This episode, new Office Hours contributor David Phillippi interviews Francesco Duina about his book, Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession. Topics include competition in sports, raising children, and comparing America’s culture of competition with Denmark. What are we trying to gain by being so competitive? And are we getting it? Listen in to find out.
This week we talk with Shamus Khan about his new book Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. One the one hand, elite social institutions—such as St. Paul’s—have opened up to women and minorities in recent decades, but on the other hand, inequality has increased and wealth is more concentrated now than since the 1920s. What explains this apparent contradiction between increasing openness yet rising inequality? Khan draws on his experiences as a student and then researcher at St. Paul’s to help answer this question.
Orit Avishai talks about her Fall 2010 Contexts article, Women of God. People often assume that conservative religions are bad for women, but Avishai shows us the ways in which women within fundamentalist religions can have empowering experiences as well.
(The audio quality’s pretty rough on the interview this time — sorry about that!)
This week, Tom O’Connell stops by Office Hours to talk about the history of Hull-House and how to bring community service to the social sciences. O’Connell is the author of Jane Addams’s Democratic Journey from the Fall 2010 issue of Contexts.
This episode we talk with Janet Hankin, co-editor of the special issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, “What Do We Know? Key Findings from 50 Years of Medical Sociology”. We discuss the contributions and insights sociologists have made in the areas of health, illness, and the medical establishment. Topics include the transformation of the health care system in the United States over the past 50 years, and the distinction between the sociology in medicine and the sociology of medicine.
This episode we talk with Eszter Hargittai, from the Communication Studies department at Northwestern University. Popular myth has it that the youth of today are calm, competent masters of the internet, but Hargittai’s research points to significant gaps and inequalities in the level of internet skills possesed by so-called digital natives. What skills are lacking, why does this matter, and what should we do about it?
This episode, we talk with Keith Hampton about his research on wireless internet and public spaces. Does public wifi encourage a stronger public sphere or diminish public life by encouraging everyone to live inside their own private digital bubble? Hampton argues it’s more complicated than that, and public WiFi can, in fact, encourage many different kinds of social interaction, both online and offline.
To learn more about Hampton’s research, check out his Fall 2010 Photo Essay in Contexts, as well as his new article published in the Journal of Communication.
This week, Frances Fox Piven stops by Office Hours for a discussion of the impact of labor on the American Left. Topics include labor history, globalization and labor, and the future of labor strikes.
This episode is kind of an experiment. The Office Hours podcasters are working with Contexts magazine to try something new: an audio reading of the free feature article in the new issue of Contexts, Heroes, Presidents, and Politics by Jeffrey Alexander.
If you like what you hear, let us know! This may just be a one time experiment…or not.
This episode, Jesse visits with Robert M. Groves, Director of the United States Census Bureau. Topics include why our census takes a full sample and how we pull it off, how we count tough populations like undocumented migrants and the homeless, and controversies over racial identification and the role of the state in the census.