Tagged: sociology

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

Classification and the NSA: The Power of Silence

The chief of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, made his first public comments since Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s PRISM spying program.   The media aftermath of Snowden’s revelation generated multiple narratives surrounding the program. Media coverage focused on privacy concerns, the criminality of Snowden, and the necessity of the program to protect America’s safety.  Lost in the production of these various discourses, there were also narratives that did not emerge, that remained silent.  The absences of particular narratives...

Sociology Compass Issues

A New Sociological Approach to Big Data

Via retail transactions, searching Google, Tweeting and countless other prosaic activities IBM estimates we are creating 2.5 billion gigabytes of data a day. This is ‘Big Data’; a catch-all, superficial and problematic term for unwieldy data sets that require substantial computing power to curate and put to constructive use. Although its slippery definition is relevant to this blog post; problematising the concept of Big Data is for another time. This post begins with the methodological enthusiasm and scepticism that exists...

Gender & Sexuality

Title IX v. The Boy Crisis: Toward Single-Sex Education?

A few weeks ago I posted some thoughts on the impact of Title IX beyond collegiate athletics and last week my colleague, Markus Gerke, wrote brilliantly about the myth of the boy crisis in education.  In this post I will illustrate how Title IX proponents and believers in the boy crisis myth have come to clash over the topic of single-sex education. The movement to single-sex education in the US has been framed as a solution to both girls’ absence...

History of Sociology / Opinion / Social Theory / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

Development and Human Rights

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...

Gender & Sexuality

How not to talk about Gender and Education – Is the 'Boys Crisis' in Education a Reality?

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...

Opinion

What is a HIPSTER?

  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?

Science & Technology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

A sociological understanding of online health behaviours

  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...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Title IX: Way Beyond Athletics

When most people hear talk of Title IX, a 1972 law that states “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance…”, it is most commonly in the context of high school and collegiate athletics.  People opposed to Title IX often claim that it is responsible for diminished funding for men’s sports...

Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology Compass Issues / Sociology of Media & Communication

Whistleblowing in the Wind: Channeling and Harnessing Collective Outrage

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.”

Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Connecting the Dots: The Politics of Race in Big Time Football's 2013 Offseason

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.

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

Fear and Data Hoarding in the U.S.A.: The Use of Big Data to Fight Crime

  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,...

Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

Racially Profiling the Victims of Murder. Colorblindness, Racism and the Selective Silence on Race in the US and Germany

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...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture

Does your life pass the Bechdel Test?

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...

Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture

Does the Web call time on our traditional ethical arrangements?

  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...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

“We Can Prevent Rape by Telling Men Not to Commit It”: Men and Rape Prevention

  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...

Political & Economic Sociology / Social Movements / Social Change

Social Movements This Summer: Listen to the Echoes

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...