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Author

James M. Thomas

Other affiliations: University of Missouri
Bio: James M. Thomas is an academic researcher from University of Mississippi. The author has contributed to research in topics: Racism & Ethnic group. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 23 publications receiving 276 citations. Previous affiliations of James M. Thomas include University of Missouri.

Papers
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TL;DR: In this paper, a case study of how diversity is defined, organized, and implemented within an American public flagship university reveals what I characterize as a diversity regime: a set of meanings and practices that institutionalizes a benign commitment to diversity, and in doing so obscures, entrenches, and intensifies existing racial inequality by failing to make fundamental changes in how power, resources, and opportunities are distributed.
Abstract: Despite record investment in diversity infrastructure, racial inequality persists in higher education. This article examines, through a case study of diversity’s articulation process, how diversity is defined, organized, and implemented within an American public flagship university. My findings reveal what I characterize as a diversity regime: a set of meanings and practices that institutionalizes a benign commitment to diversity, and in doing so obscures, entrenches, and even intensifies existing racial inequality by failing to make fundamental changes in how power, resources, and opportunities are distributed. My concept of a diversity regime helps explain how and why organizational commitments to multiculturalism and diversity often fall short in practice. The concept of a diversity regime also helps us better understand the underlying processes that perpetuate racial inequality.

49 citations

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TL;DR: The authors argue that JHL activity constitutes a form of rebellion and conclude that jailhouse lawyers may be best understood as primitive rebels in the sense that prisoners have relatively few ways to resist either the control or the conditions imposed upon them by their state keepers.
Abstract: Are those who use law in attempts to change the conditions of social existence rebels, revolutionaries, or merely ineffective idealists? Drawing upon themes from existential literature and our past research on prisons, we address this question by looking at one category of active litigants, prison jailhouse lawyers (JHLs). Exiled and powerless, prisoners have relatively few ways to resist either the control or the conditions imposed upon them by their state keepers. JHLs, however, actively resist prison staff and authority. We argue that JHL activity constitutes a form of rebellion and conclude that jailhouse lawyers may be best understood as primitive rebels.

32 citations

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TL;DR: This article present a challenge to contemporary understandings of the phenomena of race and racism through a historical investigation of Jews' relationship to medieval Christendom, and show how race as a marker of both corporeal difference and socio-political consequence was formulated over time through a rearticulation of Church doctrine which first positioned the inferiority of the Jew within their religious practices, to one which located their inferiority as inherently part of their soul and manifest upon their bodies.
Abstract: Social science discourse on race and racism has limited itself through processes of periodization and temporal constructions of racial differences, and recent scholars continue to posit race and racism as effects of modernity rather than investigating its development prior to modernity. This article looks to present a challenge to contemporary understandings of the phenomena of race and racism through a historical investigation of Jews' relationship to medieval Christendom. Through the framework of racial formation (Omi and Winant [1986] 1994) I look to show how race as a marker of both corporeal difference and socio-political consequence was formulated over time through a rearticulation of Church doctrine which first positioned the inferiority of the Jew within their religious practices, to one which located their inferiority as inherently part of their soul and manifest upon their bodies – from fixable through conversion to incurable and diseased.

32 citations

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TL;DR: Theorizing the centrality of race remains a key issue within the social sciences as discussed by the authors, and an examination of four programs that dominate critical inquiry, particularly in the US context, can be found in this paper.
Abstract: Theorizing the centrality of race remains a key issue within the social sciences. However, an examination of four programs that dominate critical inquiry, particularly in the US context – Racial Fo...

27 citations

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TL;DR: Thomas' book as mentioned in this paper is an excellent descriptive and interpretive analysis of JHLs and jailhouse lawyering, and it will surely provide the basis for further research on JHL and JHL.
Abstract: ...a brilliant investigation...Thomas' book not only is an excellent descriptive and interpretive analysis but it will surely provide the basis of further research on JHLs and jailhouse lawyering. It presently stands as the definitive statement on the subject.-CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

26 citations


Cited by
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01 Jan 1986
TL;DR: The New York Review ofBooks as mentioned in this paper is now over twenty years old and it has attracted controversy since its inception, but it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history, especially an admittedly impressionistic survey, must give some attention.
Abstract: It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

2,430 citations

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TL;DR: GARLAND, 2001, p. 2, the authors argues that a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças, and problemas de controle social that deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das
Abstract: Nos últimos trinta trinta anos, houve profundas mudanças na forma como compreendemos o crime e a justiça criminal. O crime tornou-se um evento simbólico, um verdadeiro teste para a ordem social e para as políticas governamentais, um desafio para a sociedade civil, para a democracia e para os direitos humanos. Segundo David Garland, professor da Faculdade de Direito da New York University, um dos principais autores no campo da Sociologia da Punição e com artigo publicado na Revista de Sociologia e Política , número 13, na modernidade tardia houve uma verdadeira obsessão securitária, direcionando as políticas criminais para um maior rigor em relação às penas e maior intolerância com o criminoso. Há trinta anos, nos EUA e na Inglaterra essa tendência era insuspeita. O livro mostra que os dois países compartilham intrigantes similaridades em suas práticas criminais, a despeito da divisão racial, das desigualdades econômicas e da letalidade violenta que marcam fortemente o cenário americano. Segundo David Garland, encontram-se nos dois países os “mesmos tipos de riscos e inseguranças, a mesma percepção a respeito dos problemas de um controle social não-efetivo, as mesmas críticas da justiça criminal tradicional, e as mesmas ansiedades recorrentes sobre mudança e ordem sociais”1 (GARLAND, 2001, p. 2). O argumento principal da obra é o seguinte: a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças e problemas de controle social que deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das políticas criminais, o grau máximo de duração das penas e a excessivas taxas de encarceramento.

2,183 citations

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1,479 citations

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TL;DR: Hardt and Negri as discussed by the authors present a history of war and democracy in the age of empire, with a focus on the role of women and women in the process of war.
Abstract: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2004. New York. Penguin Books. 448 pages. ISBN: 0143035592 (paper).

1,244 citations

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1,020 citations