James M. Thomas

Jennifer G. Correa

Affective Labour explores four distinct landscapes in order to demonstrate how collective feelings are organized by social actors in order to both reproduce and contest hegemony. Utilizing a variety of methods, including participant observation, in-depth interviews across field sites, and content analysis of mass media, Correa and Thomas demonstrate the centrality of affective labor in enabling and constraining prevailing norms and practices of race, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality across multiple spatial contexts: the U.S.- Mexico border, urban nightlife districts, American college campuses, and emergent social movements against the police state. The book demonstrates how the power of affective labour might be harnessed for progressively oriented world-building projects, including what the authors term an ‘affective labour from below.’ By tying an analysis of affective labour into movements for social justice, the authors aim to produce a critical theory of the world that can be practically applied.

(Dis) assembling Distance and Difference

Affective Labour

For decades, stand-up comedy has been central to the imbrication of popular culture and political discourse, reshaping the margins of political critique, and often within the contexts of urban nightlife entertainment. In Working to Laugh: Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy Venues, James M. Thomas (JT) provides an ethnographic analysis of urban nightlife sites where this popular form of entertainment occurs. Examining the relationship between the performance, the venue, and the social actors who participate in these scenes, JT demonstrates how stand-up venues function as both enablers and constrainers of social difference, including race, class, gender, and heteronormativity, within the larger urban nightlife environment. JT’s analysis of a professional comedy club and a sub-cultural bar that hosts a weekly comedy show illuminates the full range of stand-up comedy in the American cultural milieu, from the highly organized, routinized, and predictable format of the professional venue, to the more unpredictable, and in some cases, cutting edge format of the amateur show.

Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy Venues

Working to Laugh

Erica Levin

Jackie Im

Xiaoyu Weng

Michelle Mansour

Victoria Gannon

Shana Agid

Pro Arts Gallery (Oakland, Calif.)

Michelle Blade, Chris Fraser, Taro Hattori, Weston Teruya

Pro Arts 2 X 2 Solos 2011

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Kalamazoo County Directory

As a major, public flagship university in the American South, so-called “Diversity University” has struggled to define its commitments to diversity and inclusion, and to put those commitments into practice. In Diversity Regimes, sociologist James M. Thomas draws on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork at DU to illustrate the conflicts and contingencies between a core set of actors at DU over what diversity is and how it should be accomplished. Thomas’s analysis of this dynamic process uncovers what he calls “diversity regimes”: a complex combination of meanings, practices, and actions that work to institutionalize commitments to diversity, but in doing so obscure, entrench, and even magnify existing racial inequalities. Thomas’s concept of diversity regimes, and his focus on how they are organized and unfold in real time, provides new insights into the social organization of multicultural principles and practices.

Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities

Diversity Regimes

A New Gilded Age by James M. Thomas A cohesive collection of stories and essays, A New Gilded Age contains an insightful commentary on American culture, politics, and history. By blending all three elements, this book holds the reader’s interest through each scenario. Following short stories that capture memorable moments of time and events are essays broad in scope and perception. They include, among others, observations on the American Revolution; the great and unappreciated nitrogen fix; unfairness pervading today’s Gilded Age; wickedness in human affairs demanding retribution; a second look at second chances. All forge a deeper consideration.

Stories and Essays

A New Gilded Age

James M. Thomas

Books

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