(via alwaysbringyoursunshine)
As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find….
Graduation picture with mom and dad! Thanks for your unconditional support and love throughout the years. Laura and Baba, you were both here in spirit. #cigrad #graduation #family (at South Quad - CSUCI)
Tiana Schisler and Dave Ashley on stage during #cigrad. #csuci #graduation
Justin Bartels, Impression.
‘The series focuses on the clothing that women think they should wear, or are told what to wear, to impress someone in a sexual manner. There is a physical mark that is left from these clothes, showing the discomfort women go through.’
Embodiment. Wow.
(via sociolab)
(via sociolab)
(via whitedenial-ontrial)
It goes without saying that a meal from McDonalds is an experience in itself. Some of us are fans, others tend to stay away, but like it or not, almost everyone has been to the fabled golden arches.
The New York Times published a brilliant editorial shot by Nolan Conway that highlights the myriad of faces and sometimes dogs that visit McDonalds.
The Many Faces of McDonalds Customers
via It’s Nice That
npr:
Scientists Clone Human Embryos To Make Stem Cells : Shots
The achievement is a long-sought step toward harnessing the potential power of such cells to treat diseases. But the discovery raises ethical concerns because it brings researchers closer to cloning humans, and involves creating and then destroying human embryos for research purposes.
Graphic Source: Mitalipov Lab/OHSUGraphic
Credit: Adapted for NPR by Alyson Hurt
Bodily experiences of what Durkheim refers to as ‘collective effervescence’ are sociologically significant as they have the potential to transform people’s experience of their fleshy selves and the world around them. The somatic experience of the sacred, ‘something added to and above the real’, arises out of these transformations, and expresses a corporeal solidarity between people which can bind them into particular sectional groups, or into the social collectivity as a whole. It was Durkheim’s view, in fact, that the very possibility of society is contingent upon individuals being incorporated into this corporeal experience of solidarity. If this incorporation did not take place, if the beliefs, traditions and aspirations of the group were no longer felt by the individual, then ‘society would die’ along with the sacred.Durkheim’s writings have been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, yet sociologists have often been influenced by what Donald Levine has called Talcott Parsons’s ‘strikingly partial’ reading of Durkheim. In a similar vein, Bryan Turner has noted the influence of Parsons’s reading of Durkheim’s sociology as ‘the heir of social contract theories’ concerned with solving the ‘Hobbesian problem of order’. In consequence, many sociologists have tended to focus on the, admittedly important, rationalist dimensions of Durkheim’s thought, while being far less attentive to those other aspects of his work which reflect a concern with forms of embodiment and the transformative capacities of effervescent forms of sociality.
In contrast to this, however, Collins, Lindholm and Turner have suggested that Durkheim’s work can be read as a direct, corporeally oriented challenge to such a cognitive and rationalist emphasis. Furthermore, Célestin Bouglé’s recognition that for Durkheim society was a ‘fiery furnace’, as much as an ordered realm of ‘social facts’, has been developed by sociologists such as Stjepan Mestrovic. As Mestrovic highlights, Durkheim and Mauss emphasised the irrational bodily bases of human sociality. This is not to say that Durkheim did not place enormous importance on the rational dimensions of human experience.
Nevertheless, it is clear that for Durkheim the rational demands of society are intimately related to the irrational and sacred ‘fires’ of effervescent sociality. Nisbet emphasises this in his comment that Durkheim rejected as ‘untenable and meretricious’ any attempt to see contract as either historically or logically primordial, since it only gives rise to ‘transient relations and passing associations’. The pre-contractual, ‘irrational’, foundations of contract, in contrast, rest in the effervescence which allows certain forms of bodily experience and knowing to become possible, and certain types of relationship to be sanctified as normal.
”Phillip Mellor & Chris Schilling - Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community, and Modernity
‘Classical’ sociologists are always much more interesting than the standard textbook interpretations of them. Although there are a wealth of texts on ‘reading Weber’ etc from the 1980s challenging the main basis of these interpretations much of it still has not worked its way into the textbooks nor teaching. Particularly thinking with Weber of the debates on objectivity that avoid the simplistic way it is normally addressed and a lot of the commentary of the potential Foucauldian reading his work offers in terms of Protestant discipline and techniques.
A significant strength behind the continuation of the standard interpretations comes from the means of systematisation and canonisation that formed this notion of ‘classical’ sociology with Parsons being a crucial agent of this. Not only were particular theorists selected to exemplify sociology but in addition this was done by prioritising certain texts from their work over others. I think Elias summarised Parsons best when he described him as someone of obvious intelligence but it is hard to shake the feeling that it had been put to waste.
Does anyone know if there are any books that bring together the challenges to the standard interpretations of the main ‘classical’ sociologists? I am interested in collating texts that would hopefully be useful for teaching purposes. Seeking to find ways to introduce students to the ‘key’ sociologists that is more engaging by focusing on aspects of their work normally overlooked with links to contemporary work that utilizes it as well.
(via thepovertyoftheory)
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