End the Semester Right: With a Movie

What’s that you say? You’re swamped, your students are swamped, and everyone needs a chance to coast into summer? Final papers, class reflections, formal and informal evaluations—there has to be a better way!

There is, and I believe we all know it as: show a danged movie. And here at TSP, we like to provide inspiration. At the bottom of today’s roundup, there’s a list of 56 documentaries and other films that have been recommended to us as excellent fodder for crim, soc, social movements, gender, media studies, and every other class you might be teaching or taking. To learn more, visit this interview with Jessie Daniels and its extensive comments with suggestions from other profs and students (many with links) or this older post with some more good choices.

Now, here’s what we’ve been doing as the semester winds down:

The Editors’ Desk:

“One More Shout-Out for Ethnography Article,” by Doug Hartmann. Why that Atlantic article was so very, very good.

Citings & Sightings:

“An Opinion on Public Opinion Polls,” by Carolyn Lubben. Herb Gans in the Neiman Journalism Lab on why public opinion reports can be awfully misleading.

“Feeling Good with God,” by John Ziegler. You guys, we found the perfect picture for this piece on mental health and religiosity.

Office Hours:

“David Leonard on Jason Collins,” with Kyle Green. Gender, sport, sexuality, media, stigma, this interview has it all.

A Few from the Community Pages:

• Girl w/ Pen. Deborah Siegel kicks off Girl w/ Pen’s tenure with her first of a new series of columns on thought leaders and articles you should know about. She starts with Judith Warner’s new Center for American Progress Report.
• Sociological Images. One of the more disturbing sociological images we’ve seen in a while, “Women as Literal Targets of Misogyny,” has been flying around the web this week (and comes with the biggest and most literal trigger warning we can come up with). In the meantime, Gwen Sharp takes a look at changing U.S. racial demographics, while Lisa Wade schools us on Why Sociology is Awesome and why Occidental College has some ‘splaining to do as the faculty take a vote of no confidence in their administrators.
• Cyborgology. The quantified self and weigh-ins, whether Reddit can self-police on racism,  why MOOCs give some the willies, and why a bombing suspect’s selfie is, literally and sociologically, front-page news.

Scholars Strategy Network:

“Why Autonomous Social Movements Hold the Key to Reducing Violence Against Women,” by S. Laurel Whedon and Mala Htun.

“Black Politics and the Origins of America’s Prison Boom,” by Michael Javen Fortner.

And now, the Movie Pile:

• The End of Poverty?
• Garbage Dreams
• The Road from Crime
• 49 Up
• The Split Horn: Life of a Hmong Shaman in America
• Quiet Rage
• The Devil’s Playground
• We Live in Public
• HIP-HOP: Beyond Beats & Rhymes
• Southern Comfort
• The Pill
• Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed
• Heart of the Game
• An Inconvenient Truth
• The Lottery (a good alternative, Jessie Daniels says, to Waiting for Superman)
• Resolved
• Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo
• Omar and Pete
• The Dhamma Brothers
• The Farm
• Writ Writer
• Ghosts of Attica
• Manufactured Landscapes
• Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
• The War Room
• Flow: For Love of Water
• Secret of the Wild Child
• Ikiru
• The Seventh Seal
• Of Gods and Men
• Tell Me a Riddle
• Dead Man
• Race: The Power of an Illusion, pt. 3
• The Color of Fear
• Food, Inc.
• The Battle for Whiteclay
• Inside Job
• Harvest of Shame
• American Harvest
• The Harvest/La Cosecha
• New Harvest, Old Shame
• Carolyn Liebler suggests clips from Little Miss Sunshine, Wedding Crashers, Ghostbusters, and Fiddler on the Roof
• At the River I Stand
• Merchants of Cool
• Occupation: Dreamland
• Stonewall Uprising
• Generation M: Misogyny in Media & Culture
• The Mickey Mouse Monopoly
• Iron Jawed Angels
• Tough Guise: Men and Masculinity in Media
• Further Off the Straight & Narrow
• Makers
• Zeitgeist: Moving Forward
• Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky
• Forks over Knives
• Pull of Gravity