knowledge

This week, some soccer players competing in the Euro 2012 (hosted in Poland and Ukraine) have also spent time visiting the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camps.  According to the BBC’s Clare Spencer, this genocide tourism is not a new phenomenon.   In fact, 1.4 million people visited Auschwitz last year.

Other sites of genocides and similar atrocities, such as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia, are also becoming popular destinations for tourists.  The Aegis Trust notes that over 40,000 foreigners visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in 2011.  And, tourists visit the hotel featured in Hotel Rwanda every day to take their pictures by its entrance.

So why do tourists increasingly visit mass graves and memorials? Psychologist Sheila Keegan says that what we want to get out of a vacation has expanded.  In other words, we want to relax, but we also want to broader our horizons.

“People want to be challenged. It may be voyeuristic and macabre but people want to feel those big emotions which they don’t often come across. They want to ask that very basic question about being human – ‘how could we do this?’,” she says.

Keegan also explains that vacations are good talking points. “It’s about creating your own history, reminding yourself how lucky you are.”

(This doesn’t come without controversy, though. For more on that, check out the article.)

A recent report released by Senator Tom Coburn accuses the National Science Foundation of wasting taxpayer money on questionable science projects.  Minnesota Public Radio (MRP) News offers some comfort to scientists, though.

Lawmakers and political groups like to point to government spending that seems wasteful — especially in tough economic times. And one popular target has been scientific studies that either sound silly or involve foreign countries or have to do with sex.

MRP News reviews several examples of research that, taken out of context, were deemed as inappropriate uses of government funds.

“They tried to say that about $9.4 million tax dollars was spent to study men’s penis size,” says Jeffrey Parsons of Hunter College in New York, referring to a study that was recently criticized by a group called the Traditional Values Coalition.

Parsons and his colleagues did publish a study on men’s penis size and its link to the risk of sexually transmitted disease — but Parsons says no tax dollars were used to collect the data.

While little if anything actually comes of claims like this, they do make some scientists nervous and influence their decisions.

People started to be very careful when they wrote grant proposals, Parsons recalls. “A lot of code words started to get used. We would talk about ‘highly vulnerable youth’ as a euphemism for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered youth.”

Yet, scientists can take comfort in remembering past studies that were ridiculed.  Robert Kraut’s research on why bowlers smile was once given a Golden Fleece Award for wasting tax dollars from then-Senator William Proxmire, but it’s now considered ground-breaking research on how people communicate.

Kraut thinks scientists will always have to deal with this kind of thing. “Much of the policy debate in Washington, it’s all about appearances,” he says. “And it’s easy in sound bites to ridicule without presenting a full story.”

On April 21st, 2011, Harold Garfinkel, one of the important figures of the sociological canon and the man responsible for countless ‘face the wrong way in an elevator’ or ‘eat like a dog in a crowded cafateria’ introduction to sociology labs, passed away. He was 93.

The New York Times honored his passing with an account of his importance to the discipline and to broader understandings of the social world. In the article Garfinkel is attributed with the ability to draw out the complexity of even the simplest social interaction. His tendency to match the complexity of the social world with the complexity of his writing is also noted when he is characterized as:

an innovative sociologist who turned the study of common sense into a dense and arcane discipline.

Through development of the sociological approach known as ethnomethodology, Garfinkel went against the grain of the discipline by focusing on how members of society worked together to create social order rather than focusing on how the social rules determined the behaviors of individual members of society.

Mr. Garfinkel was sometimes likened to a quantum physicist because, in effect, he suggested that the fundamental building blocks of a social order were much smaller and much harder to observe than had been previously believed. Rules were not the smallest particles of social order, he found; rather, the rules themselves would be impossible without the bits of knowledge, the gestures and the methods of reasoning that allow people to communicate.

John Heritage, a professor of sociology at U.C.L.A., explains,

“His point of view wasn’t that rules aren’t important, but that how they get interpreted and applied is a matter of mutual negotiation. We have to have common resources for any form of coordinated action of human beings, and we use these common resources just to exist in a shared world. It’s a fundamental part of the human condition.”

In Garfinkel’s seminal work, Studies in Ethnomethodology, published in 1967, he introduced sociologists to so-called “breaching” experiments:

in which the subjects’ expectations of social behavior were violated; for example, a subject playing tic tac toe was confronted with an opponent who made his marks on the lines dividing the spaces on the game board instead of in the spaces themselves. Their reactions — outrage, anger, puzzlement, etc. — helped demonstrate the existence of underlying presumptions that constitute social life.

As Professor Heritage explains, the book had influence beyond disciplinary walls.

“Not only did it deal with rules and language, which are fundamental elements of sociological study, but it reached across many fields: cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy. You wouldn’t get any argument if you said it was among the 10 most important books in sociology in the 20th century.”