January 2011
9 posts
If It Were My Home
If It Were My Home compares living conditions in one country with that of another and is quite useful for illustrating basic differences in standards of living. While gaging quality of life is no doubt more complicated than all of this, it serves as a good general overview of the way in which nations differ.
A Call For Sociological Songs
“We are all Bourgeois now” - McCarthy
From the songwriter, Malcolm Eden: This is perhaps the song of ours I prefer, especially from the point of view of the recording. I think the rest of the group all like it too. It’s about a woman who wanders around Thatcher’s Britain with no money and two or three children, trying to understand what the hell is going on. She meets a...
CJ Pascoe on Hegemonic Masculinity
The emergent sociology of masculinity became a “critical study of men, their behaviors, practices, values and perspectives” (Whitehead and Barrett 2001, 14). These new sociologists of masculinity positioned themselves in opposition to earlier Parsonian theories of masculinity, proffering, not a single masculine “role,” but rather the idea that masculinity is...
8 tags
Homelessness, Poverty, and the Neoliberal...
Every holiday season, in the midst of orgiastic consumer spending and all-around gluttony, it seems necessary for newspapers and other media outlets to report on charitable and compassionate acts. These kind of stories are a staple of the holidays and can be genuinely inspirational, no doubt bringing about some good in and of themselves. There was, however, one story in particular which caught...
4 tags
Austerity and Rationalizing an Irrational System
As Naomi Klein demonstrates in The Shock Doctrine, capitalists have been quite successful in seizing upon crises to advance political and financial programs which further their goals. As Milton Friedman put it, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” David Harvey refers to...
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Postmodernism & The Scientific Method
The New Yorker just published a fascinating piece titled “The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method?” which reminds me of the classic divide between empiricist and postmodernist orientations. The article provides several examples of how (what is considered to be) solid scientific research can undergo what is described as “a decline effect.”...