Lately there has been a lot of talk about class, and not just the vague election year pandering to the vague demographic of the “middle class.” Instead, the very concept of class has become a subject of debate. Last time, I focused on Mitt Romney’s comment’s about “people who have fallen out of the middle class.” This time I focus on fellow candidate Rick Santorum’s criticism of Romney for using the word class. Here’s what Santorum said: “There are no...
A recent article published in the Kansas City Star stimulated my interest for a discourse. I found the article especially relevant, as presently, a wide segment of the United States population vehemently opposes undocumented aliens in the country. The article’s author reported that an immigration bill proposal sponsored by State Senator Will Kraus, a Lee’s Summit Republican, would require public schools in Missouri to verify the immigration status of students. A provision of the proposed bill stipulates that all public...
While leaving the gym this morning, I came across a dog that was left in a car with all of the windows sealed shut. Although it was by no means a hot morning in the southern New Mexico desert, the sun was nonetheless beating down directly on the car; by any indication, the panting dog inside was anything but comfortable. I decided to report the situation to the owner of the facility, only to be shrugged off with a flippant,...
“Somebody who’s fallen from the middle class to poverty, in my opinion is still middle class.” Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, made this statement on a talk show a few weeks ago. Bloggers ridiculed the comment as nonsensical. I admit I too was tempted to just call Romney an idiot (again) and move on. But, as I’ve been watching politicians in a society of growing inequality and high unemployment struggle with the concept of class while desperately trying not to...
“I don’t know if I should be saying this right now,” sophomore Allie stated, her eyes making a cautionary sweep of the room, even though except for us it was empty, and the door had long been shut. White and well-off, she held a prestigious academic scholarship and took many of her courses through a selective honors program. But not this course: “[The professor] was a nice lady, but she felt like she had to tie every single thing she...
In 2010, MSNBC published an article written by Alex Johnson entitled “Some schools rethink bans on cell phones: Bans don’t work, so administrators explore using mobile devices”. In the report, Johnson notes that 100 plus students were suspended – not for cheating, smoking, or bullying – but for having cell phones. While presented here as merely an anecdote, there can little doubt that the use of cell phones, and mobile technology more generally, is an issue that has caught the...
In Guy Ritchie’s newest Sherlock Holmes movie, European political intrigue abounds as the 19th century wanes. Politically consequential bombings are regularly blamed on anarchists who seem intent on spreading terror and chaos, and anarchists are used as a cover for an attempt at an even more effective disruption of European politics. In my last post I reviewed some of these types of images of anarchism, and suggested that anarchism actually provides an interesting opportunity for analysis in terms of its history...
It would be nearly impossible to imagine John Bader, a dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs at Johns Hopkins University and author of Dean’s List: 11 Habits of Highly Successful College Students, ever uttering the lines of Larry Summers (fictional Larry Summers, that is, as represented in The Social Network). The Summers character, on the phone with his wife, glares up at two young men in his office and says: “I have to go, dear. Students are here. Undergraduates.” Those moments...
On my weekly trip to the grocery store, the traffic seems heavier than usual; perhaps the nice weather has coaxed people from their homes or out of work. It is surprisingly warm today with a high reported to reach the 70s. Taking advantage, my car windows are rolled down, sunglasses are on, and it seems that Bruno Mars has gripped popular radio channels. While stopped at a red light (about a dozen cars back), I notice a group of about...
Editor’s note: This post has been reprinted with permission of the author. The original can be found on the University of Missouri-Kansas City Department of Criminal Justice and Criminolgy Blog: http://umkccjc.blogspot.com/2011/12/hate-crime-statistics-report-gender.html. By Dr. Jessica Hodge As someone who studies hate crimes and teaches a class about the subject, I find myself anticipating every year the release of the FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics report.[1] In this report, the FBI provides a variety of statistics involving the types of hate crime incidences that occurred during the...
Anarchism has made fleeting appearances in several media outlets in the last couple of months, and the Occupy Wall Street protests seem largely responsible for those appearances. Before about two weeks ago, I understood anarchism to advocate a lack of any authority (and I incorrectly assumed this meant an absence of social order), and I had some vague association between anarchism, violence, and labor unions in the 1920s. But anarchism and its history is far more complicated, and far more...
Author’s Note: This piece was originally posted to Sociology Lens on December 10th. On December 13th, the piece was temporarily removed and I was asked to make revisions to make more explicit the conventional sociological themes in this piece. This request was made as the result of pressure from a senior professor who deemed this piece too “polemical” and not “sociological.” While I and many others in the discipline have epistemological objections to very concept of value-free social science, and...
“Oh, I hate that,” my colleague moaned, leaning on the hay- in “hate” with a weary sigh. The that in question was a grammatical construction I had not encountered in my previous TESOL experiences: from as a noun, linked to a country of origin on the other side of a being verb. My from is…Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala. “I don’t know where they get it from,” my colleague continued. “It’s not like they ever heard it from a native...
Since the Occupy movement began in September, my sociological imagination has been churning with questions. I initially thought: Is this the beginning of a revolution, or is it an anti-tea party left wing group? But most of all, I wondered more broadly: What is it? Seemingly, I am not the only one in the realm of confusion. The Occupy Movement has been criticized for not being a cohesive movement. It has likewise been lauded as unstructured, lacking of a clear...
I’ve read a lot about the shocking revelation that a former coach at Penn State allegedly molested up to 8 boys and raped at least one. The story is all the more shocking given the grand jury testimony that points to a possible cover up by Penn State officials. Indeed, media coverage of who knew what and when has almost eclipsed coverage of the original alleged crimes. Two Penn State administrators were charged with perjury and amid the outrage the...
New scientific evidence, prompted by the invention and diffusion of new technologies, often stimulates a period of social reckoning: what does this new evidence mean for our existing beliefs and practices? Can they be reconciled or must something be profoundly rethought? The explosion of neuroscience research, much of which uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), is no exception. Findings in the early 1990s led to the development of fMRI, which measures change in blood flow in the brain based on...
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