Hello, here are two new publications from OOW members!

Ghaziani, Amin. 2025. “The Cultural Field of Queer Nightlife: Organizations, Artists, and Curatorial Activism.” The Sociological Quarterly. 

ABSTRACT: Queer nightlife is recognized by humanists as an artistic project, while social scientists use it more often as a case to examine deviance and regulatory control, macro-structural inequities, substance use, and sexual violence. In this article, I invite researchers to prioritize culture and creativity in theoretical frameworks of nightlife. Based on 112 interviews about underground parties in London that have arisen as gay bars close, I argue that, more than just an art form, queer nightlife is a cultural field. The conceptual shift from form to field accents the organizational plurality of nightlife, relational artmaking practices, and the aesthetics of activism. While these themes have been described by others—and they are by no means exhaustive—I use them to explain broad associations between art and event-based nightlife scenes in the context of community-level disruptions.

Neeraj Rajasekar, Evan Gunderson, and Annika Wilcox. 2025. “The Language of “Diversity” or “DEI”? Exploring Job Titles of Diversity Professionals in US Institutions of Higher Education.” Sociological Forum. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.13047

ABSTRACT : Diversity discourse and related policy have been common in US higher education, and many such institutions employ diversity professionals. As diversity has historically been a contested concept, the language schools use to articulate diversity can greatly shape the discursive environment and work faced by diversity professionals, especially in the current moment of regular political attacks on diversity and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices in US higher education. This study analyzes the language of diversity in US higher education via analysis of diversity-related job titles. We examine job title data collected from thousands of colleges and universities across the country over an 18-year period, with special attention to educational institutions’ use of “diversity” versus “DEI” terminology. We also analyze how institutional characteristics and contextual factors are associated with language in diversity-related job titles. We find that te language of DEI became substantially more prominent over time, rising steadily from 2015 through 2022. While this may change in the near future, our study illustrates that DEI language had some momentum in American institutions of higher education (IHEs) in the past decade. Notably, schools’ language choice has little association with institutional characteristics or contextual factors, which has implications in a moment where anti-DEI politics and policy are affecting IHEs around the country. We discuss our analysis in the context of the current political-legal landscape and consider directions for future research examining the language of diversity and DEI in US society.

Lee, Youngrong. (2025). Class identity vs intersectional solidarities: Divergent models for organizing gig workers in Seoul and Toronto. International Journal of Comparative Sociology,  online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/00207152241312904

ABSTRACT

Studies indicate that gig workers, one of the leading groups revitalizing labor movements globally, have organized by diverging from traditional union strategies. How do they achieve this in diverse local contexts? Drawing on 21 months of international ethnographic fieldwork with gig workers’ unions in Seoul and Toronto, this article examines how and why these two unions develop different strategies for addressing critical crises. Comparative analysis reveals that while the shared labor process and the multinational parent company drive the unions toward new unionism, different worker subjectivities are emphasized by each union based on specific axes of oppression: working-class citizen men in Seoul and racialized immigrants in Toronto. These union orientations are linked to the unions’ distinct histories, including the biographies of founding members. My argument is twofold. First, to better understand rising gig workers’ organizing efforts around the globe, we must consider both global and local contexts. While gig labor processes push gig workers’ unions to move away from traditional union tactics, two key local factors—the workforce’s demographic makeup and union histories—shape their divergent models. Second, it is critical to understand the process of cultivating solidarity—not only building solidarity itself but also deciding which groups to be in solidarity within the local context.

Here is a new publication from our OOW section member:

Wilcox, Annika. 2025. “Conforming Critical Diversity: Voicing Diversity for Equity in an Organizational Inequality Regime.” Sociological Focus 58(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/00380237.2024.2433524

ABSTRACT: Diversity is a contested notion: it can be framed “uncritically,” as all differences that benefit privileged groups, or “critically,” as categorical inequalities that must be addressed to advance equity. While uncritical diversity is broadly legitimated, critical diversity is often socially suppressed, particularly in racialized and gendered workplaces. Prior research elucidates how organizational actors advance uncritical (e.g. colorblind) diversity yet pays little attention to how everyday employees voice critical diversity in white-male-dominated work contexts that politicize matters of inequality. I address this concern via analysis of an extreme case: a large, U.S.-based technology company. Drawing on in-depth interviews with employees, I demonstrate that individuals strategically negotiate critical and uncritical meanings of diversity in conversation by conforming critical diversity, which involves (1) defining diversity broadly yet centering categories of inequality, (2) offering critical and uncritical justifications of diversity, and (3) couching critical justifications in individualistic language. These practices uphold status-quo-reproducing diversity narratives while also generating more critical arguments than expected based on prior research. Results suggest the importance of studying how the interactional spaces of organizations and workplaces constrain and enable individuals’ discussions of diversity. If organizations redefined cultural norms governing diversity-related conversations, they might see greater results from formal diversity initiatives.