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This essay outlines the author's experience of having his ethnographic data subpoenaed. It outlines the challenges of subpoena's to research, and suggests four solutions: (1) Apply for and utilize the National Institutes of Health certificate of confidentiality by asking health‐related questions over the course of one's research; (2) Establish a task force that articulates clear ethical guidelines for ethnographic research, with attention to the conditions wherein ethnographers can break confidentiality (and might also comply with subpoenas). These ethical guidelines should then be made clear to research subjects as a part of informed consent processes; (3) Demand that institutions (institutional review boards) that require confidentiality as a condition of research be required to defend that confidentiality through the office of the general counsel; (4) Socialize the cost of subpoenas, wherein scholars can be part of an insurance pool that will defend them in the event of a subpoena and thereby defend the general enterprise of ethnographic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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An essay is presented which discusses the American sociologist and writer W.E.B. DuBois' early 20th century sociological theory on the elite. An overview of DuBois' perspective on African Americans' improving their social conditions, including the racial aspects and the role that elite African Americans played in this regard, is provided.

Elites are those with vastly disproportionate control over or access to a resource. We can understand this as a position that a social actor occupies, or we can imagine such resources as a possession of an actor. The study of elites is the study of power and inequality, from above. It involves looking at the distribution of social resources, which can include economic, social, cultural, political, or knowledge capital. It also means exploring the role of institutions such as schools, families, and clubs in how such resources are organized and distributed. Over the past decade, particularly as social power and economic rewards have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, elite sociology has experienced a revival. Empirical observations of these phenomena point to the changing character of American inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual assault is a part of many students' experiences in higher education. In U.S. universities, one in four women and one in ten men report being sexually assaulted before graduation. Bystander training programmes have been shown to modestly reduce campus sexual assault. Like all public health interventions, however, they have unintended social consequences; this research examines how undergraduate men on one campus understand bystander interventions and how those understandings shape their actual practices. We draw on ethnographic data collected between August 2015 and January 2017 at Columbia University and Barnard College. Our findings show that university training and an earnest desire to be responsible lead many men to intervene in possible sexual assaults. However, students' gendered methods target more socially vulnerable and socially distant men while protecting popular men and those to whom they are socially connected. Students' actual bystander practices thus reproduce social hierarchies in which low prestige may or may not be connected to actual risks of sexual assault. These results suggest that understanding intragroup dynamics and social hierarchies is essential to assault prevention in universities and that students' actions as bystanders may be effective at preventing assaults in some circumstances but may lead to new risks of sexual assault.