Category: Opinion

Last Friday, President Obama announced a proposal for tuition-free community college.  IF Obama’s plan is implemented it could save a full-time community college student an average of $3800 per year.  Students are required to “make steady progress” toward completing their program by registering at least part-time each semester and maintain a 2.5 GPA.  The federal government will split the costs with states by covering three quarters of tuition while the state picks up the remaining quarter.  If Obama’s plan is...

Name the first famous Korean that comes into your head. Unless you’re (a) Korean, (b) majoring in East-Asian studies or (c) showing off, you’ll probably say Kim Jong-Eun, the western media’s favourite Evil Dictator. Kim, like his father, makes it oh-so-easy for stories about him to quickly become clickbait. The dynastic backstory, brutal haircut, penchant for Dr. Evil-style Maoist tunics, countless silly titles, affection for basketball, Dennis Rodman and overeating – add in the very real nuclear ambitions, the forced labour...

Yup. It’s ‘Doge Keynes’.  Paul Stoller – perhaps best known for his pioneering work on the ‘anthropology of the senses‘ – suggested last month in a blog for the Huffington Post that the ‘unprecedented prosperity that human activity has generated has ironically resulted in widespread misery in the world.’ Stoller calls upon anthropologists to shift ‘from passive to active voice,’ claiming that they are uniquely positioned to challenge what I like to refer to as the two-pronged politics of idiocy,...

To ask a person how much their apartment is worth (as Channel 4 reporter, Paraic O’Brien, did to Russell Brand yesterday), or how much they pay in rent when they are attending a march in solidarity with less fortunate and more marginalized people is manipulative and dishonest, and, yes, it does make you a ‘snide’. It was an attempt to surreptitiously undermine the actions of Brand and paint him as a hypocrite simply because he happens to be richer than...

I just got back from IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, where I volunteered in the running of this annual two-week event, in exchange for the chance to gorge myself on a host of documentary films, gratis. Lots of different subject matters were covered: graffiti artists in Brazil, al-Shabab militants in Somalia, music therapists in the United States, arms dealers in India, fracking in South Africa, loads of stuff. Not only were most of the films extremely watchable...

Perhaps it is because I was not in the UK for much of last year, but Black Friday came as something of a shock. Stepping out of my flat on yesterday’s bright November morning, I came across the above signboard, positioned on Croydon’s High Street by inveterate tax avoiders Vodafone. My initial reaction was one of sincere befuddlement – not because I hadn’t heard the term Black Friday before, for I had. Except, the Black Friday I thought I knew...

I remember a piece by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show from a few years ago where he asks his Senior Black Correspondent (Larry Wilmore): ‘Is blackface ever ok?’ the correspondent responds ‘No!’ and gets up to leave. When he is asked for a longer answer Wilmore says ‘Noooooooo!’. Then, when pushed further he states that ‘Blackface is part of a long history of mocking and dehumanizing black people while appropriating our culture. Here is when blackface is ok, when...

 ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ © 2013 Sumi Perera RE In my post a fortnight ago, I picked up on a topic that Johannes Lenhard had engaged with on Sociology Lens earlier this year – the apparent immateriality of new monetary forms. From paper money, now unbacked by gold and promising the bearer nothing more than an ‘identical replacement of itself,’ up to the monetary ether that circulates in the rarefied market for foreign exchange derivatives, back down to London’s increasingly cashless public...

My friend hates instant messaging. I know this because he sends me instant messages about it. His main problem is that messaging, whether through SMS, facebook or whatsapp, is distracting, causes misunderstandings, and is a poor substitute for a quick old-fashioned phone call.  Whether my particularly cantankerous and contradictory friend is right or not, the way we communicate is certainly changing very rapidly indeed, in interesting and challenging ways. In the last fifteen years alone we have shifted from phone...

Writing for Sociology Lens earlier this year, Johannes Lenhard introduced ‘the homeless as the last materialists’ – past masters in the dying arts of cash, marginal to the ‘dematerialised’ and ‘virtual’ monetary circuits that are fast becoming conventional. For it is not only in the migraine-inducing markets for foreign-exchange derivatives (worth US$70 trillion at last count) that money appears dematerialised and virtual; you cannot any longer use cash to pay your bus fare in London. But for homeless people in...

When thinking about new blog post topics,  inspiration can come from any number of topics: something on social media, a new film or book being released, or, most often, something in the news that catches our eye and asks for a Sociological analysis. My topic today is a combination of two, that fit together almost too coincidentally to be funny: The London School of Economics’ student union’s decision to disband its Men’s Rugby club  for production of an offensive leaflet, and...

  Mothers seem to be good at finding tribes.  They blog, form Facebook pages, meet for regular play dates, etc…If the plight of early woman were anything like this nostalgic blog post, I would surely miss a communal motherhood as I would miss an appendage.  I suspect however, that even with shared laughter the washing, cooking, and caretaking required of early mothers left them just as exhausted as we feel today.  According to Wikipedia (insert snickering), archeologists think that tribal...