Alternative View of Modernity: The Subaltern Speaks

This article derives from my 2021 ASA presidential address. I examine how sociologists including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and white American sociologists have omitted key determinants of modernity in their accounts of this pivotal development in world history. Those determinants are white supremacy, western empires, racial hierarchies, colonization, slavery, Jim Crow, patriarchy, and resistance movements. This article demonstrates that any accounts omitting these determinants will only produce an anemic and misleading analysis of modernity. The central argument maintains that the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois developed a superior analysis of modernity by analytically centering these determinants. I conclude by making a case for the development of an emancipatory sociology in the tradition of Du Boisian critical sociological thought.

Disparities in Lung Cancer: miRNA Isoform Characterization in Lung Adenocarcinoma

Despite the development of targeted therapeutics, immunotherapy, and strategies for early detection, lung cancer carries a high mortality. Further, significant racial disparities in outcomes exist for which the molecular drivers have yet to be fully elucidated. The growing field of Epitranscriptomics has introduced a new layer of complexity to the molecular pathogenesis of cancer. RNA modifications can occur in coding and non-coding RNAs, such as miRNAs, possibly altering their gene regulatory function. The potential role for such modifications as clinically informative biomarkers remains largely unknown. Here, we concurrently profiled canonical miRNAs, shifted isomiRs (templated and non-templated), miRNAs with single-point modification events (RNA and DNA) in White American (W) and Black or African American (B/AA) lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) patients. We found that while most deregulated miRNA isoforms were similar in W and B/AA LUAD tissues compared to normal adjacent tissues, there was a subgroup of isoforms with deregulation according to race. We specifically investigated an edited miRNA, miR-151a-3p with an A-to-I editing event at position 3, to determine how its altered expression may be associated with activation of divergent biological pathways between W and B/AA LUAD patients. Finally, we identified distinct race-specific miRNA isoforms that correlated with prognosis for both Ws and B/AAs. Our results suggest that concurrently profiling canonical and non-canonical miRNAs may have potential as a strategy for identifying additional distinct biological pathways and biomarkers in lung cancer.

Race and Indigeneity

Looking at processes of racial boundary formation, especially in everyday practices, allows for researchers to understand how racialized distinctions are made, remade, and understood. For Native Nations, membership is heavily influenced by Indigenous kinship practices. Kinship systems reinforce laws that maintain place-based forms of social organization; however, Indigenous kinship practices are not always accounted for in discussions regarding American Indian racial boundary formation. Overlooking Indigenous kinship practices leaves room for misidentification, especially when misidentification is grounded in anti-Indian and anti-Black racism. Overlooking Indigenous kinship systems also leaves room for Native identity and trauma to be appropriated, namely by white American settlers. This chapter discusses how not accounting for Indigenous kinship systems leaves room for misclassification, appropriation, and racial violence.

Women Hip-Hop Artists and Womanist Theology

Hip-Hop is a cultural phenomenon steeped in the conservative ideologies of individualism and capitalism. It sells a lifestyle and its most recent surge of rap music and popular culture spotlights Black women more than ever before. Although Black women have always been significant piece in Hip-Hop culture, their artistry has jolted its systemic capitalism and patriarchy to engage intersectionality through a discourse of classism, sexual orientation, and racism while upending White supremacy’s either:or binary. Applying the principles of Womanism, Black female Hip-Hop artists negotiate cultural identity politics as activists to innovatively expand thought on gender performance and produce a fusion of contemporary Blackness for the 21st century. Their artivism builds a safe environment of differences within society using conscious thought, language, and performative methods to defy the White American ethos of sexism, misogyny, and materialism. By garnering a better knowledge of their existence through Indigenous African spirituality, Black women reclaim ownership of their bodies from Western European standards, including race, and gender to challenge Christianity’s meaning of martyrdom. This act of reclamation provides a reformative tool of inclusion and being fluidity through Hip-Hop music and its culture.

He Rawe Tona Kakahu/She Wore a Becoming Dress: Performing the Hyphen

<p>In the British settler nations of the United States, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, there continues to be debate about how to conduct research across the coloniser-indigene hyphen. Various indigenous scholars have discussed, at length, how western scholarship has been and continues to be implicated in the colonisation of indigenous peoples. While some progress has been made, it continues to be an unresolved issue. As a white American woman, I have responded to this situation by conducting my doctoral research using a decolonising epistemological pluralism that I developed through my practice as an artist and performer. This methodology, which is critical and performative, seeks to dismantle the colonial matrix of power and the dualisms that underpin the hegemony of western knowledge and casts a critical eye on power relations as they manifest out in the world and as they reproduce themselves inside individuals. It is my belief that such an approach will decentre the settler and facilitate working across the hyphen. As an example of how such a methodology could function, I undertook a collaborative and performative research project with Anahera Gildea, a Māori writer and performer from the iwi (tribe) of Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga. Our research examined the intersection of gender and colonisation. The knowledge systems that we chose to use arose naturally out of who we are and what we know. We are both Butoh performers. We both practice Nichiren Buddhism and use it to guide our daily lives. The outcome of our research was He rawe tona kakahu/She Wore A Becoming Dress, a multimedia Butoh performance, which was performed for two nights at the Film Archive in Wellington, New Zealand in 2009. As a collaboration that worked across the hyphen, we both engaged with critical and decolonising theory from our respective positions on the hyphen, as well as brought our respective world views—I, white American and Anahera, Te Ao Māori . This thesis is an attempt to provide a practice-based understanding of what it was like to undertake research using such a decolonising epistemological pluralism.</p>

He Rawe Tona Kakahu/She Wore a Becoming Dress: Performing the Hyphen

<p>In the British settler nations of the United States, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, there continues to be debate about how to conduct research across the coloniser-indigene hyphen. Various indigenous scholars have discussed, at length, how western scholarship has been and continues to be implicated in the colonisation of indigenous peoples. While some progress has been made, it continues to be an unresolved issue. As a white American woman, I have responded to this situation by conducting my doctoral research using a decolonising epistemological pluralism that I developed through my practice as an artist and performer. This methodology, which is critical and performative, seeks to dismantle the colonial matrix of power and the dualisms that underpin the hegemony of western knowledge and casts a critical eye on power relations as they manifest out in the world and as they reproduce themselves inside individuals. It is my belief that such an approach will decentre the settler and facilitate working across the hyphen. As an example of how such a methodology could function, I undertook a collaborative and performative research project with Anahera Gildea, a Māori writer and performer from the iwi (tribe) of Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga. Our research examined the intersection of gender and colonisation. The knowledge systems that we chose to use arose naturally out of who we are and what we know. We are both Butoh performers. We both practice Nichiren Buddhism and use it to guide our daily lives. The outcome of our research was He rawe tona kakahu/She Wore A Becoming Dress, a multimedia Butoh performance, which was performed for two nights at the Film Archive in Wellington, New Zealand in 2009. As a collaboration that worked across the hyphen, we both engaged with critical and decolonising theory from our respective positions on the hyphen, as well as brought our respective world views—I, white American and Anahera, Te Ao Māori . This thesis is an attempt to provide a practice-based understanding of what it was like to undertake research using such a decolonising epistemological pluralism.</p>

How diverse are the samples used to study intimate relationships? A systematic review

The social and behavioral sciences have long suffered from a lack of diversity in the samples used to study a broad array of phenomena. In an attempt to move toward a more contextually-informed approach, multiple subfields have undertaken meta-science studies of the diversity and inclusion of underrepresented groups in their body of literature. The current study is a systematic review of the field of relationship science aimed at examining the state of diversity and inclusion in this field. Relationship-focused papers published in five top relationship science journals from 2014 to 2018 ( N = 559 articles, containing 771 unique studies) were reviewed. Studies were coded for research methods (e.g., sample source, dyadic data, observational data, and experimental design) and sample characteristics (e.g., age, education, income, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation). Results indicate that the modal participant in a study of romantic relationships is 30 years old, White, American, middle-class, college educated, and involved in a different-sex, same-race relationship. Additionally, only 74 studies (10%) focused on traditionally underrepresented groups (i.e., non-White, low-income, and/or sexual and gender minorities). Findings underscore the need for greater inclusion of underrepresented groups to ensure the validity and credibility of relationship science. We conclude with general recommendations for the field.