Sociology

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The Politics of Metabolism: The Metabolic Syndrome and the Reproduction of Race and Racism
(2009) Hatch, Anthony Ryan; Collins, Patricia H; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Biomedical researchers, government agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry increasingly use the term metabolic syndrome to define the observed co-occurrence of the major biological risk markers for heart disease, type II diabetes, and stroke. The metabolic syndrome is a new feature in what I call the politics of metabolism, or the discourses, social processes, and institutional relationships that governs the metabolism of individuals and groups. The emergence of the metabolic syndrome reflects a growing network of scientific, state, and corporate actors and institutions that are invested in studying, regulating, and profiting from control over metabolism. Drawing on insights from critical race theory, science and technology studies, and Foucauldian studies of biopower, I analyze the metabolic syndrome as a new discourse about metabolism that continually draws upon racial meanings to construct individual and group differences in different kinds of metabolic risk. The metabolic syndrome not only constitutes a new way of constructing, studying, and treating metabolic health problems, it also constitutes an emerging site for the production of racial meanings. Researchers use race in metabolic syndrome research and to study, prescribe, and label prescription drugs that may be related to the metabolic syndrome. I investigate the use of race and the metabolic syndrome in biomedical research on prescription drugs and African Americans. I develop the metaphor of killer applications to examine how prescription drugs operate in the politics of metabolism. A killer application is a superior technology that combines human and non-human elements that structure bodily practices in a wide range of social, commercial, and scientific contexts--prescription drugs have become the new killer applications in biomedicine. I argue that the search for killer applications has transformed the ways that pharmaceutical corporations study prescription drugs, metabolism, and race. I compare how drug researchers use race and the metabolic syndrome to study antipsychotics and statins in African Americans, how physicians' race-based diagnoses of schizophrenia and high cholesterol structure the prescribing patterns of antipsychotics and statins, and how scientists' assumptions about the genetic basis of racial differences in drug metabolism structure the debate about racebased drug therapies.
Awakening Sleeping Beauty: Promises of Eternal Youth Packaged Through Scientific Innovation
(2008-10-30) smirnova, michelle hannah; Mamo, Laura; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The definition of what constitutes "healthy" aging has recently experienced a shift in emphasis from internal to external components--especially for the white, affluent, heterosexual woman. The emergence of the skincare cosmeceutical industry and its attention to aging women's bodies raises questions about the discursive logics regarding health that both produce and are produced by modern aesthetic ideals and how they have produced this emergent aesthetic component of the "life-extension project." Similar to Nikolas Rose's (2001) "will to health", I propose that ideals of health, youth and beauty have become collapsed into a civic duty of this women--the "will to youth". A discourse analysis (124 cosmeceutical advertisements from More--a niche magazine directed at 40+ women), revealed how this industry constructs the aging woman's body as pathological by invoking the idea that the fairytale dreams of Sleeping Beauty and the fountain of youth may be realized through scientific innovations, most notably the cosmeceutical.
The Outsourcing of Intimate Affairs
(2007-04-26) Lair, Craig Dennis; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In this dissertation I place the trend of outsourcing what I refer to as "intimate affairs" - those activities necessary to reproduce both physically and emotionally what Habermas (1991 [1962]: 46-47) calls the "intimate sphere" (e.g. the preparation of food, housekeeping tasks, parenting, gift giving, etc.) - within a theoretical context by arguing that this type of outsourcing is best understood from the perspective of reflexive modernization theory. In particular, I argue that the outsourcing of intimate affairs is best seen as resulting from two processes that stand at the heart of reflexive modernization: the disembedding of the social world and the concomitant wave of individualization that has accompanied this development. But more than just reflecting these processes, I also argue that intimate outsourcing can be seen as promoting disembedding and individualization as well. However, this dissertation also addresses a number of issues that, while being central to the debate over this topic, have largely been left unanswered. These include questions of what exactly is outsourcing and how it can be applied to activities such as intimate affairs? It is also includes the question of what is new and/or historically unique about outsourcing in comparison to past practices where intimate affairs were outsourcing. As I show, answering these questions is important for placing this trend in a theoretical context. In this dissertation I also critically evaluate a number of alternative theoretical accounts that have addressed to topic of outsourcing at the micro-level. As I show, while many of these theories have important insights in to this topic, they also have a number of significant limitations in accounting for the outsourcing of intimate affairs. In particular, I argue that most of these theories fail to place this type of outsourcing within a broad enough theoretical context. I show that such a context is offered by the theory of reflexive modernization theory and that many of the particular insights of these alternative theories can be integrated into the reflexive modernization perspective.
Adolescents and Antidepressants: Analyzing a Social Scientific Controversy
(2007-02-19) Nelson, Amber Dawn; Mamo, Laura; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This thesis analyzes the scientific controversy over giving antidepressant medications to adolescents as it unfolded in a U.S. Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hearing. Using the FDA hearing held on February 2, 2004, convened in response to a "crisis" evolving around the safety of antidepressant use among adolescents, this paper analyzes the unfolding response. This study utilizes social world's analysis, a qualitative methods approach designed to uncover the multiple stakes and claims of the problem as understood by each person at the hearing. I identified four distinct social worlds: 1) Adolescents, family and friends, 2) Independent professionals, 3) FDA, and 4) FDA-summoned professionals. Findings revealed that 103 actors came together around the crisis and each defined the problem of the controversy through one or more of the following four distinct frames; (1) side effects, (2) data, (3) practices and policies and/or (4) a lack of access to informed choice.
Narrative and Selfhood in the Antidepressant Era
(2006-05-30) Stepnisky, Jeffrey Nicholas; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation is a study of the relationship between antidepressant medications, self-understanding, and the narrative construction of self. The analysis relied upon two kinds of empirical data. First, advertisements for antidepressants in popular magazines, television, and online promotional websites were collected. Second, interviews were conducted with 23 people who were taking or had taken antidepressant medications. It is argued that antidepressants are components of the larger social processes of risk, biomedicalization, and individualization. In contrast to a narrative view, which conceives selfhood as a dialogical and embodied achievement, the antidepressants participate in a set of discourses that sustain atomistic conceptions of the self. The analysis emphasizes the personal agency that antidepressant users bring to bear upon their use of antidepressants. Chapter one is an introduction to theories of risk, individualization, and narrative as well as the ways in which narrative and selfhood are potentially transformed through the use of antidepressants. Chapter two offers an analysis of three theoretical conceptualizations of the relationship between biomedicine and selfhood: naturalism, poststructuralism and the narrative-hermeneutic perspective adopted in the dissertation. Chapter three analyzes the advertising materials emphasizing the manner in which relationships are constructed between selfhood, biology, and antidepressant medications. Chapters four, five, and six introduce interview materials in order to examine: a) how people learn to use antidepressants and in doing so come to split-off and manage unwanted elements of their selves, b) the ways in which the popular discourse of authenticity (being a "real" self) is transformed in the encounter with antidepressants, and c) the manner in which the antidepressants are taken up in social institutions such as the family. The dissertation concludes with a reflection upon the implications of a shift from a form of selfhood composed in narrative and relationship, to a form of post-social selfhood composed through the use of technologies such as antidepressants.
SPACE, IDENTITY AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY: NEGOTIATING DECOLONIZATION IN THE UNITED NATIONS
(2006-05-11) Patil, Vrushali; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Beginning with the colonial and imperial encounters that constitute the early, conflict-ridden moments of trans-territorial contact, this research is interested in the relationship between gender, race, and shifting transnational power relationships. Bringing together work from Sociology, Women's Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, it is interested in the following questions. How are modern constructions of gender and race forged in transnational--colonial as well as 'postcolonial'--processes? How did they emerge in and contribute to such processes during the colonial era? Specifically, how did they shape colonialist constructions of space, identity and international community? How has this relationship shifted with legal decolonization? First, it offers a theory regarding these questions in the European colonial era, the theory of kinship. This theory posits that the colonialist construction of space, identity and international community historically relied on a trope of kinship, which operated by constructing the colonies as 'children' and the metropoles as 'parents.' Even more, kinship actually helped to constitute colonial notions of race (i.e., 'childlike natives') and gender (i.e., 'the lack of the nuclear household in African society as evidence of cultural immaturity'). In this manner, kinship helped to define colonized others as children, thereby to deny the subjectivity of these others (particularly their spatial and identity claims), and thus to ultimately build hierarchical structures of international community. Combining discourse and comparative historical methods of analysis, this work explores how colonialists and anti-colonialists renegotiate transnational power relationships within the debates on decolonization in the United Nations from 1946-1960. It argues that while colonialists continued to use the trope of kinship to legitimate the status quo, anti-colonialists insisted that the colonies had 'grown up' and that continuing colonialism was a humiliation that emasculated fully adult men. Thus, anti-colonialists attempted to reorder global power relationships by renegotiating the kinship trope. In other words, to the politics of paternalism, they responded with the politics of masculinity. Ultimately, then, the complex, shifting, politics of race relied on a politics of gender/sexuality, both of which were central to the changing contours of international community in the mid-20th century.
Women as Producers and Consumers in 1950s America: An Analysis of Spatial Hysteresis
(2006-02-20) Thorn, Elizabeth Kathleen; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Bourdieu employs the concept of hysteresis to describe a temporal lag or mismatch between habitus and field. I expand on this concept to develop a theory of spatial hysteresis, in which multiple fields are included in the analysis. Spatial hysteresis may occur when one field undergoes change at a faster rate than another field, producing changes in capital holdings and habitus that affect the second field. Twelve in-depth interviews provide limited evidence of spatial hysteresis in women's positions in consumer society and the labor force in the postwar United States. Rapid changes in consumer society may have increased women's capital holdings and altered their habitus, paving the way for the changes that subsequently occurred in the labor force.
Easton: A 21st Century (R)evolution in Consumption, Community, Urbanism, and Space
(2005-04-28) Ryan, John Michael; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This research was designed, planned, and implemented with three overarching and interrelated objectives in mind - to apply existing theoretical knowledge on consumption, community, urbanism, and space to the specific case study of Easton Town Center; to enhance, contribute, and extend the research and literature surrounding these four areas; and to flesh out the paradigm of Easton into a more coherent, comprehensive theory with potential applications for future social scientific inquiry.
Rhetorical Analysis of Arguments Made in the Climate Change Debate: Argument Families and Social Network LInks as Potential Bases for Agreement
(2004-11-11) Malone, Elizabeth L.; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The issue of climate change brings together some of the most important sociological issues of the age, including global governance, the role of industrialization and capitalism in degrading the environment, the relationship between humans and non-human nature, and the inequality of nations. However, it is an open question whether societies and countries of the world can come to agreement about the meaning of climate change and actions (or no action) that should be taken to address it. To avoid privileging one or another of the issue's aspects, this study used a discursive and rhetorical approach to include all the arguments made in the debate on an equal footing. First, 100 documents that make arguments about climate change were analyzed to characterize the arguments made and to distinguish four rhetorical elements: the personal and organizational sources of authority for the rhetor, the type(s) of evidence used for the claims made, the worldview(s) expressed, and the actions proposed. This analysis provided the basis for categorizing the documents into "families," coherent arguments made about the climate change issue; and performing a social network analysis to discern linkages formed by the argument families and rhetorical elements that might be the basis for coming to agreement about climate change issues. The study found coherence within families as well as multiple links across families, indicating that rhetors in the climate change debate form a dense network of ties that could be used to build agreement.

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