The Gift of a Vocation: Learning, Writing, and Teaching Sociology

To write a sociological festschrift for a scholar necessarily means looking at a chain of influence instead of one person. In this essay, I honor William Shaffir, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at McMaster University, who taught me as I worked towards the MA. I examine what I learned from him by starting with my undergraduate experiences at McGill University, where Billy (I never heard anyone call him William) received his PhD. We shared influences there, including those who had studied with Howard S. Becker at Northwestern University. I then turn to my time at McMaster, and how Billy strengthened my knowledge of symbolic interactionism and qualitative methods, as well as taught me important lessons about writing. He also reduced graduate students’ anxieties, including mine, through two words: “No problem.” My experiences with Billy provided a model of mentoring that challenged the usual hierarchy between graduate students and professors. Those lessons were reinforced as I pursued a PhD at the University of Minnesota and spent two quarters at Northwestern University as a visiting student. These connecting influences helped me write and teach sociology in a largely quantitative department at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where I lacked the kind of support I had received as an undergraduate and graduate student. I taught there over 37 years, practicing the kind of sociology and mentoring that Billy generously modeled so many years ago

Denying Social Harm: Students’ Resistance to Lessons About Inequality

Students share folk beliefs that make it difficult for them to understand inequality, especially the harmful consequences of social practices they routinely engage in, are attached to, and take for granted. Four of these beliefs include: (a) harm is direct, extreme, and the product of an individual\u27s intentions; (2) harm is the product of the psyche; (3) for harm to occur, there must be an individual to blame; (4) beliefs and practices that students cherish or enjoy cannot be harmful. We offer sociological ideas that counter students’ individualistic understanding of social harm

Making Sexism Visible: Birdcages, Martians, and Pregnant Men

This paper offers six strategies for dealing with students’ resistance to learning about the oppression of women: making the familiar strange, substituting race for sex, distinguishing between intentions and consequences, imagining men in women\u27s bodies, exposing students’ claims of equal gender oppression as false parallels, and analyzing some of women\u27s desires as instances of false power. These teaching strategies, along with Marilyn Frye\u27s (1983) metaphor of oppression as a birdcage consisting of systematically related wires, provide a framework for pre-empting or responding to students’ resistance

We’ve Come a Long Way, Guys! Rhetorics of Resistance to the Feminist Critique of Sexist Language

We provide a qualitative analysis of resistance to calls for gender-neutral language. We analyzed more than 900 comments responding to two essays—one on AlterNet and another on Vox posted to the Vox editor’s Facebook page—that critiqued a pervasive male-based generic, “you guys.” Five rhetorics of resistance are discussed: appeals to origins, appeals to linguistic authority, appeals to aesthetics, appeals to intentionality and inclusivity, and appeals to women and feminist authorities. These rhetorics justified “you guys” as a nonsexist term, thereby allowing commenters to continue using it without compromising their moral identities as liberals or feminists. In addition to resisting an analysis that linked their use of “you guys” to social harms, commenters positioned the authors who called for true generics as unreasonable, divisive, and authoritarian. We conclude with suggestions for how feminists can challenge the status quo and promote social change