Katja M Guenther
Biographic Data
| ID | 135029 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Katja M Guenther |
| GIVEN NAMES | Katja M |
| FAMILY NAME | Guenther |
| SIGNATURE | GUENTHER K M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Riverside |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2615-9549 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 172 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 28 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
An invitation to bring animals into feminist and queer sociology
This paper presents an invitation to feminist and queer sociology to engage more frequently, enthusiastically, and deeply with animals. Feminist and queer sociology that attend to animals and animality stand to develop better knowledge for animals and animal studies and for women, queers, and feminist and queer sociology. Sociologists working from feminist and queer perspectives are also particularly well‐positioned within the discipline of socio…
Examining Interspecies Complexity and Conflict in the Anthropocene
Understanding the Durable Myth of the “Irresponsible Pet Owner”
Ethnographic research in an animal welfare organization challenges common, and harmful, framings of what causes guardians to surrender companion animals
Challenging and Reinforcing the Ability/Disability System through Advocacy for Disabled Dogs
This paper illuminates how volunteers and animal rescuers who assist dogs from a high-intake public shelter in the Los Angeles metropolitan area simultaneously resist the devaluation of the lives of disabled dogs while sensationalizing and fetishizing disability through their discursive and representational practices. Drawing on observations from three years of ethnographic fieldwork in an animal shelter and with animal rescues, as well as from p…
The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals
A behind-the-scenes examination of how a high-intake public shelter asserts control over human and animal populations, how those humans and animals respond to and resist such control, and what the consequences of these dynamics of domination and defiance are for impounded companion animals and for all animals. Can we save America's homeless animals
Taking the ghetto out of the dog
This paper examines how rescuers of pit bulls in the Los Angeles area participate in remaking pit bulls so that the dogs shed their racialized, gendered, and classed identities as companions to Black and poor Latinx men and instead become suitable companions for white, feminized middle-class homes. Pit bull rescuers employ a range of strategies to make the dogs more palatable to the types of adopters rescuers see as desirable, and help reinforce …
Formations of Belief
Rebel Genius
Reviewed by: Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science by Tara Abraham Katja Guenther Tara Abraham. Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017. 320 pp. Ill. $40.00 (978-0262035095). It may seem strange that a book on cybernetics should be reviewed in a journal on the history of medicine. After all, cybernetics is most often associated with technology and the…
Being Godless
Being Godless: Ethnographies of Atheism and Non-Religion." Journal of Contemporary Religion, 33(2), pp. 354–355
Secular sexism
Volunteers' Power and Resistance in the Struggle for Shelter Animal Survival
This article presents an analysis of how volunteers use different forms of capital to resist the practices and discourses of the organization for which they volunteer. Volunteers at a large public animal shelter do not share the shelter's institutionally held belief that shelter death is an inevitable result of homelessness among companion animals; to reduce shelter death, they craft challenges to the shelter practice of putting dogs down and wor…
How volunteerism inhibits mobilization
This paper presents an analysis of how volunteerism can neutralize impulses for mobilization. An ethnographic case study of shelter animal advocates, or individuals promoting shelter reform to ensure that companion animals impounded at animal shelters receive proper medical and behavioral care and are given opportunity for adoption, illuminates a specific set of mechanisms that explain why they have not engaged in collective action such as protes…
Monkeys, Mirrors, and Me
This article explores the work of psychologist Gordon Gallup, Jr., during the 1960s and 1970s on mirror self-recognition in animals. It shows how Gallup tried to integrate the mental "self-concept" into an otherwise strictly behaviorist paradigm. By making an argument from material culture, the article demonstrates how Gallup's adoption of a self-concept is best understood as a product of his sustained analysis of the workings of the mirror as a …
Stratification
Bounded by Disbelief
Recent empirical studies have revealed that religious believers tend to hold atheists and other religious doubters in low regard. This article examines how atheists in turn negotiate and construct the social and symbolic boundaries between atheists and religious believers. I draw on ethnographic and interview data to explore the lenses through which atheists view religion, religious believers, and the boundary between religious believers and non-…
From the Outside In
From the Outside In: Crossing Boundaries to Build Collective Identity in the New Atheist Movement Get access Katja M. Guenther, Katja M. Guenther Direct correspondence to: Katja M. Guenther, Department of Sociology, Watkins Hall, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Kerry Mulligan Kerry Mulligan Search for other works by this author on:…
Rethinking a Feminist Classic
European Societies
A Movement Without Memory
The creation and maintenance of strategically useful collective memories can be important achievements for social movements, yet not all movements will attempt or succeed in these endeavors. This article examines how the shared history of the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) gender egalitarianism project was forgotten in the unified Germany. Feminist activists faced many conditions that appeared conducive to propagating a collective memory of t…
The Possibilities and Pitfalls of NGO Feminism
This article identifies the problems and opportunities facing feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Drawing on the cases of feminist organizing in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and eastern Germany, I discuss the strategic advantages and disadvantages of NGO feminism, or feminism organized largely around service provisioning for women and the receipt of funds from state agencies and private foundations. I synthesize and move beyond…
The Impact of Intersecting Dimensions of Inequality and Identity on the Racial Status of Eastern African Immigrants 1
In this article, we examine how immigrants from eastern Africa to the Minneapolis and St. Paul metropolitan area understand and navigate the U.S. color line and its implications for nonwhites. Although these immigrants are subject to constraints based on their racial status as black, they mobilize other intersecting aspects of their identities to manipulate racial classifications in the hopes of attaining upward mobility in the United States, eve…
Making their place
Migrant Women Transforming Citizenship
The politics of names
This article examines how the decision to use real names or pseudonyms for people, organizations, and places involves consideration of the ethics of confidentiality, the power of naming, and strategies for fieldwork and presentation of findings. While these issues are infrequently discussed in published work, qualitative researchers need to attend to how we decide what names to use in presenting our findings. Rather than avoiding discussions of c…
The Impact of Emotional Opportunities on the Emotion Cultures of Feminist Organizations
A fundamental debate within feminist scholarship and activism centers on what relationship feminism should have with the state. This article explores this debate empirically by examining differences in the emotion cultures of a state-dependent and an autonomous feminist organization in postsocialist eastern Germany. The comparative analysis demonstrates how organizations construct specific emotion cultures in response to emotional opportunities a…
The politics of names
This article examines how the decision to use real names or pseudonyms for people, organizations, and places involves consideration of the ethics of confidentiality, the power of naming, and strategies for fieldwork and presentation of findings. While these issues are infrequently discussed in published work, qualitative researchers need to attend to how we decide what names to use in presenting our findings. Rather than avoiding discussions of c…
The Impact of Intersecting Dimensions of Inequality and Identity on the Racial Status of Eastern African Immigrants 1
In this article, we examine how immigrants from eastern Africa to the Minneapolis and St. Paul metropolitan area understand and navigate the U.S. color line and its implications for nonwhites. Although these immigrants are subject to constraints based on their racial status as black, they mobilize other intersecting aspects of their identities to manipulate racial classifications in the hopes of attaining upward mobility in the United States, eve…
From the Outside In
From the Outside In: Crossing Boundaries to Build Collective Identity in the New Atheist Movement Get access Katja M. Guenther, Katja M. Guenther Direct correspondence to: Katja M. Guenther, Department of Sociology, Watkins Hall, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Kerry Mulligan Kerry Mulligan Search for other works by this author on:…
Bounded by Disbelief
Recent empirical studies have revealed that religious believers tend to hold atheists and other religious doubters in low regard. This article examines how atheists in turn negotiate and construct the social and symbolic boundaries between atheists and religious believers. I draw on ethnographic and interview data to explore the lenses through which atheists view religion, religious believers, and the boundary between religious believers and non-…
The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals
A behind-the-scenes examination of how a high-intake public shelter asserts control over human and animal populations, how those humans and animals respond to and resist such control, and what the consequences of these dynamics of domination and defiance are for impounded companion animals and for all animals. Can we save America's homeless animals
The Impact of Emotional Opportunities on the Emotion Cultures of Feminist Organizations
A fundamental debate within feminist scholarship and activism centers on what relationship feminism should have with the state. This article explores this debate empirically by examining differences in the emotion cultures of a state-dependent and an autonomous feminist organization in postsocialist eastern Germany. The comparative analysis demonstrates how organizations construct specific emotion cultures in response to emotional opportunities a…
Understanding Policy Diffusion across Feminist Social Movements
Gender mainstreaming emerged on the European policy scene in the mid-1990s as an innovative and controversial policy tool for reducing gender inequalities. The European Union seeks to propagate the practice of gender mainstreaming both within EU institutions and among member states. Feminist scholars and policy elites have discussed and debated gender mainstreaming widely but have yet to consider how local feminist activists, who could play a cen…
A Movement Without Memory
The creation and maintenance of strategically useful collective memories can be important achievements for social movements, yet not all movements will attempt or succeed in these endeavors. This article examines how the shared history of the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) gender egalitarianism project was forgotten in the unified Germany. Feminist activists faced many conditions that appeared conducive to propagating a collective memory of t…
Secular sexism
The Possibilities and Pitfalls of NGO Feminism
This article identifies the problems and opportunities facing feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Drawing on the cases of feminist organizing in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and eastern Germany, I discuss the strategic advantages and disadvantages of NGO feminism, or feminism organized largely around service provisioning for women and the receipt of funds from state agencies and private foundations. I synthesize and move beyond…
A Bastion of Sanity in a Crazy World
This article examines the development of the local women’s movement in one city in eastern Germany since German unification in 1990. Utilizing a framework that attends to issues of scale, space, and place reveals how this women’s movement has both participated in and benefited from the downward scaling of women’s mobilizations in the immediate postunification period. Feminist activists and organizations contributed to the constitution of the city…
Taking the ghetto out of the dog
This paper examines how rescuers of pit bulls in the Los Angeles area participate in remaking pit bulls so that the dogs shed their racialized, gendered, and classed identities as companions to Black and poor Latinx men and instead become suitable companions for white, feminized middle-class homes. Pit bull rescuers employ a range of strategies to make the dogs more palatable to the types of adopters rescuers see as desirable, and help reinforce …
The race relations “Problematic” in American sociology
An invitation to bring animals into feminist and queer sociology
This paper presents an invitation to feminist and queer sociology to engage more frequently, enthusiastically, and deeply with animals. Feminist and queer sociology that attend to animals and animality stand to develop better knowledge for animals and animal studies and for women, queers, and feminist and queer sociology. Sociologists working from feminist and queer perspectives are also particularly well‐positioned within the discipline of socio…
How volunteerism inhibits mobilization
This paper presents an analysis of how volunteerism can neutralize impulses for mobilization. An ethnographic case study of shelter animal advocates, or individuals promoting shelter reform to ensure that companion animals impounded at animal shelters receive proper medical and behavioral care and are given opportunity for adoption, illuminates a specific set of mechanisms that explain why they have not engaged in collective action such as protes…
Being Godless
Being Godless: Ethnographies of Atheism and Non-Religion." Journal of Contemporary Religion, 33(2), pp. 354–355
Volunteers' Power and Resistance in the Struggle for Shelter Animal Survival
This article presents an analysis of how volunteers use different forms of capital to resist the practices and discourses of the organization for which they volunteer. Volunteers at a large public animal shelter do not share the shelter's institutionally held belief that shelter death is an inevitable result of homelessness among companion animals; to reduce shelter death, they craft challenges to the shelter practice of putting dogs down and wor…
Monkeys, Mirrors, and Me
This article explores the work of psychologist Gordon Gallup, Jr., during the 1960s and 1970s on mirror self-recognition in animals. It shows how Gallup tried to integrate the mental "self-concept" into an otherwise strictly behaviorist paradigm. By making an argument from material culture, the article demonstrates how Gallup's adoption of a self-concept is best understood as a product of his sustained analysis of the workings of the mirror as a …
The race relations “Problematic” in American sociology
A Bastion of Sanity in a Crazy World
This article examines the development of the local women’s movement in one city in eastern Germany since German unification in 1990. Utilizing a framework that attends to issues of scale, space, and place reveals how this women’s movement has both participated in and benefited from the downward scaling of women’s mobilizations in the immediate postunification period. Feminist activists and organizations contributed to the constitution of the city…
Understanding Policy Diffusion across Feminist Social Movements
Gender mainstreaming emerged on the European policy scene in the mid-1990s as an innovative and controversial policy tool for reducing gender inequalities. The European Union seeks to propagate the practice of gender mainstreaming both within EU institutions and among member states. Feminist scholars and policy elites have discussed and debated gender mainstreaming widely but have yet to consider how local feminist activists, who could play a cen…
The politics of names
This article examines how the decision to use real names or pseudonyms for people, organizations, and places involves consideration of the ethics of confidentiality, the power of naming, and strategies for fieldwork and presentation of findings. While these issues are infrequently discussed in published work, qualitative researchers need to attend to how we decide what names to use in presenting our findings. Rather than avoiding discussions of c…
The Impact of Emotional Opportunities on the Emotion Cultures of Feminist Organizations
A fundamental debate within feminist scholarship and activism centers on what relationship feminism should have with the state. This article explores this debate empirically by examining differences in the emotion cultures of a state-dependent and an autonomous feminist organization in postsocialist eastern Germany. The comparative analysis demonstrates how organizations construct specific emotion cultures in response to emotional opportunities a…
Making their place
Migrant Women Transforming Citizenship
The Possibilities and Pitfalls of NGO Feminism
This article identifies the problems and opportunities facing feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Drawing on the cases of feminist organizing in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and eastern Germany, I discuss the strategic advantages and disadvantages of NGO feminism, or feminism organized largely around service provisioning for women and the receipt of funds from state agencies and private foundations. I synthesize and move beyond…
The Impact of Intersecting Dimensions of Inequality and Identity on the Racial Status of Eastern African Immigrants 1
In this article, we examine how immigrants from eastern Africa to the Minneapolis and St. Paul metropolitan area understand and navigate the U.S. color line and its implications for nonwhites. Although these immigrants are subject to constraints based on their racial status as black, they mobilize other intersecting aspects of their identities to manipulate racial classifications in the hopes of attaining upward mobility in the United States, eve…
European Societies
A Movement Without Memory
The creation and maintenance of strategically useful collective memories can be important achievements for social movements, yet not all movements will attempt or succeed in these endeavors. This article examines how the shared history of the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) gender egalitarianism project was forgotten in the unified Germany. Feminist activists faced many conditions that appeared conducive to propagating a collective memory of t…
From the Outside In
From the Outside In: Crossing Boundaries to Build Collective Identity in the New Atheist Movement Get access Katja M. Guenther, Katja M. Guenther Direct correspondence to: Katja M. Guenther, Department of Sociology, Watkins Hall, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Kerry Mulligan Kerry Mulligan Search for other works by this author on:…
Rethinking a Feminist Classic
Bounded by Disbelief
Recent empirical studies have revealed that religious believers tend to hold atheists and other religious doubters in low regard. This article examines how atheists in turn negotiate and construct the social and symbolic boundaries between atheists and religious believers. I draw on ethnographic and interview data to explore the lenses through which atheists view religion, religious believers, and the boundary between religious believers and non-…
Stratification
Volunteers' Power and Resistance in the Struggle for Shelter Animal Survival
This article presents an analysis of how volunteers use different forms of capital to resist the practices and discourses of the organization for which they volunteer. Volunteers at a large public animal shelter do not share the shelter's institutionally held belief that shelter death is an inevitable result of homelessness among companion animals; to reduce shelter death, they craft challenges to the shelter practice of putting dogs down and wor…
How volunteerism inhibits mobilization
This paper presents an analysis of how volunteerism can neutralize impulses for mobilization. An ethnographic case study of shelter animal advocates, or individuals promoting shelter reform to ensure that companion animals impounded at animal shelters receive proper medical and behavioral care and are given opportunity for adoption, illuminates a specific set of mechanisms that explain why they have not engaged in collective action such as protes…
Monkeys, Mirrors, and Me
This article explores the work of psychologist Gordon Gallup, Jr., during the 1960s and 1970s on mirror self-recognition in animals. It shows how Gallup tried to integrate the mental "self-concept" into an otherwise strictly behaviorist paradigm. By making an argument from material culture, the article demonstrates how Gallup's adoption of a self-concept is best understood as a product of his sustained analysis of the workings of the mirror as a …
Rebel Genius
Reviewed by: Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science by Tara Abraham Katja Guenther Tara Abraham. Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017. 320 pp. Ill. $40.00 (978-0262035095). It may seem strange that a book on cybernetics should be reviewed in a journal on the history of medicine. After all, cybernetics is most often associated with technology and the…
Being Godless
Being Godless: Ethnographies of Atheism and Non-Religion." Journal of Contemporary Religion, 33(2), pp. 354–355
Secular sexism
Formations of Belief
The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals
A behind-the-scenes examination of how a high-intake public shelter asserts control over human and animal populations, how those humans and animals respond to and resist such control, and what the consequences of these dynamics of domination and defiance are for impounded companion animals and for all animals. Can we save America's homeless animals
Taking the ghetto out of the dog
This paper examines how rescuers of pit bulls in the Los Angeles area participate in remaking pit bulls so that the dogs shed their racialized, gendered, and classed identities as companions to Black and poor Latinx men and instead become suitable companions for white, feminized middle-class homes. Pit bull rescuers employ a range of strategies to make the dogs more palatable to the types of adopters rescuers see as desirable, and help reinforce …
Understanding the Durable Myth of the “Irresponsible Pet Owner”
Ethnographic research in an animal welfare organization challenges common, and harmful, framings of what causes guardians to surrender companion animals
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (15 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (6 works) · Politics (6 works)