K Irwin
Biographic Data
| ID | 17258 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Irwin |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Irwin |
| SIGNATURE | IRWIN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0022-9118 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 224 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Should Schools Replace Exclusionary Punishments With Therapy? Gender, Race, and Class Inequalities and School-Based Mental Health Services
Since 2000, researchers have found that school punishments in the U.S. have disproportionately disadvantaged poor and working-class girls and boys of color. To mitigate the gender, race, and class disparities within exclusionary discipline, some scholars have recommended turning to inclusionary strategies, such as school-based mental health (SBMH) services, to solve problems among students. From 2007 to 2019, I observed a SBMH program at a public…
Boys' Violence in Settler-Colonial Contexts: Illegitimate Civic Duty and Pathways to Violence
The data for this paper come from an 11-year participant observation study in a public high school in Hawaiʻi. The study included 25 interviews with working-class and poor boys of color, most of whom were of Pacific Islander ancestry. This manuscript considers whether everyday acts of violence among the boys in the study stemmed from common motivations that cut across race, gender, and class divides. The study also explored whether the boys’ viol…
You Kind of Find Yourself Helpless: Teens’ Identity Constructions and Responses to Childhood Trauma
Innovations in the trauma-informed care (TIC) field have promised to transform youth-serving institutions by asking practitioners to pay attention to the developmental needs of young people facing maltreatment. Despite notable TIC innovations, our knowledge about childhood trauma tends to be adult-centric, presenting youth as passive recipients of (rather than active agents responding to) harm. How 27 high school students made sense of childhood …
Punishment and Racial Segregation of Schools: Against Racial Threat and Toward a Racial Control Perspective
Punitive Exclusion and Therapeutic Support: Race, Gender, Class, and Multidimensional Control of High School Girls
The 1980s brought a sharp upturn in punitive practices in U.S. schools. One negative result of harsh school discipline has been that poor students of color have been punished at disproportionate rates, with the racial disparity in sanctions being dramatic among girls. Some have argued that support services can undermine multiple inequalities in punitive exclusion, although very little research has examined how inequalities function in schools tha…
Forum 36: From Fieldwork to Written Text
this edition of 'Forum' addresses the issues raised when anthropologists attempt to transform their preliminary records into an academic analysis. participants of the 'Forum' answer the following questions: What are the processes by which encounters and conversations with informants become a 'written source'? Is it acceptable to edit field notes? By what processes do these 'written sources' turn into the text of a publication? Is it acceptable to…
The Form and Flow of Teaching Ethnographic Knowledge: Hands-on Approaches for Learning Epistemology
A glance across ethnographic methods terrain reveals multiple controversies and divisive critiques. When training graduate students, these debates and controversies can be consequential. We offer suggestions for teaching graduate ethnographic methods courses that, first, help students understand some of the common epistemological debates in the field and, second, provide them with hands-on activities to practice working within different knowledge…
Jacked Up and Unjust: Pacific Islander Teens Confront Violent Legacies
Do different dimensions of ethnic identity reduce the risk of violence among Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents in Hawai'i
This study examines whether different dimensions of ethnic identity are associated with reduced risk of violence among an understudied population: Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents. Drawing from survey data of 298 Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Japanese, and Filipino adolescents in Hawai‘i, this study focuses on whether three dimensions of ethnic identity (“affirmation and belonging,” “ethnic identity achievement,” and “other-group orient…
Do Descriptive Norms Solve Social Dilemmas? Conformity and Contributions in Collective Action Groups
Collective action researchers have focused on injunctive norms that specify approved behavior as a panacea for collective action problems. We investigate whether descriptive norms (similar behavior) can also solve these problems. We argue that descriptive norms generate social identification, which then sustains conformity to expectations. Consequently, descriptive norms can characterize both cooperation and noncooperation, such that cooperative …
The Race to Punish in American Schools: Class and Race Predictors of Punitive School-Crime Control
Fighting for Her Honor: Girls’ Violence in Distressed Communities
Since the 1980s, delinquency researchers and urban ethnographers have increasingly placed girls’ violence in the center of their inquiries. Within recent scholarship, there are several looming questions such as how much of girls’ violence is shaped by the same forces motivating violent boys and how much is shaped by concerns unique to girls. This study draws on data from a 6-year qualitative study of violence among Pacific Islander high school st…
Exploring the Hypothesis of Ethnic Practice as Social Capital: Violence Among Asian/Pacific Islander Youth in Hawaii
Background: Studies of youth violence have usually examined social capital using qualitative methods, but remain limited by small sample sizes. In addition, few studies examine violence among Asian/Pacific Islander (API) youth, even though they are one of the fastest-growing youth populations in the USA. Aims: To contribute to a better understanding of culture and ethnicity in youth violence among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders by quantify…
Subjective Constructions of Neighborhood Boundaries: Lessons from a Qualitative Study of Four Neighborhoods
This article explores the boundaries of neighborhoods as subjectively constructed by 37 adolescents and 33 parents across four census-defined block groups in a Western city. We examine the degree of consensus among participants on the spatial boundaries of their neighborhoods, the stability of participants’ subjectively constructed neighborhood definitions, and the overlap between subjectively constructed definitions and census block group and tr…
Girls’ Violence: Beyond Dangerous Masculinity
In this article, we review criminological perspectives of girls’ violence. To do this, we first look at the 20th‐century tendency to view violent girls as being the same as violent boys or as taking up dangerous types of masculinity. Second, we consider the contemporary ways that researchers have tried to move beyond male‐centered and masculinized explanations of female violence. Noting potential problems with current perspectives, we argue that …
Are Blacks Really Less Trusting than Whites? Revisiting the Race and Trust Question
Many scholars have concluded that blacks are less trusting than whites. The research presented here calls that conclusion into question. Previous research has been based on the standard trust measure, which may not be well suited to understanding how trust varies with social categories such as race. Building on theories of self-categorization and social identity, we argue that blacks are not less trusting than whites as suggested in previous work…
Thoughts on Feminist Mentoring: Experiences of Faculty Members from Two Generations in the Academy
The Violence of Adolescent Life: Experiencing and Managing Everyday Threats
This article examines the experiences of 43 adolescents living in Denver, Colorado, from 1994 to 1996-the 2-year period following the peak of the youth violence epidemic. Where the dominant theories explaining inner-city violence tend to focus on disadvantaged communities, this study sampled youths from 5 neighborhoods with varying crime, poverty, family stability, and resident mobility rates. The findings demonstrate that, although most teens wo…
Saints and Sinners: Elite Tattoo Collectors and Tattooists as Positive and Negative Deviants
Arguing that the deviance literature has presented an overly negative image of norm breaking, some researchers in the 1980s and 1990s began to argue for a category of positive deviance that included studies of individuals who exceed social norms (Ben-Yehuda 1990; Dodge 1985; Heckert 1989, 1997, 1998). The positive deviance perspective inspired several strong theoretical statements suggesting that deviance can only be conceptualized as a negative …
Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, and Pleasure
Legitimating the First Tattoo: Moral Passage through Informal Interaction
Once considered low class or dangerous symbols, tattoos began to be defined as hip, trendy, and glamorous in the 1990s. Using the increasing popularity of tattoos among nineties youth as an example of moral passage, this article examines some of the interpretive processes at work in the destigmatization of deviance. Whereas researchers have positioned political action or population shifts as the main forces influencing moral passage, this article…
Sex trading and psychological distress among women recruited from the streets of Harlem
OBJECTIVES: This study examines the relationship between sex trading and psychological distress and the implications of that relationship for prevention of human immunodeficiency virus among a sample of young women recruited from the streets of Harlem. METHODS: Interviews were conducted with 346 predominantly drug-using women, aged 18 to 29 years, of whom 176 had exchanged sex for money or drugs in the previous 30 days and were categorized as "se…
What's wrong is right: A response to the state of the discipline
Ideology, pregnancy and drugs: Differences between crack-cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine users
Results of routine restaurant inspections can predict outbreaks of foodborne illness: The Seattle-King County experience
To analyze the association between the results of routine inspections and foodborne outbreaks in restaurants, we conducted a matched case-control study using available data from Seattle-King County, Washington. Case restaurants were facilities with a reported foodborne outbreak between January 1, 1986 and March 31, 1987 (N = 28). Two control restaurants with no reported outbreaks during this period were matched to each case restaurant on county h…
Subjective Constructions of Neighborhood Boundaries: Lessons from a Qualitative Study of Four Neighborhoods
This article explores the boundaries of neighborhoods as subjectively constructed by 37 adolescents and 33 parents across four census-defined block groups in a Western city. We examine the degree of consensus among participants on the spatial boundaries of their neighborhoods, the stability of participants’ subjectively constructed neighborhood definitions, and the overlap between subjectively constructed definitions and census block group and tr…
Are Blacks Really Less Trusting than Whites? Revisiting the Race and Trust Question
Many scholars have concluded that blacks are less trusting than whites. The research presented here calls that conclusion into question. Previous research has been based on the standard trust measure, which may not be well suited to understanding how trust varies with social categories such as race. Building on theories of self-categorization and social identity, we argue that blacks are not less trusting than whites as suggested in previous work…
The Race to Punish in American Schools: Class and Race Predictors of Punitive School-Crime Control
Legitimating the First Tattoo: Moral Passage through Informal Interaction
Once considered low class or dangerous symbols, tattoos began to be defined as hip, trendy, and glamorous in the 1990s. Using the increasing popularity of tattoos among nineties youth as an example of moral passage, this article examines some of the interpretive processes at work in the destigmatization of deviance. Whereas researchers have positioned political action or population shifts as the main forces influencing moral passage, this article…
Saints and Sinners: Elite Tattoo Collectors and Tattooists as Positive and Negative Deviants
Arguing that the deviance literature has presented an overly negative image of norm breaking, some researchers in the 1980s and 1990s began to argue for a category of positive deviance that included studies of individuals who exceed social norms (Ben-Yehuda 1990; Dodge 1985; Heckert 1989, 1997, 1998). The positive deviance perspective inspired several strong theoretical statements suggesting that deviance can only be conceptualized as a negative …
Sex trading and psychological distress among women recruited from the streets of Harlem
OBJECTIVES: This study examines the relationship between sex trading and psychological distress and the implications of that relationship for prevention of human immunodeficiency virus among a sample of young women recruited from the streets of Harlem. METHODS: Interviews were conducted with 346 predominantly drug-using women, aged 18 to 29 years, of whom 176 had exchanged sex for money or drugs in the previous 30 days and were categorized as "se…
The Form and Flow of Teaching Ethnographic Knowledge: Hands-on Approaches for Learning Epistemology
A glance across ethnographic methods terrain reveals multiple controversies and divisive critiques. When training graduate students, these debates and controversies can be consequential. We offer suggestions for teaching graduate ethnographic methods courses that, first, help students understand some of the common epistemological debates in the field and, second, provide them with hands-on activities to practice working within different knowledge…
Girls’ Violence: Beyond Dangerous Masculinity
In this article, we review criminological perspectives of girls’ violence. To do this, we first look at the 20th‐century tendency to view violent girls as being the same as violent boys or as taking up dangerous types of masculinity. Second, we consider the contemporary ways that researchers have tried to move beyond male‐centered and masculinized explanations of female violence. Noting potential problems with current perspectives, we argue that …
Results of routine restaurant inspections can predict outbreaks of foodborne illness: The Seattle-King County experience
To analyze the association between the results of routine inspections and foodborne outbreaks in restaurants, we conducted a matched case-control study using available data from Seattle-King County, Washington. Case restaurants were facilities with a reported foodborne outbreak between January 1, 1986 and March 31, 1987 (N = 28). Two control restaurants with no reported outbreaks during this period were matched to each case restaurant on county h…
The Violence of Adolescent Life: Experiencing and Managing Everyday Threats
This article examines the experiences of 43 adolescents living in Denver, Colorado, from 1994 to 1996-the 2-year period following the peak of the youth violence epidemic. Where the dominant theories explaining inner-city violence tend to focus on disadvantaged communities, this study sampled youths from 5 neighborhoods with varying crime, poverty, family stability, and resident mobility rates. The findings demonstrate that, although most teens wo…
What's wrong is right: A response to the state of the discipline
Punishment and Racial Segregation of Schools: Against Racial Threat and Toward a Racial Control Perspective
Do different dimensions of ethnic identity reduce the risk of violence among Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents in Hawai'i
This study examines whether different dimensions of ethnic identity are associated with reduced risk of violence among an understudied population: Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents. Drawing from survey data of 298 Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Japanese, and Filipino adolescents in Hawai‘i, this study focuses on whether three dimensions of ethnic identity (“affirmation and belonging,” “ethnic identity achievement,” and “other-group orient…
Fighting for Her Honor: Girls’ Violence in Distressed Communities
Since the 1980s, delinquency researchers and urban ethnographers have increasingly placed girls’ violence in the center of their inquiries. Within recent scholarship, there are several looming questions such as how much of girls’ violence is shaped by the same forces motivating violent boys and how much is shaped by concerns unique to girls. This study draws on data from a 6-year qualitative study of violence among Pacific Islander high school st…
Punitive Exclusion and Therapeutic Support: Race, Gender, Class, and Multidimensional Control of High School Girls
The 1980s brought a sharp upturn in punitive practices in U.S. schools. One negative result of harsh school discipline has been that poor students of color have been punished at disproportionate rates, with the racial disparity in sanctions being dramatic among girls. Some have argued that support services can undermine multiple inequalities in punitive exclusion, although very little research has examined how inequalities function in schools tha…
Thoughts on Feminist Mentoring: Experiences of Faculty Members from Two Generations in the Academy
Ideology, pregnancy and drugs: Differences between crack-cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine users
Results of routine restaurant inspections can predict outbreaks of foodborne illness: The Seattle-King County experience
To analyze the association between the results of routine inspections and foodborne outbreaks in restaurants, we conducted a matched case-control study using available data from Seattle-King County, Washington. Case restaurants were facilities with a reported foodborne outbreak between January 1, 1986 and March 31, 1987 (N = 28). Two control restaurants with no reported outbreaks during this period were matched to each case restaurant on county h…
What's wrong is right: A response to the state of the discipline
Ideology, pregnancy and drugs: Differences between crack-cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine users
Sex trading and psychological distress among women recruited from the streets of Harlem
OBJECTIVES: This study examines the relationship between sex trading and psychological distress and the implications of that relationship for prevention of human immunodeficiency virus among a sample of young women recruited from the streets of Harlem. METHODS: Interviews were conducted with 346 predominantly drug-using women, aged 18 to 29 years, of whom 176 had exchanged sex for money or drugs in the previous 30 days and were categorized as "se…
Legitimating the First Tattoo: Moral Passage through Informal Interaction
Once considered low class or dangerous symbols, tattoos began to be defined as hip, trendy, and glamorous in the 1990s. Using the increasing popularity of tattoos among nineties youth as an example of moral passage, this article examines some of the interpretive processes at work in the destigmatization of deviance. Whereas researchers have positioned political action or population shifts as the main forces influencing moral passage, this article…
Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, and Pleasure
Saints and Sinners: Elite Tattoo Collectors and Tattooists as Positive and Negative Deviants
Arguing that the deviance literature has presented an overly negative image of norm breaking, some researchers in the 1980s and 1990s began to argue for a category of positive deviance that included studies of individuals who exceed social norms (Ben-Yehuda 1990; Dodge 1985; Heckert 1989, 1997, 1998). The positive deviance perspective inspired several strong theoretical statements suggesting that deviance can only be conceptualized as a negative …
The Violence of Adolescent Life: Experiencing and Managing Everyday Threats
This article examines the experiences of 43 adolescents living in Denver, Colorado, from 1994 to 1996-the 2-year period following the peak of the youth violence epidemic. Where the dominant theories explaining inner-city violence tend to focus on disadvantaged communities, this study sampled youths from 5 neighborhoods with varying crime, poverty, family stability, and resident mobility rates. The findings demonstrate that, although most teens wo…
Thoughts on Feminist Mentoring: Experiences of Faculty Members from Two Generations in the Academy
Are Blacks Really Less Trusting than Whites? Revisiting the Race and Trust Question
Many scholars have concluded that blacks are less trusting than whites. The research presented here calls that conclusion into question. Previous research has been based on the standard trust measure, which may not be well suited to understanding how trust varies with social categories such as race. Building on theories of self-categorization and social identity, we argue that blacks are not less trusting than whites as suggested in previous work…
Girls’ Violence: Beyond Dangerous Masculinity
In this article, we review criminological perspectives of girls’ violence. To do this, we first look at the 20th‐century tendency to view violent girls as being the same as violent boys or as taking up dangerous types of masculinity. Second, we consider the contemporary ways that researchers have tried to move beyond male‐centered and masculinized explanations of female violence. Noting potential problems with current perspectives, we argue that …
Exploring the Hypothesis of Ethnic Practice as Social Capital: Violence Among Asian/Pacific Islander Youth in Hawaii
Background: Studies of youth violence have usually examined social capital using qualitative methods, but remain limited by small sample sizes. In addition, few studies examine violence among Asian/Pacific Islander (API) youth, even though they are one of the fastest-growing youth populations in the USA. Aims: To contribute to a better understanding of culture and ethnicity in youth violence among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders by quantify…
Subjective Constructions of Neighborhood Boundaries: Lessons from a Qualitative Study of Four Neighborhoods
This article explores the boundaries of neighborhoods as subjectively constructed by 37 adolescents and 33 parents across four census-defined block groups in a Western city. We examine the degree of consensus among participants on the spatial boundaries of their neighborhoods, the stability of participants’ subjectively constructed neighborhood definitions, and the overlap between subjectively constructed definitions and census block group and tr…
Fighting for Her Honor: Girls’ Violence in Distressed Communities
Since the 1980s, delinquency researchers and urban ethnographers have increasingly placed girls’ violence in the center of their inquiries. Within recent scholarship, there are several looming questions such as how much of girls’ violence is shaped by the same forces motivating violent boys and how much is shaped by concerns unique to girls. This study draws on data from a 6-year qualitative study of violence among Pacific Islander high school st…
Do Descriptive Norms Solve Social Dilemmas? Conformity and Contributions in Collective Action Groups
Collective action researchers have focused on injunctive norms that specify approved behavior as a panacea for collective action problems. We investigate whether descriptive norms (similar behavior) can also solve these problems. We argue that descriptive norms generate social identification, which then sustains conformity to expectations. Consequently, descriptive norms can characterize both cooperation and noncooperation, such that cooperative …
The Race to Punish in American Schools: Class and Race Predictors of Punitive School-Crime Control
The Form and Flow of Teaching Ethnographic Knowledge: Hands-on Approaches for Learning Epistemology
A glance across ethnographic methods terrain reveals multiple controversies and divisive critiques. When training graduate students, these debates and controversies can be consequential. We offer suggestions for teaching graduate ethnographic methods courses that, first, help students understand some of the common epistemological debates in the field and, second, provide them with hands-on activities to practice working within different knowledge…
Jacked Up and Unjust: Pacific Islander Teens Confront Violent Legacies
Do different dimensions of ethnic identity reduce the risk of violence among Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents in Hawai'i
This study examines whether different dimensions of ethnic identity are associated with reduced risk of violence among an understudied population: Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents. Drawing from survey data of 298 Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Japanese, and Filipino adolescents in Hawai‘i, this study focuses on whether three dimensions of ethnic identity (“affirmation and belonging,” “ethnic identity achievement,” and “other-group orient…
Forum 36: From Fieldwork to Written Text
this edition of 'Forum' addresses the issues raised when anthropologists attempt to transform their preliminary records into an academic analysis. participants of the 'Forum' answer the following questions: What are the processes by which encounters and conversations with informants become a 'written source'? Is it acceptable to edit field notes? By what processes do these 'written sources' turn into the text of a publication? Is it acceptable to…
Punitive Exclusion and Therapeutic Support: Race, Gender, Class, and Multidimensional Control of High School Girls
The 1980s brought a sharp upturn in punitive practices in U.S. schools. One negative result of harsh school discipline has been that poor students of color have been punished at disproportionate rates, with the racial disparity in sanctions being dramatic among girls. Some have argued that support services can undermine multiple inequalities in punitive exclusion, although very little research has examined how inequalities function in schools tha…
You Kind of Find Yourself Helpless: Teens’ Identity Constructions and Responses to Childhood Trauma
Innovations in the trauma-informed care (TIC) field have promised to transform youth-serving institutions by asking practitioners to pay attention to the developmental needs of young people facing maltreatment. Despite notable TIC innovations, our knowledge about childhood trauma tends to be adult-centric, presenting youth as passive recipients of (rather than active agents responding to) harm. How 27 high school students made sense of childhood …
Punishment and Racial Segregation of Schools: Against Racial Threat and Toward a Racial Control Perspective
Boys' Violence in Settler-Colonial Contexts: Illegitimate Civic Duty and Pathways to Violence
The data for this paper come from an 11-year participant observation study in a public high school in Hawaiʻi. The study included 25 interviews with working-class and poor boys of color, most of whom were of Pacific Islander ancestry. This manuscript considers whether everyday acts of violence among the boys in the study stemmed from common motivations that cut across race, gender, and class divides. The study also explored whether the boys’ viol…
Should Schools Replace Exclusionary Punishments With Therapy? Gender, Race, and Class Inequalities and School-Based Mental Health Services
Since 2000, researchers have found that school punishments in the U.S. have disproportionately disadvantaged poor and working-class girls and boys of color. To mitigate the gender, race, and class disparities within exclusionary discipline, some scholars have recommended turning to inclusionary strategies, such as school-based mental health (SBMH) services, to solve problems among students. From 2007 to 2019, I observed a SBMH program at a public…
Sociology (19 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Political science (12 works) · Criminology (10 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Ethnic group (6 works) · Social science (6 works)