Susan Pearce

ABSTRACT In the United States, the rise in ethnic diversity due to immigration in recent decades has been most visible in new “gateway” cities and towns, such as the Baltimore–Washington, D.C. corridor, now the fourth-largest gateway for new immigration. Among the more grave issues that immigrant women face in these gateways and elsewhere is the experience of intimate partner violence. This article reports on a study using qualitative methods to document the problem, approaches, and challenges in the rapidly diversifying city of Baltimore, Maryland. We report on individual and focus-group interviews with professionals in 10 agencies who work directly with the Baltimore populations. Drawing on intersectionality theory, we propose a conceptual framework that disaggregates the location of “immigration” into four components: contexts of exit, contexts of reception, racial and class hierarchies, and culture. The study's results problematize cultural essentialist models and raise questions about current U.S. legal systems regarding immigration.

... However, Latinas are more likely to point to "push factors," saying that they needed or ... An Ecuadorian woman and a Jamaican woman spoke about childhood dreams of having their ... Moreover, in order to achieve the highest level of success, immigrant entrepreneurs must move ...

The field of sociology in Turkey has a history that is perhaps unique to Europe (and the “West”) in its co-founding with a modern nation-state, and yet its story is more central to the discipline’s general development than that of a marginal “outlier.” Positioned at an East–west crossroads, Turkey, and its sociological tradition, have been in an ongoing conversation between the two cultural poles. Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism, this article traces the discipline’s history through the lens of an East–west gaze. Touching on the lived public social questions that this story invokes, regarding ethnic relations, gender, migration, democracy-building, religion, and international relations, this article surveys the growth and present state of the discipline, including methodological trends and current issues.

The legacy of the Solidarity movement of the 1980s, which was a leading force in the region’s 1989 revolutions, culminating most symbolically with the fall of the Berlin Wall, has yet to be institutionalized in Polish social memory. A spate of official commemorations marking the movement’s 25th anniversary in 2005 provided a palette on which Poles projected—or refused to project—their memories. The movement’s legacy continues to play out in current and contentious electoral politics, since the leaders of the top contending parties are former Solidarity activists. Despite and partly because of this active presence of Solidarity movement players, Polish civil society appears to be in a liminal state of active hesitation over the task of concretizing this movement’s past in commemorative forms. This article proposes six cultural and political explanations for this hesitation. It also recommends that social scientists disaggregate the concept of memory work into various manifestations on a continuum from hesitation to deliberation and agitation to institutionalization. As the article illustrates, hesitation can constitute action. At stake in this exercise is a larger discourse—over the direction of the post-1989 socio-political changes vis-à-vis the aims of the 1989 revolutions and the meaning of democracy and transitional justice in a posttotalitarian context.