The notion of race as a social construct, rather than an objective physical reality, has increasingly made inroads in the United States in recent years. Yet even in quarters where it seems most widely accepted and familiar, it has hit roadblocks. After a brief discussion of the idea of race as socially constructed, I will describe and dissect three areas in which it seems to have been difficult to apply: genetic and biomedical research; debates about “transracial” identities; and sports.

The panel was titled, "Breaking Ground: Grassroots Engagement Connecting the University and Incarcerated Communities" and featured three educational initiatives working within the UGA community and inside Georgia jails and prisons. Also on the panel were Dr. Caroline Young from the UGA English Department, who teaches at Whitworth Prison in Hartwell, GA, and undergraduate students Austin Joshua and Evan Johnson from the Athens Prison Tutorial program. Dr.

Dr. Vanessa Gonlin received the UGA NAACP 2022 Mary McLeod Bethune Educator Award for her new course, Colorism and Hairism in Communities of Color, which highlights the impact of these pervasive yet less-frequently discussed forms of discrimination.

In research, you can’t always test what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you can test what you need to. What do you do when you are theory testing and aren’t yet able to directly test the mechanisms you want to test? This presentation explores a series of setbacks in figuring out how to test a new theoretical research program.

What are the political consequences, at the grassroots level, of working-class decline? Based on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork on the Unemployed Workers' Movement in Argentina, this presentation provides a case study of how workers affected by job loss protect their traditional forms of life by joining progressive community organizations.

How doctors police mistakes among themselves varies. Physicians support, tolerate, avoid, ridicule, confront, report, and banish colleagues for errors. What explains this variation? An established theory of social control and a growing literature on stratification in medical education suggest that the vertical direction of medical cases may partially account for the different social control strategies physicians use to manage mistakes.

How will an external threat from Asia affect racial relations in the United States? While Americans' sense of shared adversity during the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to unite people across racial and national lines, research also suggests that perception of threat increases racially biased behaviors and may have spillover effects on intergroup relations. Using an experiment that combines behavioral game and survey methods (N = 1,987), we examine the impact of disease threat from Asia on Americans' prosocial behavior towards racial in-group and out-group members.

Dr. Pablo Lapegna, Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, will spend the Fall semester at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. At Harvard, he will be working on his new research project, examining how middle-size farmers and people living in Argentine rural towns reconcile the socio-economic benefits afforded by herbicide-resistant crops and their environmental and health impacts.