Junhow Wei

• University of Pennsylvania

Letter From the Editor, Special Issue

How do academic advisors encourage students to consider the meaning, value, and logic of their educational journeys during appointments despite pressures from students and others to discuss rote information, such as curricular rules and requirements? The concept of stealth advising describes how advisors manage such pressures by weaving novel conte...

Drawing on fieldwork at American Idol auditions, I describe how contestants come to accept their fate after being cut from the competition. I revisit Goffman's metaphor of “cooling the mark out,” especially the cooling out strategy of offering people another chance to qualify for roles at which they failed. Contestants' desires to audition and audi...

Audiences, critics, and academics have raised significant moral concerns about reality television. The genre is commonly criticized for being exploitative, harmful, and fake. By extension, reality TV workers are morally tainted, seen as dirty workers of questionable character. This dissertation describes the sources of moral taint in reality televi...

Few studies have explored the relationship between globalization and emotional expression. One prominent means through which physical forms of emotional display circulate globally is through the mass media, and specifically through the reality television format trade. Whether local people can successfully perform globally circulating forms of emoti...

Cultural industry workers, at times, compromise the values and tastes that are important parts of their artistic identities to accommodate commercial demands. I argue that workers resolve frustrations that arise from such compromises through identity work—individuals’ active construction of their identities in social contexts. Using ethnographic da...

To examine the pattern of mifepristone uptake in the United States and whether the introduction of this drug has facilitated access to abortion services. Using data from a national census of abortion providers and from the U.S. distributor of mifepristone, we assessed the number and proportion of abortions performed using mifepristone, the distribu...

This study measured differences in the provision of care between public and private providers of contraceptive services, what problems using contraception these providers perceived their patients to have and providers' views on how to improve their patients' method use. A nationally representative mixed-mode survey (mail, Internet and fax) of priva...