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Sociology, like most disciplines/institutions in racialized (and other oppressive) social systems, are steeped with policies and practices that are designed to maintain the status quo. Thus, they are partly responsible for the gatekeeping, careerism, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination that plague our scholarly communities. In this piece, an extension of my 2018 Presidential Address to the Association for Humanist Sociology, I challenge academics to push back and find better ways, through critical humanist sociology, to serve the public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With this concluding article, we build off the scholarship from this two-part special issue on white space to recommend meaningful interventions that seek to challenge and dismantle white spaces at the organizational, institutional, and structural levels of U.S. society. We focus on two broad arenas of social space, one geographical (residential neighborhoods) and one institutional (education), in the hopes of generating more engagement from scholars of race and racism in conversations about policies that can meaningfully transform white space. We share experiences from the Systemic Justice Seminar and student activism at Harvard to highlight some innovative ideas about challenging, disrupting, and resisting white space. We suggest ways to think about policies and actions that make visible the tacitly exclusionary mechanisms within white spaces and create ways for BIPOC people and communities to take up space. Lastly, we encourage academic and public communities to continue exploring the best methods for deconstructing white space on the way to creating a more racially equitable society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, social scientists have begun to explicitly interrogate the racialized economic, political, cultural, and ideological mechanisms of social space. This work interrogates the overt and covert racial organization of social spaces and the ways in which systemic White supremacy is facilitated by racialized space. Drawing on and synthesizing that work we explicate a critical theory of White space, explicating how geographical, physical, cultural, and ideological social spaces reproduce a racialized social structure organized by White supremacy. We argue that White spaces are integral to racialized social systems and global anti-Black racism in ways that not only normalize the existing racial and social order but ensures Whites' fantasy(ies) of complete dominion over place and space, as well as control over brown and Black bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we compare two nationally recognized museums located in Chicago and Boston: The Art Institute of Chicago and the Boston Fine Arts Museum. We find that while both museums are colonial projects and White sanctuaries, there are variations in the racial mechanisms in place that help maintain White supremacy. Specifically, we look at three such mechanisms and compare and contrast between the two museums. We contend our findings suggest that while White supremacy is universal in its national (global) depth and breath, place matters. We argue that the physical context of the museums—their location within each city, the lay out of their locations, and the physical space of the museums themselves—help explain this variation. We end with specific implications for our work, centering on how we might dismantle current ideas of high culture (read: White) in favor of museums that are more inclusive, recognize their colonial project histories, and have antiracism in their mission as socially responsible institutions for the cities in which they reside and the people who reside there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the decolonizing sociology and the wider academy in which it operates which means citing scholars of color or those from outside of western paradigms, reading transnationally, and allowing for new ways of thinking to take space in sociological atmospheres.

The article focuses on violence arising out of social diversity. Topics discussed include expansion of the umbrella term diversity in modern times; the All Lives Matter which is socially more acceptable as it includes diverse groups and the Black Lives Matter movement which is claimed to be socially unjust; and stopping of use of the term diversity in favor of specific issues that need to be addressed.

In a day when many are fatigued with discourse on racism, discrimination, and inequality but others face a socially and politically trenchant White backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement, race scholars are faced with the complex scenario in which they must simultaneously articulate (1) what, when, and where racism operates to exercise both deleterious and advantageous effects on differently racialized actors and (2) exactly why and how racism (especially its “color-blind” variant) functions toward the reproduction of the racialized social system. While scholarship on the former is well rehearsed, we see this special issue as a clarion call for new scholarship to interrogate the precise mechanisms by which color-blind racism and the racialized social system operate. New work on mechanisms gestures (at the least) toward the three directions laid out in this issue: the axiological (the study of values), ontological (the study of being), and epistemological (the study of knowledge) dimensions of social life. Race scholars would be well served to illumine how color-blind racism and the racialized social system hold specific properties and processes by which values, being, and knowledge function intimately and integrally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issue surrounding interdisciplinarity, post-disciplinarity and anomic specialization in the field of sociology. Topics covered include the dearth of interdisciplinary research in sociology, the impact of the practice of sociology in the pursuit of a wider comprehension of social forces, and the institutional barriers hindering scholars to pursue interdisciplinary research and testing.

The authors focus on the concept of sociology and explore for whom and what purpose it serves, citing the highlights of the 50-year career of the Association for Humanist Sociology's first president, Alfred McClung Lee. Topics discussed include the ideas of marketplace citizenship, the move of universities toward an apparent denotative endorsement of corporatization, and an analysis of Lee's statement of purpose for humanist sociology.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the authors discuss topics to be featured in the May 2015 special issue about teaching, previous editors Janine Schipper and Shawn Bingham, and Kathleen Fitzgerald for her service as book review editor.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the legacy of the late humanist sociologist Ray P. Cuzzort.