Shamus Khan
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3594797 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Shamus Khan |
| PRENOMES | Shamus |
| SOBRENOME | Khan |
| ASSINATURA | KHAN S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0331-5000 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 69 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 1170 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 12 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2008 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
The fragile accomplishment of elite domination
Family Work Among the Astors
Within classical sociological accounts of capitalism, families are curious remnants of the past. Contemporary elite sociology dismisses the family in a different way: by primarily focusing on individual men. When the family does appear within elite studies, scholars frequently follow a stratification framework, which focuses on the transmission of social position from parents to children. This paper breaks with these dominant tendencies to unders…
Salvage ethnography
In a reflection upon Alexander's (2024. The Asian Gang Revisited: Changing Muslim Masculinities. London: Bloomsbury Publishers.) The Asian Gang Revisited, I highlight challenges with "revisits". They rest on a colonialist anthropological assumption: that you can go back to your tribe, and as a primitive community you're welcome to assume that they are largely stuck in place. It's thereby easy enough to reevaluate your claims. Alexander provides u…
Privilege, with Shamus Khan
What does privilege look like today?How do the advantaged perform "ease"?And why do some of us feel at home in elite spaces, while others feel awkward?Princeton sociologist Shamus Khan joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on elites, entitlement and more.Reminding us that "poor people are not why there's inequality; rich people are why there's inequality", he highlights the importance of studying elites for studying inequality, as the gap between the t…
A dataset without a code book
This paper reflects upon calls for “open data” in ethnography, drawing on our experiences doing research on sexual violence. The core claim of this paper is not that open data is undesirable; it is that there is a lot we must know before we presume its benefits apply to ethnographic research. The epistemic and ontological foundation of open data is grounded in a logic that is not always consistent with that of ethnographic practice. We begin by i…
Which Cases Do I Need?' Constructing Cases and Observations in Qualitative Research
This methodological review starts one step before Small's classic account of how many cases a scholar needs. We ask, 'Which cases do I need?' We argue that a core feature of most qualitative research is case construction, which we define as the delineation of a social category of inquiry. We outline how qualitative researchers construct cases and observations and discuss how these choices impact data collection, analysis, and argumentation. In pa…
From Compliance to Transformation
This response to Campbell et al. makes three points. First, the commitment to “know more” must examine the full ecology of relationship violence and sexual misconduct (RVSM); that knowledge is essential for creating multilevel prevention strategies. Second, a full realization of an intersectional perspective requires attention to a broader range of power-based harms, forging institutional links between RVSM prevention and work on diversity, equit…
Sexual Geographies
We begin many of the public presentations of our work with Austin's story.He was, as we usually note, one of the more engaging young men that we interviewed in our 2015-16 research on sexual assault and sexual health on the Columbia and Barnard campuses, realized as part of the broader Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation.He appears in Sexual Citizens' only spicy sex scene, doing his part on a hot summer night to narrow the campus or…
L’assignation à comparaître et la saisie des données ethnographiques
Cet article décrit l’expérience de l’auteur, assigné à comparaître pour ses données ethnographiques. Il décrit les défis posés par les citations à comparaître dans le domaine de la recherche et propose quatre solutions : (1) demander et utiliser le certificat de confidentialité des National Institutes of Health en posant des questions relatives à la santé au cours de la recherche ; (2) créer un groupe de travail qui formule des directives éthique…
Associations Between Low-Household Income and First-Generation Status With College Student Belonging, Mental Health, and Well-Being
Completing college can be difficult and students who are first-generation (FG) or low-income (LI) or both (FGLI) encounter unique structural challenges. We conducted a population-based survey (N=1671) at two interconnected highly-selective institutions of higher education and examined measures related to belonging, mental health, and well-being. Means and standard deviations for continuous measures and proportions for categorical measures were ca…
States against citizens
Sexual Citizens
The Situational Contexts of Sexual Experiences among Urban College Students
Objectives Research examining sex among college students has frequently focused on negative sexual experiences. This study aimed to understand situational predictors of various dimensions of students’ sexual experiences. Methods: 427 college students participated in a 60-day daily survey; 213 reported sex and were asked questions about each sexual encounter. Results: 1,664 sexual encounters were reported. 72.5% were described as very pleasurable,…
Editor’s Letter
It is with a combination of sadness and relief that I write my final editorial letter for Public Culture. Serving as editor the last four years has been an honor. The generous support of Eric Klinenberg and the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University allowed me to focus on the core task of reading articles and reviews. Knowing the extent of what other editors do, I realize what a privilege this was. And the truly phenomenal manageme…
Socio-Ecologically Constituted Types of Sexual Assault
Despite the burden of sexual assault on college campuses, few effective prevention programs exist. Understanding the socio-ecological context in which sexual assaults occur may illuminate novel pathways to augment prevention. We examined data from 349 students at two inter-connected urban universities who completed a population-based survey ( N = 1,671) and described at least one incident of sexual assault victimization. Using latent class analys…
Social Constructions of Rape at Columbia University and Barnard College, 1955–90
Sex on college campuses has fascinated scholars, reporters, and the public since the advent of coeducational higher education in the middle of the nineteenth century. But the emergence of rape on campus as a public problem is relatively recent. This article reveals the changing social constructions of campus rape as a public problem through a detailed examination of newspaper reporting on this issue as it unfolded at Columbia University and Barna…
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)
The classic "Undead text" of sociology is Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. This article argues that what helps make Presentation Undead is that its key point is obvious. Yet this is only the case after someone shows that point to you. Undead texts are ones that live in us, because reading them awakens us to what we feel we have always seen and known, but did not quite know until we read them
Social Dimensions of Sexual Consent Among Cisgender Heterosexual College Students
Friends, strangers, and bystanders
Sexual assault is a part of many students' experiences in higher education. In U.S. universities, one in four women and one in ten men report being sexually assaulted before graduation. Bystander training programmes have been shown to modestly reduce campus sexual assault. Like all public health interventions, however, they have unintended social consequences; this research examines how undergraduate men on one campus understand bystander interve…
Antidemocracy in America
Editor’s Letter
Our issue opens with a reflection on racist motifs at festivals and parades throughout Colombia. Melissa Valle ties the presence of characters that mirror “Mammy” and “Jezebel” archetypes and evoke the primitive African to the globally circulating racial imagination. As local narratives meet global representations, these subservient, sexualized, and animalistic representations make race legible. Resisting what many US scholars of Latin America ar…
The Temporal Character of Sexual Consent among College Students
The presence or absence of sexual consent distinguishes between sexual contact that is sexual assault and sex that is not assault. While temporality is an implicit focus in studies of sexual consent, it has received relatively little attention as an object of analysis. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research conducted as part of a mixed methods study on sexual health and sexual assault among college students, this article examines the role of t…
The Social Organization of Sexual Assault
In this review, we provide an overview of the literature on sexual assault. First, we define sexual assault, noting its multiple dimensions and the consequences for operationalization—including reviewing strategies for such operationalization. Second, we outline different approaches to sexual assault, critically assessing those frameworks that rely upon a model of sociopathy; instead, we propose focusing on more sociological and ecological unders…
The Advisory Board Perspective from a Campus Community-Based Participatory Research Project on Sexual Violence
Based on the experience of board members this article outlines four recommendations for the construction of CBPR studies: meeting frequently, co-education of board members and researchers, addressing power and privilege, and prioritizing highly valued participation, with mutual respect for and recognition of distinct roles and expertise
Bodycams and Gender Equity
Law enforcement agencies, community advocates and policymakers hope that the widespread adoption of police bodycams will alleviate racial disparities and reduce misconduct and use of force. Racial justice has been central to this conversation, but gender justice has not. This essay takes an intersectional, gendered look at bodycam policies, challenging the assumption that officers will act more fairly when they know they are being recorded. Bodyc…
Talk Is Cheap
This article examines the methodological implications of the fact that what people say is often a poor predictor of what they do. We argue that many interview and survey researchers routinely conflate self-reports with behavior and assume a consistency between attitudes and action. We call this erroneous inference of situated behavior from verbal accounts the attitudinal fallacy. Though interviewing and ethnography are often lumped together as 'q…
The Sociology of Elites
Elites are those with vastly disproportionate control over or access to a resource. We can understand this as a position that a social actor occupies, or we can imagine such resources as a possession of an actor. The study of elites is the study of power and inequality, from above. It involves looking at the distribution of social resources, which can include economic, social, cultural, political, or knowledge capital. It also means exploring the…
Theoretical and methodological pathways for research on elites
In this introductory essay to our special issue on elites, we outline some of the major challenges to research in this area and propose a series of theoretical and methodological pathways to address them. Theoretically we make four recommendations: (a) greater attentiveness to and specificity about the relationship between elites and power; (b) a clearer articulation of the relationships between elites and the varieties of capitalism; (c) far mor…
Sexual Citizens
Less Theory. More Description
Sociology must worry less about theoretical innovation and more about empirical description
How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America
This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that th…
Reasons and Inclusion
This article provides two empirical evaluations of deliberation. Given that scholars of deliberation often argue for its importance without empirical support, we first examine whether there is a 'deliberative difference'; if actors engaging in deliberation arrive at different decisions than those who think on their own or 'just talk.' As we find a general convergence within deliberation scholarship around reasons and inclusion, the second test ex…
I Didn't Want To Be 'That Girl
This article deploys ethnographic data to explain why some students do not label experiences as sexual assault or report those experiences. Using ideas of social risks and productive ambiguities, it argues that not labeling or reporting assault can help students (1) sustain their current identities and allow for several future ones, (2) retain their social relationships and group affiliations while maintaining the possibility of developing a wide…
Elite identities
Elites have changed. They are now more open and meritocratic. They are also the engines of inequality. In this article, I argue that elites have embraced the rhetoric of the rights movements of the past decades, becoming champions of the notion that it is individual capacities that matter, not ascriptive characteristics. This stance embraces a new efficiency of our world, that of the market. The earnest deployment of these ideas by the elite has …
The Analytic Lenses of Ethnography
It is almost axiomatic that there are two contrasting theoretical approaches to ethnography: induction and deduction. However, regardless of whether ethnographers build theory from observations (induction) or use observations to test theory (deduction), they approach the field armed with one or more particular analytic lens that leads them to focus on a distinct thread of the social fabric. We outline the suite of analytic lenses that typify ethn…
"Drones as "Atmospheric Policing
The use of drones to supplement and operationalize US border enforcement and municipal policing disturbs the supposed boundary between military and civilian or battleground and home front. Situating drones in an expanded field of a war power-police power nexus draws together histories of so-called small wars, insurgencies, civil rebellions, labor strikes, prison uprisings, and practices of resistance at various scales that have responded and cont…
Toward an Understanding of the Relationship Between Accounts and Action
The Subpoena of Ethnographic Data
This essay outlines the author's experience of having his ethnographic data subpoenaed. It outlines the challenges of subpoena's to research, and suggests four solutions: (1) Apply for and utilize the National Institutes of Health certificate of confidentiality by asking health‐related questions over the course of one's research; (2) Establish a task force that articulates clear ethical guidelines for ethnographic research, with attention to the …
Policing Intensity
How do everyday acts of policing hinge upon the contrastive evaluation of sensible intensities? This article examines how various attunements toward regimes of sensible intensities shape the policing of borders and bodies in a place where questions of the "sovereign" and identifications of the "illegal" are semiotically and politically up for grabs: the Indonesia-Malaysia borderlands. In two expository sketches, it examines the various ways in wh…
The Education of Elites in the United States
Cet article propose d'étudier la formation des élites dans le système éducatif des États-Unis. Il examine comment les étudiants sont acceptés dans les écoles d'élite, leurs expériences au sein de ces écoles et les conséquences de la formation des élites. Il soutient que les écoles d'élite ne sont pas caractérisées seulement par la sélectivité initiale, la compétitivité, le niveau social ou les caractéristiques des étudiants qui les fréquentent, e…
Which Cases Do I Need?' Constructing Cases and Observations in Qualitative Research
This methodological review starts one step before Small's classic account of how many cases a scholar needs. We ask, 'Which cases do I need?' We argue that a core feature of most qualitative research is case construction, which we define as the delineation of a social category of inquiry. We outline how qualitative researchers construct cases and observations and discuss how these choices impact data collection, analysis, and argumentation. In pa…
Speculative Policing
This article develops a theorization of "speculative policing": an experimental, future-oriented form of policing that connects crime prevention to real-estate speculation and other forms of negotiating urban risk and uncertainty. Speculative policing works to establish a specific sociopolitical order; renders economically productive the differentiated and dynamic value of urban spaces and populations; and involves flexible, provisional intervent…
The Police Are the Punishment
Against the normative definition of punishment as the infliction of pain on an offender by an appropriate legal authority, this essay argues that the police, although they are not entitled to administer retribution, commonly do so on the street or at the precinct, including against innocent individuals. Such punishment is disproportionately imposed on working-class men from disadvantaged neighborhoods belonging to ethnoracial minorities. It is ju…
The Social Organization of Sexual Assault
In this review, we provide an overview of the literature on sexual assault. First, we define sexual assault, noting its multiple dimensions and the consequences for operationalization—including reviewing strategies for such operationalization. Second, we outline different approaches to sexual assault, critically assessing those frameworks that rely upon a model of sociopathy; instead, we propose focusing on more sociological and ecological unders…
The Sociology of Elite Distinction
Elimination Politics
Focusing on punishment and imprisonment across three time periods, this essay explores the two-pronged attack on Palestinian politics that has characterized the settler-colonial project in Palestine over the past one hundred years. This double move entails an attempt to deny or destroy Palestinian political community, while simultaneously identifying Palestinians as political actors, specifically as bad actors. The aim is to undermine Palestinian…
The Exceptional Prison
Between 2013 and 2016, police in one Brazilian city killed 3,287 people-66.5 percent of whom were black. It might not seem surprising, then, that this place is also one of the only in the world that has a prison just for police. But this prison is exceptional, a "model" place, as those who run it say. It isn't "dungeon-like" or a "warehouse of black lives," as scholars describe prisons in this country and elsewhere. Among an apiary, a tilapia pon…
Violence Work and the Police Order
As violence work, policing exceeds the institution of the police. Indeed, the latest bout of American invasions that cluster under the label "global war on terror" have been framed as policing operations by American officials as well as scholars. What, then, is the relationship between these two violence workers, the soldier and the police officer? Should we characterize violence work, from Ferguson to Fallujah, as "policing"? And if so, how? Wha…
To Protect and Serve Themselves
The police in the United States were once subject to control by political machines. The professionalization process freed police from this control, but it had an unexpected result. Professionalization meant that police answered primarily to themselves, which enabled them to become self-interested. This process transformed the police into a new type of authoritative political actor. This article examines the history and organizational sociology of…
Deliberation and Ethnicity
Scholars typically suggest that deliberation, defined as communication guided by reason‐giving and inclusion, works best behind a veil of ignorance or when personal differences are bracketed. In this article we explore deliberation within ethnically diverse groups. We operationalize ethnicity in three ways: as an aspect of individual identity, as an identity that is made salient through priming, and as an enactment relative to interactions in par…
Reasons and Inclusion
This article provides two empirical evaluations of deliberation. Given that scholars of deliberation often argue for its importance without empirical support, we first examine whether there is a 'deliberative difference'; if actors engaging in deliberation arrive at different decisions than those who think on their own or 'just talk.' As we find a general convergence within deliberation scholarship around reasons and inclusion, the second test ex…
Privilege
As one of the most prestigious high schools in the nation, St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, has long been the exclusive domain of America's wealthiest sons. But times have changed. Today, a new elite of boys and girls is being molded at St. Paul's, one that reflects the hope of openness but also the persistence of inequality. In Privilege , Shamus Khan returns to his alma mater to provide an inside look at an institution that has been…
The Sociology of Elite Distinction
No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal
Boys and Their Schooling
The Sociology of Elites
Elites are those with vastly disproportionate control over or access to a resource. We can understand this as a position that a social actor occupies, or we can imagine such resources as a possession of an actor. The study of elites is the study of power and inequality, from above. It involves looking at the distribution of social resources, which can include economic, social, cultural, political, or knowledge capital. It also means exploring the…
Elite identities
Elites have changed. They are now more open and meritocratic. They are also the engines of inequality. In this article, I argue that elites have embraced the rhetoric of the rights movements of the past decades, becoming champions of the notion that it is individual capacities that matter, not ascriptive characteristics. This stance embraces a new efficiency of our world, that of the market. The earnest deployment of these ideas by the elite has …
Herbert J Gans
Saying Meritocracy and Doing Privilege
This article describes the relationship between saying and doing. It argues that focusing on the discrepancy between participants' accounts and their actions is one of the greatest analytical strengths of ethnography. We make this case by drawing upon an ethnography of an elite boarding school. We also reflect on the way that two ethnographers worked together to better understand the social significance of accounts that are incongruent with situa…
Humans Cannot Communicate”—Unravelling the Mental Knots of Niklas Luhmann
DiMaggio, P. J. and W. W. Powell. 1991. Introduction (pp. 1–38) in Powell, W. W. and P. J. DiMaggio (eds) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. DiMaggio, P. J. and W. W. Powell. 1991. ‘‘The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields’’ (pp. 63–82) in Powell, W. W. and P. J. DiMaggio (eds) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analy…
Lost in Transition
Deliberation and Ethnicity
Scholars typically suggest that deliberation, defined as communication guided by reason‐giving and inclusion, works best behind a veil of ignorance or when personal differences are bracketed. In this article we explore deliberation within ethnically diverse groups. We operationalize ethnicity in three ways: as an aspect of individual identity, as an identity that is made salient through priming, and as an enactment relative to interactions in par…
Toward an Understanding of the Relationship Between Accounts and Action
Talk Is Cheap
This article examines the methodological implications of the fact that what people say is often a poor predictor of what they do. We argue that many interview and survey researchers routinely conflate self-reports with behavior and assume a consistency between attitudes and action. We call this erroneous inference of situated behavior from verbal accounts the attitudinal fallacy. Though interviewing and ethnography are often lumped together as 'q…
Talking Like a Generation
This article contributes to the 'cognitive turn' in the study of ethnicity and national identity, which focuses on how individuals construct ethnic identity categories pertinent to social cohesion. Using Mannheim as a methodological and analytical guide, we show how examining ethnicity as a relational enactment devoid of a priori categorisations allows situational identities that intersect with classical sociological concepts other than ethnicity…
Editor’s Letter
The articles collected in this issue of Public Culture all serve as a model for using fine-grained local knowledge to interrogate and refine grand theories like globalization or neoliberalism. We follow tuberculosis research from nineteenth-century Berlin through to mid-twentieth-century Britain and India; we visit the “virtual world” of online poker to understand how people act under and make sense of uncertainty; we explore East African encount…
The Education of Elites in the United States
Cet article propose d'étudier la formation des élites dans le système éducatif des États-Unis. Il examine comment les étudiants sont acceptés dans les écoles d'élite, leurs expériences au sein de ces écoles et les conséquences de la formation des élites. Il soutient que les écoles d'élite ne sont pas caractérisées seulement par la sélectivité initiale, la compétitivité, le niveau social ou les caractéristiques des étudiants qui les fréquentent, e…
Can we have aesthetics with social constructionism? - Antoine Hennion, The Passion for Music
Can we have aesthetics with social constructionism? - Antoine Hennion, The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation, trans. Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier (Oxford, Routledge, 2015) - Volume 57 Issue 3
Saskia Sassen
Shamus Khan talks with Saskia Sassen about some of her most influential book projects, from The Mobility of Labor and Capital and The Global City to her recent publication, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Reading these texts together and in light of current issues, their conversation touches on topics such as how migration relates to political and economic processes, the continuously shifting landscape of global cities…
What elite theory should have learned, and can still learn, from W.E.B. DuBois
One of W.E.B. DuBois’ most famous concepts, the “Talented Tenth”, is a theory of elites1 (1903). Yet elite scholars have completely ignored this contribution. In this brief essay, we outline what e
Editor’s Letter
This issue presents a collection of essays that illustrate infrastructures, politics, affects, and structures of feeling that produce social life through the often-intertwined effects that pull people together while simultaneously pushing them apart.In our Forum essay, Noah Arjomand begins the issue with a series of photos that follow a young Turkish man in the days before shipping out to fulfill his duty as a conscripted soldier. Complicated att…
Editor’s Letter
Our issue opens somewhat unusually for Public Culture, with two Forum pieces that focus on the United States.Harel Shapira begins by bringing us up close with American gun culture.Drawing on his two-year ethnography of gun owners, Shapira introduces us to Calvin Mitchell.Calvin is a classic gun owner in many senses -he's conservative, he loves guns, he belongs to a range of gun organizations -but he also happens to be black.And through Calvin, Sh…
Editor’s Letter
Our issue opens with a concern that will run through my editorship of Public Culture: violence. (We will devote a special issue to the topic in 2017.) Madiha Tahir brings us to Barmal, a district in Afghanistan’s Paktika Province bordering Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. While American journalists often write about such places from “green zones,” hundreds of miles away, or more likely from different countries and even different continents altogether, Ta…
The Analytic Lenses of Ethnography
It is almost axiomatic that there are two contrasting theoretical approaches to ethnography: induction and deduction. However, regardless of whether ethnographers build theory from observations (induction) or use observations to test theory (deduction), they approach the field armed with one or more particular analytic lens that leads them to focus on a distinct thread of the social fabric. We outline the suite of analytic lenses that typify ethn…
Beyond action
Isaac Reed, like the great early work of Talcott Parsons, is focused on social action and continental theorization and largely blind to the broader American interactionist tradition. Absent are Blumer, Dewey, Mead, James (though Peirce appears fleetingly), or the more phenomenological tradition of Schutz or Garfinkel. Absent too is the relational theorizing of gender and race scholars. Given all that is in Reed, it is absurd to suggest that there…
Sociology (51 obras) · Political science (46 obras) · Law (34 obras) · Psychology (25 obras) · Politics (22 obras) · Epistemology (20 obras) · Social Psychology (16 obras) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (14 obras) · Computer Science (13 obras) · Criminology (13 obras)