Soc 101 Party! Speech

Breaking Out of the Iron Cage

Oops We Broke Out of the Iron Cage Again

"Who Wants to Earn an Average Workman's Wage?"

Flashback



Women's "Situation"



Say It Like an Italian

Bollywood Sociologists

Associated Producers...

Sociology 101B Party!

OUR THEORISTS

Michelle Obama: A Feminist Review

NPR Weekend Edition Sunday, May 10, 2009

"First Lady Michelle Obama's emergence as the nation's "Mom-in-Chief" has sparked lively discussion in the feminist blogosphere. Some say the first lady image plays down her success as a career woman, but others say her presence in that role is, in itself, a sign of progress."

This NPR piece also highlights the importance that race plays in the perspectives among feminists. What may be seen by white feminists as reinforcing stereotypes and placing Michelle Obama in a "feminine box", is actually seen by some black feminists as an affirmation of African American women.

Click Here to Listen Now.

"I am a Superwomyn." Yes she is.

Our classmate Laurice, a student of GSI Abigail Andrews, recently created this amazing video after interviewing three Pilipina womyn involved in one of the Pil-orgs on campus called GABRIELA Network (Gabnet). Gabnet is a Philippine-US womyn's solidarity organization that raises awareness and fights issues facing Pilipina womyn. Check out the video as an excellent example of consciousness raising and then visit Laurice's blog at http://1aurice.blogspot.com/.

Women Protest Legalized Rape

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has backed a law that the United Nations Development Fund for Women claims legalizes rape within marriage and forbids women from leaving the house without permission.

Afghan women protested the law and were attacked by a larger counter protest





Afghan 'anti-rape' women attacked

Afghanistan 'rape' law puts women's rights front and center






Women police linked arms and created a barrier around the protesters to protect them


April 15: Afghan police officers stop Shiite counter protesters in Kabul, Afghanistan. The group of some 1,000 Afghans swarmed a demonstration by 300 women Wednesday protesting against a new conservative marriage law. Some counter protesters pelted the women with small stones as police struggled to keep the two groups apart.

MacKinnon: On Sex for Money

Dude, You’ve Got Problems

By Judith Warner for The New York Times
April 23, 2009

Early this month, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old boy from Springfield, Mass., hanged himself after months of incessantly being hounded by his classmates for being “gay.” (He was not; but did, apparently, like to do well in school.)

In March, 2007, 17-year-old Eric Mohat shot himself in the head, after a long-term tormentor told him in class, “Why don’t you go home and shoot yourself; no one will miss you.” Eric liked theater, played the piano and wore bright clothing, a lawyer for his family told ABC news, and so had long been subject to taunts of “gay,” “fag,” “queer” and “homo.”

Teachers and school administrators, the Mohats’ lawsuit now asserts, did nothing.

We should do something to get this insanity under control.

I’m not just talking about combating bullying, which has been a national obsession ever since Columbine, and yet seems to continue unabated. I’m only partly talking about homophobia, which, though virulent, cruel and occasionally fatal among teenagers, is not the whole story behind the fact that words like “fag” and “gay” are now among the most potent and feared weapons in the school bully’s arsenal.

Being called a “fag,” you see, actually has almost nothing to do with being gay.

It’s really about showing any perceived weakness or femininity – by being emotional, seeming incompetent, caring too much about clothing, liking to dance or even having an interest in literature. It’s similar to what being viewed as a “nerd” is, Bennington College psychology professor David Anderegg notes in his 2007 book, “Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them”: “‘queer’ in the sense of being ‘odd’ or ‘unusual,’” but also, for middle schoolers in particular, doing “anything that was too much like what a goody-goody would do.”

It’s what being called a “girl” used to be, a generation or two ago.

For the complete article: Click here.

What’s Wrong With Cinderella?

By Peggy Orenstein for The New York Times Magazine
December 24, 2006

I finally came unhinged in the dentist’s office — one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games — where I’d taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I’d held my tongue. I’d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with “Hi, Princess”; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her “princess meal”; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, “I bet I know your favorite color” and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist’s Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, “Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?” I lost it.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped. “Do you have a princess drill, too?”

She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.

“Come on!” I continued, my voice rising. “It’s 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?”

My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. “Why are you so mad, Mama?” she asked. “What’s wrong with princesses?”

Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. To call princesses a “trend” among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. “Princess,” as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet.

For the complete article: Click here.

Put on your sociological lenses

"If Marxism had ever produced a functional, prosperous society, it might have looked something like this tiny southern Japanese island."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/world/asia/22japan.html

This NYtimes article describes the village of Hime Island that uses a work-sharing system aided by government subsidies to decrease unemployment. Hime's work-sharing is viewed as a traditional approach towards the Japanese ideals of harmony. While the author of the article wants to suggest this is Marxist socialism, I feel this is more a form of patrimonialism on a second look.

Some interesting notes from the article:

"Nor does the island’s penchant for equality stop at work-sharing. At an annual village ceremony to mark the coming of age of 20-year-old islanders, women are forbidden to wear traditional
kimonos for fear the differences in quality could reveal their households’ economic status."

"Many islanders say they accept the status quo simply because life here is comfortable. They say rocking the boat would only ostracize them on an island where everyone knows one another."

"My job is to prevent elections by keeping everyone equal, and thus happy,said Mr. Fujimoto[the current mayor], 65, sitting in a modest office in the village hall. His only visible sign of authority was a buzzer on his desk that he pushed to summon an assistant."

NUMMI

Just to bring theory alive a bit more, I was at the Cherry Blossom Parade in SF Japantown last week and here's what I find. NUMMI workers and their family walked down the streets in Japanese attire, though many were not Japanese, alongside several of its Toyota vehicles.

End the University as We Know It

By MARK C. TAYLOR

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost.

Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. [...] And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.

Colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

1. Restructure the curriculum: The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

2. Abolish permanent departments and create problem-focused programs. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions... Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff.

[...]

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change.

Full Article

"Institution, Individual, Imagination"

Attend the First Annual UC Berkeley Sociology Research Symposium, "Institution, Individual, Imagination," on Friday, April 24 from 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

The Symposium will celebrate unstoppable intellectual inquiry among scholars from multiple departments in both the social sciences and humanities. Intended as a communal space for the sharing and building of new knowledge, the Symposium will exemplify the pursuit of fresh ideas and innovative research.

Among SOC 101B GSIs and students who will present: Mike Levien, Kate Mason, and Simeon Newman.

Happy Earth Day!

The Earth is but one country, and Mankind its Citizens


"Some claim that Earth Day is held on April 22 because it is Lenin's birthday. Not true. According to Kathleen Rogers of the Earth Day Network, the day was selected because it fell on a Wednesday in 1970, as it does today. The organizers figured they would get the most participation on a weekday. It was also a day when students would be on campuses, so the youth-driven movement could have more participation."

10 Things You Should Know About Earth Day



John Tierney wrote an article in the NYT that makes some rather bold claims:

"When the first Earth Day took place in 1970, American environmentalists had good reason to feel guilty. The nation’s affluence and advanced technology seemed so obviously bad for the planet that they were featured in a famous equation .. Their equation was I=PAT, which means that environmental impact is equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied by technology. Protecting the planet seemed to require fewer people, less wealth and simpler technology — the same sort of social transformation and energy revolution that will be advocated at many Earth Day rallies on Wednesday.

But among researchers who analyze environmental data, a lot has changed since the 1970s. With the benefit of their hindsight and improved equations, I’ll make a couple of predictions:

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because...

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy..."


What do you think? Wealth + technology = better planet?

Why Do They Call Washington Bureaucrats "Czars?"

I'm sure a lot of people are burned out from theory right now, but in case you've ever wondered why they keep calling those washington peeps "czars," here's your answer. It was really starting to bother me so I looked it up.

Items within article tangentially related to class material (but not really):

"Czar"- Russia - Lenin
Benjamin Franklin - Spirit of Capitalism - Weber
Bureaucrat - bureaucracy - Weber


"How did a term for Russian royalty work its way into American government?"

When Benjamin Franklin wanted to describe our national indifference to royal pomp and circumstance, he would compare Americans to a London porter whose heavy load once jostled Czar Peter the Great. When told he had just bumped into the czar, the porter responded: "Poh! We are all czars here!"

Franklin's porter could have been describing the incoming Obama administration. Already Tom Daschle has been tapped for "health czar" [this is an old article] and Carol Browner for "climate czar." Adolfo Carrión is expected to be the "urban affairs czar." There's also been talk of a "technology czar" and a "copyright czar." Plans for a "car czar" recently fell apart on Capitol Hill, but Obama and the incoming Congress will try, try again in the new year.

This efflorescence of czars—those interagency point people charged with cutting through red tape to coordinate policy—has people wondering: Why do we use a term from imperial Russia to describe bureaucratic troubleshooters?


click for full article

Come share your ideas with Maximillian!

More differences than predestenation

It seems that there are more differences between the Catholics and the Protestant than old Weber was willing to admit.

Take a look at this link, the protestants are towards the end, but in order to understand it, do watch the whole thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fRJ0T-y-pw

A.

What Weber Didn't Know: The Truth about Booty

You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
by Johann Hari

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

For the entire article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html

Week 12: Spontaneous, Brilliant Thoughts (Midterm Special)

This is a place for rambling thoughts, for spontaneous brilliant thoughts that just have to be written and cannot wait. This week, the "Spontaneous, Brilliant Thoughts" forum will also be the place where you can ask and answer exam-specific questions. Of course, if your question needs its own post, please feel free to generate a separate entry. And good luck!