This week we thought we’d dig back into the Office Hours archives a bit and revisit an interview we did with Theda Skocpol from 2009 on media, the Internet, and civic participation in the 2008 election. A few years later, we’reright in the middle of another election cycle and questions about the impact of traditional media and online social media are as pertinent as ever, so we thought it’d be a good time to think back to a time when a younger Barack Obama was striding into office with the promise of a new post-partisan era of American political engagement…
This week we talk with Bartholomew Ryan from the Walker Art Center and co-curator of the Baby Marx exhibition. We chat about what happens when you combine social theorists, puppetry, and a trip to Occupy Wall Street.
This week we talk with Gary Alan Fine. We discuss his recent article in Contexts, Uncertain Knowledge, on how rumors shape our world and explain why some people still think we have a Kenyan President.
Today we talk with Joe Soss, author of the forthcoming book, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race, co-authored with Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram. Soss traces the major changes and continuities in welfare provision and poverty governance in the United States over the past 40 years, and the racial, political, and economic factors in creating these policies.
This week we talk with Corey Shdaimah, author of Negotiating Justice: Progressive Lawyering, Low-Income Clients, and the Quest for Social Change. Shdaimah examines how the themes central to progressive lawyering—autonomy, collaboration, transformation, and social change—look on the ground, in the legal services office. We discuss the ethnographic methods she used for this research, and how lawyers and clients navigate their relationships with one another.
