Jelly’s Place: An Ethnographic Memoir

This is a report of a field experience in retrospect. An ethnographic study of black streetcorner men, it was conducted in the early 1970s among the patrons of Jelly’s Place, a bar and liquor store on the South Side of Chicago. The 55 men came repeatedly to Jelly’s corner and created a local social stratification system. The focus of the study was the way in which they made and remade their local status system in everyday life. This document describes the field work experience which led me to focus on this particular sociological issue and to represent the social dynamics of the group.     

Women's agency in Australia's first fertility transition: a debate revisited

The place of women's agency in the fertility transition of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is a contested one. Some argue that the transition was achieved mainly through male methods of contraception. Others, including many arguing from an Australian perspective, contend that women's agency in fertility decline was significant. In this article, the authors revisit the issue of women's agency in Australia. Drawing on a range of archival sources and scholarship, they seek to demonstrate that women in Australia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had access to contraception, albeit limited, and, where that failed, to abortion. The authors argue that the changing political and educational climate, which saw women gaining the vote in 1894 in South Australia and admission to secondary and higher education and paid work, provided the setting for women's changing status. Their increasing agency – an agency many women worked to secure – encouraged women to challenge many traditional practices.     

Productive power in the Papua New Guinea church partnership programme

This article analyses the strategy of partnership governing the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program (CPP). Using a governmentality lens that sees power as having a productive aspect, it focuses on how the technologies of financial management and planning, monitoring, and evaluation (PME) are taken up by the churches. Fieldwork research reveals how, in conforming to the discipline of these technologies to fulfil the partnership requirements, skilful and pragmatic individuals utilise the same technologies to empower their churches to enact their theology on development. For partnerships to work, the space must be created for such productive power to flourish.     

From hegemonic to inclusive masculinities in English professional football: marking a cultural shift

Abstract

In this article, we conduct a generational study of measuring progress towards the inclusion of homosexuality in professional sport. We accomplish this by interviewing an openly gay football player, Anton Hysén, in the year 2017, using the precise same questions about the relationship between his homosexuality and sport that were asked of the first openly gay professional footballer in 1992, Justin Fashanu. We thus measure difference in attitude according to the 25 years that have elapsed between the interviews. Our results emphasize two themes: First, the near-total acceptance of being gay within professional football today, compared to 25 years ago; and second, the social praise that is levied upon today’s openly gay sportsmen, compared to the social stigma placed upon Fashanu.