Inventing the Ties That Bind

Inventing the Ties That Bind
Author: Francesca Polletta
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2020-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022673434X

At a time of deep political divisions, leaders have called on ordinary Americans to talk to one another: to share their stories, listen empathetically, and focus on what they have in common, not what makes them different. In Inventing the Ties that Bind, Francesca Polletta questions this popular solution for healing our rifts. Talking the way that friends do is not the same as equality, she points out. And initiatives that bring strangers together for friendly dialogue may provide fleeting experiences of intimacy, but do not supply the enduring ties that solidarity requires. But Polletta also studies how Americans cooperate outside such initiatives, in social movements, churches, unions, government, and in their everyday lives. She shows that they often act on behalf of people they see as neighbors, not friends, as allies, not intimates, and people with whom they have an imagined relationship, not a real one. To repair our fractured civic landscape, she argues, we should draw on the rich language of solidarity that Americans already have.

The Participant

The Participant
Author: Christopher M. Kelty
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-01-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022666676X

Participation is everywhere today. It has been formalized, measured, standardized, scaled up, network-enabled, and sent around the world. Platforms, algorithms, and software offer to make participation easier, but new technologies have had the opposite effect. We find ourselves suspicious of how participation extracts our data or monetizes our emotions, and the more procedural participation becomes, the more it seems to recede from our grasp. In this book, Christopher M. Kelty traces four stories of participation across the twentieth century, showing how they are part of a much longer-term problem in relation to the individual and collective experience of representative democracy. Kelty argues that in the last century or so, the power of participation has dwindled; over time, it has been formatted in ways that cramp and dwarf it, even as the drive to participate has spread to nearly every kind of human endeavor, all around the world. The Participant is a historical ethnography of the concept of participation, investigating how the concept has evolved into the form it takes today. It is a book that asks, “Why do we participate?” And sometimes, “Why do we refuse?”

Anonymous

Anonymous
Author: Thomas DeGloma
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2023-09-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022676513X

"In recent years, anonymity has rocked the political and social landscape. The examples are many: an anonymous whistleblower revealed a quid-pro-quo verbal promise made by Donald Trump to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, the hacker group Anonymous compromised more than 100 million Sony accounts, and the bestselling author Elena Ferrante insistently refused to reveal her real name and identity. In Anonymous, Thomas DeGloma sets out to provide a sociological theory that accounts for the many faces of anonymity, describing the social forces that give anonymity its unique power in our society. He asks a number of pressing questions about the social conditions and effects of anonymity: What is anonymity, and why, under various circumstances, do individuals act anonymously? How do individuals accomplish anonymity? How do they use it, and, in some situations, how is it imposed on them? What are the implications of anonymous actions, for various relationships, and for society in general, for better or for worse? To answer these questions, DeGloma tackles anonymity thematically, dedicating each chapter to a distinct type of anonymous action. These span what DeGloma calls protective anonymity (when anonymity allows people to take action that would be impossible or unsafe if their identity were known), subversive anonymity (when actors use anonymity to escape scrutiny or punishment, whether for liberatory or nefarious purposes), or ascribed anonymity (when people become effectively anonymous because their individual attributes are subsumed in a generic category such as racial typification). Ultimately, he uncovers how meanings are made and conveyed in anonymous interactions and situations, explores the ways that anonymity can be imposed on individuals in some relationships, and helps us better understand the consequences of anonymous performances and ascriptions of anonymity for all those involved"--

Fair Share

Fair Share
Author: Gary Alan Fine
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2023-01-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226823822

A deeply researched ethnographic portrait of progressive senior activists in Chicago who demonstrate how a tiny public wields collective power to advocate for broad social change. If you've ever been to a protest or been involved in a movement for social change, you have likely experienced a local culture, one with slogans, jargon, and shared commitments. Though one might think of a cohort of youthful organizers when imagining protest culture, this powerful ethnography from esteemed sociologist Gary Alan Fine explores the world of senior citizens on the front lines of progressive protests. While seniors are a notoriously important—and historically conservative—political cohort, the group Fine calls “Chicago Seniors Together” is a decidedly leftist organization, inspired by the model of Saul Alinsky. The group advocates for social issues, such as affordable housing and healthcare, that affect all sectors of society but take on a particular urgency in the lives of seniors. Seniors connect and mobilize around their distinct experiences but do so in service of concerns that extend beyond themselves. Not only do these seniors experience social issues as seniors—but they use their age as a dramatic visual in advocating for political change. In Fair Share, Fine brings readers into the vital world of an overlooked political group, describing how a “tiny public” mobilizes its demands for broad social change. In investigating this process, he shows that senior citizen activists are particularly savvy about using age to their advantage in social movements. After all, what could be more attention-grabbing than a group of passionate older people determinedly shuffling through snowy streets with canes, in wheelchairs, and holding walkers to demand healthcare equity, risking their own health in the process?

Pressed for Time

Pressed for Time
Author: Judy Wajcman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2015
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 022619647X

The technologically tethered, iPhone-addicted figure is an image we can easily conjure. Most of us complain that there aren't enough hours in the day and too many e-mails in our thumb-accessible inboxes. This widespread perception that life is faster than it used to be is now ingrained in our culture, and smartphones and the Internet are continually being blamed. But isn't the sole purpose of the smartphone to give us such quick access to people and information that we'll be free to do other things? Isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier? In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. She argues that we are not mere hostages to communication devices, and the sense of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set rather than the machines that help us set them. Indeed, being busy and having action-packed lives has become valorized by our productivity driven culture. Wajcman offers a bracing historical perspective, exploring the commodification of clock time, and how the speed of the industrial age became identified with progress. She also delves into the ways time-use differs for diverse groups in modern societies, showing how changes in work patterns, family arrangements, and parenting all affect time stress. Bringing together empirical research on time use and theoretical debates about dramatic digital developments, this accessible and engaging book will leave readers better versed in how to use technology to navigate life's fast lane.

A Place on the Corner, Second Edition

A Place on the Corner, Second Edition
Author: Elijah Anderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-05-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022677502X

This paperback edition of A Place on the Corner marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Elijah Anderson's sociological classic, a study of street corner life at a local barroom/liquor store located in the ghetto on Chicago's South Side. Anderson returned night after night, month after month, to gain a deeper understanding of the people he met, vividly depicting how they created—and recreated—their local stratification system. In addition, Anderson introduces key sociological concepts, including "the extended primary group" and "being down." The new preface and appendix in this edition expand on Anderson's original work, telling the intriguing story of how he went about his field work among the men who frequented Jelly's corner.

Power in Modernity

Power in Modernity
Author: Isaac Ariail Reed
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2020-03-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022668945X

In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination. Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money. He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity. Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?

Insurgent Communities

Insurgent Communities
Author: Sharon M. Quinsaat
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2024-03-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226831671

Sociologist Sharon M. Quinsaat sheds new light on the formation of diasporic connections through transnational protests. When people migrate and settle in other countries, do they automatically form a diaspora? In Insurgent Communities, Sharon M. Quinsaat explains the dynamic process through which a diaspora is strategically constructed. Quinsaat looks to Filipinos in the United States and the Netherlands—examining their resistance against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, their mobilization for migrants’ rights, and the construction of a collective memory of the Marcos regime—to argue that diasporas emerge through political activism. Social movements provide an essential space for addressing migrants’ diverse experiences and relationships with their homeland and its history. A significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of migration and social movements studies, Insurgent Communities illuminates how people develop collective identities in times of social upheaval.

Inventing Secularism

Inventing Secularism
Author: Ray Argyle
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-02-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476684219

Jailed for atheism and disowned by his family, George Jacob Holyoake came out of an English prison at the age of 25 determined to bring an end to religion's control over daily life. This first modern biography of the founder of Secularism describes a transformative figure whose controversial and conflict-filled life helped shape the modern world. Ever on the front lines of social reform, Holyoake was hailed for having won "the freedoms we take for granted today." With Secularism now under siege, George Holyoake's vision of a "virtuous society" rings today with renewed clarity.

Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Volume 2

Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Volume 2
Author: Steven Hitlin
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2023-10-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3031320220

This handbook articulates how sociology can re-engage its roots as the scientific study of human moral systems, actions, and interpretation. This second volume builds on the successful original volume published in 2010, which contributed to the initiation of a new section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), thus growing the field. This volume takes sociology back to its roots over a century ago, when morality was a central topic of work and governance. It engages scholars from across subfields in sociology, representing each section of the ASA, who each contribute a chapter on how their subfield connects to research on morality. This reference work appeals to broader readership than was envisaged for the first volume, as the relationship between sociology as a discipline and its origins in questions of morality is further renewed. The volume editors focus on three areas: the current state of the sociology of morality across a range of sociological subfields; taking a new look at some of the issues discussed in the first handbook, which are now relevant in sometimes completely new contexts; and reflecting on where the sociology of morality should go next. This is a must-read reference for students and scholars interested in topics of morality, ethics, altruism, religion, and spirituality from across the social science.