Eric Orion Silva

In this editors' introduction to the special issue honoring the work of Lyn Lofland, we familiarize the reader with Lofland's scholarship and outline the themes taken up by this project. We argue that because Lofland's scholarship exemplifies a particular tradition within late 20th‐century American symbolic interaction, it serves as a model for those of us working in the same vein, while also offering a steelman case against which we can consider the downsides of our tradition. Thus, this special issue allows us to consider how we, as contemporary scholars, attend to tensions in our work related to the nature of social structure and social process, generalization, and the politics of knowledge.

Lyn H. Lofland is an exemplary symbolic interactionist. I support this claim by considering her research contributions and their continuing significance for interactionists. This discussion is organized around a comparison of Lofland's scholarship in her many articles and books (A World of Strangers, The Craft of Dying, and The Public Realm) against the ideals presented in her own evaluation of the work of Spencer E. Cahill. I further contend that Lofland's research program demonstrates how interactionists should operate with curiosity and humility. In closing, I argue that her work provides guidance for how interactionists can contend with perennial concerns that our work is astructural and irrelevant.

Masks emerged as one of the few means of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant minority of Americans, however, resisted the emergent mask wearing norm. This study seeks to examine the ways that constructions of mask use as an appropriate alleviation of the threat posed by COVID-19 was disrupted in public discourse. It does so by employing a qualitative content analysis of comments made on Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube in response to a mask burning rally held in Boise, Idaho in March 2021. Guided by the literature on aligning activity, this analysis identifies four of the processes by which the positive definition of mask wearing was undermined. Through fragmentation, neutralization, dilution, and displacement, the official definition of mask use was complicated by competing definitions of conduct and also contested evaluations of identities. These findings provide further understanding of the obstacles to coordination during COVID-19 and the role that aligning activity plays as an obstacle to the social construction of danger in the absence of established norms.

Although much research has considered the worldview of the vaccine hesitant, little attention has been given to the cultural conflict over what it means to be a person who takes vaccines. Through a qualitative content analysis of comments made on the Facebook pages of media outlets serving southeast Georgia, this analysis identifies both motives for rejecting the vaccine and outlines the symbolic boundaries that the vaccine hesitant have erected to distinguish themselves from vaccine advocates. The motives include perfunctory rejections, claims that the vaccine is ineffective, illegitimate, injurious in the short and long term, poisonous, infectious, particularly dangerous for children, and a component of conspiracy theories. These symbolic boundaries include distinguishing vaccine advocates from the vaccine hesitant by personal characteristics such as irrationality and authoritarianism. There are also social boundaries rooted in social locations - namely conservatives vs. liberals and non-elites vs. elites. This study also demonstrates how vaccine proponents engage with these symbolic boundaries. Vaccine proponents both contest and accept these boundaries. Likewise, pro-vaccine comments vary in terms of whether they stigmatize the boundary between vaccine user and non-user. This study adds to the literature on health communication and vaccines by confirming previous reports of the reasons for not taking the COVID-19 vaccine, indicating that public communication on vaccines is not regionally specific, and demonstrating the role that ostensible vaccine advocates might play in contributing to vaccine hesitancy.

Employing a qualitative content analysis of online comments made on YouTube and letters to the editor published in US newspapers, we examine the deployment and neutralization of the evil corporation master frame in debates on two distinct biotechnologies, vaccines and genetically modified organisms. This study builds on previous research by outlining three diagnostic components of the evil corporation master frame: dishonesty, greed, and the contamination of authority. It also finds that supporters of vaccines and genetically modified organisms seek to neutralize the evil corporation master frame through aggressive, defensive, endurance, and redemptive framings. This study provides ideational detail for the ways that controversial biotechnology is constructed. The particularly vexing anti-vaccine movement is not dissimilar from other challenges to mainstream science as disparate movements draw on the same master frame. It also demonstrates how defenses of genetically modified organisms and vaccines tend to reify the anti-corporate stigma that sustains challenges to scientific authority.

Although the United States has long been criticized for its treatment of migrants, the family separations that resulted from the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy drew particularly intense approbation and much media coverage in June 2018. One way to understand the conflict over this policy is to view it as a stigma contest where the status of a number of identities (migrant, immigration advocate, captor, policy apologist) are subject to a liminal stigma. Recent scholarship has documented how internet commenters disparage certain identities as they defend others. Through a qualitative content analysis of 172 opinion articles published in U.S. newspapers between 2009 and 2020, this article examines the ways that ideational stigmatization of immigrant detainees, captors, and nativists has and has not varied by time and arena of the public sphere. We find that many of the condemnations and denials found online are also prominent in editorials and op-eds. (e.g., detention as cruel, detainees as noncriminals, captors as racist, detainees as nonvictims,). The commentary section of U.S. newspapers, however, tended to defend the detainees and condemn their captors and nativist citizens. These findings provide a fuller record of how immigration detention and family separation were constructed during the Trump administration and a deeper understanding for the fervor of U.S. nativists.

In 2018, the Trump administration initiated a “zero‐tolerance” border policy wherein they criminally prosecuted all individuals who were apprehended crossing the border without proper authorization. The policy change resulted in numerous migrant children being separated from their parents. Through a qualitative content analysis of 1500 YouTube comments made in response to CNN and ProPublica news coverage, we examine each side's aligning activity. Separation challengers claimed border crossers were innocent while condemning their opponents as racist, cruel, and otherwise shameful. Separation advocates bolstered their own claims of innocence by denying that the detainees are victims and condemning separation challengers as hypocrites, dishonest, complicit in illegal immigration, and generally loathsome. These findings show that, enabled by social media, aligning activity in stigma contests can produce a liminal stigma, where identities suffer the ideational aspects of stigma but not necessarily the loss of social status.

Donald Trump's election to the U.S. Presidency in 2016 qualifies as one of the more shocking events in American political history. This article reviews the literature on the social construction of Donald Trump's political career. It finds prominent ideological laminations over racism, Islamophobia, nativism, sexism, Christianity, and right‐wing populism in Trump's discursive field. This article argues that Trump's discursive field comprises a juncture of stigma contests over the moral worth of numerous collective identities including men, women, racial minorities, immigrants, Muslims, Christians, and the middle class. Such stigma contests likely exacerbate recognition gaps created by neoliberal policies. This review suggests that scholars should continue to examine the connection between Trump's political career and stigmatization. Moreover, cultural sociologists should ready themselves to track the dialectical response to Trump and to assess the lasting impact on the American normative order.

This article builds on the scholarship on color-blind ideology by examining discourse challenging two cases of institutional discrimination (the criminalization of unauthorized immigrants and sports teams’ use of Native American symbolism). Our research questions are first, what general options do anti-racists have for navigating norms of color-blindness in the public sphere? Second, how does context influence how people confront institutional discrimination? Based on an ethnographic content analysis of 165 letters to the editor published in American newspapers, we find that opponents of institutional discrimination have the choice of addressing one of four laminations. In each lamination, authors acknowledge framings of racial discrimination that are unacknowledged in previous ones. In the abstraction lamination, authors do not recognize race and ethnicity. In the pigmentation lamination, authors identify race and ethnicity, but not discrimination. Authors in the discrimination lamination acknowledge the practice is harmful to a particular racial or ethnic group, and the contextualization lamination lends added dimensionality to the discourse. A comparison of the laminations of pro-immigrant and anti-mascot letters demonstrates varying willingness to acknowledge racial discrimination. Namely, the pro-immigrant discourse was more color-blind than anti-mascot criticism. We consider the potential causes of these findings and offer suggestions for future research in the conclusion