Tagged: sociology

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

West Virginia Chemical Spill as State-Corporate Crime

On January 9, 2014 government officials in West Virginia discovered that over 7,500 gallons of chemicals used to clean coal had leaked out of a Freedom Industries’ chemical facility and into the nearby Elk River. The location of the leaking storage facilities was just upriver from the largest treatment facility in West Virginia affecting over 300,000 residents throughout the state. Immediately discovering the leak, government officials notified the residents of Charleston and surrounding areas to stop using tap water. The...

Gender & Sexuality

The elusive gay male soccer player in Germany – Homophobia and Solidarity

In 2013, NBA player Jason Collins made headlines when he became the first active openly gay male* athlete in one of the major 4 men’s team sports in the US. A similar story made headlines this winter in Germany, when recently retired soccer player Thomas Hitzlsperger – who formerly played in the German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A and English Premier League as well as for the German national team – came out as gay in an interview with the newspaper...

Political & Economic Sociology / Science & Technology / Sociology of Media & Communication

From the defining issue of our era to “green crap” – the transformation of climate change discourse in the UK.

Source: http://politicalscrapbook.net/2013/11/david-cameron-get-rid-of-all-the-green-crap/ As the saying goes ‘the jury’s in’; human activity is causing global temperatures to rise unnaturally and catastrophically quickly. The IPCC’s international panel of more than 800 scientists compiled over 9,200 peer-reviewed research papers to reach this verdict.  As a result, we are said to be initiating a mass extinction event analogous to one that annihilated the dinosaurs. Yet, climate change, once a totemic issue for politicians attempting to appear progressive, is becoming one of their marginal concerns. ...

Feminist Theory / Gender & Sexuality / Opinion

Lesbians watching gay porn: fluid sexuality or a second wave hangover?

This post was borne out of a recent discussion with a good friend of mine, Harriet, who is a self-identified lesbian. (I include the phrase self-identified here deliberately: I realise her propensity to prefer the company and sex of woman does not categorise her as a lesbian, but it is a term she very comfortably uses herself). She was talking about going to a sex party, and I, in what I perceived to be ignorance, asked her what her interest...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

Do Guns Make Women's Lives Safer?

One of our readers responded to my previous article on the construction of rapists vs normal men in the media and the related issue of how to best respond to popular assertion that guns could play an effective role in women’s self-defense against rape. While agreeing with my overall analysis, she is looking for argumentative tools of how to counter ‘pro gun for self-defense against rape’ style arguments. Her question comes down to this: “The ‘change the society’ rhetoric makes...

Gender & Sexuality / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Culture

Fatherhood and Black Fatherhood

You may have noticed that a photo of a Black man doing his daughter’s hair was plastered all over Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds last month. That man, Doyin Richards, runs a blog, Daddy Doin’ Work, about his experiences raising his two daughters. But, unlike most of the posts from his blog, this photo went viral. When the photo appeared all over social media, it was paired with a quote from his blog. “I have a dream that people will view...

Social Movements / Social Change

Unist’ot’en action camp: the importance of autonomy in resistance

As the Midwest and Northeastern United States thaw out from our early January “Polar Vortex,” I can’t help but wish governments and corporations would make self-improvement resolutions like so many people do during this time of year. Corporations are, after all, afforded the rights of “personhood,” so why not? What would their lists include? In my dream scenario these bodies would resolve to abolish themselves but, assuming this won’t happen any time soon, I significantly lower the bar. Perhaps something like, “This...

Social Identity / Sociology of Media & Communication

Speech, Identity, and Losing the Accent

The voice isn’t often taken as a subject for Sociological analysis, despite affecting and representing a great range of highly sociological topics such as social stratification and identity, amongst many others. Taking the voice as an object of study can be incredibly illuminative, as trends in the way we speak are a clear indicator of wider social changes, as well as being highly applicable to social theory. I started thinking about this after hearing a radio programme on the BBC, that...

Social Movements / Social Change

Goffman and the Web

  Despite writing in an era that predated many of the digital communication technologies that have become important to us, Erving Goffman’s analyses of social behaviour and interaction may be useful for understanding digital phenomena.  Recently there has been a resurgence of  Goffman’s ideas within web and digital communication research, notably from the Presentation of self in everyday life (1959).  This article draws on recent work which has applied Goffman’s ideas to the digital field to suggest how his work...

Feminist Theory / Gender & Sexuality

Teaching Gender and Feminism as a Male-Identified Instructor

My colleague Cliff Leek elsewhere has recently talked about the tension, struggles and challenges of being an ally. Those of us located on the ‘privilege’ side of different axes of inequality and oppression (like race, class and gender) face the challenge of how to become (and stay) active and effective allies without reinforcing the very inequalities we are trying to fight, and trying to speak truth to power without claiming to speak for the movements we are aligned with. As...

Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Organizations & Work

The Sociology Classroom: Critical, Transformative, Radical? Part 3 of 3. Radical Pedagogy & Practice

In the first part of this series, I asked whether the sociology classroom can be a space of critical or radical pedagogy and discussed the theories behind Freirean learner-centered approaches to radical pedagogy. In my second article , I laid out some critiques of these models brought forward by scholars equally committed to critical sociology and radical analyses. Despite these critical voices though, there is certainly good reason for radical scholars to have their pedagogy reflect their intellectual commitments. Today’s...

Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

Everyday Deviancy and the Web

  Since the credit crunch of 2008, and the global financial crisis swept around the world, a new rogue’s gallery of folk devils have been the focus of media opprobrium. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has ceased to talk about ‘Broken Britain’, how everyone is ‘in it together’ and of the laissez-faire, small government ideology epitomised by the ‘big society’. Perhaps this is because the discourse sounds too hypocritical even for a politician to espouse. As jobs are lost,...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture

Men's Less-Than-Super Contributions to Housework

How do women and men divide housework?  That question has become a matter of intrigue in US media in recent years.  In fact, in the last week alone two major newspapers, The New York Times and The Atlantic, carried opinion pieces on the gendered division of housework in America.  A plethora of research indicates that in the last 30 years men have begun to increase the amount of time that they spend on housework but the fact remains that women...

Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology Compass Issues / Sociology of Culture

Riot Grrrl and the Rejection of Resonating Frames

A few weeks ago, I went to see The Punk Singer, a new documentary about Kathleen Hanna – a force within the Riot Grrrl movement. I was mentally and emotionally transported back to the 1990s, reflecting on my late-teens-and-early-20s self. I became nostalgic for that raw anger at injustice channeled into high energy and creative expression, carried along by a sense of excitement and hope, and the supportive feeling of community that, at times, largely consisted of the feminist music...

Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Organizations & Work

The Sociology Classroom: Critical, Transformative, Radical? Part 2 of 3. Problems with Learner-Centered Models

I have previously written about whether the sociology classroom can be a space of critical or radical pedagogy and how critical research agendas should be reflected in sociological pedagogy. Most authors experimenting with critical pedagogy rely on Freirean conceptions of student-centered learning that seek to eliminate teacher-student hierarchies and offer students the change to take ownership of their education by involving them in peer-grading, course design and instruction. However, scholars equally committed to critical sociology and radical analyses have critique...

Class & Stratification / Sociology Compass Issues

Social Class, Social Mobility and English Elite Universities

Elizabeth M. Lee’s article Elite Colleges and Socioeconomic Status (Lee, 2013) in September’s Sociology Compass is a sophisticated exploration of why elite colleges’ demographics remain “largely homogenous across generations”. The UK also exhibits this, seemingly, symptom of a malfunctioning meritocracy. Former Prime Minister Sir John Major described Britain’s lack of social mobility as “truly shocking” and the current Foreign Secretary called it “disturbing” . It’s easy to see why; the upper echelons of our politics and culture are dominated by...