J’s research agenda explores how the boundaries and content of social categories are (re)produced and used interactionally, institutionally, and thus, structurally. The thread that runs through my research agenda is contributing to understandings of the (re)production and maintenance of social and especially racial(ized) categories, both in situated interactions and through longer-term discursive trends. Whether through the racialization of national membership, the maintenance of “color evasive” practices, or game-playing, my research elucidates the fundamental processes through which perceived category membership informs how people frame what they do and how they interpret what others do. I use a mixed-methods approach that includes comparative historical methods, ethnomethodological conversation analysis, and discourse analysis to examine how categories act as store houses of commonsense knowledge about groups of people, and how that knowledge serves as a basis and resource for inference and action. At its core, this research focuses on the ways that people index and exploit social categories in, and as a basis for, social action, with emphasis on how the interactional (re)production of category-based knowledge informs other structural outcomes and processes.
Their dissertation combined discourse-historical and conversation analytic methods to analyze engagement with the racialization of Muslims in Germany between 1890 and the present. This project has been supported by a Fulbright Student Research Grant, through which they were able to spend the 2019-20 academic year in Germany completing their dissertation research and collecting preliminary data for their next major project. This dissertation was also supported by the UC Santa Barbara Graduate Division Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
In their dissertation, they extended literature on Western and Northern European modalities of anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, both among the increasingly prominent far right and within the mainstream. Specifically, it demonstrates how contemporary far-right populist movements, like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, have successfully adapted more mainstream discursive resources, such that they can express anti-immigration and anti-Muslim positions in ways designed to avoid being sanctioned as racist. Moreover, in examining the work that members do to circumvent the potential sanctioning of racist speech, this research demonstrates how Germany, and Europe more broadly, are maintained as a “space free of race” through quotidian practices in spite of persistent racial inequality and racism.
J’s work has been published in notable interdisciplinary outlets, including Populist Nationalism in Europe and the Americas; Patterns of Prejudice; German Politics and Society, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and Language and Communication.
In addition to this work, J has several ongoing projects. They are analyzing naturally-occurring video of individuals playing competitive board games and examining the production of complaints, advice, and expertise in interaction. This research continues their study of the ways that individuals produce and orient to actions and characteristics as “category-appropriate.” They have also co-authored chapters in a book under contract and review at University of Nebraska Press examining the identity and experiences of “Blaxicans”—multiracial people of Black and Mexican descent. In addition, they are involved in a collaboration with Jack Joyce at University of Oxford on an extended project exploring sense-making around interventions in public disputes involving racist conduct and the production of racist conduct in and of itself. One manuscript from this project is currently under review at Journal of Pragmatics, while another is currently in preparation
J’s next major project involves a comparative study of the interactional (re)production and normative management of racial categories in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom, with a continued focus on the institutional setting of political talk. While these national contexts vary considerably vis-à-vis racial formations, they have all had recent resurgences in far-right, white supremacist political activity, anti-racist political activism, and public debates around colonial history. Whether through ongoing efforts of a local Black Lives Matters movement in each country, the toppling of statutes affiliated with the system of enslavement in the U.S. and U.K., or the ongoing debate over reparations for the genocide of Ovaherero and Nama people in Germany, discussions about race, coloniality, and national history have been consistently topicalized in contemporary political discourse. In addition to these conversations prompted by the hauntings of national history (Gordon 1997), such discussions of about race/ism have also been increasingly topicalized with the notable presence of far-right, extremist politicians in Congress, Parliament, and the Bundestag. This project will examine the “context-sensitive” but “context-free” (Lerner 2003) practices available to politicians for talking about, assessing policies with, accounting for, questioning the relevance of, etc. and therefore (re)producing race. As such, my next project proposes to examine how conversations and debates in these three national contexts over the past several years have contributed to the (re)production and policing of racial categories and racial commonsense.
Selected Publications
Sterphone, J. 2022. “Complaining by category: managing social categories and action ascriptions in war game interactions.” Language & Communication 84: 46-60.
Sterphone, J. 2022. “Negotiating the Mainstream: Mitigated Rejections of Far-Right Policy Proposals in Bundestag Debates.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 26(3): 335-361.
Sterphone, J. 2021. “On the relevance and consequentiality of Muslim as a social category in pre-unification Germany.” Patterns of Prejudice 54(4): 367-391.
Sterphone, J. 2021. “The New Nationalism? Antecedents of the Alternative für Deutschland’s Islamfeindlichkeit [Islamophobia].” German Politics and Society 38(4): 28-50.
Daniel, G. Reginald and Joseph Sterphone. 2019. “Shame, Anti-Semitism, and Hitler’s Rise to Power in Germany.” EC Psychology and Psychiatry 8(5): 334-345.
Joyce, Jack and J Sterphone. 2022. “Challenging racism in public spaces: practices for interventions into disputes.” Journal of Pragmatics 201: 43-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2022.09.001
Scheff, Thomas J., G. Reginald Daniel, and Joseph Sterphone. 2018. “Shame and a theory of war and violence.”Aggression and Violent Behavior, 39: 109-115.
Chapters in Edited Volumes
Daniel, G. Reginald and J Sterphone. In press. “Hypodescent,” Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, Matthew Hughey and Michael Rosino, eds. New York: Routledge.
Sterphone, Joseph. 2019. “‘Mut zu Deutschland!’ [Courage for Germany] On the National Populism of Alternative für Deutschland”, pp. 99-115 in Populist Nationalism in Europe and the Americas, Fernando Lopez-Alves and Diane Johnson, eds. New York: Routledge.
J Sterphone 