In the last decade of the 20th century, development thinking shifted from a growth oriented model to the concept of human development as a process of enhancing human capabilities. This paradigmatic shift, articulated in the writings of Amartya Sen, moves beyond growth of income and captures the quality of growth in terms of social and human development and the meaningful participation of, and fair distribution of benefits for all concerned. The United Nations took up this approach with the Human...
In her latest piece for the Atlantic, Christina Hoff Sommers – author of “The War against Boys” – continues to make the case that boys are losing out in education, are being disadvantaged by schools that supposedly cater exclusively to girls and are thus in need of remedial help in order to catch up to girls educationally. Arguments like hers are still going strong in public discourse, although a vast amount of research has shown the situation to be much...
from https://seanwes.com/2012/hipster-designerd/ This week in a local Massachusetts newspaper a columnist made a list of demands to the influx of hipsters into his neighborhood. In the article the author attempts to reconcile with how his city is gentrifying and seems to be making something of a plea to the newcomers’ humanity. The article sparked my interest and had me asking, what is a hipster?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMedicine_Drugs.svg The 2006 Online Health Search, a US survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, showed that “prescription or over-the-counter drugs” was the fifth most widely searched health topic on the Web. The most recent study, conducted by the Pew Project in September 2012, found that 72% of Internet users they surveyed say they looked online for health information within the past year. As well as providing knowledge, the Web is also a retail opportunity which allows...
News continues to break revealing more incidents of U.S. government spying. Based on documents provided by Edward Snowden, we learn that targets of the NSA now include the phone calls, emails, and text messages of the presidents of Brazil and Mexico, and the internal communications system of news broadcaster Al Jazeera. The leaks have also brought to light that the U.S. has been hacking into foreign networks in order to place them under covert control through an effort dubbed “GENIE.”
Football season is upon us, and there are plenty of reasons why this moment in big time football is very intriguing from a sociological perspective. More specifically, most of the major offseason storylines of both professional and collegiate football tell us much about the racial politics in big time football and the negotiations of race and sports in the media. Update: Johnny Manziel makes the cover of Time Magazine.
Key components of New York Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk strategy were recently struck down by a Federal Judge for violating the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. The controversy surrounding the stop-and-frisk program primarily focused on its racial profiling—over 85 percent of the 4.3 million people stopped since 2003 were minorities. This decision has received considerable attention; however, there was a second component of NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program that was also defeated that received less attention. As part of the stop-and-frisk program,...
In his 2005 song “White Privilege,” white hip-hop artist Macklemore asked, “Where’s my place in a music that’s been taken by my race?”. In the same song he acknowledges that “white rappers’ albums really get the most spins” and that “hip-hop started off on a block [he’s] never been to, to counteract a struggle that [he’s] never been through.” This seemingly self-aware critique of his own whiteness in the context of hip-hop dropped 7 years before Macklemore’s meteoric rise to...
Germany is currently witnessing one of its most anticipated criminal cases in recent history, as Beate Zschäpe, the sole surviving member of the three-person white supremacist group National Socialist Underground (NSU), is being tried for membership in a terrorist cell and conspiracy to commit ten murders. In addition to highlighting the continued danger of white supremacist groups, this case and its handling by the police and the media not only speaks to the lingering racism in Germany but also to...
The Bechdel test is a simple but effective way of assessing the feminist qualities of a film, and how women are represented. The test was introduced by Alison Bechdel in 1985, in a comic strip called ‘The Rule’. The test asks three simple questions of a film: 1) Are there more than two (named) female characters in the film? 2) Do they interact with each other? 3) If they do, do they talk about something other than a man? If...
Ethnography is a “particular method or sets of methods” which in its “characteristic form it involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s lives for an extended period of time; watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions — in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983: 1). Ethnography therefore allows insight into the knowledge and meanings behind the composition...
Last Spring, during a Colorado State Senate hearing on gun control, a rape survivor testified that she believed she could have prevented her victimization if she had been allowed by the state of Colorado to carry a concealed firearm. A female state senator then rebuked her claims by citing statistics regarding defensive firearm use. In response to the exchange in the Colorado State Senate, Fox News brought together Zerlina Maxwell, a writer and political analyst, and Gayle Trotter, senior...
Scholars of political protest continue to attempt translation of social movements that ostensibly took a new turn in the past few years. Inspired by the Arab Spring, this current wave of contention can be traced through the Indignados and other anti-austerity uprisings, and eventually into efforts to Occupy everywhere. These movements share some characteristics: they are less leader-led than many previous movements, and participants often call for democratization but lack a clear, unified set of demands. A common tactic is...
About a year ago, I wrote my first post for Sociology Lens about the tensions over sex education in the United States. Specifically, I commented on Jessica Field’s Sociology Compass article, “Sexuality Education in the United States: Shared Cultural Ideas Across the Political Divide,” in which she argues that, regardless of political position on sex education, most participants in debates operate from a shared assumption about the dangers of adolescent sexuality. Following Fields, I called for a truly comprehensive form...
On July 13th, George Zimmerman was found not guilty in the shooting of 17 year old Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman shot Martin during a scuffle—the details of which we will never truly know—and claimed that he had done so only in self-defense. The jury believed him; much of the viewing public did not. In the weeks since the verdict, the nation has been reeling. The shooting itself, the failure of the police department, the vigilantism encouraged by “Stand Your Ground”...
Recent California statistics by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation expose a contradiction plaguing weight loss initiatives in the United States. More and more Californians are exercising, but obesity rates are rising across the state. Between 2001 and 2011, all of the counties in California saw an increase in rates of exercise. The increases were particularly dramatic for women; the rates of women who completed a sufficient amount of physical activity in a week rose...
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