Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explains how the lesbian/gay movement in San Francisco arrived at a new institutional settlement in the early 1970s. In 1968 gay liberation displayed a contradictory mix of civil rights, identity, and revolutionary political ideologies. By 1972 the movement had stabilized around building gay identity and pursuing civil rights. The crystallization of the field around gay pride and gay rights was not inevitable, but a result of the specific way events unfolded in this historical moment. While the New Left enabled the emergence of gay liberation by making thinkable new ways of organizing around sexuality, this same sense of possibility made it difficult for activists to assess competing alternatives and thus generated internal conflict. The rapid decline of the New Left in the early 1970s clarified the political environment. It reduced internal conflict and allowed political consensus to form around approaches compatible with emerging political opportunities. Thus, the way that events unfolded produced the right set of conditions for the forging of this new field - the right actors in the right place and time with the right cultural models. The role of historically specific events in the forging of this field suggests that "conditions peculiar to the circumstance" play a role in field crystallization generally (Sewell 1996, p. 862). This attention to process challenges the view that field crystallization can be predicted from prior constellations of power and social structure.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Bay Area sociologists and activists assemble to discuss political and cultural struggles over the status of medical marijuana in California, and the formation of patient and advocate communities. The medical marijuana issue encompasses competing visions of medical efficacy, health care delivery, and the roles of patients and caregivers.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Conventional sociological understandings of nature have treated it as a distinct, enveloping entity that affects and is affected by humans, but is fundamentally separate from them. In the past ten years sociologists of science and medicine have problematized this assumption by examining how nature/human distinctions are materially, legally, and rhetorically made. This paper examines how lay participants in San Francisco restoration ecology projects explain the value of manipulating plants, animals, fire, air, earth, and water to create facsimiles of past nature, or what I call “denaturalized nature.” It is denaturalized in the sense that it is understood to be a creation of humans but also to contain elements that are found in systems less affected by human interaction. The value of creating denaturalized nature for participants is that it co-produces diversity and positive physical interactions in relationships between humans, and between humans and denaturalized nature. These values are not, I argue, generalizable to other restoration projects, but are derived from place-specific understandings of San Francisco in the past and the present.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This session explores how young people in the Bay Area are experiencing its racial and cultural diversity and what new identities, networks and political movements they are developing. Panelists will speak from a range of perspectives--academic research, grassroots activism and advocacy, and divergent life experiences.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Abstract: In this paper, I present an empirical analysis of the cultural activities of a particular group of upper-middle class immigrants of color. I apply the notion of boundary work to immigrants in the multi-faceted context of the San Francisco bay area where they might give salience to differing and contradictory criteria for status depending on the multiple cultural repertoires available to draw from. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, I find that Bengali immigrants, in the face of racialization and internal differentiation, construct immigrant cultural capital by fusing “tolerant” multi-cultural (Bryson, 1999) and “exclusive” ethnic cultural capital (Carter, 2003). I argue that segmented assimilation, currently, the most influential theory on immigrant identity, fails to elucidate how racial formation in the U.S. impacts upon highly skilled, non-white immigrants who identify ethnically but are not based in an ethnic enclave. My findings display that scholars of immigrant identity need to acknowledge the role of multidimensional cultural capital in adaptation and identification processes.