What motivates a lifelong scholarly pursuit, and how do one's studies inform life outside the academy? Sociologists, who live in families but also study families, who go to work but also study work, ...who participate in communities but also try to understand communities, have an especiallyintimate relation to their research. Growing up poor, struggling as a woman in a male-dominated profession, participating in protests against the Vietnam War; facts of life influence research agendas, individual understandings of the world, and ultimately the shape of the discipline as a whole.Barry Glassner and Rosanna Hertz asked twenty-two of America's most prominent sociologists to reflect upon how their personal lives influenced their research, and vice versa, how their research has influenced their lives. In this volume, the authors reveal with candor and discernment how worldevents, political commitments and unanticipated constraints influenced the course of their careers. They disclose how race, class, and gender proved to be pivotal elements in the course of their individual lives, and in how they carry out their research. Faced with academic institutions that did nothire or promote persons of their gender, race, sexual orientation, or physical disability, they invented new routes to success within their fields. Faced with disappointments in political organizations to which they were devoted, they found ways to integrate their disillusionment into their researchagendas. While some of the contributors radically changed their political commitments, and others saw more stability, none stood still.An intimate look at biography and craft, these snapshots provide a fascinating glimpse of the sociological life for colleagues, other academics, and aspiring young sociologists. The collection demonstrates how inequalities and injustices can be made into motors for
scholarly research, which in turnhave the power to change individual life courses and entire societies.
Politicians & consumer products manufacturers have learned to tap into the human fear mechanism to achieve their ends. These fear mongers use narrative techniques to overcome errors in reasoning by ...repeating the cause for fear, labeling isolated incidents as trends, & misdirecting the public's attention. These techniques are illustrated in the case of the public's fear of youth violence rising when juvenile crime was falling & in the current fear of terrorism. Other uncommon dangers that the media & politicians have blown into full-fledged fears are fire during surgery & child kidnapping. In a culture of fear, the state's coercive power increases. 3 References. M. Pflum
What motivates a lifelong scholarly pursuit, and how do one's studies inform life outside the academy? Sociologists, who live in families but also study families, who go to work but also study work, ...who participate in communities but also try to understand communities, have an especially intimate relation to their research. Growing up poor, struggling as a woman in a male-dominated profession, participating in protests against the Vietnam War; facts of life influence research agendas, individual understandings of the world, and ultimately the shape of the discipline as a whole. Barry Glassner and Rosanna Hertz asked twenty-two of America's most prominent sociologists to reflect upon how their personal lives influenced their research, and vice versa, how their research has influenced their lives. In this volume, the authors reveal with candor and discernment how world events, political commitments and unanticipated constraints influenced the course of their careers. They disclose how race, class, and gender proved to be pivotal elements in the course of their individual lives, and in how they carry out their research. Faced with academic institutions that did not hire or promote persons of their gender, race, sexual orientation, or physical disability, they invented new routes to success within their fields. Faced with disappointments in political organizations to which they were devoted, they found ways to integrate their disillusionment into their research agendas. While some of the contributors radically changed their political commitments, and others saw more stability, none stood still. An intimate look at biography and craft, these snapshots provide a fascinating glimpse of the sociological life for colleagues, other academics, and aspiring young sociologists. The collection demonstrates how inequalities and injustices can be made into motors for scholarly research, which in turn have the power to change individual life courses and entire societies.
The uses of ignorance Glassner, Barry
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
10/2015, Letnik:
62, Številka:
9
Journal Article, Trade Publication Article
"According to the Christian tradition," the president said, "grace is not earned. Consider these lines from the poet and environmental activist Wendell Berry, in his poem "The Peace of Wild Things": ...When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. .. ...my studying, I've concluded that some of the deepest and toughest learning occurs when we struggle with ways of understanding the world that are alien to us, with concepts and practices that we would rather brush aside.
Paradoxically, liberal-arts colleges and smaller research universities may be better positioned to bring about these sorts of changes than are their much larger counterparts, because on smaller ...campuses, faculty members tend to know a variety of colleagues outside their home departments.Being proficient at writing code or any other technical skill will take you only so far in an evolving labor market....a successful new approach to narrowly technical engineering is "whole brain" engineering, in which the curriculum integrates the elements of left-brain thinking — analysis, logic, synthesis and mathematics — with the kind of high-level right-brain thinking that fosters intuition, metaphorical thought, and creative problem-solving.
