This article examines how white youths culturally appropriate hip-hop by adhering to the demands of color-blind ideology. Using ethnographic methods and interviews of members in a local hip-hop scene, I argue that colorblind ideology provides whites with the discursive resources to justify their presence in the scene, and more important, to appropriate hip-hop by removing the racially coded meanings embedded in the music and replacing them with color-blind ones. This research contributes to the existing scholarship on racial ideology by analyzing how it is put into action by individuals in a specific local context in which race is salient. Furthermore, it extends our understanding of how color-blind ideology operates in practice, enabling whites with the discursive resources and racial power to culturally appropriate hip-hop, however unintentionally, for their own purposes.

This article examines how nursing home care workers use emotions to construct dignity at work. Previous scholarship has shown how the financial and organizational characteristics of nursing homes shape and constrain emotion work among staff. Using evidence gathered during 18 months of participant observation in two nursing homes and 65 interviews with staff, this article analyzes how, despite obstacles, nursing home care workers generated authentic emotional attachments to residents. Surprisingly, some staff members said they particularly appreciated working with residents difficult to control. They felt accomplished when such residents successfully transitioned from life at home to life in institutional care. Emotions created dignity for staff and induced compliance among residents. Emotions are not only generated by organizations and imposed on workers; staff themselves produced emotions—sometimes in ways consistent with organizational demands, and sometimes not—and they consistently found in their emotions a resource to manage the strains of their work lives.

In this article, I examine how individuals diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease use illness narratives to construct community. The ability to narrate is a fundamental component of the self. Using 354 posts by 32 members of an Internet forum, I argue that people with Alzheimer's, whose ability to narrate, and thus create a self, was compromised, nonetheless managed to tell stories of redemption out of which a salvaged self emerged. Narratives are essential for the construction of self, but as I show in this article, they are also essential for the construction of community. Forum members shared stories, gave advice, offered encouragement, and commiserated about their symptoms in ways that generated solidarity. Internet forums provide a venue for people with illnesses who are unable to leave the home to construct community.

No abstract

No abstract