Latest articles from sociology lens
In a recent article, Brad Allenby and Carolyn Mattick argue that the ‘rule book’ of international warfare needs to be rewritten to include of the use of new technologies, in particular drones.[1] Drones sit in an ambiguous legal space because they are unmanned aerial vehicles that are often used to fly in a restricted airspace. Compounding this problem is that the use of drones is largely undocumented as a matter of national secrecy. Nevertheless another layer of technology, social media,...
As discussed in neoliberalism and its consequences, increasingly, there appears to be a connection between neoliberalism and the development of anomie. Such an association is unsurprising considering that neoliberalism encourages individuals to achieve ever greater success even though such a goal is unrealistic. In response to being blocked from realizing their never-ending aspirations, Merton (1968) argues that people in success-driven societies will feel deprived and frustrated as a divide forms between idealistic ambitions and factual reality. While such a divide has...
Earlier this year, many retired football players and their families filed a class-action lawsuit against the NFL. The complaint states that the NFL hid evidence of the dangers of the game, dangers like brain damage from repeat concussions and sub-concussive trauma. New research indicates that the repetitive beatings that football players experience over the course of their career causes irreparable damage to their brains, leading to cognitive, emotional, and functional problems similar to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Several players committed...
In mid-October, I posted about a recent study that assesses the relationship between rates of sexual activity-related outcomes and the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. The researchers found that injection of the vaccine is not associated with elevated rates of sexual activity-related outcomes in young girls, specifically pregnancy, contraceptive counseling, and sexually transmitted infection testing and diagnosis. While removing the stigma around the vaccine will help girls and women, I asked why the vaccine continues to be associated with women,...
Amazon.com provides a number of feedback spaces. These kinds of spaces are the communicative loops that situate digital consumption. Recently we have seen a number of variations in the form of these reviews. Critically, these reviews include ones that take the form of explicit social commentary and go beyond the particularity of a simple product review. This practice drew me to the thinking about economies of review, as parables for digital communication and consumption. Can such reviews challenge spaces of...
(If you are interested in this post, please see my earlier post on neoliberalism) Based on recent research, there appears to be a link between the ideals of neoliberalism and increasing rates of inequality. Navarro (1998) argues, for instance, that neoliberal policies have contributed to growing inequalities around the globe and to worsening living conditions for the majority of the world’s people. For her part, George (1999) agrees and blames increasing inequality on the common neoliberal practices of placing public...
The presidential debates have raised some interesting and important questions about gender inequality in the U.S. Specifically, the second debate (transcript) brought up the issue of fair pay and equal wages for American women. While Governor Romney’s response—which involved “binders full of women”—rightfully took a lot of heat, both candidates could have benefitted from a brief lesson in the sociology of gender discrimination. Perhaps their aides will pass this on.Gov. Romney’s answer focused on increasing women’s participation in the workforce...
This week, the journal, Pediatrics, published an article on the relationship between rates of sexual activity-related outcomes and the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. Specifically, the researchers set out to determine if HPV vaccination leads to increased sexual activity in young girls. Since the vaccine’s inception, some parents, medical officials, religious organizations and others have suggested that giving girls this protection from HPV will promote them to engage in sexual activity; the vaccination is essentially an endorsement for sex in the...
In the U.S., whites are the dominant ethno-racial group. Interestingly, however, Doane (1997) and Nayak (2007) point out that this group has often been ignored in the race and ethnicity literature. As a result, Doane argues that the study of the dominant ethnic group in the United States has been underdeveloped, the ethnic hierarchy has not been adequately researched, the strategic use of the dominant role has lacked attention, and the evolution of this group has not been fully examined....
I found the following quote from one of Obama’s speeches on his campaign website: “We are greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules.” After reading this quote, I wondered if the discourse of “a fair shot” is a useful way to put forth a political agenda. On one hand, this is a standard...
There is something curious happening this election season, and it has nothing to do with 47% or Obamacare. Voters in three states – Washington, Oregon, and Colorado – will be casting ballots on whether or not to legalize cannabis. Whether or not these measures ultimately pass, they amount to the most direct challenge to the legitimacy of US drug policy since the War on Drugs began over 40 years ago. Of particular interest here are the similarities between the proposed...
Sexual harassment, assault, and rape are topics that are very difficult to discuss. American society has taken strides to develop programs, protocols, and legal actions to help victims of these heinous crimes. Despite these efforts, there are still environments where women and men experience this act of violence at disproportionately high rates. In the newly released documentary, The Invisible War, we are exposed to the high incidence of rape in the United States military. The documentary opens up with a caption that...
New York City is a city characterized by its diversity and multiculturalism. Some of the U.S.’s largest populations of racial and ethnic minorities live within the city limits. And yet, in many ways, NYC continues to drop the ball when it comes to truly integrating its diverse population. A recent example illustrates this problem. The NAACP recently filed a federal civil rights complaint, stating that the city’s elite public schools, like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, have accepted far too few...
In his 2011 article New Media, Web 2.0 and Surveillance Christian Fuchs argues that our life on the Internet, specifically as embodied in the practices and ideology of Web 2.0, is being expropriated as a “form of personal mass dataveillance.”[1] For Fuchs, social networking sites, such as Facebook, are prime sites to explore this shift. The ‘dataveillance’ of these digital social spaces present us with a complex matrix of motivations, communication logics, and economic interests – represented in individual users...
Bad calls leads NFL league and NFLRA to reach an agreement: On Thursday September 27, 2012 the National Football League (NFL) and fans welcomed official referees back to the field with cheers and chants. If for some reason you didn’t hear that NFL referees were on strike, you arer either not a football fan, or missed sports fans complaining about “bad calls” this past week. I for one am not a die-hard football fan, but it has been impossible to escape the...
In a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, a group of scholars reported on the continued gender discrimination in the hard sciences. The researchers asked 127 male and female professors in biology, chemistry, and physics to rate male and female job candidates for a position in their labs. The portfolios of the candidates were exactly the same, but half used the name, “Jennifer,” and the other half, “John.” The professors rated...
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