Sociology Lens

Source: Gordon Incorporated

Over the past 400 years, the Western criminal justice system (CJS) has greatly evolved. Like virtually all social institutions, its evolution has been highly impacted by the wider social environment. Along with the arrival of new technologies, philosophies, and aspirations, the Western CJS has altered its policies and practices. One very important change that has taken place over the past few centuries has been the birth of the modern prison system. Strongly inspired by factors related to capitalism, the prison system has continuously oscillated between focusing on incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. Beyond economic reasons, part of this fluctuation has taken place because of the West’s increasing desire to punish offenders mentally as opposed to physically as well as its vacillating theories regarding the true “nature of man.” In response to such ideas, it is important to consider exactly where and how the modern prison was born as well as what factors contributed to its creation. (more…)

Sociologists frequently note that individuals – in effort to understand the social world – construct boundaries and make distinctions (Zerubavel, 1991). That is, in efforts to make sense of the world and its reality, individuals cut up, carve out, and make meaningful distinctions. Distinguishing one from another, that is “masculine” from “feminine”, “affluent” from “deprived”, “strong” from “weak”, and “right” from “wrong” provides an avenue for meaning and reality materialize.

However, the same boundaries that construct a reality for individuals, groups, and cultures, also establish points of conflict. Consequently, the social world endures ongoing transformations as it encounters friction and opposition between sources of authority. Individuals, much like culture, “struggle over what significant symbols mean and who has the authority to project public definitions” (O’Brian, 2008). Whilst boundaries help individuals define their social environment and navigate its complex terrain, they often create areas of contested space in which contradictions and power play out. (more…)

President Obama receives the script from his recent Mic Checking

Author’s Note: This piece was originally posted to Sociology Lens on December 10th. On December 13th, the piece was temporarily removed and I was asked to make revisions to make more explicit the conventional sociological themes in this piece. This request was made as the result of pressure from a senior professor who deemed this piece too “polemical” and not “sociological.” While I and many others in the discipline have epistemological objections to very concept of value-free social science, and thus view with suspicion any implication that sociology can be separated from politics, I agreed to make revisions, because I think that argument in this piece important and can only be strengthened by further reference to the social theory canon. The downside is that the post is now less accessible to a popular audience than it was originally intended to be, so I have archived a copy of the original here. Finally, I must note that, while examining power is, perhaps, the oldest and most important task of sociology, it is (and has always been) political by nature.

A recent news piece for Inside Higher Ed reports on several instances where students have disrupted public presentations by conservative academics, activists, or politicians. The students used “the human microphone”—i.e., a practice of amplifying a speaker’s voice by having many people repeat the speaker’s words in unison—to offer counterpoints to the arguments being made by the presenter. The article’s author, Allie Grasgreen, asserts that the mic checking the conservative presenters is tantamount to “censorship.” This assertion shares the logic of what Karl Rove demanded when he was mic checked at John Hopkins:

If you believe in free speech and you have a chance to show it… if you believe in the right of the First Amendment to free speech… then you demonstrate it by shutting up and waiting until the Q&A session… line up behind the mic…

But Grasgreen and Rove both miss the point. Occupiers are trying to demonstrate—through the very performance of this act—that “free speech” is not evenly distributed. The point is that only the 1% ever find themselves at the podium. The 99% are left to fill the seats in the audience, and, if they are lucky, they may have the chance to do as Rove commands and line up behind the mic for a few brief seconds in the spotlight. This is, of course, because the opportunity to speak and to be heard is inextricable from issues of wealth and power. The few who hold these assets in abundance have more purchasing power in the attention economy. K Street is nothing if not an industrialized machine for converting money and power into speech that will be heard. Sure, we all may have “free speech,” but as George Orwell quipped in Animal Farm “some animals are more equal than others.” (more…)

David Orr half-smiled at me from the pages of the New York Times Book Review this morning. In his dark blue button down shirt, head cocked sympathetically to the side, wire-rimmed glasses gracefully seated at the bottom of a long forehead, this man has clearly selected an author photo of himself that represents his belief in the power of ideas. His own, surely, and those of others so long as they are expressed in poetry. But Orr’s new book Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry bears a title that says volumes about how he sees those ideas. They’re “pointless.” They’re just pretty. Addictively pretty, apparently. Pretty enough to obsess over. Pretty enough to love, even if it never makes a  ”point.” Which begs the question: what the heck is a “point”? And who gets to decide when one is made?

Ideas for Orr apparently get to float around outside of everyday social practices. And because ideas are so detached, he figures, they must just be beautiful and pointless. Perhaps Orr should have engaged in discussions with poetry lovers whose experiences were different than his own. People whose experiences with poetry had nothing to do with luxuriating in the beautiful and the pointless.

Poetry is not a luxury. The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.

Audre Lorde, from Sister Outsider (1984)

Poetry is not a luxury, Audre Lorde writes, but how can someone like David Orr, whose economic and social access to “art supplies” (or at least to folks who recognize, either through his intellectual-looking picture or his publicly stated delight in “beautiful and pointless” ideas, that his creative work, his thought-work, is stuff of value) conceive of the real, material inequalities around whose knowledge “counts” that make poetry necessary. Not just the poetry that goes in great collections or chapbooks or  coffee-shop goers’ Moleskins, but the stuff through which real people who don’t have the luxury of Orr’s social position share the knowledge that they create.

As Lorde observes, poetry can be written on scraps of paper, in dark pantries, between double work shifts, or on the bus. It can emerge in conversation. It can be  spoken but never written, yet repeated again and again across contexts and across differences. Or spoken once, and never again, but the knowledge shared knowledge that shapes whole ways of knowing, ways of seeing the world. Poetry does not require reams of paper (like, say, a book defending poetry would). Nor does it require long leaves of absence from work and daily life in order to complete a manuscript for publication. Poetry is an art form that cuts across material inequalities and enables, encourages the very human and humanizing act of sharing knowledge.

And in just about one sentence, Audre Lord moves us beyond the whole problematic of another man whose author photos bear a striking similarity to Orr’s: here I’m thinking of Michel Foucault and his anxiety over the repressive power of “the gaze”. Lorde writes: “As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us” (1984: 36). Poetry is where those silences can be broken.

This post has moved to http://williampaulbell.wordpress.com/2009/08/29/the-g8-protests-and-the-logically-inconsistent-foundations-of-neoclassical-economics/

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by smteixeirapoit

This week, the Venezuelan government removed thirty-four radio stations from the air for failing to submit registration papers promptly. Venezuelan citizens argue that eliminating these radio stations hinders freedom of speech. Additionally, Antonio Ledezma, the opposition mayor of Caracas, contends that removing these radio stations demonstrates the government is “scared of freedom of expression”.

This raises several questions: Who controls the media? Why do they control access to certain sources of information? Perhaps, the government controls the media in order to squelch anti-government sentiment. This seems plausible given that the presidency of Hugo Chavez has faced considerable criticism and the government has proposed legislation imprisoning journalists for publishing “harmful” material.

(more…)

by christinablunt

On Wednesday, April 8, a U.S. container ship, the Maersk Alabama, was commandeered by a group of Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. The Maersk Alabama was quickly recovered but the captain, Richard Phillips, was held hostage by four of the pirates on a lifeboat for several days. Negotiations were conducted between the marauders and the American destroyer, the U.S.S. Bainbridge. On April 12, acting with President Obama’s authorization and the belief that Captain Phillips was in imminent danger, U.S. snipers shot the 3 pirates that remained aboard the life vessel and rescued the Captain shortly there after. On April 21 the sole survivor was brought to New York and will face trial as an adult on charges of piracy.

Our fascination with pirates may be historical or, perhaps, part of the hidden fantasy of taking to the high seas and living life with reckless abandon. However, it may have to do with the seemingly asymmetric power dynamic between 4 Somalis on a life boat and a U.S. destroyer with a direct line to President Obama.

The standoff between the U.S. Armed Forces and three pirates on a dingy is a very interesting example of the sort of asymmetric combat currently engaged in all over the world. While there seem to be many differences in this case between terrorists and pirates, including their motivation and overall goals, one important commonality is the way in which a super-power engages them. The asymmetry in this particular instance was starker than in others but it causes one to consider, in a time when sheer might is (perhaps only slightly) decreasing as an indicator of power in global relations, how will Sociologists conceive of power in the 21st century?

Link to the story in the Guardian.

Link to Teaching & Learning Guide for: Sociology of Terrorism and Counterterrorism: A Social Science Understanding of a Terrorist Threat

Link to the Blackwell Reference Online: Power by Steven Lukes

by theoryforthemasses

A recent book written by philosopher Dennis Dutton draws from the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology to explain the biological foundations of creativity.  Dutton attempts to synthesize Darwin’s theory of evolution with culture, suggesting that creative capacities have been passed on from one generation to the next as a mode of survival.  Storytellers, for example, would have been able to work out “what if” scenarios through making up stories, a practice that would keep them from risking their lives by attempting dangerous activities.  According to Dutton, these individuals, along with their attentive listeners, may have had better of odds of survival.

What Dutton and other evolutionary psychologists seem to ignore, however, is the issue of power.  They seem to suggest that “survival of the fittest” implies that some people or groups naturally have more power than others.  This could be the case if all humans were able to reach a state of natural, uninhibited production.  Mechanisms and conduits of power, however, are unequally and often arbitrarily distributed (on the basis of such characteristics as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ablebodiness, geographic location, etc.).   An “evolutionary” explanation of creativity may therefore be nothing more than a sociological one.

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E. Burnstein and C. Branigan on evolutionary analyses

by theoryforthemasses

A recent article in The New York Times explored the burgeoning popularity of homebirth among New Yorkers. Citing the success of the documentary film, The Business of Being Born, the article suggests that New York City women are increasingly opting for birthing at home rather than in hospitals. Researchers such as Robbie Davis-Floyd and Melissa Cheyney have offered interesting insights into the unique experiences of homebirthers, particularly into their acquisition and use of knowledge, power, and control during pregnancy and childbirth. They suggest that homebirthers intellectually, emotionally, and physically prepare for their births in distinctive ways, and are typically able to exercise nuanced forms of power and therefore control over their birth experiences. All this seems to be predicated, however, on “informed consent,” or the acquisition of birth knowledge from sources such as midwives, Internet research, and birthing literature. While homebirth is a viable option for some women, we cannot ignore the extent to which knowledge and access to it is based on social class. Indeed, there are many women who are opting for homebirth. It seems to be that many of them, however, are wealthier women who have the time and financial means to dedicate to rigorous birth preparation. While birthing at home with a midwife may mean fewer medical interventions, and therefore be less expensive, knowledge acquisition is rarely free. Therefore, the relationship between birth options and social class cannot be ignored.

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Davis-Floyd and others on contemporary birth practices