gap in public opinion through a values lens

Philadelphia Battlefields: Disruptive Campaigns and Upset Elections in a Changing City, by John Kromer
How upstart political candidates achieved spectacular successes over Philadelphia’s entrenched political establishment

Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategies in Political Campaigns, by Kelly Dittmar
Explores how candidates and campaign professionals navigate the gendered terrain of political campaigns

Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. Political Campaigns, by Charlton D, Mcllwain, and Stephen M. Caliendo
Why, when, and how often candidates use race appeals, and how the electorate responds

On the Stump: Campaign Oratory and Democracy in the United States, Britain, and Australia, by Sean Scalmer
The story of how the “stump speech” was created, diffused, and helped to shape the modern democracies of the Anglo-American world

Latino Mayors: Political Change in the Postindustrial City, edited by Marion Orr and Domingo Morel
The first book to examine the rise of Latino mayors in the United States

Campaign Advertising and American Democracy, by Michael M Franz, Paul Freedman, Ken Goldstein, and Travis N Ridout
Surprising findings about the positive effects of political advertising

Choices and Changes: Interest Groups in the Electoral Process, by Michael M. Franz
The most comprehensive book about interest groups in recent American politics

Why Veterans Run: Military Service in American Presidential Elections, 1789-2016, by Jeremy M. Teigen
Why more than half of American presidential candidates have been military veterans—and why it matters

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, civil rights, Education, ethics, gender studies, History, immigration, latinos, law & criminology, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, philosophy, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Social Distancing with Shakespeare

Posted on April 15, 2020 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Jeffrey Wilson, author of Shakespeare and Trump, writes about why people are cycling experiences with coronavirus through Shakespeare.

First came the meme to wash hands for the duration of Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot” speech.

Soon society was shutting down. “I’m worried about Covid-19 causing theatres to go dark,” tweeted theater-maker @MediocreDave on March 9, 2020. “Not because I’ll lose income, but because we’ll inevitably be subjected to opportunistic Shakespeare scholars making smug but superficial analogies to the playhouse closures of the late Elizabethan plague years.” That’ll be the end of that, I thought.

The next day, Slate ran a piece from Ben Cohen, “The Infectious Pestilence Did Reign: How the Plague Ravaged William Shakespeare’s World and Inspired his Work, from Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth.” Two days later, Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith was historicizing appropriations of Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing scene for Penguin Books. Another two days, and The Atlantic ran Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s “Shakespeare Wrote His Best Works During a Plague.”

The content of these essays—Shakespeare born in plague, shuttered theaters prompting his poetry, Romeo and Juliet derailed by quarantine, playwrights sustained by wealthy patrons, disease threatening rival acting troupes, great art created in isolation—is not as fascinating as the questions raised by their method. Why are people cycling experiences with coronavirus through Shakespeare? What do we gain from comparisons between social distancing in Shakespeare’s time and in ours? How might our experiences with social distancing help us better understand Shakespeare’s? How can these examples help us think about academic work in 2020?

On March 14, @rosannecash caused a collective groan by tweeting, “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.”

Twitter did its thing. “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” wrote @sydneeisanelf. “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he masturbated incessantly,” said @emilynussbaum.

With doors shuttered, some theaters offered plays and programming online, free to the public, including Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theater, the Public Theater, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Then came pop-up performances like Patrick Stewart’s #ASonnetADay and The Two Gentleman of Verona on Zoom. What is the value of art in times of social distancing? How is social distancing changing the way art is done? Based on the analogy to Shakespeare, what might the art that comes out of coronavirus look like?

Academics followed suit. On March 23, Andy Kesson, Callan Davies, and Emma Whipday launched A Bit Lit, featuring open-access, of-the-moment interviews with early-modern literary scholars. What is the role of humanistic thought and conversation in times of social distancing? What is the importance—if any—of studying Shakespeare when society is in such turmoil?

Social distancing with Shakespeare soon became A Thing. Kathryn Harkup in The Telegraph on March 15; Andrew Dickson in The Guardian on March 22; James Shapiro on CNN on March 30. The genre was common enough to call for satire. On April 1, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner wrote “What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague” for The New Yorker: “Day 25: Definitely too dark. Keep the mood light! No one wants to see a tragedy after a plague.”

Emma Smith tackled that tension with a straight face in the New York Times, arguing that “[Shakespeare’s] fictions reimagine the macro-narrative of epidemic as the micro-narrative of tragedy.” Is our experience with coronavirus tragic? What makes something tragic?

Elsewhere in the New York Times, Ian Wheeler cited Shakespeare to argue that, in America, “We need a better patronage system for artists.” In The New Yorker, James Shapiro lobbed Coriolanus-shaped bombs at the Trump administration: “The casual insults, the condescension, and the refusal to accept responsibility will be familiar to anyone who has lately tuned in to the daily White House briefings on the coronavirus pandemic.”

Shakespeare and Trump_smThese various ShakesTakes sift into terms developed in Shakespeare and Trump, my recent book about the surprising—and bizarre—relationship between the provincial English playwright and the billionaire President of the United States. There are the ShakesMemes. There are the Politicitations. And there is the Shaxtivism.

Above all, the Shakespearean gloss on social distancing shows the power—and pitfalls—of Public Shakespeare, where scholars eschew peer-reviewed academic writing in favor of public engagement.

I come not to bury Public Shakespeare, nor to praise it. I want to ask what it is, where it comes from, how it works, and why it elicits simultaneous enthusiasm and nausea. What is behind the push in some scholars to filter current events through Shakespeare? What is behind the tendency in others to get annoyed when they do?

Why are Shakespeareans suddenly authorities on everything—from presidential politics to social distancing? At a time when Donald Trump nonchalantly disclaims, “I’m not a doctor,” then proceeds to use his power and platform to promote hydroxychloroquine, why are Shakespeare scholars going widely outside their areas of expertise surrounding a 400-year-old English playwright to comment on current events?

Four points:

  1. As an early-modern playwright who often represented medieval and ancient history, Shakespeare built into his texts the practice of engaging the present with the distant past.
  2. As artworks that often have scholarly sources, yet are performed for a broad audience of mixed social backgrounds, Shakespeare’s plays have public engagement built into them.
  3. The long tradition of modern-dress Shakespearean performance and adaptation provides a model for scholars looking to bring ideas that are old and artistic into conversation with current events.
  4. At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, Public Shakespeare gives scholars a platform to illustrate the practicality and utility of our field.

There is tremendous energy right now behind public-facing ShakesWork with an ethical if not activist edge. There is also legitimate skepticism of that endeavor. As @ClearShakes wrote on April 12, “Guys, sometimes there just isn’t a Shakespeare play that’s relevant to our situation.”

But recognizing Public Shakespeare as more closely related to Shakespearean performance than Shakespearean scholarship helps us understand why, like any show that takes creative risks, some cheer and some hiss.

 

Filed under: american studies, art, cultural studies, drama, Education, ethics, History, literature, Mass Media and Communications, philosophy, political science, sociology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

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