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Tag Archive for ‘Audrey Sprenger’
The Nature of Cities
For me, good urban sociology reminds us that cities are small, intimate things that won’t be around forever. They might seem vast and tall and solid and permanent, but they’re not. Cities are living, breathing organic matter, like a flower… Read More ›
What Oprah’s Research Staff Failed To Inform Her About India
Note: This list was written as a quick response to Oprah Winfrey’s visit to and report on South Asia in the Summer of 2012. 1) Yes, it is customary in (most parts) of South Asia for people to eat with… Read More ›
Why Academic Sociology Does Not Deserve The Hatchet
Note: This list was written as a quick response to this post on Freakonomics, “Sociology and Political Science Deserve The Hatchet.” The photograph above is of one of the very first American sociologists, Anna Julia Cooper, who received her doctorate from… Read More ›
The Americans
The first Americans I ever met were Anna and Katie Klein, who, were the only kids in my grade two class at Queen Mary School in Peterborough, Ontario to have traveled to places like New England and New York and… Read More ›
One Story High
One Story High is a collection of very short sociological biographies I curated and edited for the on-line journal Fast Capitalism late in 2009, featuring the work of novelist and literary critic Amitava Kumar, anthropologist Katie Stewart and filmmaker John Cohen… Read More ›
The Facebook Project
* In my Introductory Sociology course, It’s Not Rocket Science, students create faux Facebook profiles of people who are their exact social opposite, then interact with one another for ten weeks, (as well as observe and analyze these interactions), finally… Read More ›
When Sociology Was Cool, 2
When Pete Seeger was sociology major at Harvard University, Thomas and Znaneicki’s The Polish Peasant had been published but Talcott Parson’s The Social System had not. Parsons was on the faculty, however, and so was Robert Merton, though they weren’t… Read More ›
A Biography Like A Match
The very best sociological biography I ever read was Kate Moses’ Wintering. In it, she takes Sylvia Plath’s collection of poetry Ariel and then re-orders each poem so they are laid out in the way Plath left them with/as her… Read More ›
The Traces We Leave Behind
For years I wrote about small communities of people who were not famous, but were, at least, breathing, that is, alive. Now I mostly write about one famous, (or, perhaps to some, infamous), man, who, though an internationally recognized, (not… Read More ›
Books Like Sociology
The idea of studying modern social problems in a methodical way emerges in the late 19th, early 20th century through the writings of scholars such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and especially, Emile Durkheim and W.E.B. Du Bois…. Read More ›
With Ten Dollars
I couldn’t have invented an ethnographic field site more perfect than the Winnipeg River. With Clark’s Corner at its center, it was every bit as iconic as William Foote Whyte’s Cornerville, Elliott Liebow’s Tally’s corner or Elijah Anderson’s a place… Read More ›
Bringing The People (Magazine) Back In
The American tabloid People Weekly was first published in 1974. Mia Farrow, who was starring as Daisy Buchanan in the film The Great Gatsby at the time, was its first cover girl, gazing vacantly out into the world, her hair… Read More ›
Mi Vida Sin Mi
Once, years ago, the man who lived in the apartment below mine committed suicide. The police came pounding on my door in the middle of night to ask questions: Did I know him? When was the last time I saw… Read More ›
American Cowboys Played By Girls
My two very favourite American Cowboys are Brandon Teena and Calamity Jane, who were, I realize, quite different from one another. Brandon, born Teena Renae Brandon in 1972, was a gas station attendant, petty thief and ladies’ man who spent… Read More ›
Boys Named Kip, Not Kim
There’s an episode of the American television show Seinfeld where Elaine has to hide from everyone the fact that she hated the Academy Award winning movie The English Patient. You can watch a clip from this episode here. For me,… Read More ›
Communities Are Social
Note: All the names in this story have been changed. But the photograph above gives a clue to the identity of one of the towns mentioned. No matter how hard we labor to make our homes more permanent, more stable,… Read More ›
The Solitude Trilogy
After he became heralded as one of the greatest pianists to ever play, Glenn Gould stopped performing live. Doing so just didn’t allow him to perfect the way he wanted to play like performing in a studio did, where he… Read More ›
Where New York Stops & Bombay Starts
Note: I went looking for Bombay in New York City last night inspired by Bombay V. New York, a brilliant on-going photo essay by Nisha Sondhe. An earlier It’s Not Rocket Science post on India is right here.
Paradise At Home
Dear Dr. Sprenger, Thank you so much for your article Home Goings on The Sociological Imagination. As a sociologist who left her home in West Virginia many years ago, I have always carried the feeling of being misplaced or unsettled…. Read More ›
Home Goings
So entrenched in our most intimate yearnings, home often seems as if it were some universal truth, like it says in all those sayings, home is where the heart is, home is where you hang your hat, you would be… Read More ›
The Opposite of Crush
Once, in my Introductory Sociology course, I gave a lecture about social oppression. It was fairly abstract. I didn’t talk about any specific kind of social oppression, like gender oppression or racial oppression or sexual oppression. I just talked about… Read More ›
Living Above The Martinis
For a year I lived above a pizza parlor, just like the sociologist William Foote Whyte did in 1936, the year he was doing field research for what would later become his famous urban ethnography, Street Corner Society. And every… Read More ›
Three Truths & A Lie
I was never really very good at that game Three Truths and a Lie, the one where (when you’re a slumber party or living in a dorm) you’re supposed to tell four things about yourself, three true, one untrue and… Read More ›
White Western Extra
When I was twenty-one I moved to India for what was supposed to be a year, but I ended up staying much longer. For a while I lived in the seacoast town of Vishakapatnam, sometimes called Vizag, where herds of… Read More ›
When Sociology Was Cool
I got my doctorate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the exact same place C. Wright Mills got his doctorate in sociology. I know this because we shared some of the same professors there and, even more importantly, because… Read More ›