Assistant Professor of Sociology Stephanie A. Dhuman recently published an article titled “‘Why Can’t We Have Some Kind of Unity?’ Cultural Contention Amongst Puerto Rican and Black Residents in Southern Suburbia” in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (SRE).
According to its website, SRE, the official journal of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, “publishes the highest quality, cutting-edge, and critical sociological research on race and ethnicity.” Dhuman’s publication was named the feature article of the journal’s October issue, the fourth and final issue of 2023.
Through fieldwork and interviews with community residents, Dhuman introduced the new concept of “cultural contention,” when groups hold discordant conceptualizations of their relationship, grounded in both their perceptions of one another and interactions with other residents. This cultural contention has larger implications for how we view and measure group tensions and cohesions, and the potential for future coalition building.
Along with the publication, there is a podcast on the SRE website in which Dhuman discusses the research and implications of cultural contention.
