Sociology is Power

[thesociologicalcinema]

In this short clip, sociologist Lester Andrist (@landrist) offers a quick explanation to students at Howard University of the difference between equality and equity as two very different frames for approaching social justice.

[tumblingintosociology]

The Top Jobs Where Women Are Outnumbered by Men Named John

Our Glass Ceiling Index finds skewed gender representation and ethnic sameness in many institutions of American politics, culture and education.

[constellations-soc]

Ryan D. Enos, “The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics” - New Books in Sociology [Podcast]

Ryan Enos is the author of The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Enos is assistant professor of government at Harvard University. Scholars have long wrestled with the impact of segregation on politics.…

[tumblingintosociology]

In 83 Million Eviction Records, a Sweeping and Intimate New Look at Housing in America

A Princeton sociologist chronicled the human toll of eviction in one city in a 2016 book. A new project may reveal just how widespread the problem is.

“Dr. Desmond’s team found records for nearly 900,000 eviction judgments in 2016, meaning landlords were given the legal right to remove at least one in 50 renter households in the communities covered by this data. That figure was one in 25 in Milwaukee and one in nine in Richmond. And one in five renter households in Richmond were threatened with eviction in 2016. Their landlords began legal proceedings, even if those cases didn’t end with a lasting mark on a tenant’s record.

For landlords, these numbers represent a financial drain of unpaid rent; for tenants, a looming risk of losing their homes.In Richmond, most of those evicted never made it to a courtroom. They didn’t appear because the process seemed inscrutable, or because they didn’t have lawyers to navigate it, or because they believed there is not much to say when you simply don’t have the money. The median amount owed was $686.

The consequences of what happens here then spread across the city. The Richmond public school system reroutes buses to follow children from apartments to homeless shelters to pay-by-the-week motels. City social workers coach residents on how to fill out job applications when they have no answer for the address line. Families lose their food stamps and Medicaid benefits when they lose the permanent addresses where renewal notices are sent.”

[constellations-soc]

Jo Littler, “Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power, and Myths of Mobility” - New Books in Sociology [Podcast]

How does the idea of "€˜meritocracy"€™ serve to reinforce social inequality? In Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (Routledge, 2017) Dr Jo Littler, Reader in Culture and Creative Industries at City,

[sociolab]

When you pare away the sensationalism that characterizes much of the reporting on the campus scene, political correctness doesn’t seem to be as powerful a force as its critics want us to believe. Take the panic over trigger warnings. In 2015, the National Coalition Against Censorship released the results of a survey of more than 800 professors in the Modern Language Association and the College Art Association—professors who, as teachers of literature and art, would be among the most likely to use warnings. More than 92 percent said they were unaware of any student efforts on their campus to require trigger warnings, 85 percent reported their own students had never asked for them, and 88 percent of those who did not offer trigger warnings said their students hadn’t complained about their absence. The report concluded that reports of a trigger warning epidemic were difficult to substantiate.‘

The Kids Are Right: There is nothing outrageous about stamping out bigoted speech - Osita Nwanevu

[pewresearch]

Check boxes for same-sex couples will be offered in the 2020 census in an attempt to fix a long-standing problem of Census Bureau overcounts of these couples. In addition, the census will ask those who check the white or black race boxes to say more about their national origins.

[askatransguy]

“In my practice as a social worker, I see more and more wealthy, usually white, middle-class youth and children coming out as trans. It’s beautiful. They are brave and resilient; and sometimes, their families actually support them in transitioning and advocating for their access to school, healthcare, university. Yet I see just as many trans youth, mostly of color, who are estranged from their families, living in shelters, blocked from accessing the resources they need for day-to-day living, let alone medical transition and higher education. Trans visibility is brighter than ever, trans rights awareness is at an all-time high. Yet the class divide between trans people grows and grows.”

— Trans Visibility Does Not Equal Trans Liberation | Kai Cheng Thom for them.  (via gaywrites)

[everydayhybridity-deactivated20]

“But as the smartphone has come to stand between us and an ever-greater swath of the things we do in everyday life, the global trend toward dematerialization is unmistakable. As a result, it’s already difficult to contemplate objects like a phone booth, a Filofax or a Palm Pilot without experiencing a shock of either reminiscence or perplexity, depending on the degree of our past acquaintance with them.”

Adam Greenfield - Radical Technologies. Chapter 1. Smartphone: The Networking of the Self.

[fuckyeahdialectics]

The Times of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-Indian plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation - as a plea for the re-introduction of Negro slavery - how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, alongside this ‘use value’, regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations, but rather observe the planters’ impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as an embellishment for this mood of malicious glee and indolence. They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become wage labourers, but, instead, self-sustaining peasants working for their own consumption. As far as they are concerned, capital does not exist as capital, because autonomous wealth as such can exist only either on the basis of direct forced labour, slavery, or indirect forced labour, wage labour. Wealth confronts direct forced labour not as capital, but rather as relation of domination…

Marx, K. (1993). Grundrisse. London: Penguin. p.325-6 (via fuckyeahdialectics)

[constellations-soc]

UK welfare reform has seen sanctions become a crucial form of punishment for claimants who are judged to have failed to meet behavioural conditions. Drawing on data from an ESRC-funded study (2013-2018) of the efficacy and ethicality of welfare conditionality in England and Scotland (see: www.welfareconditioanality.ac.uk), the paper explores the ethical arguments made by 207 participants who reported experiencing one or more sanctions. These arguments are to be explored through Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) theory of justification, in detailing how participants justified / critiqued sanction decisions through reference to different models of justice. In making their argument, participants often pointed to sanction decisions not being a ‘natural situation’, one which has a clear flow to events in accordance with general principles. Participants reported being unaware their actions were sanctionable, felt that deferring sanction decisions to a ‘decision maker’ disempowered them, and that there was a haste to sanction without adequate opportunity to provide explanation. More broadly, the sanctions system was critiqued for having an industrial model of service provision, where claimants are ‘just a number’, and there being a lack of a civic ethos throughout the system. This pervasive sense of injustice, despite the acceptance amongst a significant number of participants of the general principles of conditionality, brings into question whether the current sanctions system is compatible with the criteria required to be a justifiable order. The paper will therefore also reconsider the debates between pragmatic and critical sociologies, particularly the importance of symbolic forms of domination and violence.

Copy of the slides from my presentation at the British Sociological Association’s 2018 Conference on Tuesday 10th April

[shrinkrants]

Inventing Mental Health First Aid: The Problem of Psychocentrism

This article provides a sociopolitical critique of contemporary Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) discourses. The concept of psychocentrism, adopted as an analytical tool, critiques the porblematic nature of MHFA premises and practices that automate, expedite, enforce, and normalize the global movement to psychiatrize human distress. Contesting MHFA’s international image as a benevolent, individual crisis intervention model, this essay discusses MHFA as a technique of neoliberal governance, moral surveillance, and social control, responsible for reinvigorating the psychiatric profession while dividing and demoting the populace.

[thesociologicalcinema]

The man who seeks to arouse prejudice among workers is not their friend. He who advises the white wage-worker to look down upon the black wage-worker is the enemy of both. ~ Eugene V. Debs

[thesovietbroadcast]

The ethics of seeing – Re-Picture – Medium

Neeta Satam discusses combating colonialism and sensationalism in photographing “the other” to bring equitable discourse to photojournalism.

Years before I became a photojournalist, I was a geologist in awe of landscape photography. To hone my shooting skills, I began attending weekly meetings of photography enthusiasts at a local camera club in the Boston area.

In the first few meetings, I noticed the club was dominated by wealthy men who spent enormous amounts of money on the latest gear and “photo expeditions” to foreign countries. The equipment they owned and the countries they visited seemed like status symbols among this circle.

I often wondered, what if the “subjects” from the countries they visited showed up in the United States to snap pictures of them mowing their front yards or of their grandkids jumping on a trampoline?

At the Missouri Photo Workshop two years later, that imagined scene became a reality. On the first day of the workshop, when photographers were out in the town of Troy photographing daily life, a local woman became angry about the presence of Showkat Nanda, a workshop participant. Nanda, a brown man who sports a beard, was not taking pictures, but quietly sat on the periphery of a playground with a camera around his neck.

Though he explained that he was a part of a workshop documenting the community, which was being conducted with support from the town, the woman continued to express suspicion and disdain in an angry tone and asked him to leave.

“In that moment, I felt like I was not a human being. I felt hurt,” Nanda recollected. “Westerners consider Kashmir conservative and third world, but we treat people with dignity, especially outsiders.”

[dailymarx]

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production… The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

Marx - Economic Manuscripts 1859 (via dailymarx)

[dailymarx]

But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being.

Marx - The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1852 (via dailymarx)

[fuckyeahdialectics]

For Marx, profit is not a motivation of conduct—even one ‘imposed’ by the system—it is an objective category that designates a part of realized surplus value. In the same way, the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system, according to Marx, is not at all a contradiction between its social character and its ‘private purpose’, but a contradiction between the socialization of productive forces and their private appropriation. Thus the characterization of the existing social system as capitalist in no way depends on the motivations of the conduct of managers.” (Poulantzas, 1969, p.71)

Poulantzas, N. (1969). The Problem of the Capitalist State. New Left Review, I/58(November-December), 67–78.

Exactly. Marxist analysis is important, because it does not aim at an ethical critique of capitalism - capitalism isn’t about bad dudes doing bad things, but about the production of badness!

(via fuckyeahdialectics)