culture

This week we talk about the sociology and economics of academic journal publishing, the Elsevier boycott, and whether the journal system as we know it is necessary anymore. Our decision: everybody can just podcast everything from now on. Starting with….

Episode Number 37

This episode we start with a discussion of violent protests prompted by a question from a listener (Which is great! Send more!). We then talk about Twitter, hashtags, Gmail, and passwords before moving on to a discussion about education and universal preschool.

Links from this episode:

Download Improv #36!

We have three segments this episode:

  1. We talk with Shannon Golden about Kony 2012. Shannon provides some insight into the situation in Uganda while Chris cynically revels in the implosion of Invisible Children.
  2. We talk about the Mike Daisey/This American Life fiasco. Arturo defends liars, as usual, while I, er, Jon, stands strong as a defender of truth.
  3. The whacky world of Young Adult literature.

Links from the discussion:

Get Improv #35. (35 Improvs. Are we improving yet?)

This episode, we fail to talk about Robocop, then we have a discussion about Getting Wasted, and then chat a bit about current political events.

Download the Big 3-0

After a quick ASA recap from Jesse and Arturo, we talk about the challenges of writing—and academic writing in particular—and whether diversity on television can make a difference.

Download Episode #29

Long time, no see. Hope you’re having a nice summer. We’re back with two topics.

First, we spend most of the hour talking about barefoot running, the Born to Run crowd, and naturalist (no, not naturist) social movements.

Second, we briefly try to make sense of the London riots, but ultimately Chris wins out by convincing Arturo and Jon they know nothing and should just stop talking.

Download episode 28

This episode we talk about a recent paper about happiness (via Graphic Sociology) and whether or not happiness studies actually tell us anything about happiness. After that, we follow-up on an argument Chris made last episode about “being cool” as a cause of human social behavior.

The sound is a little rough this week as three out of the four of us were actually in the same room for a change, which is actually harder to record than four people in four different cities using Skype.

Download Improv 27!

Two topics this week:

First, Arturo jumps off from a recent New Books in Sociology episode to ask whether or not sociology is too set in making repetitive and uncreative arguments.

Second, Chris takes us on a tour through the Billboard Hot 100 and the Top 200, with a stop at the Grammy Album of the Year, partially in response to this article on Hysteria and pop music.

Note: Jon accidentally posted the link to last episode when initially creating this post. If you got the wrong file, please redownload now. Sorry!

Download The Hot 26!

We start off talking about Charlie Sheen and celebrity (yeah, sorry), and then transition into a discussion about the iPad and music, and technology and qualitative data analysis. We thought we were done then, but we kept on talking about the sad state of rock music today and then NPR versus the right wing. We decided to keep the whole thing.

Links from the episode:

Download Episode 22!

Remember that big stink over anthropology and science in December? We invited anthropologist Eric Plemons back on the show to talk about science, anthropology, and sociology. We had a fun, lively, & at times heated discussion about the topic. Unfortunately, we were a bit slow with the editing and some time has now passed since this was exactly front page news, but we say science is always in season on the Sociology Improv.

Get the Big Two Ohhhhh!