Transfer from one institution to another is increasingly common for students during the course of their higher education careers. The number of students moving from community colleges to four-year universities continues to rise. Transfer students report experiences of alienation, isolation, and other personal and academic challenges. To address this problematic transition, the authors propose a cohort-based learning community model that incorporates high-impact practices of first-year experience programs demonstrated to improve retention. These include enhanced advising, project-based student collaboration, application of knowledge across courses, collaboration of core faculty, peer support, and required participation in campus activities. This model, applicable to any major and particularly useful for those comprised heavily of upper division courses, is applied in a Sociology department. Findings from the pilot study suggest that students experience increased sense of community, improved academic and social integration, and great promise for retention. Ultimately, the comprehensive model and assessment plan detailed in this article can be implemented in a similar manner across disciplines and universities for a variety of student populations of concern.

This paper presents a critical examination of the representations and code words for race and gender used in coverage of the Democratic primary between January 2008 and June 9, 2008. This analysis included all coverage in the New York Times and two cable television news channels (CNN, MSNBC). With an election pitting a black man against a white woman, media has been forced to go behind the colorblind curtain that typically ignores all but the most obvious references to race. Evidence illustrates how the mainstream media, in creating a story that resonates with commonsense understandings of race, gender and power, reworks representations of the candidates in a way that does not challenge white, masculine hegemony.

This research presents data from in-depth interviews of sixty adults in Southern California who have formed families across the black/white color line. In a societal context where normative family formation remains mono-racial, many adults in multiracial families manage their social performances to mitigate the stigma associated with their unusual family pattern or to challenge social expectations associated with race, class, and gender. Their stories reveal how they deploy strategic exaggerations of gender and stereotypes of social class in their day to day lives. These deployments operate to manage social interactions when confronting commonsense expectations about what it means to be a man or woman who trespasses the color line in family formation

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This paper concerns homelessness and its strained relation to personal privacy. The homeless, by and large, have no access to truly private spaces they can lay legitimate claim to-places where they will not be potentially harassed or seen by the public or the police. In this paper, I illustrate some of the experiences the homeless have had while lacking privacy, the ways they adjust to and cope with the loss of privacy, and their attempts to find privacy, however temporarily. In addition, the relations between legality and homeless living are explored alongside some discussion of the homeless shelter system and how people that have stayed in shelters often view it. The methodology implemented in the study involved face-to-face contact and the use of a semi-structured instrument of interview questions concerning the lived experiences encountered by homeless individuals living on the streets in Anaheim and Fullerton in southern California. The direct evidence from the study suggests that many homeless individuals have their reasons for disliking homeless shelters, that their public experiences are inevitably trying and uncomfortable, and that public and police surveillance of their daily activities pose a sort of omnipresent threat to their privacy, possessions and even their bodies. And this threat is of a kind that they have minimal, if any, means to circumvent. I conclude with an examination of the kind of policy-Housing First-that is the best social tool we collectively have, so far, for reducing the number of actively homeless persons.