open source academic journals
Via Kristina B (thanks!), Danah Boyd writes a great essay on open-access academic journals. I’m thinking it over…
Amended: With a little additional snooping, I caught the news that Harvard is having all ‘finished’ articles by Arts and Sciences faculty free and online. Here’s a clip:
The decision, which only affects the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, won’t necessarily disrupt exclusivity agreements with journals or upend the academic publishing industry, but it could send a signal that a standard bearer in higher education is seriously looking at alternative distribution models for its faculty’s scholarship. Already, various open-access movements are pressing for reforms (from modest to radical) to the current economic model, which depends on journals’ traditional gatekeeping function and their necessarily limited audiences but which has concerned many in the academic community worried about rising costs and the shift to digital media.
I’m mulling it over some more…
outlaws, rogues, and research
I’ve had a good deal of back and forth with people over Gang Leader for a Day, and Scatterplot has had some posts and comment/discussion on some interesting issues as well. Mitch Duneier has an interesting post on ethics and IRB, and also links to Jack Katz’s work on it, here, with a draft essay on the ‘ethical escape routes’ for underground ethnographers. This essay looks like it will become mandatory reading in my qualitative course–whenever I get to teach it again–because it deals with many of the historical and current tensions of IRB. Particularly the section on ‘How Fieldworkers Become IRB Outlaws.’
a moment of race eclipsing gender…
A few weeks ago there was a ‘race incident’ where I teach. It ballooned into a campus-wide conversation, with a few panels and lots and lots of questions. The thumbnail sketch of it is that a student and her boyfriend showed up to a ‘Celebrity Rehab’ costume party in blackface, as Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown. (Bobby wasn’t in rehab, though. Just Whitney. FYI.) From what I’ve heard, the Black Student Association mobilized quickly and approached the student in as respectful and non-confrontational way as could be expected, and the woman went to the bathroom to take off the make-up.
I went to one of the campus-wide conversations and it was a tense but polite affair. Many of the students were thoughtful and I learned a lot. One thing that bothered me is that students wanted for-credit courses on race, but a student in my class stood up to stay what I was thinking: “There are classes like that, they’re called ‘Sociology.'” Overall, there has been a lot of talk about the history of minstrelism, and I am really happy there has been a campus-wide conversation about this. We had a few of my best class discussions about it in my theory course–particularly when we were talking about Du Bois a week afterwards. Naturally. (The affects of the ‘small’ movements at the dawn of freedom for African-Americans that W.E.B. discusses are truly chilling in their implications. The entire class was floored as we read it all.) I have thought about it a lot, and re-oriented my classes a bit around it, but didn’t tackle something…
Here’s one thing that I have not noticed: much of any discussion about the boyfriend. From what students told me, the woman was crying as she came to find out that the Philip Rothian human stain wouldn’t be wash away so easily. There is very little mention of the boyfriend, save for the fact that he didn’t seem to think that it was such a big deal, and resolutely refused to make the symbolic gesture of attempting to take off the make up, and just stood there as his girlfriend was in the loo. Such defiance makes me wonder about what his role was in the decision-making. Why has she been so assailed in the discussion, and why has he been ignored as a silent partner? Yes, he’s not a student, but still. I’m not saying that all men are racist or that there are no women who are racist (but here’s an interesting article about how the lack of racist women is undermining the KKK). (Nor am I attempting to further the binary oppositions of gender and sexuality.) However, it is within the realm of possibility that this student was a reluctant accomplice in her boyfriend’s boneheaded scheme. It’s not to absolve her role (or the role of her friends who let her leave her dorm), but I wonder if there is an unwillingness to address the issue of gender politics here. I’m not suggesting that the race-issues are unimportant but that they have, perhaps, eclipsed something else in the mix. I feel that it is a rare occasion when a gender issue of male dominance isn’t tackled on this campus. (And didn’t Bobby Brown have a whole power thing too? Arrested for battery?)
the end of thumbing through books?
It could, quite possibly, be a terrible admission on my part, but yesterday I used Google Books to find two quotes in books that were sitting right next to me. Need to find what Richard Florida has to say about careers for that chapter on ‘cultural workers?’ No problem. Lecturing on Veblen and you aren’t quite sure where that line is about how women are the ‘chief ornament’ of the pecuniary class? You’ve got it. Even when the pages aren’t included in the limited preview, it seems that the search allows you to see the page if you request something specifically. (And yes, Google Scholar includes Google Books in its searches.) It’s enough for me to have one of those dark moments wherein I realize that I could never be an academic if not for technologies like word processing (I keep an Underwood in my house to remind me of it), and mull further thoughts about how Google is secretly destroying all the information that it cannot index.
sociology as a ‘female preserve’
In theory class last week we discussed Harriet Martineau at some length. (She fits in perfectly after teaching Durkheim and before Veblen.) My students are intrigued by the ideal that Durkheim borrowed her ideas, since she was writing about similar epistemological and substantive topics and because the French version of her translation of Comte’s Positivist Sociology (even Comte preferred it over his own) could have been in his hot hands at Ecole Normale Superieure: she translated it in 1851 and he was at the school by 1879. Also, her How to Observe Morals and Manners was written in 1838, well before Emile’s Rules of Sociological Method (1895). I could not prove or disprove such suspicions, so if anyone knows of anything, feel free to let me know.
Relatedly, perhaps, there’s a provocative article that came out last month on the ‘feminization of sociology,’ (and I found an earlier one on the related ‘decline’ of the discipline). I’m not sure about the word choice here, but it is assuredly better than other forms of describing it (e.g., ‘female zoo,’ ‘female ghetto,’ ‘female asylum’).
furthermore…
A Times article highlights the rise of non-tenured labor, fleshing out a few more issues than the AAUP report I linked to earlier. The American Federation of Teachers‘ proposal for legislation in eleven states–to increase numbers of classes taught by tenured or tenure track faculty to 75%–seems unlikely since that demographic comprises only 30% of the faculty in the U.S. To be continued…
**Addendum: Scatterplot blog has a nice discussion about this sort of thing as well…
cuny sociology in the news
NPR had a piece on how an Iraq vet is now taking sociology classes at my alma mater:
Academia … that’s where I’m at. […] Right now, school, books — Weber, Marx, Durkheim — that’s my medication.
(Thanks to Kristina B.)
spatial segregation, maps
I think I’ve said this somewhere before, but when I saw John Edwards speak at Hunter College two years ago, I was very impressed with how he had developed his ‘Two Americas‘ meme into a story about spatial segregation. Perhaps I’m jaded, but it was refreshing to hear a politician speak on this.
Last week we watched part of Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke and discussed it alongside the first few chapters of Philippe Bourgois’ In Search of Respect to talk about issues of politics, culture, race, and space. Space is a rarely discussed issue in sociology, save for a few ethnographies (Dave Grazian speaks of this gap in his fabulous Blue Chicago)
One sociologist at the forefront of these concerns (and not an ethnographer) is John Logan, who has provided a report (pdf) on Katrina as a social disaster. Here’s a image from it:
I’m always fascinated by memory maps, and one of the lovely (and distracting) things about the InterGoogle is that there are wonders that are just a few clicks away. I have no idea how I reached this point, but there is a great Flickr collection of memory maps which are, at times amusing. There are others that highlight notions of spatial inequality. Here’s Ithaca, NY. Here’s London:
By the way, if you are an educator, HBO films provides education packs for free. Check out ‘Teaching The Levees,’ a collaboration between Teacher’s College and HBO. I suggested that we have a ‘Sociology 101 Movie Night’ to get the three 101’s using the same films (out of class) to energize class discussion… Pretty cool. It’ll be interesting to see if we can organize it.
Update, from Boing Boing:
what i have not read
Slate had a nice set of blurbs about what ‘great books’ authors have not read. The Bible. Gravity’s Rainbow. Moby Dick. Harry Potter. Aside from the obvious question of whether or not a Harry Potter book is ‘great,’ I’m happy that I’ve covered those. (Ok, three-fourths of the Bible.) Faulkner. Ulysses. The Brothers Karamazov. I have just not gotten to and suspect I should. I’ve read more than the average American, I’m sure, but at times I need coercion: I had to bring Gravity’s Rainbow as my only reading material for a trip to Europe to force myself to get through it. The same with Quixote on this summer’s trip to Scandinavia. I was once with a famous sociologist and s/he asked what I was teaching in my theory class that day. I said, excitedly, “The Frankfurt School.” “Who’s that?” s/he asked. At the time I was appalled, but maybe I’ve mellowed out over the years, or realized that I have plenty of blindspots of my own.
One of those blind spots is the entire populist oeuvre of Jonathan Kozol. Maybe it’s because I missed a general education in my undergraduate studies while studying architecture (I took a year off between college and grad school, in part, to catch up on Hemingway, Kafka, Calvino, Ondaatje, and the like), but I never got around to Kozol, who must be assigned in every third undergraduate class. Regardless, Kozol gave a talk at Mt. Holyoke College to promote his new book. It was mostly pretty interesting, but he kept insisting that ‘sociologists’ were to blame for the mechanized, overly rationalized No Child Left Behind. Wa? He also complained about academics who use big words, like ‘hegemonic’ and ‘Hegelian.’ As one of my students told me afterwards, “He sure didn’t seem to have any qualms about ‘pedagogy!”‘ I’ve always thought that I’d like Kozol, and I admired his better instincts, but I was a little underwhelmed.
Other ‘classic’ social science books I need to read? Hmmm. I’m still hoping to get to Origin of the Species. (Interesting fact, maybe: Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess’ An Introduction to the Science of Sociology–the ‘Green Bible’–includes some real interesting gems, including Darwin. We’ll be reading essays of Darwin’s on Blushing and Emotions from there our theory class this semester. It’s nice to think of the very foundation of our discipline in the U.S. is a little more interesting that we think.) Others?
(As a postscript, mention of Kozol’s concerns over language sparked a fabulous discussion about Durkheim, education, and stratification in theory class yesterday. Sharp thoughts that tapped into all sorts of issues of race and power.)