Seminar Archives

Professor Dodson will speak about her recent research on careworkers in long-term care to examine larger issues of gender, class, race and carework in the current economy. The development of a family ideology promotes good care of residents and thus benefits nursing homes. Careworkers value fictive kin relationships with residents, yet the family model may be used to exploit these low-income careworkers.

Numerous commentators have concluded that the Civil Rights Act was effective in promoting increased access to good quality jobs for racial minorities. Many have worried as well that the pace of change has been too slow or stalled, particularly after 1980. Few have directly discussed under what conditions we might expect equal employment opportunity (EEO) to flourish. Explanations of status inequalities in the workplace have primarily relied on theories of social conflict and discrimination. Organizational perspectives on stratification, while not completely absent from previous research, remain a road less traveled. In this paper we present trends in race-sex inequality in U.S. workplaces since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and describe the organizational practices and discrimination processes that are likely to maintain status inequalities in the workplace and those which might be catalysts of change.

C. A. Tripp's posthumously published The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (2005) sparked the latest battle in an ongoing cold war over Abraham Lincoln's sexuality. Unlike Larry Kramer's 1999 controversial ?outing? of Lincoln, Tripp emerged wearing a mantle of academic ethos, disavowed political motive, and made clear from the outset that a convincing historical case rests on compelling evidence. However, as revealed in the copious response to Tripp's book?by defenders and detractors, gay and straight alike?an evidentiary struggle over Lincoln's sexuality is illusory, one that masks the heteronormative presumption undergirding and protected by the rhetorically constructed material status of evidence itself. As such, the vexations of Lincoln's corpus provide the ground for a queer refiguring of our understanding of public memory as ?mirror? and/or ?lamp,? and in keeping with Gavin Butt's project of ?queering the evidential,? offer a displacement of ?so-called verifiable truths from their positivistic frames of reference to render them instead . . . as projections of interpretive desire and curiosity.? What I seek through this interrogation of the evidentiary battle over Lincoln's body is a queer critical politics of revelatory inducement, not historical adducement, and to consider desire as a material force in rhetorical productions of the past.

Over the last thirty years, extraparliamentary activism in Germany has given rise to two divergent democratic countercultures, both deeply committed to a non-hierarchical, ?collectivist-democratic' style of politics, but each embracing a distinct pattern of self-organization. One has roots in the Gandhian tradition of radical non-violence; the other in the Western European ?autonomous' movement (known in Germany as the Autonomen). These two movement countercultures have developed contrasting forms of collectivist democracy, marked by different ways of dividing labor and running meetings as well as different decision-making processes and tactical orientations. Given that both movements exist within the same political system, have the same class base and face the same opportunity structures, my work explores the role of ideology to explain their divergent organizational practices through a comparative analysis of twelve collectivist groups drawn on an equal basis from each counterculture. Darcy argues that the practices of the Autonomen and non-violence groups grew out of competing understandings within each movement of their own core concepts of autonomy and non-violence. The seminar focused on the effects of this ideological contradiction among the Autonomen and its implications for the movement.

This plenary presentation examined the global politics of cybernetic forms of social control in the realms of culture, economy, and war. It provided a critical sociological history of information-driven rituals of power and resistance in an era characterized by high-speed telematic communications, electronic surveillance, and ultramodern technologies aimed at colonizing the social imagination and body.

This seminar approached the topic of online research by introducing a number of topics followed by practical application of research techniques. The types of topics covered included recruitment, participant safety, and managing the research process in online environments. Using research experience from a study of penisanity.com, an online environment in which men explore meaning and masculinity in the context of their penis, they offered practical examples and experiences that aimed to assist attendees in developing their own online research strategies.

Recent consumer research has stressed consumers' tendency to singularize, sacralize, and sentimentalize products. While this line of inquiry has been productive, this paper argues that in recent years ?disposability? and ?commodification? have been more pervasive and quantitatively important trends, and that there has been a speed- up of the cycle of product acquisition and discard. This cycle involves the acquisition and discard of items on the basis of their social utility, i.e., fashionable-ness, rather than their functional product benefits. The paper presents the case of apparel in some detail using data on purchases of new apparel items and discards of used apparel, and also looks at acquisition data for a number of other products. It ends with a discussion of the theoretical context for understanding these trends, namely the relation between what it terms symbolic and utilitarian value, and argues that in advanced consumer societies such as the US, the salience of the former is rising relative to the latter.

In ?daddy does cybernetics: Diary of a Mental Patient? Jackie Orr performed a historical, somewhat hysterical, story of U.S. Cold War culture caught between the threat of contagious panic and the government sponsored imperative to ?Keep Calm!? Part social history, part political theory, part schizophrenic poetry, this piece of ?performance theory? attempts to evoke the reasoned madness of an era from which we perhaps have yet to fully emerge.

Jackie Orr is an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University, where she teaches and writes in the fields of feminist and contemporary theory, cultural politics, and critical studies of science, technology, and psychiatry. She received her M.A. in sociology from Boston College in 1990, and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1999. Her book, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Duke University Press, 2006), looks at the entanglements of bombs, bodies, computers, pills, cybernetics, mass media, and (social) science in the management and control of panic.

By the year 2025, one quarter of the world's population over age 60 will be living in China, a nation in the process of partially privatizing its social security system. Professor Williamson presented a brief history of social security policy in China, described the current scheme, presented an analysis of the pros and cons of this scheme, and asked why China is currently on the road to adopting policy changes that are so strongly influenced by the neoliberal social security model being advanced by the World Bank. Social security policy in China is being driven largely by demographic considerations, but it is also being influenced by factors linked to globalization. Williamson asked who stands to gain and who is being put at risk by current plans to privatize the Chinese social security system. He argued that the current trend will put at risk many vulnerable categories of the population, particularly women, low-wage workers, those in the informal sector, and recent immigrants from rural areas.

By the millennium Americans were spending more than 12 billion dollars yearly on antidepressant medications. Currently, millions of people in the U.S. routinely use these pills. Are these miracle drugs, quickly curing depression? Or is their popularity a sign that we now inappropriately redefine normal life problems as diseases? Are they prescribed too often or too seldom? How do they affect self-images?

David Karp approaches these questions from the inside, having suffered from clinical depression for most of his adult life. In this book he explores the relationship between pills and personhood by listening to a group of experts who rarely get the chance to speak on the matter--those who are taking the medications. Their voices, extracted from interviews Karp conducted, color the pages with their experiences and reactions--humor, gratitude, frustration, hope, and puzzlement. Here, the patients themselves articulate their impressions of what drugs do to them and for them. They reflect on difficult issues, such as the process of becoming committed to medication, quandaries about personal authenticity, and relations with family and friends.

The stories are honest and vivid, from a distraught teenager who shuns antidepressants while regularly using street drugs to a woman who still yearns for a spiritual solution to depression even after telling intimates "I'm on Prozac and it's saving me." The book provides unflinching portraits of people attempting to make sense of a process far more complex and mysterious than doctors or pharmaceutical companies generally admit.