Amin Ghaziani
Biographic Data
| ID | 96626 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amin Ghaziani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amin |
| FAMILY NAME | Ghaziani |
| SIGNATURE | GHAZIANI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7118-0809 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 55 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 456 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
What you know depends on how you know: A queer approach for measuring sexual fluidity
they study it. A sample of 52 LGBTQ+-identified individuals who completed a brief structured demographic questionnaire prior to an in-depth interview allows for a within-study comparison of how the same respondents described their sexuality across different modalities of data collection. Our findings highlight inconsistencies between what participants wrote in a survey and how they verbalised their experiences in an interview. These differences c…
Novel/Sociology: An Interview with Jonathan Wynn, Author of The Set Up
Amin Ghaziani interviews author Jonathan Wynn
The Little Engine that Maybe Could: An Interview with Syed Ali and Philip N. Cohen
Amin Ghaziani speaks with former Contexts editors Syed Ali and Philip N. Cohen about overcoming challenges to deliver meaningful sociology to the public
A Moral Obligation: An Interview With Claude Fischer, Founding Editor of Contexts
Amin Ghaziani speaks with Claude Fischer, founding editor of Contexts, about his vision for the magazine and the importance of continued investments in public sociology
The War on Woke—and What It Means
A curated collection of essays underscoring what we lose by abandoning efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, this special section considers DEI program successes across business, healthcare, and academia
Academic Publishing in a New Era
A curated collection of sociological essays, this special section considers the opportunities and threats posed by new developments and directions in academic publishing
Canada and the United States—a Friendship Strained
A curated collection of sociological essays on the fraying of an international relationship built on years of trust, reciprocity, mutual understanding, and shared reality, this special section considers U.S.- Canada relations from the Canadian perspective
Elevating the Conversation: An Interview with Jodi O’Brien and Arlene Stein
Amin Ghaziani speaks with former Contexts editors Jodi O'Brien and Arlene Stein about translating research and engaging with the public
Like Reading The New Yorker: An Interview With James M. Jasper and Jeff Goodwin
Amin Ghaziani speaks with former Contexts editors James M. Jasper and Jeff Goodwin about the best complaint they ever got
We’re All Doing Public Sociology: An Interview with Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen
Amin Ghaziani speaks with former Contexts editors Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen about bringing the public into public sociology
Election Reflections—and What Comes Next
A curated collection of essays tracking the pulse of American democracy as the second Trump Administration comes into power, this special section considers the campaigns that were waged and previews the battles yet to come
Something Beautiful: An Interview with Fabio Rojas and Rashawn Ray
Amin Ghaziani speaks with Fabio Rojas and Rashawn Ray, former co-editors of Contexts , about drawing the public into the sociological imagination
Publishing in General Sociology Journals
The Sociology of Queer Nightlife
Queer nightlife is receiving increasing recognition in a growing field of nightlife studies, yet its insights have been largely mined by humanists. In this introduction to a subfield-defining special issue, I blend arguments from the social sciences about “dirty work” with humanistic notions of “disidentification” as a survival strategy to amplify a sociological point of view. What theoretical opportunities arise from working on and against the c…
Situational Fluidity and the Use of Identity Labels in Interactions
The number of people who identify as LGBTQ+ more than doubled in the past decade, and with this growth has come an upsurge of expressive identity labels. However, that there are more labels available does not explain how people decide which to use. On the basis of 52 interviews, the authors show that LGBTQ+ people adopt multiple terms and adjust their usage relative to the interactional demands at hand. Inspired by research in psychology and popu…
Retheorizing Intersectional Identities with the Study of Chinese LGBTQ+ Migrants
Intersectionality has transformed our understanding of how multiple axes of power mutually shape social inequalities. However, significant questions arise when applying the theory's macro-level structural insights to identities on experiential, interactional, and situational levels. In this article, we retheorize intersectionality as a processual outcome. Drawing on in-depth interviews with skilled Chinese LGBTQ+ migrants in North America (n = 50…
The Cultural Field of Queer Nightlife: Organizations, Artists, and Curatorial Activism
Queer nightlife is recognized by humanists as an artistic project, while social scientists use it more often as a case to examine deviance and regulatory control, macro-structural inequities, substance use, and sexual violence. In this article, I invite researchers to prioritize culture and creativity in theoretical frameworks of nightlife. Based on 112 interviews about underground parties in London that have arisen as gay bars close, I argue tha…
A Drop of Epistemic Humility
Amin Ghaziani interviews Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal, about the value-add of conservative viewpoints in public debate
Making Hard Things Look Easy: An Interview with Richard Florida
Amin Ghaziani interviews urbanist Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, about the skills needed to communicate big ideas beyond academia
New Evidence From Census 2020 on the Residential Segregation of Same-Sex Households: A Research Note
The 2020 decennial census provides new insights into the demography of same-sex households and can shed light on ongoing debates in urban and gayborhood studies. Although the U.S. Census gives a vast undercount of the LGBTQ population, it is still the largest source of nationally representative data on same-sex households and is accessible over three time points (2000, 2010, 2020). In this research note, we use 2020 census data to examine the res…
Renewal without replication: Expanding Durkheim's theory of disruptions via queer nightlife
Gay bars are closing in large numbers around the world, but institutional loss provides only a partial narrative for evaluating the larger field of nightlife. Drawing on 112 interviews, we argue that bar closures disrupted the field and consequently encouraged the visibility of alternate nightlife forms, called club nights. Unlike the fixed and emplaced model of bars, club nights are episodic and event-based occasions that are renewing nightlife …
The Night is Still Young: A Cross-Disciplinary Forum on Queer Nightlife Studies
Adversity and Creativity
Amin Ghaziani interviews activist, journalist, and documentarian Rokhaya Diallo about adapting to find the right medium for every message
Getting Close to the Issues
Amin Ghaziani interviews author, journalist, and podcaster Louise Callaghan about bringing a human element to global current events
Professors, We (Still) Need You
Amin Ghaziani interviews Nicholas Kristof about the state of social science in news and policy
Post-Gay Collective Identity Construction
Falling under the rubric of “post-gay,” recent changes in gay life challenge theoretical accounts of collective identity by creating effects that, while acknowledged, have not yet been articulated using a parsimonious and portable framework. Consistent with conventional wisdom, LGBT activists construct collective identity using an oppositional “us versus them” formation during those times when they strategically deploy their differences from hete…
Cycles of Sameness and Difference in LGBT Social Movements
Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on oscillations of the movement's collective identity between emphasizing simila…
Cultural Anchors and the Organization of Differences: A Multi-method Analysis of LGBT Marches on Washington
Social scientists describe culture as either coherent or incoherent and political dissent as either unifying or divisive. This article moves beyond such dichotomies. Content, historical, and network analyses of public debates on how to organize four lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Washington marches provide evidence for an integrative position. Rather than just describe consistencies or contradictions, we contend that the key analy…
Cultural Archipelagos: New Directions in the Study of Sexuality and Space
Research on sexuality and space makes assumptions about spatial singularity: Across the landscape of different neighborhoods in the city, there is one, and apparently only one, called the gayborhood. This assumption, rooted in an enclave epistemology and theoretical models that are based on immigrant migration patterns, creates blind spots in our knowledge about urban sexualities. I propose an alternative conceptual framework that emphasizes spat…
Keywords and Cultural Change: Frame Analysis of Business Model Public Talk, 1975–2000
Performative Progressiveness: Accounting for New Forms of Inequality in the Gayborhood
Attitudes toward homosexuality have liberalized considerably, but these positive public opinions conceal the persistence of prejudice at an interpersonal level. We use interviews with heterosexual residents of Chicago gayborhoods—urban districts that offer ample opportunities for contact and thus precisely the setting in which we would least expect bias to appear—to analyze this new form of inequality. Our findings show four strategies that liber…
Queer Pop–Ups: A Cultural Innovation in Urban Life
Research on sexuality and space emphasizes geographic and institutional forms that are stable, established, and fixed. By narrowing their analytic gaze on such places, which include gayborhoods and bars, scholars use observations about changing public opinions, residential integration, and the closure of nighttime venues to conclude that queer urban and institutional life is in decline. We use queer pop–up events to challenge these dominant argum…
An 'amorphous mist'? The problem of measurement in the study of culture
The Constraints of Culture: Evidence from the Chicago Dyke March
Drawing on an ethnographic study of the Chicago Dyke March, this article focuses on an instance in which a movement's ideology and identity contradict in order to advance, the theoretical question of how culture `works'. In forming as a reaction to perceived exclusions by the national and annual Gay Pride parades, Dyke March organizers developed an ideological commitment to inclusion.This ideology affected the March in three key areas: constructi…
Measuring urban sexual cultures
Problems and prospects of measurement in the study of culture
Introduction: Queer Methods
Introduction:Queer Methods Matt Brim (bio) and Amin Ghaziani (bio) Queer studies is experiencing a methodological renaissance. In both the humanities and the social sciences, scholars have begun to identify research protocols and practices that have been largely overshadowed by dramatic advances in queer theory. The 2010 volume Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, edited by Kath Browne and Cath…
Infighting and Ideology: How Conflict Informs the Local Culture of the Chicago Dyke March
DuBoisian Sociology: A Watershed of Professional and Public Sociology
W. E. B. Du Bois was a sociologist a century ahead of his discipline. From the turn of the 20th century he advanced sociological principles that broke radically fromthose embraced by mainstream soc
Renewal without replication: Expanding Durkheim's theory of disruptions via queer nightlife
Gay bars are closing in large numbers around the world, but institutional loss provides only a partial narrative for evaluating the larger field of nightlife. Drawing on 112 interviews, we argue that bar closures disrupted the field and consequently encouraged the visibility of alternate nightlife forms, called club nights. Unlike the fixed and emplaced model of bars, club nights are episodic and event-based occasions that are renewing nightlife …
Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being PassÉ: How Assimilation Affects the Spatial Expressions of Sexuality in the United States
Journalists, activists and academics alike predict that gay neighborhoods in the United States will disappear, yet many of their claims are unsubstantiated or overly determined by economic factors. This article examines 40 years of media accounts to identify the mechanisms that explain why these urban areas are changing. I begin with the observation that the rate of assimilation of sexual minorities into mainstream society has accelerated in toda…
Anticipatory and Actualized Identities: A Cultural Analysis of the Transition from Aids Disability to Work
Throughout the course of their lives, many people living with HIV/AIDS have prematurely retired onto AIDS disability. A new trend, however, has swept across the nation. Where once people were getting sick, leaving work, and embracing inevitable death, now, with advances in medical technology, many people with HIV/AIDS are renewing their lease on life and discovering a desire to go back to work. To learn how gay men's identities are impacted as th…
The Cultural Field of Queer Nightlife: Organizations, Artists, and Curatorial Activism
Queer nightlife is recognized by humanists as an artistic project, while social scientists use it more often as a case to examine deviance and regulatory control, macro-structural inequities, substance use, and sexual violence. In this article, I invite researchers to prioritize culture and creativity in theoretical frameworks of nightlife. Based on 112 interviews about underground parties in London that have arisen as gay bars close, I argue tha…
People, protest and place: Advancing research on the emplacement of LGBTQ+ urban activisms
There is a vibrant literature on LGBTQ+ urban geographies, as well as established traditions in sociology and political science on collective action, but research infrequently brings these interdisciplinary fields of sexualities, social movements and urban studies together to explore the emplacement of LGBTQ+ urban activisms. In this article, I use contributions from this special issue of Urban Studies to propose two pathways, conceptualised as a…
Situational Fluidity and the Use of Identity Labels in Interactions
The number of people who identify as LGBTQ+ more than doubled in the past decade, and with this growth has come an upsurge of expressive identity labels. However, that there are more labels available does not explain how people decide which to use. On the basis of 52 interviews, the authors show that LGBTQ+ people adopt multiple terms and adjust their usage relative to the interactional demands at hand. Inspired by research in psychology and popu…
Retheorizing Intersectional Identities with the Study of Chinese LGBTQ+ Migrants
Intersectionality has transformed our understanding of how multiple axes of power mutually shape social inequalities. However, significant questions arise when applying the theory's macro-level structural insights to identities on experiential, interactional, and situational levels. In this article, we retheorize intersectionality as a processual outcome. Drawing on in-depth interviews with skilled Chinese LGBTQ+ migrants in North America (n = 50…
The Night is Still Young: A Cross-Disciplinary Forum on Queer Nightlife Studies
Distinguishing but not defining: How ambivalence affects contemporary identity disclosures
LGBTQ Social Movements
Infighting and Ideology: How Conflict Informs the Local Culture of the Chicago Dyke March
Anticipatory and Actualized Identities: A Cultural Analysis of the Transition from Aids Disability to Work
Throughout the course of their lives, many people living with HIV/AIDS have prematurely retired onto AIDS disability. A new trend, however, has swept across the nation. Where once people were getting sick, leaving work, and embracing inevitable death, now, with advances in medical technology, many people with HIV/AIDS are renewing their lease on life and discovering a desire to go back to work. To learn how gay men's identities are impacted as th…
Keywords and Cultural Change: Frame Analysis of Business Model Public Talk, 1975–2000
DuBoisian Sociology: A Watershed of Professional and Public Sociology
W. E. B. Du Bois was a sociologist a century ahead of his discipline. From the turn of the 20th century he advanced sociological principles that broke radically fromthose embraced by mainstream soc
Infighting and Ideology: How Conflict Informs the Local Culture of the Chicago Dyke March
Infighting and Ideology: How Conflict Informs the Local Culture of the Chicago Dyke March
Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine
The Constraints of Culture: Evidence from the Chicago Dyke March
Drawing on an ethnographic study of the Chicago Dyke March, this article focuses on an instance in which a movement's ideology and identity contradict in order to advance, the theoretical question of how culture `works'. In forming as a reaction to perceived exclusions by the national and annual Gay Pride parades, Dyke March organizers developed an ideological commitment to inclusion.This ideology affected the March in three key areas: constructi…
An 'amorphous mist'? The problem of measurement in the study of culture
How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism
Cultural Anchors and the Organization of Differences: A Multi-method Analysis of LGBT Marches on Washington
Social scientists describe culture as either coherent or incoherent and political dissent as either unifying or divisive. This article moves beyond such dichotomies. Content, historical, and network analyses of public debates on how to organize four lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Washington marches provide evidence for an integrative position. Rather than just describe consistencies or contradictions, we contend that the key analy…
Post-Gay Collective Identity Construction
Falling under the rubric of “post-gay,” recent changes in gay life challenge theoretical accounts of collective identity by creating effects that, while acknowledged, have not yet been articulated using a parsimonious and portable framework. Consistent with conventional wisdom, LGBT activists construct collective identity using an oppositional “us versus them” formation during those times when they strategically deploy their differences from hete…
There Goes the Gayborhood?
There Goes the Gayborhood?
Gay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are “gayborhoods” destined to disappear? This book provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why they are changing today, and their prospect…
Problems and prospects of measurement in the study of culture
Measuring urban sexual cultures
Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence
Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being PassÉ: How Assimilation Affects the Spatial Expressions of Sexuality in the United States
Journalists, activists and academics alike predict that gay neighborhoods in the United States will disappear, yet many of their claims are unsubstantiated or overly determined by economic factors. This article examines 40 years of media accounts to identify the mechanisms that explain why these urban areas are changing. I begin with the observation that the rate of assimilation of sexual minorities into mainstream society has accelerated in toda…
Introduction: Queer Methods
Introduction:Queer Methods Matt Brim (bio) and Amin Ghaziani (bio) Queer studies is experiencing a methodological renaissance. In both the humanities and the social sciences, scholars have begun to identify research protocols and practices that have been largely overshadowed by dramatic advances in queer theory. The 2010 volume Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, edited by Kath Browne and Cath…
Cycles of Sameness and Difference in LGBT Social Movements
Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on oscillations of the movement's collective identity between emphasizing simila…
Performative Progressiveness: Accounting for New Forms of Inequality in the Gayborhood
Attitudes toward homosexuality have liberalized considerably, but these positive public opinions conceal the persistence of prejudice at an interpersonal level. We use interviews with heterosexual residents of Chicago gayborhoods—urban districts that offer ample opportunities for contact and thus precisely the setting in which we would least expect bias to appear—to analyze this new form of inequality. Our findings show four strategies that liber…
Cultural Archipelagos: New Directions in the Study of Sexuality and Space
Research on sexuality and space makes assumptions about spatial singularity: Across the landscape of different neighborhoods in the city, there is one, and apparently only one, called the gayborhood. This assumption, rooted in an enclave epistemology and theoretical models that are based on immigrant migration patterns, creates blind spots in our knowledge about urban sexualities. I propose an alternative conceptual framework that emphasizes spat…
Queer Pop–Ups: A Cultural Innovation in Urban Life
Research on sexuality and space emphasizes geographic and institutional forms that are stable, established, and fixed. By narrowing their analytic gaze on such places, which include gayborhoods and bars, scholars use observations about changing public opinions, residential integration, and the closure of nighttime venues to conclude that queer urban and institutional life is in decline. We use queer pop–up events to challenge these dominant argum…
LGBTQ Social Movements
Imagining Queer Methods
Reimagines the field of queer studies by asking “How do we do queer theory?” Imagining Queer Methods showcases the methodological renaissance unfolding in queer scholarship. This volume brings together emerging and esteemed researchers from all corners of the academy who are defining new directions for the field. From critical race studies, history, journalism, lesbian feminist studies, literature, media studies, and performance studies to anthro…
After/Lives: Insights from the Covid-19 Pandemic for Gay Neighborhoods
Beginning in 2020, COVID-19 produced shock-shifts that were felt across the globe, not least at the level of the local neighborhood. Some of these shifts have called into question the role of physical places for face-to-face gatherings, including those used by LGBTQ+ people. Such open questions are a key concern for a book on gayborhoods, so this chapter engages in three analytic tasks to provide preliminary reflections on how pandemics problemat…
Sociology (45 works) · Political science (28 works) · Law (23 works) · Gender Studies (22 works) · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Media studies (12 works) · Queer (12 works)