Browsing by Subject "Social structure"

Examining how structural and cultural factors shape postsecondary educational outcomes is at the heart of sociological research in education. However, although there has been a rich history in exploring these sociological concepts in education, many fundamental questions remain unanswered. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), this study extends existing research in the sociology of education by addressing two research questions that relate to how social structure and culture predict youths’ future postsecondary educational outcomes.

Pertaining to structural explanations of educational outcomes, I examine the first research question: do black youth benefit less from increases in their parents’ social class status on their college enrollment and educational attainment. Classic and contemporary studies show greater social class status is associated with higher levels of education for youth. However, racialized processes might constrain the benefits blacks receive from increases in parents’ social class. Therefore, I analyze whether race moderates the relationship between youths’ social class status during high school and two measures of postsecondary educational outcomes: (1) college enrollment two years post-high school and (2) educational attainment eight years post-high school. Results suggest black youth receive lower benefits from social class than whites for both outcomes, and parents’ gender plays a role in the racial differences in the link between social class and both outcomes.

Pertaining to cultural explanations of educational outcomes, I examine the second research question: does within-school variation in school culture during high school predict future college enrollment. Although many studies examine the role school culture—measured as the within-school average in schooling behaviors or beliefs—plays in shaping high school students’ decisions to attend college, few studies investigate how within-school variation in culture predicts college enrollment. Therefore, I analyze whether an association exists between college enrollment two years post-high school and within-school variation in school culture. Results suggest that students in public and private schools are less likely to enroll in college after attending a high school with greater within-school variation in culture. Results from this research question combined with the results of the first research question have implications for the study of structural and cultural factors in education research.

My dissertation elucidates the roles feasts played in constructing the social order for different Jewish communities from approximately the third century B.C.E. to the third century C.E. Feasts - defined in this work as events based on the communal consumption of food and drink conscientiously differentiated from quotidian meals - punctuated the rhythms of the lives of Jews throughout ancient Palestine and the Diaspora. Jews convened feasts before and after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. to mark seminal moments in Jewish history and to commemorate the roles God and his intermediaries played in these events. Jews also held feasts on a number of other occasions. Individuals and groups of Jews may have held feasts upon the visitation of foreign dignitaries, the completion of a major building project, after the safe return of a family or friend from a journey abroad, or during important life-cycle events. Regardless of the occasion, feasts consisted of a host of practices that provided Jews with the means to establish, maintain, or contest social hierarchies and group cohesion. How individuals and groups of Jews manipulated the constitutive elements of feasts during the period under investigation to actuate the social order within their communities is the focus of this dissertation.

To achieve this dissertation's objective, I will examine the textual and archaeological evidence for the performances of feasts within two domains that were central to the construction of Jewish society: privately owned Jewish domiciles in Palestine and the communal and religious institution of the synagogue located in the Diaspora and Palestine. There have been previous studies that have examined both the textual and archaeological data for the functions of feasts convened within these locations, but they have been temporally limited and have not taken into account recent anthropological and ethnographic studies demonstrating the dynamic functions of feasts. My analysis of the literary and archaeological evidence for feasts held within Jewish domiciles and synagogues shows that these repasts provided Jews with various opportunities to determine their relationships with one another, advance their economic and political agendas, seek power, and establish and/or contest broader tenets of the social order. I hope that my study will lead to further investigations into the social dynamics of Jewish feasts as well as their role as a catalyst for the transformation of economic, political, and religious institutions that shaped Jewish society in antiquity.

This dissertation presents three studies of the social and reproductive behavior and social structure of male chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in Gombe National Park, Tanzania.

I. In many species of non-human primates, males cooperate and form friendly social bonds while simultaneously competing with each other for dominance rank and mating opportunities. While several studies reveal clear links between female bonds and correlates of fitness in female philopatric primate species, few have investigated whether bonds among males have measurable fitness benefits. Further, no studies in chimpanzees have investigated the fitness effects of cooperative exchange, or contrasted the fitness effects of bond formation and cooperative exchange. Here, I investigate whether 1) male social bonds, 2) position in affiliative and coalition networks, or 3) strategic exchange with other individuals of grooming for support or tolerance facilitate fitness benefits in one population of wild, free-ranging chimpanzees. I generated measures of social connectedness, coalition formation, and grooming effort for each male in two-year periods from 1990 to 2011, and employed mixed models to determine whether, controlling for current rank and age, these measures predicted 1) rank change (a correlate of future reproductive output) and 2) reproductive success within each period. I found that rank change was associated with betweenness in the network of coalition formation, but only weakly with social bonds and not at all with position in the network of social relationships. I further found that rank change was predicted by grooming effort, although this relationship depended on male dominance rank. Surprisingly, reproductive success was not associated with social connectedness or with betweenness in coalitionary or social relationship networks. Instead, grooming effort strongly predicted reproductive success. Thus it appears that males that occupy central positions in the coalition network, and those that groom others at a high rate, are more likely to rise in rank (if they are low-ranking to begin with). However, males that successfully sire offspring groom others at a high rate. These results suggest that, unlike in cercopithecine primates, social bonds do not enhance fitness in male chimpanzees, and instead males rely on grooming and coalition formation to improve their rank and reproductive success.

II. Animals face both costs and benefits associated with living in groups. When the costs of membership exceed the benefits, group fissions can occur. Fissions are documented in a number of animal species, but are comparatively rare in male philopatric primates. One of the few likely cases occurred in chimpanzees in 1973 in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, when the main study community split into two separate communities, Kasekela and Kahama. Over the next four years, the Kasekela community killed the adult males and one female of the Kahama community. Here we use social network analysis to explore the process of community fission in chimpanzees by examining association, grooming, and ranging patterns. We found that the two communities split from one original cohesive community, although one with incipient subgrouping patterns. Subgrouping patterns in the grooming and association networks began to increase sharply beginning in 1971, and this period closely coincided with a dominance struggle between three high-ranking males and with a peak in operational sex ratio. Finally, we found a relationship between post-split community membership and previous association, grooming and ranging patterns in most periods of analysis, a tendency that became more pronounced as the fission approached. Thus, analysis suggests that the community began to split during a time of unusual sex ratio and a protracted dominance struggle, and that individuals remained with others with whom they preferentially associated in the previous years. These results are contrasted with group fissions in other taxa, and provide clues to the costs and benefits of group membership in chimpanzees.

III. In sexually reproducing animals, male and female reproductive strategies often conflict. In some species, males use aggression to overcome female choice, but debate persists over the extent to which this strategy is successful. Previous studies of male aggression toward females among wild chimpanzees have yielded contradictory results about the relationship between aggression and mating behavior. Critically, however, copulation frequency in primates is not always predictive of reproductive success. We analyzed a 17-year sample of behavioral and genetic data from the Kasekela chimpanzee community in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, to test the hypothesis that male aggression toward females increases male reproductive success. We examined the effect of male aggression toward females during ovarian cycling, including periods when the females were sexually receptive (swollen) and periods when they were not. We found that, after controlling for confounding factors, male aggression during a female’s swollen periods was positively correlated with copulation frequency. However, aggression toward swollen females was not predictive of paternity. Instead, aggression by high-ranking males toward females during their nonswollen periods was positively associated with likelihood of paternity. This indicates that long-term patterns of intimidation allow high-ranking males to increase their reproductive success, supporting the sexual coercion hypothesis. To our knowledge, this is the first study to present genetic evidence of sexual coercion as an adaptive strategy in a social mammal.

This dissertation is an investigation of trends in the current US system of education, as informed by historical movements for autonomous education in the period of Reconstruction and in the 1960s and 70s. The driving questions of the dissertation are 1. How to understand the system of education in the US as having a historical and current role in the preservation of an existing structure of power, 2. How did historical movements that focused on the creation of autonomous forms of education challenge the given order of society?, and 3. What would a renewal of movement for autonomous education look like in the current moment?

I examine historical, theoretical and literary texts in my analysis of the role of education in US society. My theoretical framework for the dissertation comes from the collective work of El Kilombo Intergaláctico, an organization in Durham, North Carolina, and the work of Alvaro Reyes on the crisis of capitalist society and Blackness as a political alternative. In my historical and literary research, I focus particularly on educational policy documents that demonstrate the ways in which movements for autonomous education shaped state education, and literary texts that share a vision of collective autonomous education in the US in a way that both recalls past movements and gestures toward new possibilities for movement.

Ultimately, I argue that the tradition of the creation of autonomous forms of education in the US, and existing forms of autonomous education in social movements in Latin America, have the potential to once again provide insight toward the creation of alternative forms of education in the US now that would be different from earlier and current forms of US education for domination and control.