Penn Sociology News

Steve Viscelli was recently on PBS Newshour Tonight. The episode featured Viscelli's new report. You can watch the video here.

Phoebe Ho, Hyunjoon Park, and Grace Kao have published an article on racial and ethnic differences in student participation in private supplementary education activities in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. The article can be read here.

Daniel Aldana Cohen recently wrote for The Nation an analysis for apocalyptic climate reporting and its news commentary. You can read the full article here.

Annette Lareau recently penned Teaching First-Generation College Students and it's been featured in last week's Almanac. Her essay examines tools that which could be helpful in ensuring success for all college students.

Natalie A.E. Young and Emily C. Hannum published an article on the implications of rising inequality in China for the lives of children in The China Quarterly. The paper, "Childhood Inequality in China: Evidence from Recent Survey Data (2012-2014)", draws on data from two nationally representative surveys to reveal stark disparities between children from different socio-economic backgrounds in family environments and in welfare outcomes, including physical health, psychosocial health, and educational performance. Young and Hannum find that childhood inequality in post-reform China is driven not only by the deprivations of poverty, but also by the advantages of affluence.

Steve Viscelli’s research on worker misclassification supported workers’ oral arguments in New Prime v. Oliveira before the Supreme Court of the United States recently. The case will decide whether independent contractors in interstate transportation have the ability to take employers to court over employment abuses or must submit to individual arbitration. Viscelli has argued that hundreds of thousands of such workers have been misclassified and denied minimum wage. Questioning by conservative Justices Roberts and Gorsuch was unexpectedly favorable to the workers' arguments. Read more about the case and arguments here. Read Viscelli’s amicus brief to the court here.

Peter Harvey, Ph.D. student, publishes "It's a Total Way of Life? Catholic Priests, Women's Ordination, and Identity Work" with the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Through interviews with 31 Catholic priests, Harvey shows how they are polarized along generational lines into two groups he terms “Total Identity Priests” and “Plural Identity Priests.” The existing conservative or liberal attitudes of these groups (respectively) - such as opposing or favoring women’s ordination - are shown to be maintained through priests’ everyday forms of identity work. This identity work - including wearing the clerical collar constantly, or only when “on duty” - serves to summarize, communicate, and reinforce priests’  personal identities, which in turn reinforces their existing attitudes to women’s ordination.

The Wall Street Journal recently sat down with Steve Viscelli to discuss his research on self-driving technology and the impact it could have on employment over the next quarter of a century. Full article can be read here. Viscelli's research can be downloaded here.

Ross Koppel argues for the removal of warnings and advisories associated with FDA anti-depressants in STAT. You can read the full article here.