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Doing Difference/Doing Power: Negotiations of Race and Gender in a Mentoring Program
Author(s) -
Schippers Mimi
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1525/si.2008.31.1.77
Subject(s) - salience (neuroscience) , negotiation , inequality , social psychology , salient , hierarchy , significant difference , psychology , middle class , sociology , power (physics) , interpersonal communication , power structure , race (biology) , gender studies , ethnography , political science , social science , cognitive psychology , mathematics , mathematical analysis , statistics , physics , quantum mechanics , anthropology , law
This study is an empirical exploration of how people negotiate structural inequality and interpersonal power relations through the interactive accomplishment of difference. The author presents data on a mentoring program in which college women were paired with middle school girls across race, class, and age differences. The data show white mentors' status and authority depended less on the program's structure and more on the middle school girls' interactional maneuvers to make race difference particularly salient in the mentoring relationships and, more important, to establish a set of meanings for racial difference that made African American higher in status than white. Bridging research and theory on “doing difference” and status relations, the author argues that the accomplishment of difference alone is not the main mechanism by which structural inequalities are produced in everyday life. Instead, the accomplishment of difference is reflective, productive, and sometimes divergent of structural inequalities when, within interaction, people (1) accomplish difference in a way that raises the salience of that difference for defining the situation and (2) establish meanings that define that difference as a status hierarchy.