Sociology Faculty & Students Publish Research
Congratulations to our very own Dr. April Schueths, Dr. Ted Brimeyer, and Akiv Dawson (a graduate of the M.A.S.S. Program) for the article they published in collaboration with Dr. Dina Walker-DeVose and Dr. Jonique Freeman from the School of Human Ecology titled Southern Assumptions: Normalizing Racialized Structures at a University in the Deep South.
This article is a great representation of interdisciplinary work involving students at all levels. In addition to M.A.S.S. graduate, Akiv Dawson, many of our sociology undergraduates were involved collecting the data for this research.
You can read the full article in the journal Race Ethnicity and Education and find the article’s abstract below:
Informed by critical race theory (CRT), we examine how African-American and white college students, at a predominantly white, structurally diverse, Southern US university, understand their cross-racial experiences. Black–white interactions are understood within the context of the so-called ‘post-racial’ environment, against the backdrop of high-profile cases of racial injustice, and within the added context of the historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in the rural Southern United States. Our study suggests that many students, regardless of race, recognized the persistence of racial segregation, especially in nightlife and campus Greek letter organizations (GLOs). African-American students were the most vocal and troubled by this division. Unexpectedly, however, students appeared to take for granted that in the American South, racism is persistent and indestructible. Building on Bell’s (1991) notion of racial realism and Bonilla-Silva’s (2013) notion of naturalization, we expand the view that racism is inherent or related to individual preference, to place and time, with a construct we term southern assumptions. Southern assumptions are the mechanisms in which participants connect collective historical racism in the south to the race problems of today.
Posted in Faculty, Graduate Students, MASS, Publications, Sociology, Sociology Alumni, Student Success
