White Faces, Black Faces: Is British Sociology a White Discipline?

Sociology ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 945-960 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Wakeling
2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 184-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Crow ◽  
Naoko Takeda

The history of a discipline records the careers of its practitioners as well as providing an account their ideas. Studying these careers reveals much about the particular people and their work, and also provides insights into general questions such as how disciplines evolve, and how impact can be achieved amongst and beyond academic peers. This article focuses on the career of R. E. (Ray) Pahl. It argues that his position in British sociology over the last half century can be attributed in particular to two things. First, Pahl was committed to asking sociological questions whilst being open to other influences; we call him an interdisciplinary sociologist. Secondly, his approach engaged simultaneously with theoretical, methodological and substantive elements of the discipline rather than treating them as areas of separate expertise. These key facets of his work help in understanding why his work has reached such a wide range of audiences, and in explaining his distinctive record as a sociologist within and beyond the academy, which long pre-dates current concerns with ‘impact’.


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (9) ◽  
pp. 1992-2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasmin Cloutier ◽  
Tianyi Li ◽  
Joshua Correll

Given the well-documented involvement of the amygdala in race perception, the current study aimed to investigate how interracial contact during childhood shapes amygdala response to racial outgroup members in adulthood. Of particular interest was the impact of childhood experience on amygdala response to familiar, compared with novel, Black faces. Controlling for a number of well-established individual difference measures related to interracial attitudes, the results reveal that perceivers with greater childhood exposure to racial outgroup members display greater relative reduction in amygdala response to familiar Black faces. The implications of such findings are discussed in the context of previous investigations into the neural substrates of race perception and in consideration of potential mechanisms by which childhood experience may shape race perception.


1982 ◽  
Vol 164 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Arnot

The ways in which male hegemony in education has and has not been addressed in educational research concerning women and girls in schools are considered. Two bodies of research in the British sociology of education — the cultural tradition and the political economy tradition — are discussed in terms of the ways in which they address the question of gender. The radical theories of social and cultural reproduction of class structure are then considered. It is argued that it is necessary to include a consideration of gender reproduction in any theory of class reproduction, whether the perspective is from a social or a cultural model. A theory of the production of gender differences inside and outside the schools is contrasted with prevailing reproduction theories. The paper concludes with a call for further research in the field of women's education that will both recognize the existence of class and male hegemony in the schools and will at the same time acknowledge that the constant need to reimpose hegemony entails both struggle and the possibility for change.


2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 141-142
Author(s):  
John Hall

Author(s):  
Estée Rubien-Thomas ◽  
Nia Berrian ◽  
Alessandra Cervera ◽  
Binyam Nardos ◽  
Alexandra O. Cohen ◽  
...  

AbstractThe race of an individual is a salient physical feature that is rapidly processed by the brain and can bias our perceptions of others. How the race of others explicitly impacts our actions toward them during intergroup contexts is not well understood. In the current study, we examined how task-irrelevant race information influences cognitive control in a go/no-go task in a community sample of Black (n = 54) and White (n = 51) participants. We examined the neural correlates of behavioral effects using functional magnetic resonance imaging and explored the influence of implicit racial attitudes on brain-behavior associations. Both Black and White participants showed more cognitive control failures, as indexed by dprime, to Black versus White faces, despite the irrelevance of race to the task demands. This behavioral pattern was paralleled by greater activity to Black faces in the fusiform face area, implicated in processing face and in-group information, and lateral orbitofrontal cortex, associated with resolving stimulus-response conflict. Exploratory brain-behavior associations suggest different patterns in Black and White individuals. Black participants exhibited a negative association between fusiform activity and response time during impulsive errors to Black faces, whereas White participants showed a positive association between lateral OFC activity and cognitive control performance to Black faces when accounting for implicit racial associations. Together our findings propose that attention to race information is associated with diminished cognitive control that may be driven by different mechanisms for Black and White individuals.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document