Peer-reviewed Articles by Stephen Ostertag
Cultural sociology's strong program along with civil sphere theory has the potential to reveal ne... more Cultural sociology's strong program along with civil sphere theory has the potential to reveal new and insightful ways of understanding and explaining various social inequalities. We use this paper to offer one model of how such a project might look. Drawing on the intersections of media, crime, race, and the U.S. Criminal Justice System, we identify the mechanisms and processes of racialized civil exclusion in the post-Civil Rights era of mass incarceration. In so doing we seek to make two contributions to existing literature. First, we complement popular political process and multi-institutional approaches to social inequalities by providing a model of civil exclusion that is both parsimonious and expansive. Second, we illustrate how cultural sociology's strong program and civil sphere theory may be used to engage the critical scholarship on race by identifying racialized civil exclusion as a distinct aspect of contemporary racism. We conclude with suggestions on how scholars and activists alike might use cultural sociology's strong program to inform processes of racialized civil inclusion and investigate other entrenched inequalities.
Can previously unacquainted, grieving individuals who use social media to organize and participat... more Can previously unacquainted, grieving individuals who use social media to organize and participate in decentralized mobilizations build strong, lasting social ties? If so, how? What is it about particular social media technologies and platforms that might explain the strength and longevity of their social ties? Drawing on a case study of New Orleans bloggers who took part in a variety of contentious and non-contentious mobilizations after hurricane Katrina, we find that people who mobilize through social media like blogs can form strong and lasting social ties. We argue that this is partly because of the types of communication and interaction that blogs afford. We identify two types of affordances, mechanical and cultural, as distinct qualities of social media like blogs, and illustrate how they enable the building of strong, digitally mediated social ties among grieving people.
Journalism's transition from an industrial age to an information age and the unstable economics o... more Journalism's transition from an industrial age to an information age and the unstable economics of profit-driven newsmaking have allowed for an unprecedented level of citizen input and involvement in the making of news. Here, new relationships between legacy and innovative newsmaking are forged and new models of newsmaking emerge. In this article, we discuss the case of The New Orleans Eye, an attempt at innovative newsmaking rooted in an individual citizen who started blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The New Orleans Eye is a largely foundation-funded, non-profit online news organization composed of bloggers and former ink reporters, and has a unique relationship with the local Fox television station. We treat The New Orleans Eye as an example of a mixed-media system and discuss the tensions that emerge over innovative newsmaking within a context of a profit-driven legacy news industry and a neoliberal state.
There is a lively debate on the relationship between digital media and civic participation. Some ... more There is a lively debate on the relationship between digital media and civic participation. Some scholars argue that digital media adversely affect civic participation, others that the effect of digital media on civic participation is negligible, and still others claim that digital media strengthens civic participation. Yet, most of this research is based on cross-sectional methodologies, treats digital media as a uniform entity, and overlooks new civic formations that better resonate with current social and technological environments. We address these criticisms with a retrospective case study of blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Through in-depth interviews, supplemental survey data, analysis of blog posts, and field notes, we show how a number of New Orleans’ residents used blogs to organize and take part in a variety of civic actions in the months and years after hurricane Katrina. We discuss the implications of these findings for current debates on the relationship between digital media and civic participation.
Papers by Stephen Ostertag
SSM - Population Health, 2022
Most health care approaches to understanding social ills are rooted in strain or ecological model... more Most health care approaches to understanding social ills are rooted in strain or ecological models. Strain models assume that the impact of poor physical health operates through the individual, that it is the individual suffering from poor health who engages in social ills as a means of adapting, and that the impact of poor health is rather direct and immediate. Meanwhile, ecological approaches of health acknowledge how poor health may impact others and the collective, but poorly account for the case in which this is not so, leaving unexplained the many instances of people who are in poor health but remain actively engaged with their communities and preserve relationships that nurture trust, shared norms, and cooperation. To rectify this problem, we introduce the concept of “compulsive immobility”: the situation in which those in poor health are compelled to stay indoors and refrain from community socialization. We argue that compulsive immobility mediates the relationship between poor physical health and collective efficacy, suggesting that illness, specifically to a point of physical immobility (e.g., bedridden), enables poor health to detract from collective efficacy. This allows scholars to both acknowledge how poor health may impact the individual and community, while specifying the mechanism through which it operates. To support our claim, we draw on GSS data to examine the relationship among poor health, health-related immobility, and collective efficacy. Our results provide empirical support for our argument, revealing that general health conditions influenced the level of generalized trust directly and indirectly through compulsive immobility. We conclude with suggestions on how compulsive immobility might impact neighborhood crime and propose ways through which subsequent research may refine and further test compulsive immobility as a mediator between poor health and collective efficacy.
International Journal of Communication, 2020
Most studies of news focus on production structures, texts, or audiences, often in isolation. But... more Most studies of news focus on production structures, texts, or audiences, often in isolation. But what might be the value of theorizing them together? A practice framework lends itself to this task. Both durable and contingent practices underlie news consumption and communication. These practices manifest in news content that expresses a dual-layered meaning system of enduring moral foundations and specific cultural codes. The problem-solving practices of news consumption and the goal-seeking practices of news communication intersect at the content of news, fomenting reciprocal relationships of mutual support and dependency between the two. This is news as relational social practice. Theorizing news as such provides a way of negotiating the dichotomies of durability/specificity, citizen/professional, and similarity/difference that currently structure the scholarship on news and social theory.
Global Perspectives, 2021
Research on trust and news tends to focus on professional news (agents, organizations, institutio... more Research on trust and news tends to focus on professional news (agents, organizations, institutions), ignores the content of news, and takes place during relatively settled times. This article seeks to remedy these gaps by examining how citizens used blogs to make and share news during a natural disaster and its aftermath. It draws on a case study of blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and examines the perspective of blog users to understand how they built trust in each other and in their shared realities of the recovery and rebuilding periods. It draws on cultural sociology to illustrate how civil and anticivil cultural codes, embodied in culturally specific referents, were drawn upon to construct news messages and messengers, and by extension, trust in each other and a grounded ontological understanding of reality. It argues that the cultural affordances of the blog platform were helpful in users’ ability to build both forms of trust. It concludes with implica...
Cultural Sociology, 2020
Research on social media, networks and collective action currently lacks a strong cultural compon... more Research on social media, networks and collective action currently lacks a strong cultural component, often focusing on network formation and characteristics from afar. At the same time, research in cultural sociology often takes social media for granted, removed from analytical or theoretical attention. We know little about the perspectives of users or the shared meanings, emotions, and codes that inform social media practices and discourses. Addressing this gap requires examining how users imagine, understand and use social media in ways that foment culturally-meaningful social networks and it would “thickly describe” the discourse that they create and share across these networks. This article uses social drama theory to understand the creation of community and collective action among a group of citizen bloggers in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Informed by their shared grievances and motives, users created a collective social drama across their blogs. This social drama was a...
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 2017
Objectives: Examine the relationship between parental rural-to-urban migration, caretaking arrang... more Objectives: Examine the relationship between parental rural-to-urban migration, caretaking arrangement, and left-behind children’s self-reported victimization in rural China. The direct effect of parental migration on children’s victimization as well as the indirect effect through positive caretaking and children’s delinquent/problem behavior involvement is explored. Methods: The study uses data from the Parental Migration and Children’s Well-being Survey, which collected information on parental migration and children’s experience of victimization from a probability sample of 800 middle school students in southern China. Structural equation modeling is used to evaluate hypothesized models by simultaneously assessing direct and indirect effects. Results: Compared with children living with both parents in rural China, children left behind by their fathers have an elevated level of victimization. In addition, the chronic absence of fathers leads to a higher level of delinquent and prob...
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Peer-reviewed Articles by Stephen Ostertag
Papers by Stephen Ostertag