Sociology (Bryn Mawr)

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    I can see your Halo effect: The relationship between norms around attractiveness and social status among Bi-Co students
    (2023) Ezray, Ethan; Taplin-Kaguru, Nora E.
    Appearance-based inequalities are found in everyday aspects of life and shape the experiences that people have. This study explores how such inequalities present themselves at the countercultural environment present at liberal arts schools. The primary method used for this study was qualitative interviews as a way of highlighting and understanding personal experiences. These interviews were then coded for themes to quantify as data to be analyzed. Prior literature on the sociological aspects of beauty discusses attractiveness as a form of capital, attractiveness as a form of privilege, and how pretty privilege manifests itself in locations such as the workforce or large party colleges. This study found that liberal arts colleges have their own form of appearance-based hierarchies that come in the form of hegemonic quirkiness after analyzing the data from the interviews. These findings showcase how ubiquitous appearance rules are and the ways in which they are shaped by the environment.
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    "Mexicans Gotta Support More Mexicans:" Pride, Representation, and Community Care in Mexican Chicago's Hip-Hop Underground
    (2022) Pita, Brandon D. Saucedo; Montes, Veronica (Sociologist); Cox, Amanda Barrett
    This study examines the function and meaning of hip-hop/rap to Mexican artists and cultural producers contributing to Chicago's Mexican underground hip-hop/rap music scene. Through in-depth interviews with artists who engage this scene from various perspectives – as rappers, audio engineers, or videographers – this thesis hopes to highlight the significance of this music scene to members of Chicago's Mexican community and, more importantly, how artists'Mexican identities inform and/or are informed by the art they produce. This work contributes to a, relatively limited, body of knowledge surrounding the history of Chicago's Mexican community, Chicago's underground hip/rap scene, and Mexicans' contributions to hip-hop. The findings of this study show that while Mexican artists generally lack support from other artists, their families, and their communities to pursue their artistic passions, that these artists are still finding ways to push the limits of this field and what's accepted in their communities, ultimately indicating that the scene has a bright future ahead of it.
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    Nurturing Volunteers: A Critical Analysis of Volunteerism in the Nonprofit Social Service Sector
    (2017) Duncombe, Dana; Wright, Nathan Daniel
    This study examines volunteerism and volunteer management at HIAS Pennsylvania (HIAS PA), a nonprofit organization in Philadelphia that provides legal and social supportive services to immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. In both scholarly literature and HIAS PA’s infrastructure, volunteer management and coordination emerge as a neglected topic, but also a potential source of alternate support and innovation to offset social work’s entropic tendency towards stress, burnout, and turnover. Based on an ethnographic, qualitative research model that prioritized in-depth interviews and was situated by extensive participant observations, this thesis poses questions of group membership, forms of adequate gratitude, approaches to sufficient training, and information sharing. Ultimately, it addresses broader questions of sustainable social work by offering a metaphor of torque to demonstrate that although volunteerism itself cannot dismantle structural obstacles facing social service sectors, volunteers offer a unique capacity to offload and complement an agency’s work while also igniting creative change beyond the confines of their volunteer roles. Yet in order to serve as an effective external arm of the agency, staff and volunteers must collaboratively build and continually nurture connective tissue between their individual groups and the shared issue, such as refugee resettlement.
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    Food for One, but Not for All: Food Access and Collective Identity in the Urban Agriculture Movement
    (2014) Robinson, David
    The urban agriculture movement is part of a growing alternative agrifood movement that attempts to solve social, environmental and economic problems in urban areas by introducing more local, organic and sustainable food into urban food systems. One of the primary goals of the movement is to mitigate a lack of food access in urban areas, especially for underprivileged populations. In this paper, I explore the collective identity of the urban agriculture movement in a major northeastern city in the United States. Through qualitative research conducted on farms in the city, I examine the construction of collective identity among actors in the movement. Collective identity is a dynamic process that is a function of shared attributes, shared goals, and the development of communality within movement communities. I find that through this process of collective identity, certain actors in the urban agriculture movement build boundaries that exclude certain social groups from participating in the movement. Moreover, these boundaries are constructed along existing lines of economic and social privilege. In constructing these boundaries, urban agriculture communities fail to solve issues of food access, and instead exacerbate food related inequality.
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    'No Weight on that Back Foot': Dancing Towards Empowerment through Transforming the Gendered Feminine Habitus
    (2014) Wolkoff, Alexandra C.; Karen, David
    Gender socialization implicates not only our minds but our physical bodies, leading us to perceive and to use our bodies in distinctive ways. This study illustrates that dance has the potential to re-form elements of this bodily training that women, specifically, have internalized throughout the life course. I conducted in-depth interviews with female students and instructors in an undergraduate dance program, and my narrative and thematic analyses of their accounts reveal that dance interacts with the gendered feminine body in dualistic and complex ways. I conclude that precisely because dance, itself, is an embodied practice that also inscribes its own set of dispositions into the body, it is capable of changing aspects of participants' habitus of origin (Bourdieu 1977). I discuss implications of these findings on the current state of efforts for gender equality at large.