Vulnerable populations may be hard-to-reach, but so too are state actors. Classic strategies of accessing the hard-to-reach, devised in reference to the vulnerable, do not translate well to state actors because their inaccessibility lies in their institutional power, rather than their social precarity. This article analyzes the substantive implications and practical adaptations that follow. Drawing on experiences of being denied access to America’s largest police department, I argue that by selectively granting and withholding access to external researchers, state institutions can control claims-making about the intentions of the state and its actors. Such politics of access position state organizations to shape an evidence base that justifies organizational changes in ways that advance institutional interests. This article identifies different forms of denials (denials-by-default, curable, silent, and unwritten) and practical strategies for accessing various types of public records (published, requestable, and digital), and thus problematizes whether the consequences of organizational change are as “unintended” as they are often claimed to be.

Environmental justice struggles in Latin America are informed by regional histories and are embedded in broader social justice and livelihood struggles. In this article, I present the case of two contaminated communities in the majority Afrodescendant city of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, to investigate the process through which people construct and renegotiate a form of popular environmentalism through ongoing collective discussions. I explore where community members’ frames of understanding come from and how they contribute to the formation of local environmental perspectives. Drawing on ethnographic data and a dialogic analysis of frames, I show that in this context, environmental concerns and political action are embedded in everyday life rather than being a movement people choose to identify with, and they are informed by past experiences and reconfigured to confront present conflict. I find that situating environmental issues within broader social justice claims results in an everyday environmentalism that is inseparable from other aspects of social reality instead of being a strategic political position. This case contributes to a broader understanding of struggles for environmental justice beyond our largely U.S.-based literature and facilitates cross-regional scholarly conversations.

How do groups respond to accusations of scandal? Because scandals pose significant risks of moral stigma and loss of status to those associated with them, sociologists have analyzed how actors within an accused community use strategies like denial, scapegoating, public apologies, etc. to manage the general public’s response to and interpretation of scandalous claims. While this focus on groups’ “external” responses to scandal has been productive, limited scholarship examines how actors also seek to interpretively manage scandals “internally,” among fellow members of their communities. Through an analysis of evangelical Protestants’ public statements concerning John Chau, an American missionary who garnered international media attention and public controversy after being killed by an isolated tribal group whom he sought to evangelize, we demonstrate how representatives of two factions of the American evangelical field—conservative and progressive, respectively—leveraged scandal as an opportunity to promote their respective visions of ‘authentic evangelicalism” to their broader evangelical audience. More specifically, our findings demonstrate how these spokespersons converted scandalizing accusations made against Chau and American evangelicalism into symbolic resources for solidifying or transforming the professed values and collective identities of their co-religionists. Ultimately, our study demonstrates how scandals not only reveal and potentially reconfigure moral boundaries and conflicts between accusers and accused—as previous sociological research has shown—but that scandals may also involve field-level conflict and contestation among the morally accused themselves, creating opportunities for actors to (re)shape their contemporaries’ moral certainties and collective self-understandings.

The journal Qualitative Sociology is dedicated to the qualitative interpretation and analysis of social life. The journal offers both theoretical and ...

The journal Qualitative Sociology is dedicated to the qualitative interpretation and analysis of social life. The journal offers both theoretical and ...