Diversity in Pathways to Parenthood: Patterns, Implications, and Emerging Research DirectionsThis review examines and synthesizes recent research on pathways to parenthood. We begin by providing basic information about patterns, differentials, and trends and discussing adoption and new reproductive technologies. We next turn to several areas of inquiry that became particularly prominent in the last decade: the continued ''decoupling'' of marriage and childbearing, the parental relationship context of nonmarital childbearing, family structure stability, multiple partner fertility, and racial and ethnic variation in childbearing patterns. We then consider the implications of this body of scholarship and identify avenues for future research. Throughout, we highlight racial/ethnic and social class variation in childbearing patterns.How a family forms and who forms it are fundamental issues in family research. As attested by a large body of academic work and by ongoing debates in the media, political forums, and popular culture, the answers to these questions matter. Moreover, the study of who becomes a parent, when, why, and in what context adds to our understanding of a range

To explore the limits of quantification as a form of rationalization, we examine a rare case of dequantification: race-based affirmative action in undergraduate admissions at the University of Michigan. Michigan adopted a policy of holistically reviewing undergraduate applications in 2003, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional its points-based admissions policy. Using archival and ethnographic data, we trace the adoption, evolution, and undoing of Michigan's quantified system of admissions decision-making between 1964 and 2004. In a context in which opponents of the system had legal avenues to engage a powerful outside authority, we argue that three internal features of the University's quantified admissions policy contributed to its demise: its transparency, the instability of the categories it quantified, and the existence of qualitative alternatives. Our analysis challenges the presumed durability and inevitability of quantification by identifying its vulnerabilities and suggests that quantification should be understood as a matter of degree rather than a simple binary.

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This article focuses on a case of failed consecration: the Egyptian obelisk in New York’s Central Park, commonly known as Cleopatra’s Needle. The obelisk arrived in New York from Alexandria in 1880, with great fanfare. For a brief period, it was the talk of the town: a tourist curiosity and star of advertising campaigns for consumer goods. After an initial surge in public visibility, the monument’s prominence faded. Today, the obelisk is not on the list of New York’s top cultural attractions, and no longer features in media campaigns or political rallies. I ask why the obelisk’s initial popularity failed to crystallize into an enduring condition of consecration. To answer this question, I use archival data to chart the obelisk’s transfer of ownership and planned move, through its Central Park début and subsequent decline in cultural salience. The obelisk met key criteria associated with successful cases of retrospective consecration. What weakened the obelisk’s career were lack of consecrating institutions and inherently unstable material conditions. These mechanisms are symbiotically related: because no institution took responsibility for conserving and protecting the obelisk, its granite face rapidly deteriorated and frustrated attempts to attract potential consecrating institutions. The article makes a twofold contribution to the literature on retrospective consecration. First, by discussing a failed case, it highlights the linked efficacy of consecration formation mechanisms. Second, in focusing on an ancient monument, it demonstrates the role played by materials and the specific measures of consecration that obtain in the broader sphere of ancient monuments.

Fiona R. Greenland interviews photographic artist Ayana V. Jackson.