Sociology Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

It’s Good Work—If You Can Get It

A conversation with Alexandrea Ravenelle about Side Hustle Safety Net: How Vulnerable Workers Survive Precarious Times

February 27, 2024 • by Claire Potter

As the world of work sagged and collapsed, University of North Carolina sociologist and W-2 worker Alexandrea Ravenelle decided to document this economic shock in real time....

Sex & Gender

Happily Single

Emerging asexuality and aromanticism studies can help us understand community

November 8, 2023 • by Hannah Tessler

How examining asexuality and aromanticism now can help us understand the value of social connection and community, regardless of relationship status....

Democracy

On the Sociology of “Doing as If”

For Jeffrey Goldfarb

July 8, 2021 • by Daniel Dayan

_____ I taught with Jeff Goldfarb for many years, mostly at the New School, but also at Sciences Po, in Paris. Sometimes, as part of a curriculum, and some times for the mere pleasure of debating. It was a pleasure we pursued almost uninterruptedly for more than I0 years, inviting ourselves to each ...

Memory

This Atom Bomb in Me

An atomic childhood in Appalachia

January 28, 2020 • by Lindsey A. Freeman

The following is an excerpt, published by permission. My grandfather was an atomic courier…My atomic immersion began when I visited my grandparents as a child and encountered the vibrant matter of Oak Ridge. As an adult, I write about the place to try to untangle its mysteries -- feeling a magnetic ...

Uncategorized

“What Makes Us Feel Special About Our Connections To Violence?”

A Conversation with Lindsey A. Freeman

July 8, 2019 • by Lindsey A. Freeman and Bizaa Zeynab Ali

--- Public Seminar (PS): How did this project emerge and evolve over time? Can you tell us something about your methodology and how you arrived at the decision to use the method of “sociological poetry” for your narrative. The writing in this book has a very lyrical quality to it and ...

Education

New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology

Anatole Broyard at The New School

April 16, 2019 • by Mark Larrimore

Because they were displaced themselves, or angry with us for failing to understand history, the professors did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country. … All the courses I took were about what's wrong: what's wrong with our government, with the family, with interpersonal relations ...

New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology

Feature

Why Should Data Determine Who We Are?

Steffen Mau’s “Quantified Self” explains how we can reclaim agency over our digital lives

November 30, 2018 • by Sarah Nassabieh

The Chinese government intends to create a social credit system by the year 2020. Data about the behaviour of each individual from all spheres of life shall be collected, evaluated, and transformed into a personal score. Consumption, traffic offences, activities on the internet, employment contracts, performance ratings both at school ...

Feature

Global Religious and Secular Dynamics

Critical Reflections in Lights of Peter Berger’s The Many Altars of Modernity

September 18, 2018 • by Jose Casanova

Given its association with the New School for Social Research, Public Seminar seems to me a fitting space for some critical reflections triggered by former NSSR faculty member Peter Berger’s last major work, The Many Altars of Modernity.[1] The book is significant in a dual sense. It recaptures the style and restates some ...

Feature

Seeking Illumination in Dark Times

On the power of art, race and racism, and the limitations of science and politics

September 7, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Reading our series on the arts, provides some hope in our dark times, on this cloudy and humid Friday afternoon in New York. I have long believed that the key to liberation is illumination, that we have to see the ways things are, and see how things might possibly change, ...

Feature

The African Decolonial Thought of Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí

Black Issues in Philosophy

June 20, 2018 • by Lewis Gordon

Recently, the Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí has earned her place among many of the living in conversation with this stellar community of ancestors by virtue of her contributions to contemporary African philosophy. Readers who haven’t heard of her should take this opportunity to familiarize themselves with her work. Oyĕwùmí specializes in ...