Qualitative Sociology
@qualsoc.bsky.social
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Peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the qualitative interpretation and analysis of social life.
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Our Summer 2026 issue is out!âïžThis issue features articles on moral scripts; coding and analysis; end-of-life processes; religious trauma; meaning-making after atrocity; well-being in Indigenous communities; and social inclusion. Check it out here:
link.springer.com/journal/1113...
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Qualitative Sociology
The journal Qualitative Sociology is dedicated to the qualitative interpretation and analysis of social life. The journal offers both theoretical and ...
https://link.springer.com/journal/11133/volumes-and-issues/49-2
8 days ago
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In our newest issue, Ebbinghaus draws on interviews with 37 Movement for Black Lives activists to explain how they legitimize riots as a protest tactic. Read more here:
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Legitimacy in the Repertoire of Contention: How Black Lives Matter Activists Justify Riots - Qualitative Sociology
Legitimacy is an overlooked precondition for a tacticâs availability within social movement repertoires. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 37 Movement for Black Lives activists in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, this article identifies a three-step process through which activists legitimize riots. First, activists reclassify riots as protest by lumping them with revered tactics, thereby splitting them from criminality. Second, activists engage in moral legitimation: they acknowledge the harm riots can cause to Black communities but frame them as justified counterviolence to state repression. Third, activists use instrumental legitimation. Despite potential reputational risks, they argue that riots impose costs on capitalism, delegitimize the state and lend credibility to subsequent nonviolent protests. By tracing how activists legitimate a controversial movement tactic, this article argues that legitimation work shapes tactical availability. This challenges views of the repertoire of contention as a fixed toolkit from which activists choose tactics they regard as strategically effective or aligned with their collective identities.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09630-z
5 days ago
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How do Hospice and Palliative Medicine clinicians define success and failure in their occupation, in which the conventional understanding of medical success doesn't apply? Timothy B. Elder explores and answers this question in our latest issue! Read more here:
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The Operation was Successful and the Patient Died: Processes for Achieving a Good Death - Qualitative Sociology
Clinicians in Hospice and Palliative Medicine (HPM) specialize in caring for terminally ill patients, a population often regarded as representing the âfailuresâ of medical intervention. This unique context challenges conventional definitions of success in medicine, which prioritize cure and longevity. Drawing on extensive qualitative data from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how HPM clinicians navigate these challenges by shifting their definition of success to a process rather than an outcome. These clinicians rely upon the strategy of âhewingâ to achieve success, which includes discovering and crafting shared, achievable goals with clinical stakeholdersâpatients, families, and colleagues. By examining how these clinicians construct and negotiate their professional project, this study sheds light on how clinical practices shift when confronted by the intractable problem of death. This article introduces the concept of hewing to describe how HPM clinicians coordinate patients, families, and colleagues around shared goals under conditions where standard definitions of medical success fail.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09626-9
6 days ago
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In our newest issue, Heba Alex uses interviews with Cook County state attorneys to illustrate how attorneys utilize a "moral script" of responsibility, proactiveness, and responsiveness that shapes plea deal decisions. Read more here:
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Moral Scripts in Prosecutorial Decision-Making: The Interplay Between Self and Others - Qualitative Sociology
This article analyzes the decision-making process of legal actors through an interactionist perspective. Based on interviews from Cook County, Illinois, I show how state attorneys utilize a moral script characterized by three key elements in handling cases: responsibility, proactiveness, and responsiveness. These state attorneys rely on this model not only to justify giving leniency in plea deals, but also when describing their own actions. The reported entanglement between self and others leads the attorneys to be less willing to grant mercy in cases where the self cannot be extended to others through role-taking prompted by social interaction. This study advances courtroom research by demonstrating that perceptions of deservingness are shaped by interpretive and moral factors that transcend fixed demographic categories.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09627-8
7 days ago
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Our Summer 2026 issue is out!âïžThis issue features articles on moral scripts; coding and analysis; end-of-life processes; religious trauma; meaning-making after atrocity; well-being in Indigenous communities; and social inclusion. Check it out here:
link.springer.com/journal/1113...
loading . . .
Qualitative Sociology
The journal Qualitative Sociology is dedicated to the qualitative interpretation and analysis of social life. The journal offers both theoretical and ...
https://link.springer.com/journal/11133/volumes-and-issues/49-2
8 days ago
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Ann Ward uses ethnographic data with young climate activists to explore how emotion culture structures social interaction and storytelling in activism. Read more in our newest issue:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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"The way I channel my anxiety is through my activismâ: Young Climate Activists, Storytelling, and the Emotion Culture of Cultivated Hope | Qualitative Sociology | Springer Nature Link
Around the world, young people are concerned about climate change, but some are also mobilizing to address the challenge. How do those young people collectively navigate these worries while taking cli...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09620-1
3 months ago
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In our newest issue, Cristina Khan and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz draw from ethnographic research to explore the racialization and embodiment of Latinidad among exotic dancers and its implications for symbolic boundary maintenance. Read more here:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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Playpen: Racialization, Embodiment, and Symbolic Boundary Maintenance among Erotic Dancers - Qualitative Sociology
Drawing upon an 18-month ethnography at an exotic dance venue we refer to as âPlaypen,â we show the significance and centrality of the body in drawing symbolic boundaries as constitutive of internal h...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09623-y
3 months ago
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Our Spring 2026 issue is out! đ±This issue features articles on cultural capital and ritual; embodiment; interview methodology; social capital and nature; and political activism. Check it out here:
link.springer.com/journal/1113...
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Qualitative Sociology
The journal Qualitative Sociology is dedicated to the qualitative interpretation and analysis of social life. The journal offers both theoretical and ...
https://link.springer.com/journal/11133/volumes-and-issues/49-1
3 months ago
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In our newest issue, Flockhart and Ezzell
@matt-ezzell.bsky.social
use the case of parent-LGB child relationships to introduce the concept of âpalliative emotion workâ which describes changes to unpleasant feelings in strained relationships. Read more here:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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Palliative Emotion Work: Preserving Parent-LGB Child Relationships in an Age Of âIncomplete Acceptanceâ - Qualitative Sociology
Despite the gains achieved by the gay rights movement, lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LBG) people still face discrimination. LGB acceptance in this context is incomplete. Although familial rejection upon...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09618-9
6 months ago
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Using interviews with Black residents, Lacee Anne Satcher âȘ
@laceesatcher.bsky.social
challenges the âdesertâ framework for understanding urban resource access by demonstrating how lived experiences differ from GIS-based assessments. Read more in our newest issue:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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In the Eye of the Beholder: Exploring Perceived Access in an Urban Resource Desert - Qualitative Sociology
Neighborhood resource access is a critical determinant of health and well-being, yet traditional measures often overlook the subjective experiences of residents in under-resourced areas. This study ex...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09605-0
6 months ago
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In our newest issue, Anna WoĆșny explores how intermediaries act as cultural guides in Japanâs marriage-hunting marketplace. Read it here:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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Varieties of Mediation: Ideational Heterogeneity, Cultural Fluency, and Market Intermediaries in Japanese âMarriage Hunting' - Qualitative Sociology
How do market intermediaries assist individuals in navigating exchanges? This article theorizes how intermediaries act as cultural guides in the marketplace by arbitrating between heterogeneous ideas ...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09606-z
6 months ago
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Our Winter 2025 issue is out! âïž This issue features articles on relational work; religion and cultural diffusion; conspiracy theory; cultural memory; street art; sociology of talent; neighborhood resources; and emotion work. Check out this important work here:
link.springer.com/journal/1113...
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Qualitative Sociology
The journal Qualitative Sociology is dedicated to the qualitative interpretation and analysis of social life. The journal offers both theoretical and ...
https://link.springer.com/journal/11133/volumes-and-issues/48-4
6 months ago
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In our newest issue, Tony Cheng @tonykcheng.bsky.social explains how challenging it can be for qualitative researchers to access state actors. Denials to access are strategic for state actors who control claims-making about their institutions. Read more here:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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State Actors as Hard-to-Reach Populations - Qualitative Sociology
Vulnerable populations may be hard-to-reach, but so too are state actors. Classic strategies of accessing the hard-to-reach, devised in reference to the vulnerable, do not translate well to state actors because their inaccessibility lies in their institutional power, rather than their social precarity. This article analyzes the substantive implications and practical adaptations that follow. Drawing on experiences of being denied access to Americaâs largest police department, I argue that by selectively granting and withholding access to external researchers, state institutions can control claims-making about the intentions of the state and its actors. Such politics of access position state organizations to shape an evidence base that justifies organizational changes in ways that advance institutional interests. This article identifies different forms of denials (denials-by-default, curable, silent, and unwritten) and practical strategies for accessing various types of public records (published, requestable, and digital), and thus problematizes whether the consequences of organizational change are as âunintendedâ as they are often claimed to be.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09596-y
9 months ago
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In her ethnographic research in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, Maricarmen Hernandez investigates how community members affected by the petrochemical industry negotiate their relationships with environmentalism. Read more in our newest issue:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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Environmental Justice in Latin America: Framing Everyday Environmentalism - Qualitative Sociology
Environmental justice struggles in Latin America are informed by regional histories and are embedded in broader social justice and livelihood struggles. In this article, I present the case of two contaminated communities in the majority Afrodescendant city of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, to investigate the process through which people construct and renegotiate a form of popular environmentalism through ongoing collective discussions. I explore where community membersâ frames of understanding come from and how they contribute to the formation of local environmental perspectives. Drawing on ethnographic data and a dialogic analysis of frames, I show that in this context, environmental concerns and political action are embedded in everyday life rather than being a movement people choose to identify with, and they are informed by past experiences and reconfigured to confront present conflict. I find that situating environmental issues within broader social justice claims results in an everyday environmentalism that is inseparable from other aspects of social reality instead of being a strategic political position. This case contributes to a broader understanding of struggles for environmental justice beyond our largely U.S.-based literature and facilitates cross-regional scholarly conversations.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09598-w
9 months ago
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In our newest issue, Adam Kotanko @akotanko.bsky.social and Dan Winchester @bishopofwestsaxons.bsky.social explore how groups respond to accusation of scandal through an analysis of evangelical Protestantsâ statements of American missionary John Chau. Read it here
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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Making a Martyr?: Scandal, Symbolic Power, and the Controversial Death of Evangelical Missionary John Chau - Qualitative Sociology
How do groups respond to accusations of scandal? Because scandals pose significant risks of moral stigma and loss of status to those associated with them, sociologists have analyzed how actors within an accused community use strategies like denial, scapegoating, public apologies, etc. to manage the general publicâs response to and interpretation of scandalous claims. While this focus on groupsâ âexternalâ responses to scandal has been productive, limited scholarship examines how actors also seek to interpretively manage scandals âinternally,â among fellow members of their communities. Through an analysis of evangelical Protestantsâ public statements concerning John Chau, an American missionary who garnered international media attention and public controversy after being killed by an isolated tribal group whom he sought to evangelize, we demonstrate how representatives of two factions of the American evangelical fieldâconservative and progressive, respectivelyâleveraged scandal as an opportunity to promote their respective visions of âauthentic evangelicalismâ to their broader evangelical audience. More specifically, our findings demonstrate how these spokespersons converted scandalizing accusations made against Chau and American evangelicalism into symbolic resources for solidifying or transforming the professed values and collective identities of their co-religionists. Ultimately, our study demonstrates how scandals not only reveal and potentially reconfigure moral boundaries and conflicts between accusers and accusedâas previous sociological research has shownâbut that scandals may also involve field-level conflict and contestation among the morally accused themselves, creating opportunities for actors to (re)shape their contemporariesâ moral certainties and collective self-understandings.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-025-09593-1
9 months ago
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Qualitative Sociology honors the life of Bob Emerson with a special tribute in our latest issue. Bob was a dedicated ethnographer and one of the discipline's greatest teachers, training generations of students in the craft of field research. [1/2]
9 months ago
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Our September 2025 issue is out! đ This issue features articles on religion and morality; environmental justice; philanthropy; beauty norms; and sex work as well as a special tribute to Bob Emerson. Check out all of this important work here:
link.springer.com/journal/1113...
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Qualitative Sociology
The journal Qualitative Sociology is dedicated to the qualitative interpretation and analysis of social life. The journal offers both theoretical and ...
https://link.springer.com/journal/11133/volumes-and-issues/48-3
9 months ago
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