Sociology Archives - Page 3 of 5

Reviews

Solidarity, and the Rise and Fall of the Public Sphere

A Review of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s Media Events

April 18, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Twenty-five years after its publication, Dayan and Katz’s classic study of ceremonial television, Media Events, has continued relevance for understanding the politics of media. With the proliferation of cable television and digital media explosion, television is no longer the hegemonic media form it once was, and the media events they ...

Solidarity, and the Rise and Fall of the Public Sphere

Education

Black Study, Black Struggle

Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology

April 6, 2017 • by Alana Lentin

This blog post is republished with the permission of the author, Alana Lentin, from her blog, alanalentin.net In April 2016, the Free University of Western Sydney was launched by a group of local people -- activists, teachers/educators and students -- critical of the neoliberal university’s capacity to be a site for ...

Education

Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology

Syllabus

March 16, 2017 • by Alana Lentin

The syllabus below comes from a graduate course offered by Alana Lentin during her Hans Speier Visiting Professorship at The New School in New York (Spring 2017). The syllabus and subsequent blog posts are republished with the permission of the author from her blog, alanalentin.net. Race, critical, and decolonial sociology is premised ...

Education

Durkheim’s Enduring Relevance

Sociology offers a solution to the problems raised by Critical Theory

February 7, 2017 • by Nicola Marcucci

Émile Durkheim and the Durkheimian school also allow us to rethink the tension between the modern social sciences, and morality and politics. However, Durkheim’s analysis of this tension is, in some respects, divergent from the one put forward by Critical Theory. Sociology, according to Durkheim, is neither about supplementing the ...

Education

Media and Publics in Dark Times

An OOPS course

January 26, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

The course objective, as I put it in the planned syllabus (responding to an administrative mandate to include such statements): “The objective of this class follows the insights of Michael Oakeshott, the great British (conservative) philosopher, as he illuminated the problem of education and of the liberal arts. He observed that ...

Education

The Crisis of Dynamic Stabilization and the Sociology of Resonance

An Interview with Hartmut Rosa

January 18, 2017 • by Eli Zaretsky

Hartmut Rosa: Yeah, I actually started my academic career by working on Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher and I did that with Axel Honnett, who at that time was at the Free University in Berlin. And this is how I got socialized into the critical theory tradition. And after that ...

Education

“Post-Truth,” And “Social Research”

Oxford English Dictionary’s word of 2016

December 28, 2016 • by Lydia Nobbs

What happens when facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief? This phenomenon is known as “post-truth,” a term that was named word of 2016 by the Oxford English Dictionary. When false news is seen as credible and the metrics of prediction have ...

Education

Politics of Small Things

December 13, 2016 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J.

This piece is part of the OOPS Series, "Social Interaction." Jeffrey Goldfarb’s “The Politics of Small Things” is a both an insightful work of social analysis and -- through this analysis itself -- an enactment of this-worldly hope in, as he might phrase it, these dark times. Instead of focusing on ...

Education

Deweyan Response to Hyperdemocracy

October 2, 2016 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J.

This piece is part of the OOPS Series, "Social Interaction." This past May, Andrew Sullivan -- political blogger extraordinaire -- made his much anticipated return to the land of talking heads with an essay on hyperdemocracy and the rise of tyranny. In it, he argued that the overexpansion of direct democracy ...

Feature

Social Constructs: Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them

May 9, 2016 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

There was a time, not so long ago, when men were men and women were women, when hetero-normativity prevailed, with the alternatives relegated to the margins, in closets, and in the shadows of lesbian and homosexual hidden locales, which were constantly under attack. Under such conditions, two sociologists explored the ...

Social Constructs: Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them

Uncategorized

Art is the Social Condition: A Proposal for the Marriage of Art and Sociology

June 2, 2015 • by Dominique Suberville

Somewhere at the beginning of the course on the Social Condition, Jeffrey Goldfarb asked us: what is politics? This question aligned with several key issues as our class attempted to explore the meaning of the social condition. Granted, months later, its definition continues to be a shape-shifter, but we’ve turned the question into a ...