December 2011
2 posts
September 2011
1 post
June 2011
1 post
May 2011
2 posts
March 2011
1 post
January 2011
7 posts
Joseph Entin's Photo →
The perfect visual representation of life in NYC at the moment. Photo by my friend Joseph Entin.
December 2010
1 post
November 2010
5 posts
The pressing historical question is how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew—and why, this time, Party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them.
- Sean Wilentz, October 18 New Yorker
Exactly. Is it naked opportunism? Or, is it the case that those with moderate views have given up entirely...
Any bets on when the Republican House will impeach Obama for being a foreign-born, Muslim, socialist?
Seeing Islam in Global Cities →
I just posted a copy of the presentation Jerry Krase and I made at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Baltimore.
Our presentation went well. Good discussion of visual methods. This sort of thing was new to SSSR, but there was a lot of interest. I expect we’ll try to do something at the meeting next year too.
October 2010
6 posts
Visual Analysis of Bigotry →
This is excellent. Another instance of the phenomenon that Jerry Krase and I are discussing at the SSSR annual meeting in Baltimore. Conservatives are quick to mistakenly believe that what they think some group looks like is actually what that group looks like — that’s how stereotypes work. Juan Williams, who plays a liberal on TV, just confirms that he and the audience are bigots.
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September 2010
31 posts
The United States has always maintained a white underclass — citizens whose role in the greater scheme of things has been to cushion national economic shocks through the disposability of their labor, with occasional time off to serve as bullet magnets in defense of the Empire.
Read the rest of this excerpt from Joe Bageant’s new book.
Via @edroso.
Place, Space, Identity: A Spatial Semiotics of the...
For the 3rd ESA Sciology of Culture RN Mid-term Conference in Milan, Italy.
Although urban communities in global cities appear quite different, particularly at first glance, spatial semiotic analysis reveals similarities in ‘glocalized’ spaces. People change the meaning of social spaces by changing the way these places look, through their activities and by their presence. Understanding how...
Seeing Everyday Multiculturalism (abstract)
For the 2010 IUAES Inter-Congress in Antalya, Turkey.
This paper employs a visual sociological approach to better connect the ordinary practices of the people who live, shop, or simply travel along a commercial thoroughfare, Coney island Avenue, in Brooklyn, New York to the often too abstract theories of globalization and multiculturalism that purport to explain what it is they are doing. Toward...
I’m on the side of the unions, always.
What am I talking about? Scott Lemieux explains.
Doghouse Riley, one of the smartest people on the internet, addresses the question of our “education failure”:
The major contention in American education over the past fifty years has been whether white students had to sit with the coloreds. That’s what we’ve argued about. Not technological advancement. Prayer. Teaching Genesis in biology class. Rewriting History to make it...
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I’m giving a paper on the spatial semiotics of the urban vernacular at the upcoming European Sociological Association RN7 (sociology of culture) mid-term conference in Milan.
This is what happens when politicians use nativist hysteria for political gain. The hate is easy to generate, but not so easy to control. Or stop.
Ignorance + xenophobia x political opportunism -> violence.
We’re headed for some dark days. The far right has stormed the public square. We’ll look back at this time in American history with great shame.
(Via PsychNews.)
Beware the Religious Wrong →
David Newland says
But it’s not the religious right that concerns me, so much as the Religious Wrong. They’re more insidious, more widely spread, and apparently their numbers are growing like wildfire – because they’re found among the members of every religion on earth.
You got that right, brother. (via @MarkFiore)
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Tony Blair is an idiot.
No, not because he played Bush’s lapdog so eagerly, though that certainly speaks volumes about his principles.
No, he’s an idiot if he thinks that progressives demanding progressive policy from politicians progressives help to elect is in any way part of the problem of contemporary politics in Western democracies.
