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This paper explores the experiences and perceptions of scientists who have published findings that question the safety and precision of genetic modification (GM) technologies. Gieryn’s concept of boundary work is used to understand how such scientists make sense of social and scientific territories. It also uncovers their reactions to being excluded from the scientific space. Like other scientists, most saw science as distinct from the social field. As a result, they were surprised by the scale and nature of the attack on their findings once their work reached the public domain. They observe with dismay the formation of a regime of knowledge in biology that allows some questions to be asked, but not others. As such, some of their insights are strikingly Foucaultian. In their own practices, they increasingly strive to engender a politics of truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars often employ concepts from Goffman's dramaturgical approach to study online communities of stigmatized individuals as '"backstage" and refuge from social disapproval. The goal of this paper is to extend this view through an examination of conversations with pro-ana bloggers, an online community for people with eating disorders. This analysis takes on the challenge of fusing Goffman's ideas about identity performance and stigma with more recent theories about boundary maintenance, in finding out how the pro-ana community uses an online environment that is both anonymous and public. In-depth interviews with pro-ana members reveal that in order to protect this virtual group and resist the stigma associated with their illness and with their online presence, they construct their own norms and rules in the online realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private and personal chefs are in a unique position being members of an established and now respected occupation, while also approximating low status household laborers, both paid and unpaid. Based on interviews with 50 chefs in California, this paper illustrates how private and personal chefs perform boundary work in order to distinguish themselves from others in the industry, as well as from each other. The boundaries drawn, however, vary according to the resources available. Facing challenges to their legitimacy, private and personal chefs position themselves as different from but equal to other chefs. Instead of relying on claims of culinary expertise, they draw emotional boundaries that turn their emotional labor into a source of distinction. When seeking to distinguish themselves from each other, some draw cultural boundaries specific to culinary skill, while others depend on non-culinary forms of cultural capital (e.g. college education). Hierarchies of gender, race, and class underlie these boundaries, as evidenced by the chefs' distinctions against home-cooks and domestic servants. Ultimately, I argue that private and personal chefs' boundary work does little to undermine the devaluation of work within the home, be it unpaid or paid. This research contributes to existing scholarship by illustrating how ambiguously positioned occupations allow workers freedom to draw upon resources from various fields in efforts to distinguish themselves and legitimize their work. Moreover, interviews with workers in relatively new fields provide insight into how gender-, class-, and race-coded professional cultures are formed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an in-depth case study of contemporary lesbians use of labels in the niche dating site, "WomynLink.com." Drawing on five months of online ethnography between November 2011 and March 2012, I examine and compare butch, femme, and queer members' use of labels and bodily presentations in WomynLink's (video) chat room, forum boards, and profiles. Using WomynLink's free chat room service or external messaging services such as Skype, I also conducted 21 online interviews. I draw on the boundary making literature to illustrate how femme, butch, and queer members engaged in different forms of boundary work to achieve online desirability by reconciling the tensions between their gendered bodily presentation and other members' perceptions of it. While femme members engaged in supportive boundary work, butch and queer members' boundary work was defensive. Femme members sought to highlight their femininity; butches' boundary work made salient their sexual interest in lieu of site members' intentional disregard and public repudiation of their masculine label use; and queer members defended their sex category as female and sexual identity as lesbian. These patterns of boundary work provide insight into how the salience of lesbian gender labels has evolved, particularly, in the contemporary online era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies the concept of boundary work to a new topic, social movements, specifically, congregation-based community organizing (CBCO). It examines how teaching participants to understand themselves according to new sets of boundaries helps organizations build mass constituencies that cross the social boundaries of race, class, and religion. These include boundaries between themselves and outsiders: CBCOs and other kinds of organizations, between participants and officials, between "people of faith"and religion vs. the economic and political systems. It also includes internal moral boundaries between virtuous or "accountable" members and others. Data shows that both moral and practical, or pragmatic boundaries are used. This research has implications not only for the study of boundary work in organizational cultures, but also for understanding how social movement organizations can strategically build mobilizing cultures across social boundaries that have inhibited broad coalition building for social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper has two goals. The first goal is to offer a spatio-temporal model for understanding the scientificity of social knowledge as a set of performative activities which mediate between science and politics. I then apply the model to the British case and argue that social science acquired academic prestige only after it emerged as an expertise in the political sphere, through the work of governmental commissions, and only after its influence and effects were felt, through legislation and policy, in the public sphere. My second goal is to show the important role played by Harriet Martineau, a social investigator and a famous popularizer of governmental reports who suffered from a severe hearing impairment, in the scientization of British politics and consequently in the development of Victorian Social Science. Using the spatio-temporal model, I suggest a phenomenological reading of Martineau's work. Martineau's biography reveals an interesting intersection between deafness, propensity toward visual knowledge, the materiality of writing reports about society (as opposed to the non-materiality of speaking), the wide circulation of these reports in the public sphere and, ultimately, the scientificity of social knowledge. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, I present an empirical analysis of the cultural activities of a particular group of upper-middle class immigrants of color. I apply the notion of boundary work to immigrants in the multi-faceted context of the San Francisco bay area where they might give salience to differing and contradictory criteria for status depending on the multiple cultural repertoires available to draw from. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, I find that Bengali immigrants, in the face of racialization and internal differentiation, construct immigrant cultural capital by fusing "tolerant" multi-cultural (Bryson, 1999) and "exclusive" ethnic cultural capital (Carter, 2003). I argue that segmented assimilation, currently, the most influential theory on immigrant identity, fails to elucidate how racial formation in the U.S. impacts upon highly skilled, non-white immigrants who identify ethnically but are not based in an ethnic enclave. My findings display that scholars of immigrant identity need to acknowledge the role of multidimensional cultural capital in adaptation and identification processes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do scientists find their place in the social world? How do the institutional contexts of scientists' work environment, training processes, and peer-group interactions reflect scientists' understanding of scientific practices, rules of the game of the scientific field, and themselves as scientists? Studies on the politics of knowledge have demonstrated that various social forces are enmeshed with the production of the "legitimate" scientific knowledge, and boundary works in the scientific field--the field-wide efforts to distinguish science and non-science--are achieved through conflicts, negotiations, and stabilization. However, scholars have not yet developed an adequate explanation as to how scientists make sense of their own practice of boundary work in relation to their everyday laboratory life. Drawing on ethnographic research at a molecular genetics laboratory, this article argues that the scientific habitus--a set of dispositions of scientists' mind and body, constituted and internalized via scientists' institutional experiences-- governs a particular practical strategy for understanding the social world. In particular, scientists are trained to be a rhythmic part of the treadmill of resource consumption and data production. With this acquired scientific habitus, scientists manage their scientific works as doable, make sense of their works in relation to the perceived rule of the scientific field, distinguish the world to which they belong and the world of uncontrollability, and voluntarily find their symbolic place in society--the place they feel comfortable and confident, but remain silent and indifferent under the already established order that deeply structures their deep-seated playground: the scientific field. This study suggests that the construction and exercise of the scientific habitus reveal the everyday politics of knowledge in the context of the neoliberal era of the knowledge economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the migration of a religious "minority" that is largely invisible within migration studies, namely the Muslim Filipino domestic workers. In doing so, this article highlights how religious belonging intersect is negotiated, from before these women leave their country, during their time in the country of destination, to when they return to the Philippines. This research therefore underlines how boundary work affects the religious belonging of this Muslim "minority", by presenting the Middle-East as an opportunity to perform norms of "Muslimness". It also highlights how performing these norms appears to be an opportunity for these women to challenge the status of being a "minority" in the Philippines. Moreover, this article shows how these Muslim "minorities" access a certain symbolic capital when they return home by becoming a Hajji and a Balikbayan (returnees). Finally, this research shows that religious belonging shape migration aspirations of Muslim Filipina domestic workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many indigenous peoples in Latin America span state borders. These contemporary state borders are imposed over territories that initially belonged to the indigenous. However, little research has addressed how such indigenous peoples identify in relation to state borders. How does collective identification of peoples who span geopolitical borders align with and diverge from those borders? And what might these different alignments and divergences mean for the potential realization of indigenous cross-border nations? This article addresses this issue by analyzing how the Mam, an indigenous people divided by the Guatemala-Mexico border, identify collectively. In particular, we focus on how Mam collective identification in Guatemala aligns with and diverges from Guatemala's political administrative boundaries and its border with Mexico. We expand upon existing sociological literature on "boundary work" as it relates to the construction of collective identities by demonstrating that the boundary work entailed by processes of indigenous identification takes place in relation to spatial, and not just symbolic, boundaries. We demonstrate that boundary work integrates the spatial with the symbolic; the two are coconstituting. Boundary work among the Mam entails defining boundaries that in some cases sustain state geopolitical borders (such as political-administrative divisions within Guatemala or even Guatemala's border with Mexico) and conflict with them in others. We also show that Mam identity is fluid and flexible, and suggest that this character enhances the potential for a Mam cross-border nation building project to gain wider acceptance among the Mam as well as vis-àvis state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Merton proposed an approach to the social stratification of scientists that was predicated on a distinction between the social processes of science and the "content" of natural scientific knowledge, which led him to a question-begging, meritocratic view of stratification (the best scientists get the most rewards). Merton's view has been criticized for overlooking the contingent and practical ways that scientists struggle to control meaning-not just of scientific texts but of all of the cultural means by which they interact with the world, including how they view the purpose of science or how "rationality" or "interestedness" is identified. An alternative view of stratification is promoted which draws on the work of Bourdieu and Gieryn to explain how the evaluation of scientific claims derives in part from the stratified distribution of material resources. In this view, the practical work of inscribing and defending boundaries can be considered a property of a stratified field that serves as a means by which stratification is reproduced. With practical cultural reasoning in the foreground, it is argued, approaches to the stratification of scientific fields can serve as a starting point for examining stratification in other intellectual fields where knowledge is less easily mistaken as absolute, such as social science and journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]