February 2012
5 posts
Occupy and Ideology
So the Occupy lesson went really well. The class was a little skeptical at first, but they seemed to warm up to the whole idea as the lesson progressed. Many of the students only knew of the Occupy movement from the Daily Show and Colbert Report, which didn’t surprise me. Now, I remember seeing and being frustrated by the Daily Show’s coverage of the protesters in Zuccotti Park and their whole...
“A contradiction arises between a seductive but alienating possessive...”
– David Harvey - “A Brief History of Neoliberalism”
“The categories of perception of the social world are, as regards their most...”
– Pierre Bourdieu (via ohhdamnamanda)
Teaching Occupy
Well, it is official. I have graduated. Now I just have another month or two of anxiously awaiting responses to graduate applications. *Fingers crossed* In the meantime, I’ve been invited by Westminster’s sociology department to teach a day on Occupy Wall Street. I’m really excited for it, but a little nervous about what kind of reaction it will get. Utah is a very interesting...
January 2012
2 posts
the sociologist: Cultural Marxism →
thesociologist:
The state of the world today is not pretty. It is timely to revisit the works of Antonio Gramsci and his fellow intellectuals on cultural Marxism. Whatever is happening has been foretold, long before bailouts and censorship became a staple in our vocabulary.
So what is cultural marxism?
It…
November 2011
1 post
WatchFoucault on the disciplinary society
October 2011
2 posts
September 2011
5 posts
"The Condition of Postmodernity" by David Harvey
The Condition of Postmodernity
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“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the...”
– Karl Marx (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)
“Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary...”
– Karl Marx (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte)
Zygmunt Bauman: "Power is divorced from politics"
August 2011
12 posts
Between planning a wedding, a honeymoon and the ASA conference, this blog has been seriously neglected. I do plan on, however, posting from the annual conference. So do check back in. Also, for my readers who will be attending the conference, don’t miss the blogger party at the Seahorse lounge in Caesar’s, Sunday at 4:30p!
Owen Jones: "The riots are a catastrophe"
For my few American readers wanting to know more about the class/political dynamics of the rioting underway in the UK, Owen Jone’s editorial is a must read. The riots are simply a disaster on every level. They are a disaster for the poor and working class communities whose homes and places of employment have been destroyed and looted. They are a disaster in that they are inciting fear and...
Are sociology and historiography, which disclose the relativity of all knowledge by reporting these knowledges to their historical conditions, not condemned to recognize their own relativity as well, and by the way obliged to condemn themselves to a nihilist relativism? … in my opinion it is possible to combine a realist vision of the scientific world and a realist theory of knowledge...
Zygmunt Bauman On Consumerism and Riots
We are all consumers now, consumers first and foremost, consumers by right and by duty. The day after the 11/9 outrage George W. Bush, when calling Americans to get over the trauma and go back to normal, found no better words than “go back shopping”. It is the level of our shopping activity and the ease with which we dispose of one object of consumption in order to replace it with a “new and...
4 tags
Robert Brydie: On the London Riots →
Coming to an American city near you…
robert-brydie:
Whilst violence directed towards innocent people leading to houses being ransacked and people forced from their homes in no way can be condoned to simply dismiss and dress it up in moralistic terms of just being the result of “yobs”, “neds”, “hoodrats” & “chavs” is to ignore the situation…
I’m going to get around to actually writing again, I swear. Just as soon as life slows down a bit…
Desperate Times
“The economic experiments of President Roosevelt may prove, I think, to be of extraordinary importance in economic history, because for the first time — at least I cannot recall a comparable case — theoretical advice is being taken by one of the rulers of the world as the basis of large-scale action. The possibility of such a remarkable event has arisen out of the utter and...
The optics of belonging to one of America's last... →
motherjones:
MoJo’s Editors in Chief Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery put John Boehner on notice.
July 2011
26 posts
WatchSave Our Schools Rally. Utah State Office of Education, Salt Lake City, Utah
Study: Union Decline Accounts for Much of the Rise...
via ASA:
Union membership in America has declined significantly since the early 1970s, and that plunge explains approximately a fifth of the increase in hourly wage inequality among women and about a third among men, according to a new study in the August issue of the American Sociological Review.
“Our study underscores the role of unions as an equalizing force in the labor market,” said...
pointandline asked: Hey, I know you! You're my brother!
That wasn't really a question, was it?
Ha! That was!
That wasn't really a question, was it?
Ha! That was!
Save Our Schools Rally
Come show solidarity with Utah’s public school teachers and students this Thursday and Friday at the downtown Salt Lake City library. Also, would a socially conscious graphic designer please volunteer with them? From appearances, they are in desperate need.
July 28th (3 PM-5 PM)
Join Salt Lake City public school advocates for a showing of The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for...
Résiste! - Rise of the Interns
I don’t think anyone needs to know German to get the drift
Privilege Denying Dude
Kudos to SocProf for his excellent review/take-down of Peter Berger’s latest book, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist. Here’s an excerpt, but you should definitely read the whole piece:
It is quite amazing to read someone who seemed to have had an easy academic career (at least, from what he tells, but things were certainly more relaxed when he started) engage in some non-stop...
Sociology Wordles
“A Critique of Political Economy” by Karl Marx
“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” by Max Weber
“Suicide” by Emile Durkheim
For more sociology wordles click here
The Culture of the New Capitalism
New analytic technologies have enabled firms to engage in what Michel Foucault has called “panoptic surveillance”; these technologies put real-time maps of resources and performance on screen. This computerized surveillance differs, however, from the control envisaged by Taylor and efficiency experts in an earlier era. In order to deliver quick, flexible results, work groups have to...
The Visual Du Jour - They Need Tax Cuts!
via globalsociology:
Paging Bill Domhoff (and via Owen Jones), class war 101:
And also:
So, obviously, “shared sacrifice” is required and we need to tighten our belts.
Elizabeth Warren Ousted
Back in February I posted on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a newly created federal agency charged with the task of protecting consumers from bad business practices. I expressed some skepticism because I thought with Warren as director it was too good to be true. Turns out it was. President Obama is simply not willing to put up a fight in order to get Warren nominated. Instead...
Use your loaf: why food prices were crucial in the... →
globalsociology:
Food riots are the future
“Heaven’s On Fire” - The Radio...
Zygmunt Bauman: The Trouble With Being Human These...
‘We live in a world which no longer questions itself, which lives from one day to another managing successive crises, without knowing where it is going and without trying to plan the itinerary. And everything important in our lives – human bonds, partnerships, neighbourhood, goals worth pursuing and dangers to avoid – feels transient, precarious, vulnerable, insecure, uncertain, risky’. “In...
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
On Gym Box, a London based fitness company that advertised a workout regimin which substituted punching bags for chavs. (“Chav” is a pejorative term for lower-class individuals, not unlinke “white-trash” or “hillbilly”):
Apparently the class was a hit with gym-goers. Describing it as ‘one of the most popular classes we have ever run,’ he claimed...
Why Greece, Italy, and Spain?
From Paul Krugman:
Specifically, the reason Greece (and Ireland, and Portugal, and to some extent Spain) are in so much trouble is that by adopting the euro they’ve left themselves with no good way out of the aftereffects of the pre-2008 bubble. To regain competitiveness, they need massive deflation; but that deflation, in addition to involving an extended period of very high unemployment,...
On Workfare and Ritual Degradation
“The degraded welfare mother was thus made to serve as a warning to all Americans who were working more and earning less, if they were working at all. There is a fate worse, and a status lower, than hard and unrewarding work. Welfare mothers were natural candidates for this labor-regulating role after the 1960s because of the changing gender and racial composition of the labor force…...
Housing Segregation and the Neoliberal State
Local fair-housing advocates are battling the Westchester county government (an affluent New York suburb) for what they say are discriminatory housing practices. Daniel Denvir has a great piece over at Salon which describes the county’s efforts to confine affordable housing to a few, out-of-the-way, quadrants. Here’s a portion:
Westchester, like many other counties, receives...
Debtocracy
I would highly recommend anyone with the time and bandwidth to check out this superb documentary on the subject of austerity from the vantage point of the Greek people.
From Richard Dienst, the author of The Bonds of Debt:
Mixing the pragmatic with the implacable, such attitudes—bedrock demands for social provision, terrible feelings of betrayal, and enduring outrage at the cruelty of...
So far I’ve avoided posting much music on...