Despite several widely covered scandals involving the role of for-profit corporations in administering immigration policy, the privatization of immigration control continues apace with the criminalization of immigration. How does this practice sustain its legitimacy among the public amid so much controversy? Recent studies on the criminalization of immigration suggest that supporters would explicitly vilify immigrants to defend the privatization of immigration control. Research on racialized social control, on the other hand, implies that proponents would avoid explicit racism and vilification and instead rely on subtler narratives to validate the practice. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of over 600 frames derived from nearly 200 news media articles spanning over 20 years, we find that journalists and their sources rarely vilify immigrants to justify the privatization of immigration control. Instead, they frame the privatization of immigration detention as a normal component of population management and an integral part of the U.S. economy through what we call the apathy strategy—a pattern of void in which not only the systematic oppression of immigrants is underplayed, immigrant themselves also become invisible.

While critical pedagogy emphasizes the marginalized status of the learner, feminist pedagogy challenges the presumption of a one-dimensional power dynamic in the classroom by illuminating the intersecting axes of power along which everyone in a learning community, including the pedagog, can simultaneously enjoy privileges and experience marginalization. Yet there has been little empirical intersectional research on how the university as an institution interferes with critical and feminist teaching. Extending Torres's intersectional theorization of critical pedagogy and building on sociological research on workplace inequality, we investigate the role of the neoliberal university in facilitating/obstructing feminist critical teaching. We conducted ethnography on three campuses across two countries, the United States and Peru. While we expected that our unconventional teaching methods combined with our foreignness, womanhood, and queerness would invite resistance from students, we found that the messages sent by the race-and gender-neutral neoliberal university were at the root of the illegibility of our teaching and our intellectual existence. We argue that the neoliberal university as it exists is antithetical to critical pedagogy in general, and feminist teaching in particular, attesting to the urgency of returning critical pedagogy to its roots in political organizing beyond formal education. Contemporary calls for increased funding for education instead of policing is just one example of how many people look toward education, including higher education, to change minds and drive fundamental social change. Critical pedagogy indeed provides theoretical and practical models for using education as a tool for human liberation but it must be rooted in political organizing. In this paper, we analyze the role of the university in facilitating/obstructing feminist critical teaching, using data collected from three campuses across two countries, the United States and Peru. We argue that the neoliberal university as it exists is antithetical to critical pedagogy in general, and feminist teaching in particular. Our teaching and research are grounded in a long tradition of liberatory education that goes back to sociology's founding father DuBois, who argued forcefully that education represents a path of freedom for marginalized people (1932). DuBois, along with bell hooks (1994) and Paolo Freire (1970), inspired generations of sociologists who wanted to teach and work toward freedom. The message that teaching about social problems must be tied to the learners' personal experiences speaks directly to the cultivation of sociological imagination (Mills [1959] 2000).

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Very few studies of legal compliance have been conducted outside the context of liberal democracies. This study tests and expands theoretical expectations regarding legitimacy and its effect on legal compliance in the context of China, a society under authoritarian rule where clashing cultural discourses coexist. In addition, it examines different types of laws, highlighting the importance of social relations regulated by and cultural elements supporting various laws. Using linear regressions with data from an original representative social survey of 556 individuals in Chengdu, China, the author finds that (1) the perceived legitimacy of law, (2) expectations concerning compliance with law, and, most importantly, (3) the association between law’s legitimacy and expected compliance all vary according to the type of social relationship targeted by the legal regulation (familial, state-oriented, or economic). The article shows how China’s cultural, political, and historical environments contribute to the patterns identified in this analysis.

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