For fifty years, American opinion on abortion barely moved.  Then the Dobbs decision happened. 

Posted on May 6, 2026 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Laurel Elder, Steven Greene, and Mary-Kate Lizotte, coauthors of Not Going Back: Public Opinion on Abortion in Post-Dobbs America, explain how and why public opinion has shifted since the Dobbs decision. 

June 2026 marks four years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion access. This anniversary provides an important opportunity to assess how public opinion has evolved in the wake of this seismic shift.

We have spent our careers researching gender and public opinion, from the gender gap, to the politics of parenthood, to views on candidate spouses. It was a natural extension of our work to examine abortion, one of the most visible and consequential gender-related issues in American politics.

Our research on abortion attitudes began well before Dobbs. What initially drew our attention was the remarkable stability of public opinion on the issue. While political debates often framed the issue as a stark divide between “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” most Americans held more nuanced, situational views, supporting legal access to abortion in some circumstances but not others. Despite high-profile political battles and public debate, aggregate public opinion on abortion remained strikingly stable for nearly half a century.

Dobbs disrupted that equilibrium. In Not Going Back we examine how and why public opinion has shifted and how American politics has been changed as a result.

As policy moved sharply to the right in the wake of Dobbs, with more than a dozen states enacting near-total abortion bans and others enacting strict limitations, public opinion moved in the opposite direction. More Americans now identify as pro-choice and support legal access to abortion under all circumstances. The result is a growing disconnect between law and public sentiment, one that is reshaping the political landscape.

One of our most notable findings is the emergence of a gender gap in abortion attitudes. Contrary to common assumptions, men and women held very similar views on abortion for decades. After Dobbs, however, women have become significantly more supportive of abortion rights than men.

This shift is driven in part by personal experience and exposure. Individuals who know someone who has struggled to access abortion care, who worry about losing access themselves, or who have a deeper understanding of reproductive health are more likely to support abortion rights. In the post-Dobbs environment, exposure to these realities has increased, especially among women.

We also find a notable reversal in issue prioritization. For decades, Republicans and those identifying as pro-life were more likely to rank abortion as a top political issue. After Dobbs, that dynamic flipped. The energy and urgency now lie with those who support expanded access to abortion.

This shift reflects, in part, divisions within the Republican coalition. While Democratic voters are largely aligned with their party’s pro-choice stance, Republicans are more internally divided. Roughly one-third of Republicans identify as pro-choice, creating a sizable group of cross-pressured voters. Our research shows that such cross-pressures are associated with lower voter turnout in the post-Dobbs era, posing an ongoing challenge for the GOP.

Our findings also highlight a key political reality: there is no widely accepted “moderate” abortion ban. In survey experiments, Americans did not view a 12-week ban as meaningfully more acceptable than a 6-week ban. In the post-Dobbs context, a ban is a ban, and bans are broadly unpopular. This creates a difficult strategic landscape for Republican candidates seeking to find more moderate positions on abortion.

The phrase that became our title—Not Going Back—emerged from the data. The forces reshaping public opinion, from policy change to increased personal exposure, are not temporary. As a result, public opinion is unlikely to return to its pre-Dobbs equilibrium. This new landscape will shape how candidates campaign, who wins elections, and how they govern. In short, Dobbs did not simply change policy; it set in motion a lasting transformation in American public opinion and politics.

We invite you to explore these findings in our new book.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, Education, ethics, gender studies, health, History, law & criminology, Mass Media and Communications, political science, sexuality, sociology, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Sentencing Reform without Sentencing Guidelines

Posted on October 10, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Rhys Hester, author of Sentencing without Guidelines, writes about how one state addressed punishment without sentencing guidelines.

 

Unlike many areas of contemporary law and policy, American crime and punishment largely rests at the state and local level. Well over 90% of crime is handled at the state level, and states retain the authority to adopt a wide variety of approaches to crime and punishment. Some states have sentencing guidelines although a majority do not; most states utilize parole but some have abolished it; some states aggressively prosecute drug activity while others have legalized or decriminalized some drugs; and states differ dramatically on how lenient or punitive they are toward similar offenses. As a result, states also vary widely on important outcome measures, such as their respective per capita imprisonment rates and the level of racial disparities in prisons. At the low end, some states imprison around 100 individuals per 100,000 residents in their state population. At the high end are states that imprison over 500 individuals per 100,000 residents, and in the not-so-distant past some states had imprisonment rates as high as 1,000.

Because there is so much variation in states’ approaches to crime and punishment, scholars are keenly interested in what we can learn about effective sentencing policy by comparing jurisdictions. One obstacle to leveraging the differences has been in obtaining data. A wave of reform in the 1980s and 1990s led to about 20 states (and the federal system) establishing sentencing commissions and adopting sentencing guidelines. Guidelines were a blessing and a curse from a scholarship perspective. On the one hand, commissions collected and disseminated comprehensive data that theretofore had been unattainable. On the other hand, while guidelines-based research proliferated, non-guidelines states (which, again, continue to make up the majority of states and include many of the largest jurisdictions, e.g., California, New York, and Texas) were neglected.

My book, Sentencing Without Guidelines, takes advantage of a historical serendipity to closely examine sentencing policies and practices, and their impacts, in South Carolina. Though it remains a non-guidelines state, judges and legislators explored the idea of guidelines for the better part of two decades, and as part of those efforts established a now-defunct sentencing commission which collected statewide data. I investigated sentencing policy in the state with the use of that data, supplemented by interviews of the state’s trial judges. The results provide a surprising sketch.

One surprise was that even though judges are not bound by guidelines, sentencing decisions throughout the state and across judges were relatively uniform. For most crimes judges have an enormous amount of discretion. For example, the penalty for Second Degree Burglary can range from 0 to 15 years in prison. Much of the academic research on sentencing finds significant variation across judges, and also across geographic locations, giving rise to a key concept of “local legal culture”—the idea that local court communities create their own working norms that lead to punishment outcomes differing significantly from place to place within the same state. These local variations persist even in states with norm-centering sentencing guidelines, so to see less variation in a state without guidelines was a puzzle.

I investigated further by launching a second phase of the research, this one based on qualitative interviews with state trial court judges. These interviews uncovered important answers, and also provided punishment reform insights that could be transferrable to other jurisdictions.

A key theme to emerge from the judge interviews was the impact of a court system practice of “judicial rotation.” Under this outdated ractice of “riding circuit,” South Carolina trial court judges continued to rotate from county to county, often holding terms of court in a dozen or more different counties throughout the year. Traditionally, circuit riding was necessary as, for example, judges from a colonial town might periodically travel to an emerging town that had no judge in order to facilitate the rule of law in new territories. As time went on most states dropped the practice, but it remains a feature of the state constitution in South Carolina.

The practice of judicial rotation led to a more statewide rather than county-based development of legal norms. Judges floated in and out, cross-pollinating ideas and approaches to other counties, and each county was influenced by a rotating cast of judges. Another fascinating and unintended consequence of rotation was the emergence of “plea judges,” an informal title judges used to refer to a small minority of judges who were known for their lenient sentencing.

According to the interviews, parties throughout the state knew the reputations of these plea judges. Because over 98% of cases in South Carolina are resolved by guilty pleas rather than jury trials, sentencing outcomes are dominated by these plea decisions. Circuit rotation leads to a virtual marketplace for judge shopping. When a harsh judge is in town holding court, a defendant can usually find a way to avoid entering a plea, holding out for a week when a more favorable plea judge might be rotating into town. During plea-judge weeks, court business is bustling as many defendants are willing to have their cases pled to and sentenced in front of a plea judge.

Based on the interview data, it appears that judges fall into one of three categories, which I labeled “plea judges,” “pragmatic judges,” and “hanging judges.” Although a minority, the plea judges create a marketplace of sentencing that influences many other judges who end up taking a pragmatic approach to sentencing that accepts the realities of plea judges in the system of rotation. These pragmatic judges might prefer to impose a harsher sentence, but they understand that time is a premium in the criminal justice system and acknowledge that defendants can maneuver for a more favorable judge. Accordingly, they will often accede to more lenient sentences reflective of the plea-judge norms to keep dockets moving. According to the judges, even prosecutors are often accepting of these plea-judge norms, preferring the sure conviction of a guilty plea and the steady movement of cases. There were, however, a handful of “hanging judges” who refused to abide by the plea-judge norms. These judges often end up being assigned to preside over jury trials rather than terms of plea court because of the reluctance of defendants to plead guilty in front of them.

There’s a well-known Aristotelean maxim that continues to define our pursuit of justice in punishment: like cases should be treated alike, and different cases should be treated differently. Guidelines are one way of attempting to sway this balance between uniformity and discretion in sentencing. Policymakers should also be aware of the powerful influences of culture and informal norms.

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A Hopefully Realistic Take on the Future of Democracy

Posted on April 10, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, David Campbell, author of Democracy’s Hidden Heroes, writes about the cultures of the bureaucratic and communal worlds.

It’s a little intimidating to have your book published on the same day that Taylor Swift’s new album drops. Even if everyone reading this blog rushes out to buy my book, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes, it will be hard to keep up in the sales competition!

But Taylor and I share something in common. We both use small, everyday stories to tell a larger story worth hearing. While the particular stories can stand on their own, it is their accumulation that packs a narrative punch.

My stories were gathered over three decades and draw on over 2,000 interviews with local bureaucrats, nonprofit directors, and other community leaders. I use their highly particular accounts of daily hassles to tell a larger story about democratic governance—what it requires, why it is so routinely difficult, but also why it often works better than we might expect. In this story, the bureaucrats we have been taught are narrow-minded rule followers often turn out to be the creative agents rescuing policy from implementation roadblocks. They don’t always succeed, but their efforts are worthy of our attention.

Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is a hopefully realistic book that counters the current pessimism about the future of democracy. Much of that pessimism stems from our division into two warring tribes. But instead of a left-right distinction let us imagine that the names of the two tribes are bureaucracy and community.

The culture of the bureaucratic world is captured in terms like standardization, specialization, formality, and uniform treatment. Its language is primarily metric—things exist to be counted, measured, and controlled.

The culture of the communal world is captured in terms like craftsmanship, social networks, local knowledge, and informal agreements. In this world communication is infused with stories. Nuance and discretion are always necessary because we are dealing with individual human beings and unique local circumstances.

Now imagine that these two worlds routinely meet and often collide, often in grants designed on high and implemented locally. Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is about the governance spaces where these collisions happen and the people who work in those spaces. These “heroes” live with a foot in both the bureaucratic world and the communal world and the burden of their work is to reconcile those worlds, however difficult that reconciliation may be. This burdened work is the secret sauce without which public policy will fail, not matter how well-intended or well-funded.

The protagonists in my story—government and foundation funders, on the one hand, and participants in networks of benevolent community care, on the other—share the common goal of improving the health and well-being of children, families, and communities. They are partners in a quest to produce tangible results, driven by their own civic motivations and increasingly by accountability demands imposed by others. The funders have the resources and some types of expertise that the community partners need. Network participants have local knowledge without which the funders’ initiatives cannot be adapted successfully to place and personal circumstance. If they could find a way to bring their capacities together, we could reasonably expect better policy and programmatic outcomes and with them a badly needed uptick in public trust in government.

By paying attention to the way the hidden heroes reconcile these two worlds—their way of embracing contraries—we can learn profound lessons that inform our politics, policy processes, and democratic culture. We learn how to become conversant in two distinct languages of public life and how to balance the alternative forms of knowledge on which bureaucracy and community networks rely. We learn to emphasize crossover roles: experts as community members; community members as experts. We learn to put more stake in learning from experience and less on pre-set strategies. We learn how to treat rules as starting points for negotiation. We learn to evaluate short-term programs not in isolation but in light of the dynamics of the community networks in which they are embedded and long-term trajectories of community change. These are the sorts of strategies and approaches needed to navigate difference democratically.  

The hidden heroes know that the voice of the people has no efficacy if there are not resources and staffing and expertise to turn that voice into programs and policies that work. They also know that the policy wonks and bureaucratic experts will always be wielding blunt instruments, such that the work of fitting policy to people and place will always be critical to achieving the results we want.

And here’s the good news: we already have a huge cadre of mid-level bureaucrats and nonprofit directors who have extraordinary experience in finding a way to marry the best of bureaucracy with the best of community voice. Hopefully, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes will play a role in introducing their collective wisdom to a broader audience of academics, students, and practitioners. 

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The struggles of Black migrants and refugees are everyone’s problem

Posted on February 7, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Philip Krestedemas, coeditor of Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations, writes about the impact of the wet foot/dry foot policy.

The U.S. government’s wet foot/dry foot policy for Cuban and Haitian refugees, which was rolled out in the mid-1990s, is often cited as an example of the racially biased double standards that are baked into U.S. refugee policy. Under this policy, Cuban asylum seekers who touched ground on U.S. soil were eligible to receive asylum. Haitians who did the same thing were detained and returned to Haiti. But on closer inspection, the wet foot/dry foot policy is not just a story about how Haitian refugees were treated differently from Cubans.  It’s also a story about how the exclusionary treatment of Haitians established a precedent that weakened asylum rights for all Caribbean asylum seekers.
            The disparate treatment of Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers is most apparent in the way the “dry foot” criterion was applied (i.e., what happened once refugees reached U.S. soil).  The “wet foot” criterion was applied the same way to Cubans and Haitians. This wasn’t much of a change for Haitian refugees. For Cuban refugees, on the other hand, it marked the end of the more generous “open arms” policy that had been in effect since the early 1960s. Under the “open arms” policy, Cuban refugees were fast-tracked for asylum whether they were apprehended at sea or on the shores of south Florida. Under wet foot/dry foot, this generous asylum policy was limited to Cubans who touched U.S. soil. Cubans who were apprehended at sea were treated no different from Haitians. 
            The saga of wet foot/dry foot is just one example of a story that has repeated itself many times over in U.S. history. Black communities are often the first to be affected by deprivations, coercions, and incursions on personal liberty that, eventually, spread to the wider society. Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations aims to give the reader an insight into the depth of this problem, examining it from several theoretical, historical, and geo-political vantage points.The book’s contributors note that anti-Black racism doesn’t just describe a group-specific experience of race; it is foundational to the structures of thought and feeling that gave rise to the modern world. One implication of this analysis is that the problems that Black people contend with can tell you a lot about problems that pervade our entire society. 
            Think of a house that is built on top of a sinkhole. The people on the bottom floor of the house are more at risk of falling into the sinkhole. The people on the upper floors of the house may not feel the same sense of urgency to address the problem and may feel comforted by the thought that they are in a somewhat better situation. But they are ignoring the fact that when the foundation finally gives way, everyone’s falling into the hole. 
            This may not be a perfect metaphor, but it captures a dynamic that is very common to the Black experience. Haitians, for example, were the first U.S. refugee population to be subjected to mandatory detention. Thirty years later, mandatory detention is not only standard for most asylum seekers in the US., it has become the norm for how governments around the world manage refugee populations.  The same can be said for the interdiction practices initially rolled out to control Haitian asylum seekers in the 1980s. These were expanded throughout the 1980s and 1990s to all refugees trying to enter the U.S. by water, imitated by European governments in the 2000s that were trying to control flows of African and Asian refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean, and were also cited as a precedent by the U.S. government in the 2010s when it rolled out programs to control the growing numbers of asylum seekers (mostly Central American, but also including Haitians and many other nationalities) at the US–Mexico border. These are just some examples from the recent history of U.S. refugee policy.  You can find similar processes at work in the U.S. history of mass incarceration, predatory lending practices in housing markets, unsafe work conditions in low-wage employment sectors, medical neglect in the health care sector, and the list goes on.
            Although Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations is focused on the migrant experience, it engages this experience with an eye to the bigger picture I’ve just described.  Our analysis is premised on the understanding that the Black experience can be used as a starting point for diagnosing problems that affect everyone, and also in a way that elevates the value of Black life. But in order to do this, we have to step outside of the ways of seeing that normalize all of the problems I’ve just described. This sums up  the purpose of the book—to invite the reader to take this step.
 

The issues raised by this blog will be discussed in more depth at a free webinar hosted by the Acacia Center for Justice, to be held on Monday, February 26, 3pm (EST), featuring faculty from Morehouse College, Temple, and Bowdoin Universities and guest speakers from Undocublack, Families for Freedom and the Haitian Bridge Alliance. Click here for more info and to register.  

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, civil rights, cultural studies, Education, ethics, History, immigration, latinos, philosophy, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Discussions on the labor market and the purposes of education

Posted on October 4, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Neil Kraus, author of The Fantasy Economy, explains the roots of education’s defensive political posture.

Growing up in the deindustrialized city of Syracuse, New York, I knew firsthand the importance of manufacturing jobs and labor unions. Once industry left an area and took thousands of unionized jobs with it, cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest changed dramatically. This was the history of deindustrialization, a history I watched unfold on the nightly news in the 1970s and 80s. 

As a high school student in the 1980s, I still recall the dominant narrative of failing schools as the cause of our changing economy that was unleashed by the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk report in 1983. As deindustrialization took hold, the education system was assigned the impossible task of providing the population with economic opportunity because, according to conventional wisdom, we had entered a “knowledge economy.”          

Decades later, as a scholar of urban politics, I became aware of the political battles over development projects and local subsidies that routinely took place in cities and frequently determined mayoral and city council elections. While a new arena brings many jobs downtown, what kinds of jobs are these? When the dust settled, after local officials had authorized tax abatements and ribbons were cut, most jobs would be low-wage, low-education jobs in hospitality and related fields. There would typically be few well-paid jobs requiring higher education. Political discussion often became about the total number of jobs rather than the types of jobs created by development. Yet the idea that we had entered a knowledge economy had become conventional wisdom. 

As a professor of political science for over 20 years, my students have long told me about their experiences in the labor market. And not just students in political science, but also those in many other fields who took my classes. While some students thrived, many struggled to find jobs commensurate with their education level.  And student debt was a recurring theme as well.        

Yet in meeting after meeting on my campus, I heard my administrators say the same kinds of things to faculty–that we were in a knowledge economy; that local business leaders could never find enough skilled workers; that in the coming years, there would be many new, exciting jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. For our students to thrive in the knowledge economy, the university had to equip them with the right skills because the labor market was continuously “upskilling.” And all claims along these lines were based on data. 

These themes were also repeated endlessly in most media discussions on the labor market and the purposes of education. The notion that education is also about creating informed citizens in a democracy had become antiquated. When someone would try to make this case in higher education, the clear implication was that this person just didn’t get it. She was an anachronism. Because we lived in a knowledge economy, it was up to higher education to determine the livelihoods of our students. And if citizens themselves didn’t like their standard of living, they should get more education, or skills.       

When I began to research the labor market using official data, I quickly discovered that the real economy looked quite different than what we were hearing on campus. The real economy had an abundance of low-wage, low-education jobs, yet the educational attainment of the population has continually increased in recent decades.       

In sum, I discovered that what we were hearing on campus and in most media discussions was largely an illusion. Yet the uncritical acceptance of a high-education, high-skill economy in which the education system and workforce are always assumed to be inadequate explained education’s permanently defensive political posture. While the real economy explained everything, in higher education, we were operating within the parameters of what I call the fantasy economy.

The Fantasy Economy chronicles the political campaign that brought us to this point, a campaign that began in the 1980s with the Reagan administration but has roots that go back much further. It’s a story of interest-group politics, in which business interests, foundations, and the institutions and researchers they fund engage in a continuous effort to frame the issue of wage stagnation and growing inequality as solely a function of the education system. 

The fantasy economy has been a remarkably successful campaign and helps explain how neoliberalism came to be. Education has been blamed for things well beyond its control, while elites have created an economy that has worked well for a small minority. To get beyond the fantasy economy, we need to ground discussion and policy in the real economy, focusing on the many proximate causes of the distribution of jobs as well as wage rates. This will allow us to reclaim the many purposes of education in a democracy as an institution designed to create an informed citizenry and cultivate meaning and purpose in life.       

Filed under: american studies, cultural studies, Education, ethics, History, Labor Studies, Mass Media and Communications, political science, race and ethnicity, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Celebrating Disability Pride

Posted on July 26, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Eileen Bellemore and Kirsten Behling, two of the coauthors of Disability Services in Higher Education, write about promoting equal access for disabled students.

July is Disability Pride Month, a time to recognize disability as an important part of our diverse identities. It provides an opportunity to share in the pride that disabiled individuals bring to our communities. But as we take this time to support those with disabilities, it is also important to acknowledge that the disabled community is often overlooked, undervalued, and excluded.

Although significant progress has been made since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law 33 years ago today, there is still much work to be done. This month is an opportunity to celebrate and raise awareness of the many ways in which people with disabilities enrich our lives, but it’s also a time to assess how we can become more accessible and inclusive in our thoughts, actions, and environments. Disability Services in Higher Education: An Insider’s Guide focuses on the important role that disability services professionals play as agents of change, working tirelessly to promote full and equal access for disabled students in higher education.

This unique resource provides theoretical and practical content that promotes understanding of the disability services field and encourages discussions to enhance accessibility and inclusivity in higher education. And it provides an assortment of acronyms as well as insights from five authors with 70 years of collective experience in supporting students with disabilities.

Support for college students with disabilities is legally required under the ADA. However, there is no standard blueprint for this complex work. Disability Services in Higher Education provides this blueprint for a wide audience, including new and seasoned professionals, faculty and institutional partners, K-12 educators, and college consultants.

Part one provides an overview of how institutions serve students with disabilities and acknowledges that disability service offices vary widely in staff experience, institutional buy-in, philosophies, and resources.

The second part of the book takes a macro- and micro-level view of the field, looking at office structure and location, staffing levels, models of service provision, spaces we occupy, budgets, onboarding new staff, records management, and guidance on how to advocate for additional resources. We provide a comprehensive analysis of disability as a social construct and as a complicated and often misunderstood identity. We explore historical models of examining disability, language, and identity development, and how we can facilitate their positive development. Additionally, we discuss how embracing disability culture reduces discrimination while promoting inclusion and justice.

In part three, we focus on the interactive process by first providing an overview of the legal, philosophical, and logistical changes that occur during the transition from high school to college. We then discuss the foundational underpinnings of establishing disability and understanding the documentation practices for identifying functional limitations, structuring the intake interview, and making reasonable determinations. In addition, we offer guidance on implementing accommodations and the importance of continued interaction with relevant constituents. Specific categories of accommodation are explored in relation to barrier removal, and we have included a chapter on assistive technology and auxiliary aids that is easily understood. We discuss our role as case managers in coordinating services with other campus providers and monitoring students’ performance throughout their lifecycle. Finally, an entire chapter is dedicated to working with faculty to help them navigate accommodations, from those who are too accommodating to those who struggle to understand the basic premise of access.

Part four focuses on compliance and how legal cases influence policies, processes, and procedures. We aim to make the grievance process less daunting by walking through the complaint process at the institutional and federal levels. We also highlight some well-known legal cases and their resolutions.

In part five, we delve into the concept of inclusion in design, examining its impact on both physical and digital environments and illuminating how design has the power to include or exclude. We explore laws and standards related to inclusion and provide options for meeting or surpassing them. Additionally, we dedicate an entire chapter to universal design, with guidance on encouraging stakeholders to embrace this approach throughout their campuses.

Part six reflects on the insights gained and looks ahead to future considerations as we work towards achieving full inclusion.

In addition, Disability Services in Higher Education is unique in that each chapter begins with thought-provoking questions that aid in learning, while reflective exercises are provided at the end of each chapter. These exercises include real-world scenarios.  Additionally, we offer customizable forms, checklists, training materials, letters, and policy examples. These are freely available and can be used immediately.

As we celebrate disability pride, we hope our book serves as a catalyst for enhancing operational practices and advancing disability rights. It’s our way of honoring and celebrating the intrinsic worth and meaningful contributions individuals with disabilities bring to our society.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, Disability Studies, Education, History, Labor Studies, political science, sociology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

The Roots of Migrant Suffering

Posted on August 18, 2021 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Jamie Longazel and Miranda Cady Hallett, editor of Migration and Mortality, consider the lethal threat U.S. imperialism poses for migrants.

During a June visit to Guatemala, Vice President Kamala Harris had a simple, three-word message for those thinking about migrating to the United States: “Do not come.” Her stern statement received pushback from progressives, but Harris remained unwavering. “Listen,” she said, “I’m really clear we have to deal with the root causes and that is my focus. Period.”

But what exactly are the ‘root causes’ of the so-called migrant crisis? Who in actuality is being harmed and in what ways? Who is benefiting? And what is missing from political rhetoric of this sort?

We take on these questions in our new, edited book, Migration and Mortality. Our central argument is that capitalism, white supremacy, and U.S. imperialism—not poor individual choices or inherently despotic tendencies in the region—are at the root of death and social suffering among migrants in the Americas.

Simply saying “do not come” overlooks how systemic dynamics produce displacement in the Americas. It also changes the narrative. When it becomes an issue of individual choice, we lose sight of all the unnecessary social and biological death migrants experience, not just along the deadly U.S.-Mexico border and in detention centers, but at home, on the streets, and at work—in high-risk extractive industries and on the plantations of large agribusiness.

The Trump administration’s spectacularly harsh policies as well as the exclusion and risks faced by asylum seekers and other migrants during the coronavirus pandemic have brought this violence into sharp focus. Yet Migration and Mortality makes clear that these dynamics, and the harsh and undeniable differential mortality they reproduce, are bipartisan and longstanding.

The current conditions of violence faced by transnational migrants in this hemisphere are the product of long histories of U.S. interventionism. Without apology, ongoing policies from the Monroe Doctrine forward overtly seek regional control and domination, spurring violence and destabilization.

Domestically, brought on by a lethal mix of fearmongering, economic anxieties related to global restructuring, and the continued reactionary response to basic civil and human rights reforms, we’re seeing a rapid rise in xenophobic discourses and policies. Other forms of legal exclusion, too, threaten migrants’ lives: health policies that discriminate on the basis of status and labor law that fails to protect migrant workers, for example.

From our description, you may assume that we, like many others, argue that “the system is broken” and requires comprehensive reform. Our conclusion is a bit different: the system works just as it should for the most powerful and that is why it continues. Immigration policies and enforcement regimes underpin a system designed to give parasitic capitalists and corporations the ability to extract wealth from migrant bodies with impunity.

While this analysis frames the book, the chapters present diverse research reports and essays—drawing on empirical work from public health to cultural anthropology, and bringing critical social theory to bear on the devastating details. While some contributions trace the profiteering of private prison companies, for example, others describe migrants’ experiences of risk and solidarity through qualitative research with impacted communities.

Contributing authors also make a point to stay attuned to migrants’ survival and agency. Because even when non-migrants are sympathetic to the plight of people on the move, we have a tendency to dehumanize, to paint migrants as helpless victims. This is the other thing Harris gets wrong: of course her command won’t cause Guatemalans to relinquish their human urge to survive at all costs. The stories in our book are horrific, to be sure, but each also reveals people fighting back, engaging in collective resistance and personal resilience, and using solidarity and ingenuity to persist—not always surviving as individuals, yet enduring as a collective.

Filed under: american studies, Anthropology, civil rights, cultural studies, ethics, History, immigration, Latin American studies, latinos, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, transnational politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Discovering How Student Activism Matters

Posted on January 29, 2020 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Matthew Williams, author of Strategizing against Sweatshops, writes about what he learned by studying college students engaged in strategically innovative activism to help sweatshop workers across the world.

When I began working on the research for my new book, Strategizing against Sweatshops, if you had asked me, I’m sure that I would have said student activism is important. But I suspect I would have been somewhat vague about the specifics of why and how it is important. In interviewing members of United Students Against Sweatshops, a college student group that is one of three oStrategizing against Sweatshops_smrganizations that I focus on, I gained a much better understanding of how and why student activism matters. Student activists’ position on college campuses puts them in a place where they are more opportunities for success as a social movement than many other movements have. And this gives student activists a chance to break new ground in changing social norms and structures in the wider society, using college campuses as beachheads of progressive change.

If you’ve ever engaged in social justice activism, you know that it is often thankless work. It’s not simply that people outside the social justice community often look at the value of what you do with some degree of skepticism, but that you must be in it for the long haul to see the results of your actions—and those results are often unclear. When political and business leaders make reforms that movements have sought, they rarely give credit to movements for influencing them. The chain of cause and effect is not always clear. Certainly, it’s rare that any particular action your group takes, no matter how dramatic, can be clearly connected with causing some particular policy change.

Student activists face some of these same frustrations. But things do change somewhat when working on the scale of a college campus. The somewhat enclosed, clearly defined boundaries and small scale of a college campus create opportunities that don’t exist elsewhere. Compared to officials in positions of government and large businesses, college administrators are relatively accessible to students. Student activists can reasonably expect to get meetings with top-level campus officials. Even if a college president has an antagonistic view of what student activists are doing, the norms of college life are such that they are expected to tolerate such activism and give the students doing it some hearing. This is particularly striking given that colleges are much less democratic than government bodies. Even for faculty, principles of shared governance have significantly eroded and college administrations have increasingly limited accountability to faculty. There are generally no democratic mechanisms on college campuses for students to keep administrators in check. And yet the small scale and norms of the college campus make it possible for student activists to directly engage with high level administrators.

Student activists have other advantages as well. Doing the sort of movement-building necessary to successfully pressure administrators to change policy (and not simply meet with students) is relatively easy within the contained arena of a college campus. Though economic pressures mean this is less true than it once was, students still have a larger amount of biographical availability—free time to engage in activism—than older people who must hold down full time jobs and may have family obligations. The existence of student newspapers and the ease of organizing an educational event such as hosting a speaker or panel makes getting out the word about one’s cause relatively easy. The density of social networks on campus—in dorms, in student groups, among informal friendship circles, etc.—makes it relatively easy to recruit people.

Finally, the small scale of the college campus makes it relatively easy to exercise leverage over those in power and see concrete results from one’s action. A number of USAS members I interviewed told me stories of sit-ins, hunger strikes, or simply a series of escalating protest actions resulting in administrators making major concessions to them.

None of this is to say that successful student activism is easy—it still requires a lot of dedication and hard work. It is simply an easier arena in which to engage in social activism that many other contexts social justice activists find themselves in.

USAS was able to use these circumstances to help sweatshop workers on the other side of the world unionize and otherwise improve their conditions. They were able to do this because so many colleges and universities have licensing agreements with major apparel firms like Nike and Champion, where the companies are allowed to produce clothing with the school’s name and logo on it and the school gets a cut of the resulting profits. Apparel companies value these deals because it gives them access to a captive audience for marketing and they believe they can use this to build lifetime brand loyalty. This gave student activists potential leverage over these companies. USAS pushed administrators to put in place pro-labor rights code of conduct for their licensees and to require the companies to allow inspections by the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring organization, to verify compliance—and they have pushed colleges to threaten to suspend or cancel their licensing agreements when licensees are found to be violating the codes of conduct.. This has forced companies like Nike and Champion to address problems when they are caught red-handed using sweatshop labor.

USAS is not unique in being able to use the small scale of the college campus to exert wider influence. Our society’s slowly changing attitudes towards sexual harassment, assault and what qualifies as consent have been significantly influenced by activism on college campuses, whose small scale allowed student activists to more easily challenge sexist norms there. And those changes in norms have slowly radiated outward from college campuses. During the 1980s, students were at the forefront of the movement to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa by pushing college administrators to divest from companies doing business in South Africa. A parallel movement is now pushing colleges to divest from the fossil fuel industry, an industry that must be dismantled to protect our planet’s fragile ecosystem and climate.

Student activism matters both because it is easier to engage in successful activism on college campuses and because victories on college campuses can have important effects on the wider world.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, economics/business, Education, ethics, Labor Studies, political science, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Wildlife crime: Understanding the human and social dimensions of a complex problem

Posted on August 8, 2018 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, William Moreto, editor of Wildlife Crime, writes about how criminology as a field has much to offer in the understanding and prevention of wildlife crime.

In recent years, wildlife crime has generated considerable public attention. This can be partly attributed to growing concerns over environmental issues, including climate change, as well as increased attention on wildlife trafficking and its impact on the status of endangered iconic megafauna, like elephants and rhinoceros. The hard sciences, including biology, has tended to take the lead in the assessment and investigation of crimes that harm the environment, including the poaching and trading of wildlife products. This is not surprising given that the unsustainable overharvesting of wildlife can result in long lasting ecological and environmental impacts, as well as potentially devastating public health concerns resulting in the consumption of unregulated and unsanitary wildlife products.

Although wildlife crime has historically tended to fall within the purview of the hard sciences, the role of the social sciences, including geography, psychology, and economics, have increasingly been recognized in both academic and non-academic circles. Indeed, while wildlife crime is very much an environmental issue, it is also inherently a human and social problem as well. Recently Bennett and colleagues (2017) helped reinforce this reality when they published an article in a leading conservation journal, Biological Conservation, demonstrating the role that 18 distinct social science fields have within the conservation sciences. Noticeably missing from this list, however, were the fields of criminology (the study of criminal behavior), criminal justice (the study of how the criminal justice system responds and operates), and crime science (the study of crime). For ease, and I hope my fellow colleagues can forgive me, but I’ll refer to this group collectively here as “criminology.”

Wildlife Crime_smCriminology as a field has much to offer in the understanding and prevention of wildlife crime, while also contributing to broader conservation science topics. The volume, Wildlife Crime: From Theory to Practice, adds to the conservation science literature by underscoring how criminological theory and research can provide unique insight on a complex problem like wildlife crime. Questions related to the why specific activities and practices are outlawed, how such regulations are viewed by communities who are affected, why individuals begin, continue, or desist as offenders, how the criminal justice system responds to such actors, and what strategies can be developed in addition to the criminal justice system are all discussed in the volume. Additionally, scholars detail their experiences conducting research on active offenders involved in wildlife crime and further highlighting the very human aspects from those involved in such activities, as well as the researchers who perform such study.

Finally, the inclusion of practitioners in the volume who are or were involved in day-to-day conservation practice cements the need for more social science research that directly focuses on those tasked with the implementation and management of conservation policy and regulation. Essentially, by better understanding how conservation policy is implemented and the real-world challenges faced by individuals who work on the front-line is essential in understanding what strategies can be effective, what may be unsuccessful, and what may ultimately prove to be counter-productive or even harmful. In sum, Wildlife Crime: From Theory to Practice contributes to the growing literature on wildlife crime by illustrating the value of viewing the issue from a criminological perspective, promoting the need for increased academic-practitioner collaborations, and reinforcing the place of social science within the conservation sciences.

 

Filed under: american studies, economics/business, environment, ethics, History, law & criminology, philosophy, political science, sociology, transnational politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

How state governments touch on nearly every aspect of public policy

Posted on June 27, 2018 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Michelle Atherton, co-editor of Pennsylvania Politics and Policy, writes about what states do and how much power they have within modern politics and policy.

In the midst of the modern 24/7 news cycle, and the focus on the tweet of the moment from our president, it’s easy to forget that politics in our federal system runs much deeper than the national level. Americans in general are woefully unaware of what states do and how much power they have within modern politics and policy. Statewide and local elections have much lower voter turnout than presidential years, as if the composition of state legislatures and governors’ offices barely matters compared to who occupies the White House. Many would argue these governing bodies matter even more to the lives of the average citizen, as state governments touch nearly every aspect of public policy.

Pennsylvania Politics and Policy_smRepublicans in control in Washington, DC did not manage to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), but it was originally up to the states to create their own healthcare exchanges, and whether to expand Medicaid. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed in 2017 lowered federal taxes for most individuals—and especially corporations—but it also capped the state and local tax (SALT) deduction at $10,000, greatly effecting the calculus of state and local governments’ approaches to maintaining revenues.

Pennsylvania, for example, is one of the states most highly dependent upon property taxes for the support of public schools, collected locally, as opposed to relying on state taxes. Will the wealthy Philadelphia suburbs revolt come November’s general election as higher income households lose thousands of dollars in tax deductions? Perhaps the results will strengthen the case among many voters for doing away with the property tax altogether as a source of funding for public schools in the Commonwealth.

This issue and many others are explored in the first publication of Pennsylvania Politics and Policy: A Commonwealth Reader. Further topics include:

  • What would it mean for Pennsylvania to adopt direct democracy such as the citizen-initiated referendum and recall like other states? Would politicians be more responsive and less prone to corruption?
  • Why doesn’t the state of Pennsylvania place a severance tax on natural gas production? Every other state does. Alaskans each receive a dividend from fossil fuel extraction, yet Pennsylvania’s legislature refuses to move the issue forward even in the face of severe budget woes.
  • Why doesn’t the state fund education based on the number of students in schools? Every other state in the nation bases funding on real student counts. In Pennsylvania, the politics of party and leadership control in the legislature dictates funding.
  • Why does Pennsylvania not tax any form of retirement income, one of just a handful of states to do so? And, what does the rapid aging of the state mean for the bottom line of funding services both for the elderly and younger individuals and families?
  • Why did it take so long to be able to buy wine and beer at the local supermarket? Pennsylvania took a unique approach to policing vice.

Another election for the governor, the entire House, and half the Senate of Pennsylvania is just around the corner. Here’s hoping Pennsylvanians find their way to the polling place to vote in proportion to the gravity of the election’s policy implications.

 

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, economics/business, Education, environment, ethics, gender studies, History, Labor Studies, law & criminology, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, political science, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

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