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Peer sexuality educators' accounts of their work reveal two approaches to empathy with their students: affinity and alliance. "Affinity-based empathy" rests on the idea that the more commonalities sexuality educators and students share (or perceive they share), the more they will be able to empathise with one another, while "alliance-based empathy" is an analytical process of considering the social contexts that shape others' lives. We assess the potential for each source of empathy to equip peer sexuality educators to counter hierarchical models of teaching and learning, effect social change and promote the interests of youth. Because shared identity categories prove difficult to manage and sustain, we find affinity alone does not offer peer sexuality educators lasting opportunities to work with young people. In contrast, developing alliance-based empathy prepares peer educators - indeed, all sexuality educators - to identify inequalities or barriers that others face and seek ways to foster social change. We conclude with recommendations for future research.

Students share folk beliefs that make it difficult for them to understand inequality, especially the harmful consequences of social practices they routinely engage in, are attached to, and take for granted. Four of these beliefs include: (a) harm is direct, extreme, and the product of an individual's intentions; (2) harm is the product of the psyche; (3) for harm to occur, there must be an individual to blame; (4) beliefs and practices that students cherish or enjoy cannot be harmful. We offer sociological ideas that counter students' individualistic understanding of social harm. (Contains 6 footnotes.)

For decades, feminist teachers have been working in a chilly political climate. Rightwing critics claim that women's studies programs suffer from "insularity and narrowness, ideological bias, and a tendency toward misinformation." In the mainstream media, feminism is both vilified and trivialized. It's no wonder that many students doubt that sexism exists. In this article, the authors share the feminist strategies they practice for teaching about sexism to their students. The authors discuss techniques on: (1) Establishing trust; (2) Facilitating student ownership of the course; (3) Getting students to apply feminist insights to the world through writing; (4) Sharpening students' analytical skills through humor; and (5) Having students connect feminist knowledge to their future actions. (Contains 19 notes.)

This paper offers six strategies for dealing with students' resistance to learning about the oppression of women: making the familiar strange, substituting race for sex, distinguishing between intentions and consequences, imagining men in women's bodies, exposing students' claims of equal gender oppression as false parallels, and analyzing some of women's desires as instances of false power. These teaching strategies, along with Marilyn Frye's (1983) metaphor of oppression as a birdcage consisting of systematically related wires, provide a framework for pre-empting or responding to students' resistance. (Contains 7 footnotes.)

Explores the changing expectations of students towards a women professor throughout the course of her pregnancy. The professor made a conscious effort to standardize her classroom behavior throughout the course. Nonetheless, students attributed negative reactions and a general decline in her effectiveness to the debilitating effects of the pregnancy. (MJP)

What is it like to teach qualitative methods to graduate students in predominantly quantitative departments? We draw on our experiences teaching fieldwork in three departments to show that folk notions [...]

Reviewer: MARTHA COPP, East Tennessee State University Imagine a softball league game at 5 A.M.: half of the players drink coffee to wake up before heading to work and the [...]

When this book arrived, I envisioned reading some gripping 'confessionals.' For students and seasoned field-workers alike, fieldwork accounts can be engaging without forcing one to get one's hands dirty or [...]

The article discusses the impact of computerization in legal work. In the decade since microelectronics began to make small computers affordable, most law firms have put computers to use. Computers arrived in law offices most often to help in billing and other aspects of the business side of legal practice. Their utility in generating templates for routine documents was quickly recognized, so that computerized word processing became almost essential to active legal practice. Most discussion of lawyers' computer use, however, focuses on either practical advice or questions of privacy. The possible implications of widespread computer use on the organization of legal work are seldom considered in anything but a completely ad hoc way. This shows a healthy absence of the wild predictions of a computer revolution which have plagued discussions of the potential impact of computers in other fields. Nonetheless, computer use may have a significant impact on the legal profession. Lawyers generally have not seen the machines as vehicles of professional transformation, still less as threats to their income and prestige. They have seen computers as cheaper clerical and research assistants, not professional challenges.