Faith and Politics at the State Level

This chapter describes legislator faith beliefs based on their evangelical or liberal multilayered moral worldviews. These views are not merely tools that are used but symbolic boundaries by which preferences are molded, values are shaped, and political perspectives are informed. Contributing to these ideological differences is the changing religious landscape in America. These opposing visions represent deep cultural divisions that influence state legislative decision-making, especially for members of the LGBTQ community.

“All they do is walk”: Successful aging and symbolic boundaries among a self-organized mall walkers club

Objectives This study examines how successful aging discourse manifests through physical and social participation among members of a self-organized mall walkers club. There is a paucity of research investigating successful aging in situ and theorizing the relationship between successful aging discourse and community participation. I draw on symbolic boundaries—a concept from cultural sociology—as a way to make sense of what mall walkers say and do. Methods I draw on data from 15 months of participant observations and interviews of mall walkers, all of whom are over 65 and predominantly Caribbean-Canadian women Results I identify three common boundaries: personal, interpersonal, and community, that mall walkers draw on to challenge narratives of decline and internalize dimensions of successful aging. Discussion These findings uncover the ways members in a self-organized community reinforce boundaries that highlight how certain dimensions of successful aging as something to be proud of and desirable. This article contributes to research on intersubjective experiences of aging by revealing how successful aging is rooted in community participation, rather than individual achievement.

Reestablishing the Foundations: Investigating the Theoretical and Practical Boundaries of Criminology

Symbolic boundaries are essential to social functioning and, more narrowly, to the social functioning of academia. Yet the boundaries of the field of Criminology remain deeply ambiguous. What are the parameters of the field? What is agreed upon as foundational theory? What are the core research agendas? This lack of clarity and consensus hampers internal dialogue between interdisciplinary scholars and constrains efforts to meaningfully address critical societal ills. As such, with this review we seek to promote cohesion in the field and improve our ability to understand crime as a social phenomenon. To accomplish this, a team of researchers conducted a thorough review of criminology textbooks and top journals in the field. We first examine explicit and implicit definitions of criminology and next identify the major avenues of current research. We further highlight major avenues and oversights of research, making recommendations for further study to promote productive cohesion amongst criminologists. Finally, we combine theoretical conceptions of criminology with current research to offer a new, comprehensive definition: Criminology is the theoretically informed scientific study—and the resulting body of knowledge—of crime broadly understood as a socially constructed and embedded phenomenon as well as its causation and prevention.

In Denmark we eat pork and shake hands! Islam and the anti-Islamic emblems of cultural difference in Danish neo-nationalism

This article argues that constructions of Danishness and Danish culture in neo-nationalist right-wing discourse have increasingly become structured around a marked opposition to Islam and Muslim immigrants. My analysis draws on Frederik Barth’s understanding of ethnic identity as constituted through processes of demarcation of boundaries vis-à-vis other groups. In such processes, certain cultural phenomena, both material and immaterial, can be elevated to emblems of cultural difference or symbolic markers of an in-group’s shared identity. The article explores how different phenomena such as freedom of speech, pork, winter swimming/mixed-gender swimming and handshakes have become salient topics of political and public debates about integration and Islam in Denmark. I argue that these phenomena have all become emblematic of an allegedly distinctive Danish culture because they serve the purpose of demarcating symbolic boundaries vis-à-vis Islam.

Immigration, Race, and Nation in the UK: The Politics of Belonging on Twitter

At a time of rising right-wing populism, the heightened political salience of immigration as an issue is linked to conceptions of ‘the national’. In this article, we analyse tweets from non-elites, defined as isolated users with low network influence, engaged in a ‘conversation’ about migration on Twitter. We investigate the values embedded in these attitudes, and what these tell us about constructions and contestations of the symbolic boundaries of the nation among ordinary people. Our corpus includes tweets posted in temporal proximity to the lifting of transitional controls on Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in the UK (1 October 2013 to 1 March 2014). Thematic analysis reveals a cohesive set of anti-immigrant or anti-immigration sentiments linked to UKIP and that express an exclusionary nationalism based on assumptions about race, ‘whiteness’ and entitlement. Also evident is a counter-narrative of pro-immigration sentiments that draw on multiple and sometimes contradictory values. Some of these values contest racialised understandings of the nation but do not coalesce in ways to disrupt the dominance of right-wing anti-immigrant sentiments on Twitter. Our findings demonstrate the importance of investigating values embedded in both anti and pro-immigration attitudes among non-elites and what these values indicate about the possibilities of re-framing migration debates among non-elites in ways that construct more inclusive symbolic national boundaries. In addition, in using the networked properties of Twitter engagement to identify non-elite users, we make a methodological contribution to scholarship on immigration attitudes.

Live and let live? Morality in symbolic boundaries across different cultural areas

This article examines morality in taste judgements. In response to Bourdieu’s analysis of France in the 1960s, sociologists note that repertoires of moral evaluation vary across contexts. They typically highlight national variations, like Nordic egalitarianism weakens cultural boundaries, and temporal variations, with transformed values having made cultural hierarchies less defensible. The article investigates a neglected type of moral variation: contrasting cultural areas. In a study of class and culture in Stavanger, Norway, the authors combined oral interviews on taste with photo elicitation in the visual arts, literature and housing/architecture. While interviewees were often careful not to appear disdainful of other people’s tastes, and expressed ambivalence about cultural boundaries, their thoughts on housing/architecture diverged. Here, people did not hesitate to criticise other people’s taste, even to the point of ridiculing their houses. The authors discuss the implications for Lamont’s symbolic boundary perspective, which is predicated on a separation of three types of symbolic boundaries (cultural, socioeconomic, moral). Morality can both weaken and reinforce cultural boundaries, depending on the areas under investigation. In conclusion, the authors suggest ways cultural sociology may conceive of different moral modalities.

Breaching Boundaries in Muslim and Christian Tourism from Indonesia to Israel and Palestine

Studies on tourism and pilgrimage show that spatial mobility, including transregional travel, mostly confirms and strengthens tourists’ and pilgrims’ social identities and symbolic boundaries between Self and Other. However, in guided religious package tours from Indonesia to Israel and Palestine, experiences with spatial boundaries do affect the Muslim and Christian pilgrims, adding more nuances to socio-cultural boundary-making. This complex making and breaching of boundaries relates to inner-Indonesian religious dynamics. Among both Muslim and Christian Indonesians, references to the Middle East express not only transregional solidarity but also multifarious orientations in inter and intra-religious relations within Indonesia. Among Indonesian Muslims, some orthodox Muslims’ orientations towards the Middle East as the birthplace of Islam are contested but also combined with indigenous Islamic traditions. Similar to these intra-Muslim frictions, members of Indonesia's Christian minority experience fissures in the expressions of local and global Christian identities. This article analyses how symbolic, social, and spatial boundaries are maintained and breached in transregional tourism from Indonesia to the Middle East.