This month thousands of sociologists met in Las Vegas for our annual meeting. There were lots of opinions about the city and our accommodations at Caesar’s Palace. In the two-minute clip below, a sociologist who studies cities, Sharon Zukin, offers her thoughts on Las Vegas:
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Photography projects can draw our attention, poignantly, to class inequality. Consider Vivian Mayer’s vintage photographs of New York and Chicago, for example, or Peter Menzel’s What We Own series. We need these projects because most of us are in class-segregated occupations and neighborhoods, not to mention a profoundly unequal world.
Photographer James Mollison has embarked on a similar project, Where Children Sleep, sent in by Kristina Killgrove, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, Yvette M., Amanda B., Dmitriy T.M., and my sister, Keely. Mollison has documented children and their bedrooms around the world. It’s heartbreaking to see how much some children have, and how little others do.
Jasmine, four-years-old, Kentucky:
Indira, seven-years-old, Nepal:
Roathy, eight-years-old, Cambodia:
Justin, eight-years-old, New Jersey:
Alyssa, Appalachia:
Jamie, nine-years-old, New York City:
Ryuta, ten-years-old, Tokyo:
Ahkohxet, eight-years-old, Brazil:
Lots more pictures, and more details about these children, at the New York Times. Or, buy the book.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Cross-posted at Scientopia.
Sadie M. sent in an example of the reproduction of the idea that “Africa” is an arid, desolate place where nature still dominates civilization. The snapshot Sadie sent in was of Nairobi. Nairobi is the 12th largest city on the continent of Africa with a population of over 3 million in the city and its surrounding suburbs. It is the capital of Kenya and an economic, political, and financial hub in the region.
This is Nairobi on Google maps:
This is what comes up if you Google image Nairobi:
Nairobi is also not a desert plain. The name, in Maasai, translates into ”the place of cool waters” and it is popularly known as “Green City in the Sun” (wikipedia).
Despite all of this, Sadie’s snapshot shows that an in flight magazine depicted Nairobi as a savanna full of elephants and bereft of people. The other two destinations featured – New York and Sydney — are pictured as they are.
So there we have it: Another piece of advertising erasing the bustling, successful economies of Africa, and instead reproducing the idea that the entire continent is an uncivilized desert full of exotic animals.
See also: How Not to Write about Africa and The Single Story of “Africa.”
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
I am always suspicious of invocations of the phrase “human nature.” It is not necessarily because I think there is no such thing, it’s simply that it is typically invoked with little consideration of the vastly diverse physical, cultural, and physical-cultural contexts in which human beings find themselves, and have found themselves. This 3 1/2 minute introduction to a BBC special, Human Planet, sent in by (my mom) Kay West, illustrates some of this diversity. While I’m a little anxious about the exotification that the clip might include (especially of “the primitive”), I still think it does a wonderful job of hinting at the wildly different contexts in which humans live:
Also, this (Gwen, do not watch!):
Found at Blame it on the Voices.
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The wildfires in Arizona are now officially the largest in the history of a state that is no stranger to wildfires (reuters). Firefighters are putting their lives on the line in order to control the blaze. This is dangerous work. Why do they choose to take such a job? Sociologist Matthew Desmond asks this question in his book, On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters, and the answer is truly surprising.
Desmond, who put himself through college fighting fires in Arizona, returned to his old job as a graduate student in order to study his fellow firefighters. When he asked them why they were willing to put their lives at risk to fight fires, the firefighters responded, “Risk? What risk?”
It turned out that the firefighters didn’t think that their work was dangerous. How is this possible?
Desmond explains that most of the firefighters were working-class men from the country who had been working with nature all of their lives. They raised cattle and rode horses; they cut down trees, chopped firewood, and built fences; they hunted and fished as often as they could. They were at home in nature. They felt that they knew nature. And they had been manipulating nature all their lives. Desmond wrote: “…my crewmembers are much more than confident on the fireline. They are comfortable.”
To these men, fire was just another part of nature. They believed that if you understood the forest, respected fire, and paid attention, then you could keep yourself safe. Period. Fire wasn’t dangerous. One of the firefighters put it like this:
Cause, personally, I don’t consider my life in danger. I think that the people I work with and with the knowledge I know, my life isn’t in danger. . . . If you know, as a firefighter, how to act on a fire, how to approach it, this and that, I mean you’re, yeah, fire can hurt you. But if you know, if you can soak up the stuff that has been taught to you, it’s not a dangerous job.
When these men were called “heroes,” they laughed. Desmond wrote: “The thought of dying on the fireline is so distant from firefighters’ imaginations that they find the idea comedic.”
When a fellow firefighter did tragically die on the fireline during Desmond’s study, he discovered just how deep this went. Unwilling to consider the possibility that fire was dangerous (at least in front of each other), the only way to make sense of the death was to find fault in an individual, or even blame the dead firefighter for being “stupid.” Desmond recounts this conversation:
“That sucks,” J.J. said.
“Someone fucked up,” Donald responded, immediately. “I’ll tell you what happened: Someone fucked up…”
Heads nodded.
Craig Neilson, the Fire Prevention Officer, added, “Their communications might have been fucked. . . . The fire was under them and burned up.”
“They probably weren’t paying attention,” Donald said…
“They’re probably stupid. Probably weren’t talking to their crew,” Peter guessed.
“Yep. They’re fuckin’ stupid, not talking to anyone. They should’ve known better than to build a helispot on top of the fire,” said Donald.
Heads continued to nod…
Desmond’s answer to why firefighters take such a risky job — because they don’t think it’s risky — was a fabulous counterpoint to dominant theories of risk taking at the time, which tended to suggest that men who did risky things were trying to prove their masculinity or seek adoration as a hero. The book is just fabulous.
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Note for Instructors: I teach this book in Soc 101, with great success. I wrote a review in Teaching Sociology and you can download my lecture notes here.
Today marks what would have been César Chávez’s 84th birthday. Chávez was born in 1927 to Mexican American farmers in Arizona. Here he is, right, at age six with his sister:
When he was about 11, his family lost their farm in the Great Depression and they turned to migrant farm work. In 1962 he and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers). His success in organizing farm workers, raising awareness of the conditions of their work, and raising support for their cause is one of the most inspiring stories of collective action in American history. Read more about Chávez here.
Chávez in 1966 with his political theater troupe, El Teatro Campesino:
Chávez, with Robert Kennedy, breaking a 25-day hunger fast:
Chávez, with farmworkers (late 1970s):
All images from NPR.
UPDATE: Reader Ramona Rodriguez-Brooks corrects our description of the El Teatro Campesino photo.
Cesar does not appear to be in the photo and I do not believe that he ever performed with El Teatro Campesino. The man whose face is most visible, wearing the “UFWOC”
sign is Luis Valdez, founder and former leader of El Teatro Campesino. Cesar was supportive of their work and El Teatro was formed during the Delano strike, but he never took an active part in El Teatro Campesino. In fact, Luis jokingly complained that Cesar would “steal” his actors to be more involved in the political organizing.
The blog-o-sphere is abuzz with praise for Vivian Maier’s mid-century photographs of public New York and Chicago life. The photos were taken by a live-in nanny working for wealthy families in Chicago’s north shore. Her photos, over 100,000 of them, were discovered after her death two years ago. To my untrained eye, they are gorgeous, interesting, and well-composed. A fascinating look at another time. More sociologically, they gracefully depict differences in socioeconomic class. I wonder if Maier, working-class herself, had a special sensitivity to these divides. In any case, I appreciate the texture that the photographs add to an understanding of how people of different classes lived.
Three examples and 14 more after the jump:
More:
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The term “food desert” was coined to draw attention to the fact that some people live far from a source of healthy, affordable food. For these people, compared to those with easier access, consistently eating fresh fruit and vegetables and avoiding convenience store and restaurant food is more difficult. Food deserts are more often found in poor neighborhoods, which is part of why the poor are more likely than people of other socioeconomic classes to be overweight and obese.
Over 2 percent of U.S. households, 2.3 million, live at least one mile from a grocery store and do not have a car (USDA). The map below depicts the percent of such households by county. In the darkest counties, over 10 percent of the households are isolated in a food desert:
See also Satter’s Hierarchy of Food Needs and the Last Sideshow Fat Man.
Via Slate.
© 2012 Sociological Images
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