Making a Case for On-the-Ground Research with the Right
Name
Making_a_Case_for_On-the-Ground_Research_with_the_Right.pdf
Size
276.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
47f56ac1cd06f31c6869eb661d0b9854
Author(s)
Larsen, Rebekah
Gaddini, Katie
Date Issued
March 5, 2026
Journal
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
Publisher
Sage
Citation
Larsen, R., & Gaddini, K. (2026). Introduction: Making a Case for On-the-Ground Research with the Right. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 55(2), 97-102.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
In 1972, American anthropologist Laura Nader made an impassioned and urgent plea for
“studying up”—to reorient ethnographic fieldwork and its object of study toward the more
powerful (Nader 1972). Nader penned this essay at the beginning of a widespread conservative
turn, socially and politically (Schulman and Zelizer 2008). The New Right was in its ascendancy,
galvanized by Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for President, and Christian conservatives, such
as Paul Weyrich, sought to build a religious-political coalition around wedge issues such as
abortion and segregation academies. Contemporary historians have contextualized the growth of the right in the 1970s as a response to hard-fought battles for gender, sexual and racial equality
the previous decade, the economy’s downtown, and the related loss of institutional trust via
events such as the Watergate scandal and protracted Vietnam War.
Nader’s call to study the powerful landed in the midst of this political transformation. It also
arrived during an intellectual transformation within the social sciences — the cultural turn —
which subsequently produced a new subfield in our discipline: cultural sociology (Alexander
2021; Swidler 1986). In addition to greater attention to interpretation and qualitative approaches,
this turn brought new theories of power to the discipline. Indeed, identifying and critiquing
power has arguably been at the core of sociology, from classic concepts from Marxian
controlling the means of production, to Foucauldian surveillance and biopower, to the ability to
construct and deconstruct meaning (Hall et al. 2013).
Today, we find ourselves in another moment of rapid political transformation within the United
States. The arrival of Donald Trump on the political stage in 2015 has ushered in a realignment
of American politics; the Conservative Party is now covered by a “MAGA umbrella,” a broad
matrix of actors, with differing, yet overlapping, economic, political and religious agendas
(Johnston 2024). The US political right’s more recent permutations and evolutions—think of
nationalistic, populistic, and even about-faces on small government libertarianism to crony
capitalism–differ from previous decades (Skocpol 2020). A similar growth of right-wing
movements have emerged across the globe, in places such as Canada, Italy, Germany, Brazil,
and Hungary. Such a political upheaval, should, as in Nader’s day, also necessitate an intellectual
re-assessment
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061261415738
