nmccoy1 Notions of authenticity and modernity are often challenged by indigenous groups. The Ya’kuana and the Sanema of Venezuela (see article below) use microphones to record birdsongs, the Yanomami of Brazil have learned how to use video equipment to document their own cultural traditions and ceremonies, and the Runakuna of the Peruvian Highlands adopt Western … Continue reading »
Filed under Culture …
The New Faces of Welfare: Overcoming the Stigma of State Assistance
by ChristinaBlunt Despite last week’s promising government figures showing a decline in the American unemployment rate, “Welfare and Citizenship: The Effects of Government Assistance on Young Adults’ Civic Participation,” serves as a reminder to social scientists that with every great social shift (such as the global economic downturn) we must re-examine our premises. The article, … Continue reading »
Don’t blame the Internet: Reevaluating the decline in American journalism
By Rachael Liberman In a recent article from The Nation, heavyweight media scholars John Nichols and Robert McChesney remind readers that the current crisis in American journalism does not necessarily mean that the industry is fated to fail. Rather, Nichols and McChesney optimistically open the article with the news that the Federal Trade Commission is … Continue reading »
Telling the Truth: Immigrants and their communities
by ChristinaBlunt Today, December 2, Maryland pastor Lennox Abrigo will be at the White House to discuss immigration reform. According to the New York Times, Abrigo and other pastors across the state have witnessed increases in the number of immigrants in their congregations as well as increases in the problems that these individuals face. Abrigo … Continue reading »
Cyborg Systems: Sociology’s Proper Unit of Analysis
by pj.rey The increasing centrality of the Internet in our daily lives has precipitated a spate of theorizing about how we – as humans and as a society – are changing (or not) due to the constant technological mediation of our most basic interactions and activities. Let’s face it: This sort of theorizing is populated … Continue reading »
The Presentation of Self…in Dating
Eva Illouz, in Cold Intimacies asks us to consider how technology changes notions of the body and of emotions. One of the forced rearticulations occurs in the realm of the presentation of self. As Illouz notes, when technology (specifically in the form of the Internet) mediates relationships we are simultaneously displaying our innermost private selves … Continue reading »
Muslim Identity, Cultural Trauma, and the Racialized Backlash
by Nickie Wild Jeffrey Alexander writes that “cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (2004). With this basic definition in mind, can we … Continue reading »
Portable pornography in the public sphere: Convenient, offensive or hazardous?
By Rachael Liberman It’s one thing to experience the pornification of culture through public advertising (billboards, subway adverts), among other mediated formats. But what if someone sitting next to you on the subway is watching pornography on their iPod? In a recent Washington Post article, Staff Writer Monica Hesse questions the acceptability of portable porn, … Continue reading »
Conference Summary Part I: The Internet as Playground and Factory
by pj.rey The New School held a conference last week that may be of interest to many Sociology Lens readers, so I have decided to devote this week’s entry to sharing some notes from the conference. The implosion of work and play was the most recurrent theme in the panels that I attended. The term … Continue reading »
The Clothes Make the (Heterosexual) Man
Dress codes in schools have long been a source of intergenerational conflict, control, and increasingly obvious, a way to police gender norms and sexuality. In an article that interrogates these instances of specific gender and sexuality “violations” through clothing and accessories, we can see both an increase in apparel as a means of identity formation … Continue reading »
