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Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands plumbs the archaeological record for what it can reveal about the creation of personal and communal identities in the Maya world. Using new primary data from her excavations at the sites of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Xuenkal, and new analysis of data from Dzibilchaltun in Yucatan, Mexico, Traci Ardren presents a series of case studies in how social identities were created, shared, and manipulated among the lowland Maya.Ardren argues that the interacting factors of gender, age, familial and community memories, and the experience of living in an urban setting were some of the key aspects of Maya identities. She demonstrates that domestic and civic spaces were shaped by gender-specific behaviors to communicate and reinforce gendered ideals. Ardren discusses how child burials disclose a sustained pattern of reverence for the potential of childhood and the power of certain children to mediate ancestral power. She shows how small shrines built a century after Yaxuna was largely abandoned indicate that its remaining residents used memory to reenvision their city during a time of cultural reinvention. And Ardren explains how Chunchucmil's physical layout of houses, plazas, and surrounding environment denotes that its occupants shared an urban identity centered in the movement of trade goods and economic exchange. Viewing this evidence through the lens of the social imaginary and other recent social theory, Ardren demonstrates that material culture and its circulations are an integral part of the discourse about social identity and group membership.

The social scientific analysis of social class is attracting renewed interest given the accentuation of economic and social inequalities throughout the world. The most widely validated measure of social class, the Nuffield class schema, developed in the 1970s, was codified in the UK's National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) and places people in one of seven main classes according to their occupation and employment status. This principally distinguishes between people working in routine or semi-routine occupations employed on a 'labour contract' on the one hand, and those working in professional or managerial occupations employed on a 'service contract' on the other. However, this occupationally based class schema does not effectively capture the role of social and cultural processes in generating class divisions. We analyse the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the UK, the BBC's 2011 Great British Class Survey, with 161,400 web respondents, as well as a nationally representative sample survey, which includes unusually detailed questions asked on social, cultural and economic capital. Using latent class analysis on these variables, we derive seven classes. We demonstrate the existence of an 'elite', whose wealth separates them from an established middle class, as well as a class of technical experts and a class of 'new affluent' workers. We also show that at the lower levels of the class structure, alongside an ageing traditional working class, there is a 'precariat' characterised by very low levels of capital, and a group of emergent service workers. We think that this new seven class model recognises both social polarisation in British society and class fragmentation in its middle layers, and will attract enormous interest from a wide social scientific community in offering an up-to-date multi-dimensional model of social class.

01 02 This book explores the possibilities and limitations re-theorizing disability using historical materialism in the interdisciplinary contexts of social theory, cultural studies, social and education policy, feminist ethics, and theories of citizenship. 19 02 Proposes a relational analysis to understand disability within a global context; theorizes disability in critical relationship to race, gender, and sexuality within the context of transnational capitalism This is an interdisciplinary text that spans the humanities and the social sciences in the areas of social theory, cultural studies, social and educational policy, feminist ethics and theories of citizenship From education to sociology and even poetry theory, disability studies is a growing discipline that offers a unique critique of our standards of normalcy and acceptance in our society; interest in this topic, among all fields of research will continue to increase and it is important that we include books with this focus on our lists 08 02 'The time for Disability and Difference in Global Contexts is now. At the forefront of both the global and materialist turns in disability studies, Nirmala Erevelles provides readers with an indispensable analysis of the ways in which disability in the current world order is constructed in relation to systems of gender, race, class, caste, and sexual orientation. Erevelles calls for a transformative body politic that resists the compulsory subject positions and relations of domination generated by neoliberal, capitalist modes of production. In and through that call, she remaps, in emancipatory ways, the terrain of disability studies, feminist studies, Marxist theory, postcolonial theory, and education.' –Robert McRuer, Professor of English, George Washington University 'In this wide-ranging exploration through the often violent historical imbrications of disability and race, Erevelles brings us to questions we will never soon forget. This book demonstrates the historical production of disability and other social differences as they press upon us today making our bodies, minds, senses matter as the conflicting social scenes that they are. No one in disability studies, or any of its affiliated fields, should go without reading this book; and no one will rest easy with their current disability knowledge once having read Disability and Difference in Global Context.' - Tanya Titchkosky, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto 'Disability and Difference in Global Contexts offers an important corrective to established scholarship in disability studies by demanding a focus on intersectionality. In language by turns provocative and heartbreaking, Nirmala Erevelles explains and enacts a 'carnal historical materialism': the theoretical yet everyday dance between identity, injury, privilege and hope.' - Margaret Price, Associate Professor of English, Spelman College 'At once deeply personal and sharply theoretical, personal and probing, this book gives us the big picture: 'disability' in its historical, material, and global settings. Erevelles' brilliant work of social theory marks a new and crucial advance in its rigorous explorations of confluences of disability, race, class, gender, and citizenship.' - Susan Schweik, Professor of English, University of California at Berkeley 02 02 This book explores the possibilities and limitations re-theorizing disability using historical materialism in the interdisciplinary contexts of social theory, cultural studies, social and education policy, feminist ethics, and theories of citizenship. 13 02 Nirmala Erevelles is an associate professor of Social Foundations of Education at the University of Alabama. 31 02 This book explores the possibilities and limitations re-theorizing disability using historical materialism in interdisciplinary contexts 04 02 Making Bodies that Matter: The Political Economy of 'Becoming' (Disabled) Of Ghosts and Ghetto Politics: Embodying Education Policy as if Disability Mattered 'Unspeakable' Offenses: Disability Studies at the Intersection of Multiple Differences (with Andrea Minear) Embodied Antimonies: Feminist Disability Studies Meets Third World Feminism (Im)Material Citizens: Cognitive Disability, Race, and the Politics of Citizenship The 'Other' Side of the Dialectic: Towards a Materialist Ethic of Care

Homophily, the tendency for similar actors to be connected at a higher rate than dissimilar actors, is a pervasive social fact. In this article, we examine changes over a 20-year period in two types of homophily—the actual level of contact between people in different social categories and the level of contact relative to chance. We use data from the 1985 and 2004 General Social Surveys to ask whether the strengths of five social distinctions—sex, race/ethnicity, religious affiliation, age, and education—changed over the past two decades in core discussion networks. Changes in the actual level of homophily are driven by the demographic composition of the United States. As the nation has become more diverse, cross-category contacts in race/ethnicity and religion have increased. After describing the raw homophily rates, we develop a case-control model to assess homophily relative to chance mixing. We find decreasing rates of homophily for gender but stability for race and age, although the young are increasingly isolated from older cohorts outside of the family. We also find some weak evidence for increasing educational and religious homophily. These relational trends may be explained by changes in demographic heterogeneity, institutional segregation, economic inequality, and symbolic boundaries.

The dramatic increase in social media use has challenged traditional social structures and shifted a great deal of interpersonal communication from the physical world to cyberspace. Much of this social media communication has been positive: Anyone around the world who has access to the Internet has the potential to communicate with and attract a massive global audience. Unfortunately, such ubiquitous communication can be also used for negative purposes such as cyberbullying, which is the focus of this paper. Previous research on cyberbullying, consisting of 135 articles, has improved the understanding of why individuals—mostly adolescents—engage in cyberbullying. However, our study addresses two key gaps in this literature: (1) how the information technology (IT) artifact fosters/inhibits cyberbullying and (2) why people are socialized to engage in cyberbullying. To address these gaps, we propose the social media cyberbullying model (SMCBM), which modifies Akers’ [Akers RL (2011) Social Learning and Social Structure: A General Theory of Crime and Deviance , 2nd ed. (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ)] social structure and social learning model. Because Akers developed his model for crimes in the physical world, we add a rich conceptualization of anonymity composed of five subconstructs as a key social media structural variable in the SMCBM to account for the IT artifact. We tested the SMCBM with 1,003 adults who have engaged in cyberbullying. The empirical findings support the SMCBM. Heavy social media use combined with anonymity facilitates the social learning process of cyberbullying in social media in a way that fosters cyberbullying. Our results indicate new directions for cyberbullying research and implications for anticyberbullying practices.