Nine ASA-NSF Small Grants Awarded for 2001-2002

The American Sociological Association (ASA) is pleased to announce nine awards from the winter 2001-2002 review cycle of the Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline (FAD). The Association’s FAD program is jointly funded through a matching grant provided to the ASA by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and administered by the ASA. These awards are designed to provide scholars with seed money for innovative research projects and also for scientific conferences that show promise for advancing research in the discipline. This round of winners includes:

Javier Auyero (State University of New York-Stony Brook) $5,880 for Fires, Tents, and Barricades: Adjustment, Corruption, and Contention. Funding will be used to study three periods of popular protest in Argentina during the last decade to answer the questions of how and why protestors decide to sack public building and whether these contentious events are the expression of the experience of local conditions as well as global economic forces. Auyero hypothesizes that contentious events in Argentina are not only reactions to structural adjustment policy but also to corruption and nepotism in local governments. To answer the research questions, the study focuses on collective action from participants’ points of view rather than ultimate causes. A multi-method approach including a content analysis of local newspapers, an examination of arrest records, and interviews with a snowball sample of protestors, journalists, police, and judges will be used to capture patterns of mobilization, discursive repertoires, and collective memories of protestors. Among other outcomes, the study will produce a database of contentious gatherings.

Liam Downey (East Carolina University) $6,980 for Environmental Inequality in Metropolitan America. Funding will be used to study environmental inequality by testing causal models to determine whether the changing distribution of whites, blacks, and Hispanics located near environmental hazards (such as manufacturing facilities) is a result of racist siting processes, racial income inequality, or the racially based operation of the housing market in 12 metropolitan areas. This study will allow for the comparison of metropolitan areas with vastly different histories of industrial development and race relations. As part of this project, Downey will merge census data from different decades, refine a GIS-based (Geographic Information System) technique that he previously developed, compare his measures of pollution proximity to those of other researchers, and identify a small set of metropolitan areas for future case study research. One outcome of the research will be multi-city, multi-region data containing four decades of census and environmental information.

Carlos Forment $6,850 for Civic Selfhood and the Invention of Democracy in 19th Century Argentina. Funding will be used to investigate the spread of democratic institutions and practices across Argentina in the mid 18th to late 19th centuries. Forment will examine the everyday habits, practices, and forms of resistance by analyzing the forming of civic organizations—including everything from joint stock companies, to fire brigades, to racial/ethnic organizations. He hypothesizes that as a result of organizational participation, Argentineans were able to break their authoritarian habits, learned to practice democracy, and became habituated to democratic practices. Forment will track these organizations by type, add them to a data bank of organizations, and draw on “practical” theory (such as John Dewey’s work on habits) to interpret the data. This work is part of a broader effort by scholars to redirect the current debate on democratic-like organizations from an “information-choice” perspective to a “habits-inculcation” perspective. The result of this project will be a second volume of studies of democratic practices in Latin American and Caribbean countries to be published by the University of Chicago.

Keith Hampton (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) $7,000 for E-Neighbors. Funding is for a study of the Internet’s effect on network ties and social relations in neighborhoods. Hampton hypothesizes that users of community Internet services will increase their social capital, compared to non-users, because they gain larger, more diverse networks and are more active communicators. These new networks are not expected to replace the role of preexisting kinship and friendship ties. To test this hypothesis servers and e-neighbor software will be given to residents of the three diverse Boston neighborhoods (a forth will be used as a control group). The software is designed to share community information. A survey will be administered to everyone above age 16 in all four neighborhoods, asking questions on relations with family, friends, neighbors and participation in community activities and organizations. This topic is important because neighborhoods with dense social capital are generally found to be safer, better informed, higher in social trust, and more able to deal with community issues.

Charles Kurzman (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) $7,000 for Islamist Networks Workshop. Funding is for a series of workshops to bring together scholars in three overlapping fields (Islamic movements, social movement studies, and social network analysis) in two sets of workshops designed to stimulate intellectual cross-fertilization among them. The justification is not limited to terrorist networks, but rather from the lack of attention to Islamism as an active transnational social movement in Western Sociology and the lack of the use of network and collective movement theory as an analytic frame for understanding these movements. The first set of workshops will provide an intensive group immersion to analyze how study of Islamic movements informs the other two theoretical schools and vice versa. Participants will be divided into teams to explore collaborative topics. The second workshop will continue to pair team members to write and present papers that will be further discussed and refined. The goal is an edited volume of these collaborative papers.

Victoria L. Pitts (City University of New York-Queens College) $6,800 for The Body and Women’s Cyberculture: Gender, Health and Bodies On-Line. Funding is for an investigation of how cyberspace is being used to conceive and create new discourses and new communities, especially in relation to gender and illness. Pitts proposes to examine how breast cancer survivors use cyberspace to create personal narratives of the female body and illness, including survivor’s acceptance of and rejection of formal medicine. The research focuses on whether the narratives that are created diversify common understanding of the experience of having an ill body; whether women interact as patients, consumers, or survivors; how they construct their cyber-identities; and whether cyberspace liberates women to develop alternative discourses. The research will employ several methods to answer these questions including a content analysis of websites and chat rooms, interviews with cancer survivors with their own websites, and interviews with a snowball sample of cancer survivors who have not used cyberspace to create discourses on cancer. This research, which draws on the literatures of gender theory, subcultures, and sociology of the body and health and illness, is designed to be a springboard for a broader study of female health and illness discourse in cyberspace.

Francesca Polletta and Marshall Ganz (Columbia University and Harvard University, Kennedy School) $5,120 for Contentious Stories: Towards a Sociology of Narrative. Funding is for a conference with two theoretical and methodological purposes. The first purpose is to develop a sociological approach to understanding the role of stories or narratives in contentious social movements in order to answer questions such as “Why do worldviews loose legitimacy?” and “When do narratives undermine the status quo?” The characteristics of a sociological approach include institutions, resources, and constraints as the context in which narratives are to be understood. The second purpose is to begin to theorize the role of narratives across disciplines. The conference will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss how tools can be adopted across disciplines. Participants will present full-length papers, each involving empirical case studies that illustrate the relation between culture, structure, and agency and narrative in social movements. The results will be an edited volume.

Charlotte Ryan (Boston College) $6,870 for A Working Conference on the Interplay Between Social Movements and Social Movement Theorizing. Funding is for a 40-person conference, in honor of William Gamson, which focuses on the interplay of theory and practice in social movements, with particular attention to the role of the social movement researcher. Conference participants will answer two major questions. First, how does the relationship between theory and practitioners affect the construction of social movement paradigms, and, second, how is theory building affected by academic or non-academic location? Movement theorists and activists will be paired on each panel to summarize key issues, and present self-reflective examinations of the challenges sociologists encounter when studying social movements and critical issues on strategy and transformative practices. The presentations and discussions will be edited for publication.

Marieke Van Willigen (East Carolina University) $6,460 for Environmental Stressors: The Physical and Mental Health Impacts of Living Near Industrial Activity. Funding is for a study that examines the relationship among the following: manufacturing facilities and pollution; physical conditions such as cancer, diabetes, asthma, and high blood pressure; and psychological well-being including the absence of depression, anxiety, and feelings of powerlessness. By examining this question, Van Willigen hopes to discover whether the location of minority groups in areas with these pollutants is a social problem. The study hypothesizes that industrial activity has negative effects on communities. These effects are mediated by feelings of powerlessness and disorder (defined as litter, vandalism, graffiti, drug use, and incivility). People who live next to factories are expected to feel less empowered and more stressed, which makes them more susceptible to physical and mental illness. Geographic Information System software will be used to link updated measures of manufacturing facilities with individual-level data from the 1995 Community, Crime, and Health Survey.

Additional information on the FAD program is available on the ASA homepage (www.asanet.org/members/fad.html) or contact Roberta Spalter-Roth ( spalter-roth@asanet.org or (202) 383-9005, ext. 317).