Soft music piped through speakers in the ballroom as I entered, trying to find an available seat. Three screens featured ASA’s “Bureaucracies of Displacement” image, the theme of the conference. This image featured a gradient, moving from pink in the lower left corner to a slight purple in the middle to blue in the upper right corner. The low hum of people talking shifted to silence as the Presidential Address and Awards Ceremony began.
After brief introductions, the ASA 2022 Awards were announced, and awardees were given a brief period to speak. Most award recipients gave thanks to mentors, friends, family, and students. I was surprised that many of the speeches echoed the sentiment of Dr. Julia Dowling, stating “we have an obligation to take our knowledge/what we learned and go out into the world and change it.” The award recipients stated that we must use our sociological knowledge to “advocate for social justice,” “make sociology more accessible,” and that this work is “in the spirit of change” as Dr. Mary Romero, Dr. Karen Sternheimer, and Dr. Adia Harvey Wingfield noted in their speeches. Nearly all awardees discussed that sociology is meant to create positive change.
Shortly after the awards, ASA President Dr. Cecilia Menjívar approached the stage. Dr. Cecilia Menjívar is a Professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Her Presidential Address discussed how the state exercises power in everyday life through state created categories which contribute to producing and reproducing inequalities.
Dr. Menjívar discussed that “legal status has become a critical dimension of stratification” that “[is] reproduced across generations.” This address highlighted 3 aspects of state categories and classification systems:
- Constructed nature of these categories.
- Normalization – these categories become normalized and woven into informal practices in everyday life.
- Misalignments, lived experiences spill over and sometimes fall in between or outside of these formalized categories.
First, Dr. Menjívar described the constructed nature of these systems that are “never neutral,” shaped by “political pressures, racism and settler colonial systems.” These systems are inherently gendered, classed, and raced and “shift to displace unwanted groups of people.” For example, Dr. Menjívar noted that asylum seekers have been reclassified as undocumented immigrants, and that the U.S. created the category of unauthorized re-entry wherein re-entry into the U.S. is prosecuted as felony crimes. Dr. Menjívar argued that these are “categories of dehumanization…institutionalized violations of human rights.”
The second category described normalization of these classification systems through everyday practices. Dr. Menjívar discussed the ways in which laws protecting women have failed in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador and the equal weight of unchanged ingrained practices and stereotyping which perpetuate violence against women. In another example, Dr. Menjívar described that non-state actors would ask Latino/a customers for proof of legal status even when not required by law, or when cashiers in supermarkets ask for legal status. This demonstrates “governmentality of the state through non state actors” and the ways in which these categorization systems are “integrated into the frames through which we see the world.” Dr. Menjívar also noted that people often respond and mobilize to resist and change these harmful categorization and classification systems.
The third aspect of Dr. Menjívar’s address focused on misalignments. “By design, state categories facilitate the work of bureaucracies but cannot capture the range of peoples’ experiences” and some fall in between or outside of these categorizations. Dr. Menjívar described that “mismatches happen in reunification” wherein “ideological codes [that] the State recognizes are different from the meaningful definitions in relationships in immigrant families” such as cousins and other family members. “Misalignments can result from neglect as when the state abandons vulnerable populations” for example “underfunding of social safety nets, showing a general disregard for the lives of the poor” and overlooking “women’s murders and disappearances” in the U.S. and Canada. Dr. Menjívar argued that “in betweenness is a condition, [where people] inhabit two different categories and [this is] very different from being classified as one or the other, this impacts their sense of self and relationships with families and interactions with institutions.” Further, that this “uncertainty of waiting in liminal condition erodes some of the benefits of being partially [categorized].”
Lastly, Dr. Menjívar discussed how sociologists create our own categories of neglect and omission “as we produce sociological knowledge.” She argued that we create categories of omission by not looking at “knowledge produced in the Global South,” which “can help us to understand the conditions in the U.S. today.” Dr. Menjívar called for sociologists to be “open to embrace knowledge and ideas” to help advance public sociology and policy and to “rethink our place in knowledge production.
This Presidential Address will be published, and a video recording may be available on ASA’s website. After thinking and reflecting on Dr. Menjívar’s address, I pondered how State created and perpetuated categorizations parallels to our own categories of omission as sociologists. It is imperative to continue working toward and advocating for social justice and to be mindful of how our own works can dismantle and/or resist these categorization systems. I look forward to ASA’s 2023 Annual Meeting, on The Educative Power of Sociology.
Brittney Pond is a co-Assistant Director of the Emancipatory Sciences Lab and a doctoral student in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences at UCSF.