Oppression and resistance dialectically envelop everyday life, for both the privileged and the oppressed. The disenfranchised live under regimes in which repression ranges from brutal to institutionally subtle. The privileged socially reproduce their rule through ideology that justifies and policy that institutionalizes subjugation. However, rejecting depression, detachment, and disaffection that emerges from surviving ruling-class regimes, many previously dispirited, instead, choose defiance. They engage in subjectivity struggles by crafting critical consciousness, refusing to be dupes to ideology that represents them as inferior. They undertake social struggles demanding policy that dismantles institutional discrimination and that enhances opportunities for learning and achievement. The exploited, as best as they can in regimes of ruling class and white male supremacy, reconstruct their selves and, it is hoped, transform society. The qualitative studies that comprise this edited collection, present a structure-and-agency perspective, broadly defined, that constitutes the best sociological lens through which to understand oppression and resistance. Contributors interrogate various aspects of oppression and resistance, from the personal to the institutional, exploring situations in which the structure of oppression was insurmountable and illustrating cases in which agency was able to transform either individual or group identity.
Theoretical and ethnographical approaches examine symbolic interactionism’s ability to deploy the concepts of structure and agency in sociological explanation. It illuminates the dialectic of oppression and resistance in everyday life, illustrating that actors make meaning through resistance.
Sociologists from North America offer 10 articles that present a structure-and-agency perspective on oppression and resistance to examine various aspects from the personal to the institutional. They address organizational oppression through the case of the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church; the portrayal of oppression of African Americans in major films; illness and identity; subscription-based journals in academic publishing vs. open access journals; resisting colonial and neoliberal models of economic development in Senegal; the Inuit of northern Canada’s efforts to resist Western cultural paradigms of time; how nursing assistants deal with the oppressive aspects of status inequality and a degrading workplace culture; mentoring as a tool of resistance among African American men in black Greek fraternities; and the Pee-Dee tribe of South Carolina, which has resisted invisibility and erasure by gaining state recognition as a tribe. Distributed in North America by Turpin Distribution. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
