Dina G. Okamoto

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · Department of Sociology

Colorism literature examines how skin tone—alongside prototypical group features and hairstyles—correlates with socioeconomic, health, and political outcomes. Yet few studies have explicitly operationalized how skin tone shapes Latinos’ experiences of racialization in “new” U.S. destinations. Here, we draw on a large, representative sample of Mexic...

Prior studies have sought to understand how immigrants integrate into U.S. society, focusing on the ways in which local contexts and institutions limit immigrant incorporation. In this study, we consider how interactions among immigrants and U.S.-born within receiving communities contribute to the process of immigrant integration. We emphasize the...

Advocacy organizations have reframed immigrants as deserving, and improved their access to services and support; yet, we know little about how low-income immigrants understand organizational frames to make individual requests in public institutions and programmes. Analyzing in-depth interviews and fieldwork over multiple years, we show how Filipina...

Recent work has called for sociologists to incorporate postcolonial theory into their toolkits to better understand the mechanics of race in the United States. The authors answer this call by showing how postcolonial and field theories can be bridged to explain how movements of the 1970s developed distinct visions of panethnicity. Drawing on publis...

A notable increase in immigration into the United States over the past half century, coupled with its recent geographic dispersion into new communities nationwide, has fueled contact among a wider set of individuals and groups than ever before. Past research has helped us understand Whites’ and Blacks’ attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, a...

Despite ideals grounding American identity in principles and ideas, most U.S. citizens continue to believe that they are rooted at least in part in ascriptive characteristics such as religion, race, or language. Research suggests that these views shape attitudes toward immigrants, and that nonwhite and non-Christian immigrants may therefore be less...

This research examines how intergroup contact experiences—including both their frequency and their qualities (friendly, discriminatory)—predict indicators of welcoming among U.S.-born and immigrant groups. Analyzing a new survey of U.S.-born groups (whites and blacks) and immigrant groups (Mexicans and Indians) from the Atlanta and Philadelphia met...

Organized after-school activities promote positive youth development across a range of outcomes. To be most effective, organized activities need to meet high-quality standards. The eight features of quality developed by the National Research Council’s Committee on Community-Level Programs for Youth have helped guide the field in this regard. Howeve...

A symbolic politics approach contends that the meanings policy proposals convey, and the audiences they attract, may matter more than whether they become law. Yet, we know little about the sociopolitical conditions prompting lawmakers to engage in symbolic politics. Using a new data set, we analyze proposals to expand or restrict in-state college t...

As alternatives to mainstream institutions, local non-profit organisations (NPOs) are important sites for immigrant civic engagement; yet, there is little research on how immigrants negotiate the benefits of NPOs. We use ethnographic fieldwork and multiple in-depth interviews with 39 NPO staff and Latina immigrants in San Francisco, California. We...

In multiethnic nation-states experiencing new flows of immigrants, political officials and citizens alike have expressed hostility in the form of demonstrations, campaigns, vandalism, and even policies. Yet local communities have also displayed public support for immigrants in the form of protests and advocacy efforts. Past literature has almost ex...

In multi-ethnic nation-states, opposition to immigration has manifested itself in attitudes and behaviors. Past research has typically focused on anti-immigrant attitudes, and relied on threat and competition theories to explain patterns in such attitudes. These theories suggest that perceived threats stemming from new influxes or large concentrati...

Panethnicity has become a significant form of identification across the globe. Categories, such as Latino and Asian American, but also identities, such as Yoruba and European, have been embraced by a growing number of individuals and institutions. In this article, we focus on three main issues: panethnic identification, the conditions under which p...

In 2012, the Pew Research Center issued a report that named Asian Americans as the “highest-income, best-educated, and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.” Despite this seemingly optimistic conclusion, over thirty Asian American advocacy groups challenged the findings. As many pointed out, the term “Asian American” itself is complica...

Collective action has been examined in studies of worker insurgency, homeless protest, the Civil Rights movement and white backlash against racial minorities. Relatively few studies, however, focus on noncontentious forms of immigrant collective action. Utilizing a new data set comprising over 1,000 immigrant civic events, we examine whether the ci...

In this paper, we examine how community-based organizations (CBOs) and their leaders negotiate and expand the boundaries of the communities they serve and represent. Drawing upon interviews with organizational leaders and documentary data from Asian American CBOs in the San Francisco Bay Area, we find that nearly all of the organizations in our sam...

Organized by groups whose distinctiveness is based on national origin, culture, language, religion, territory, or phenotype, ethnic movements are enacted with the purpose of promoting or resisting social change. Ethnic groups express grievances or claims on behalf of the larger collective through organized group efforts which are often directed at...

Newspaper coverage of Latino collective action events is critical because it can shape how issues and problems are understood by policymakers and the larger public. There is an assumption that English- and Spanish-language newspapers will report on these events in different ways, but few studies have systematically explored these differences. In th...

Most studies that attempt to understand immigrant political incorporation focus on patterns of electoral participation and citizenship acquisition. Given that nearly 60 percent of the foreign-born population in the United States is comprised of noncitizens, we argue that past studies miss an important dimension of the immigrant political incorporat...

Minority group members who face threats to their security have a number of options: they can stay in their country of origin and fight for social and political change; they can choose to emigrate, finding comfort and safety across an international border; they can participate in insurgency activities and leave their country of residence; or they ca...

For decades, studies of intermarriage have provided insights regarding the integration and assimilation of ethnic groups in the US. In this paper, marriage outcomes are analyzed to gain a better understanding of the integration of Asian Americans into American society. Instead of utilizing assimilation theories that focus on individual-level variab...

In the wake of the civil rights movement, new organizations formed which were based on the collective interests and identities of their constituencies. Some of these organizations brought together national origin groups who often differed by ethnicity, language, culture, religion and immigration history. In this paper, I focus on the conditions tha...

This analysis extends theoretical models of ethnic boundary formation to account for the shifting and layered nature of ethnic boundaries. It focuses on the underlying structural conditions that facilitate the expansion of ethnic boundaries or the con- struction of a pan-national identity, and explores how organizing along an ethnic boundary affect...

In this article, we use the Minorities at Risk dataset to examine the effects of five forms of ethnic competition (demographic, ecological, political, cultural, and economic) on multiple types of mobilization (communal conflict, rebellion, and protest). Overall, we find that measures of competition predicted communal conflict between groups rather...

In this paper we focus on a long-standing debate surrounding the measurement of interruptions in conversational behavior. This debate has implications for conversational analysts interested in turn-taking structures, researchers interested in close relationships who interpret them as an exercise of power, and group processes researchers studying st...

Social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to how much people talk, but have paid little attention to what they talk about. Research in the tradition of conversation analysis suggests that transitions between topics of conversation are accomplished in a systematic, structured way, and that social status can affect whose topics are dev...

Given the global trend of increasing ethnocultural diversity and the out-break of nationalist movements based on cultural, linguistic, and territorial identities, this review focuses on social and political mechanisms that lead to the emergence of minority group collective action. This kind of collective action is seen as a function of three necess...

We examine evidencefor supply-side explanations of occu- pational sex segregation, using the 1979-93 NLSY. Supply-side explana- tions, such as those derivedfrom neoclassical economic theoy and gender socialization, look to individual characteristics of workers, such as values, aspirations, and roles, to explain occupational outy of compensating dif...

Academic reputation rests on publication. But unlike many fields, sociology recognizes both journal articles and books, thereby complicating the relation of publication to reputation. Drawing on the sociology of science and organization theory to analyze elite sociology journals and books nominated for a major prize, the authors show how genre stru...

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