When did nature become a good for cities? When did city dwellers start imagining nature to be something they were missing? Today, urbanites’ moral associations ...
Tag: Sociology
Chicago Yesterday and Today: A Conversation with Carlo Rotella
Carlo Rotella is a professor of American studies, English, and journalism at Boston College; he’s also one of the most talented writers in the humanities ...
Stalling: How to Save the Global City
The image above is both a place and a placeholder. Flattened into the increasingly global language of digitally rendered landscapes—what South ...
Public Thinker: T. L. Taylor on Gamergate, Live-Streaming, and Esports
The qualitative sociologist T. L. Taylor is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and cofounder and director of research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to ...
Birth of a Queer Parent
By virtue of their youth, trans and queer kids offer something new. Coming out today is less exclusively a narrative of young adulthood or middle age, and increasingly an experience of childhood or ...
American Perceptions of Class
When, in 1906, the German sociologist Werner Sombart quipped that in America, “all socialist utopias came to nothing on roast beef and apple pie,” he offered a ...
Public Thinker: Issa Kohler-Hausmann on Misdemeanors and Mass Incarceration
While most critics of the American criminal justice system condemn mass incarceration, fewer have ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Mana of Mass Society”
Many of anthropology’s terms of art are taken from afar. Especially in the half century after 1870 ...
Ethnographers of Ourselves
What would you be willing to do for a friend from 20-odd years ago if you suddenly learned they were on the verge of becoming homeless or found them ...
Ask the Kids
Professors, K–12 teachers, and parents are worried. College students listen to lectures online and feel no need to open a textbook. High school students seem emotionally fragile, worrying about their ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA
Each August, sociologists from across North America gather for their annual meeting. This year they congregated in and around the Palais des congrès ...
What Next for Detroit?
One of the most important urban photographers of our time, Camilo José Vergara arrived in the United States in the midst of the “urban crisis,” as great American cities struggled with massive ...
The Future of Diversity on Campus
Donald Trump is a threat to American higher education. Signs and wonders of harm abound. In addition to his abysmally unqualified secretary of education ...
The Book That Made Me: A Sociologist
A renowned American sociologist reflects on the book that persuaded him to abandon a career playing bar piano in Chicago ...
How to Be a Global Historian
If the past is still required to understand the present, then approaching the past globally is an absolute necessity. But what does it mean to “think globally” today? What does a truly global history ...
Foucault and the Fictocritics
For at least three decades, starting in the 1970s, Michel Foucault was a phenomenon nearly comparable to the Beatles, or his predecessor on the academic scene, Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a history of ...
Black Intellectuals and White Audiences
For more than a century, black intellectuals have been asked to play the role of indigenous interpreters who can explain blackness to white America.
Waste, Value, and Environmental Racism in the Southwest
On August 5, 2015, a team contracted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate a leak at the Gold King mine in Silverton, Colorado, accidentally breached the mine, sending three ...
Where do Morals Come From?
The social sciences have an ethics problem. No, I am not referring to the recent scandals about flawed and fudged data in psychology and political science.1 I’m talking about the failure of the ...
Cyborg Communitarianism
Since life on Earth is so hard, the utopian imagination likes to turn to space. Almost as soon as astronomers and their telescopes emptied the heavens of angels, philosophers like Bernard Le Bovier ...
