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Massey, Douglas. 1985. "Ethnic Residential Segregation: A Theoretical Synthesis and Empirical Review." Sociology and Social Research 69:315-50.
Abstract:
"This review examines research on ethnic residential segregation in the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Europe, and Israel. It evaluates a theory based on principles of classic human ecology, social area analysis, and factorial ecology. The theory contains six core hypotheses conditioned on four structural characteristics, and was developed to take account of recent research findings. Empirical results from the six countries support the theory. The similarity of segregation patterns suggests the operation of common processes of ethnic concentration and dispersal, which are well-summarized by the ecological model." (EXCERPT)
| Title: | Sociology and social research. |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Los Angeles : University of Southern California, 1927-1992. |
| Description: | Entry Not Found |
| 65 v. : ill. ; 22-24 cm. | |
| Formed by the union of: | Journal of applied sociology |
| Bulletin of social research | |
| LC Subject(s): | Sociology --Periodicals. |
| Social problems --Periodicals. | |
| Social service --Periodicals. | |
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| td { font-family: Arial,sans-serif; }Location: | Van Pelt Library |
| Call Number: | HM1 .S75 |
| Library Has: | v.12 (1927)-v.76 (1991/1992) |
| Notes: | Not currently received. |
-from EBSCO MegaFILE
Holdings: Feb 1995-Nov 1996
Is TV violence all that bad for kids? The Age (Melbourne, Australia), March 5, 2005 Saturday, INSIGHT; Opinion; Pg. 9, 816 words, HUGH MACKAY LexisNexis Academic 9 Apr. 2008
This article is a response to a report from The Weekend Australian that asserts a child’s witnessing of violence in media will result in higher levels of aggression. Writer Hugh Mackay refers to a 1960’s American child-psychology experiment which consisted of observing the different ways children would play with a particular object after they watched different videos, ones that either showed children playing peacefully with that toy or children punching and kicking it. The findings were that those who watched a violent video would treat the toy violently, and those who watched the peaceful video would treat the toy peacefully. Mackay makes sure to point out that although the children would emulate the behavior, it has been concluded that the effects are only short-term, and that all long-term personalities remain virtually unchanged. Furthermore, he declares that the search for variables which might shed light on a child’s increased or decreased susceptibility toward emulating violence in the media result only in negligible data that cannot give any indication of why a particular child would be acting more or less violent than any other one. Mackay’s overall point is that although these experiments may show children in the act of emulating violence on television, all large-scale national crime statistics show that the introduction of television into the societies of decades past resulted in severe drops in crime, and that the age-group which watches the least amount of television today commits the highest amount of violent crime. In short, what a child views in movies or videogames has far less positive or negative impact on his personality than the benefits of extensive human interaction, or the dangers of lazy, television-filled inactivity.
This article is worth factoring into the discussion of Natural Born Killer’s potential effect on inspiring three young couples to committing separate violent murders in Europe and America, all after their viewing (and in one case, repeated viewing) of the 1994 film. Although accusations were made that the filmmakers and producers were responsible, hardly evidence has been found to support them. Mackay also says that at the time of his writing the article in 2005, the violent crime rate in America had been in steady decline for the last 10 years – which would mean the trend began in 1995, one year after Natural Born Killers was released. If violence in the media could truly influence people to emulate the brutality on screen, Natural Born Killers would surely qualify for those results, considering the rare intensity of bloodshed that is present throughout the whole movie. And considering it grossed 11 million dollars in the first weekend, and over 50 million dollars to date, enough people have seen the movie that we can say if there was a slight rise in a person’s aggressive tendencies after watching the movie, no matter how slight, the accumulation across the country would certainly be noticeable.
The relevance of this article has to do with the controversy surrounding Natural Born Killers, over what impacts a film of such incredible violence (coupled with its themes of glorifying such acts) can – and has – and will – have on the societies of its viewers. Boyle draws on three specific cases of murderous love-duos that occured after the films release. Edmonson-Darras, Rey-Maupin, and Herbert-Paindavoine were all young couples tried for committing horrendous murders as pairs, and all three couples admitted to having been influenced by Natural Born Killers, further adding to the intense question of how acts of brutality we see in the media are linked to real-world violence.
Girls with Guns: Narrating the Experience of War of Frelimo's "Female Detachment" Harry G. West Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 4, Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa, Part 2 (Oct., 2000), pp. 180-194 Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
West’s article about Female Detachments fighting for Mozambique’s independence from Portuguese colonialism (a war that lasted from the late-70’s to the mid-90’s) sheds light on differing psychological states of those who lead lives of violence in situations as extreme as risking one’s own life to kill others.
West himself admits he had expected to hear or observe that the women and children who lived through these ages of dramatic social changes (which were results from the consequences of colonial conquest, anti-colonial insurgency and post independent governance) would be permanently scarred from the trauma of war. This was not the case. The Female Detachments he met were proud of their service, never claiming to have ever felt scarred or vulnerable. Among the male militias, the women were not quite equal to the male soldiers, but they reported feeling empowered by the men when they were given space to carry out their own attacks. The women also claimed it felt important to participate in the war rather than having to stay trapped in their homes carrying out agricultural work.
These observations have a lot of resemblances to Mallory’s character from Natural Born Killers. West attributes the Female Detachments’ mental strength in terms of rising above trauma and suffering to their ideology and beliefs, which relates to Mallory’s ability to carry out her actions under the shade of Mickey’s philosophical indifference to death and murder. Following that relationship, the organization which the Female Detachments fought for, FRELIMO, was a forceful and dangerous group which might have been viewed as the stronger counterpart of the two genders’ militias (if they were closer aligned). As West writes of the Female Detachments, “Respect for and fear of FRELIMO were inseparable … they had no option but to comply with their ‘requests.” And after completing training, their loyalty would always be tested by FRELIMO, who would compel them to certain dangerous missions. Although Mallory is happy to carry out her side of the murders, perhaps she is much more inclined to do when she sees how much it pleases Mickey. Another similarity between Mallory and the Female Detachments is drawn from West’s account of interviewing one of the soldiers with a tape recorder: he never needed to ask a second question, the interviewee was so relieved to be telling her whole story that she never stopped. The idea of telling one’s story, and to have one’s own life of danger and violence be the focus of an interview, is one of the central themes we see in Natural Born Killers.
Timothy P. Rouse “Natural Born Killers” Teaching Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 4, (Oct., 1995), pp. 433-434 American Sociological Association Jstor 9 Apr. 2008
Timothy Rouse’s sociologically oriented review is a neat, swift map of all the great themes waiting to be found, analyzed and discussed in Natural Born Killers. He quickly places the film into the category of the postmodern, quoting Todd Gitlin’s definition of it as “a constellation of styles and tones,” but doesn’t dwell on the issue in order to carry on with his review. He doesn’t bog down his reader with lengthy personal musings or painstaking passages in search of the most perfect way to express himself, instead he explains the scope of the themes he witnessed by merely mentioning the their variety, such as Jimmy Olsen from Superman comics and the American media’s complete disregard for Native American societal conditions, and suggests what parts of the film should be compared to what examples from other areas of academics, for us to contemplate, and moves on: the economic aspect of the film, he says, should be compared to that of the Wizard of Oz, wherein the studio makes sure the driving theme of the genre is the driving theme of its profits: for the Wizard of Oz, fairytales; for Natural Born Killers, brutal action. Half of this short review is Rouse’s own narration of a few scenes from the movie, where he ties together the violent elements of Mickey’s character with the seductiveness of Mallory’s image, and then demonstrates with simplicity the backdrop of the drooling media goon and frenetic prison ward, all the while continually giving credit to Oliver Stone’s filmmaking techniques by picking out a detail of a shot, or a moment of composition, and openly relating what that single trait meant to him as an appreciative viewer.
Rouse is extremely open-minded in his appraisal, acknowledging the need for disclaimers from teachers before showing Natural Born Killers to classes but also immediately looking past the surface of what, for some, may appear to be mindless violence, unnecessary sex and tasteless gore that negatively affects the viewer. The review ends with a list of questions which provide topics of discussion for other classes and seminars almost by the line, all of which breakdown the elements of the film into clear issues with cues for the discussion’s beginning, such as the physical attractiveness of our cinema’s violent heroes, the American media’s blurry distinction between news and entertainment, the effect that uncertainty brings on crime levels and criminal mentalities, the media’s impact on culture and the role of gender in violent media.
Tolich, Martin. “Bringing Sociological Concepts into Focus in the Classroom with Modern Times, Roger and Me, and Annie Hall.” Teaching Sociology, Vol. 20, No.4. (Oct, 1992), pp. 344-347.
Tolich’s article is a type of university lesson plan involving the use of Annie Hall. A sociology professor at Massey University in New Zealand, Tolich utilizes sociologically-relevant films to provide more stimulating lessons for his students. Among the three films he chooses is Annie Hall. It allows for the students to retain a deeper understanding of sociological analysis, because film is a medium with which they more easily connect. Tolich argues that Annie Hall is pertinent in teaching many subjects, in that it strongly relates to many different aspects of today’s society. The author specifically uses Annie Hall to demonstrate an early component of romantic relationships: the pickup. Utilizing the scene in which Alvy Singer and Annie Hall first meet at a tennis club in New York City, Tolich describes, in detail, the steps a person must follow to successfully persuade another person to spend further time with him on a more intimate level. Tolich mentions every detail of the scene, displaying how Alvy and Annie engage in a perfect pickup scenario, which eventually leads to the initial phases of their romantic relationship. The article’s argument concerning the theme of the pickup more generally demonstrates the types of sociological components which exist in film and how, if created successfully, they can communicate sociological themes to students.
This work is relevant to Annie Hall because it makes a strong case for the film’s sociological elements and its ability to communicate to people on a broader scale. The use of the example of Annie and Alvy’s initial interaction makes Tolich’s argument even more pertinent, for it successfully expresses how very relatable the characters are to the everyday audience member. The article supports Annie Hall as an extremely relevant commentary on the world and the ups and downs of relationships between individuals.
Call#: Van Pelt Library HQ2044.U6 L56 2006
Call#: Van Pelt Library GE170 .F52 2000
Call#: Van Pelt Library GE195 .E588 2005
The Politics of Play is a collaborative workshop inviting artists, sociologists, designers, game designers, urban planners... PEOPLE to come together in an expedition. The purpose of this journey is to foster collaborative networks in the city through the medium of play.
The workshop will take the form of an exchange and collective learning experience divided into 3 parts; research, experimentation and implementation.
Play can offer a common ground for people to meet and exchange.
Almost everyone can play a game. The term "playing around" infers impermanence or a format for a deferred stance on an issue which offers up a way to let down ones guard. Often times this provides a sense of freedom that cannot be found in a sanctioned panel discussion, meeting or class room. Far more than humor, there is the play of ideas, the playfulness of free experimentation, the playfulness of free association and the play of paradigm shifting that are as common to scientific experiment as to pranks.
The Politics of Play is a workshop conceived by Amy Franceschini and Myriel Milicevic. The workshop serves as a plaform for research; sociological, urban studies, and game theory. The workshop was premiered at Mal au Pixel in Paris in April 2006.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716204266833
© 2004 American Academy of Political & Social Science
The Cosmopolitan Canopy
Elijah Anderson
University of Pennsylvania
The public spaces of the city are more racially, ethnically, and socially diverse than ever. Social distance and tension as expressed by wariness of strangers appear to be the order of the day. But the "cosmopolitan canopy" offers a respite and an opportunity for diverse peoples to come together to do their business and also to engage in "folk ethnography" that serves as a cognitive and cultural base on which people construct behavior in public.
Key Words: urban ethnography • cities • public space • race relations
Call#: Van Pelt Library HN80.C5 W55 2006
SOCI 643-001 SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
This is an Advanced level graduate seminar where we will review contemporary research on social stratification and mobility. We will examine empirical and theoretical studies not only in the U.S. but also in other countries to address how the pattern of social stratification varies across societies and over time. The main topics to be discussed are family processes and stratification. We will also examine studies that address how national contexts mediate social stratification. Advanced undergraduate students will be admitted with permission.
W 9-12 PARK
Wartenberg argues that the filmmaker and audience often see past the initial estimation of unlikeliness because they understand that the two love each other or share a bond, despite apparent obstacles and violations of what is socially acceptable. In this way, the pairing of an unlikely couple, for Wartenberg, can function as a vehicle for social critique. In their plotlines, the films find a way to negotiate whatever social barrier might be separating them, and during these 90 or so minutes, the audience develops a sympathy for both the individual couple and their situation. Even a small detail can elicit this effect. At the end of Some Like It Hot, for instance, when Lemmon's character reveals he is actually a man, Brown's character shrugs it off and says, "Nobody's perfect." Though this is a meant to get laughs from the audience, Wartenberg also argues that it will cause them to think about why they're laughing, thus subverting societal norms.
Wartenberg acknowledges that these films don't present themselves as "vehicles for serious social analysis," but he rejects the common conviction that films are superficial and reinforce dominant social beliefs. He concedes that sometimes in fighting certain stereotypes, films falter by including other stereotypes.
Sabrina is not mentioned in Wartenberg's analysis, but fits in neatly as a romance spanning the upper and lower class. The lower class Sabrina surprises high society when she gets involved with the upper class Larrabee brothers, and this plotline works the subvert and undo the stronghold of class barriers in 1950s society. Though seemingly rigid structures might keep a couple apart, Hollywood implicitly approved of and endorsed this unlikely pairing.
Burton, Emory C. "Sociology and the Feature Film". Teaching Sociology, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Jul., 1988): 263-271.
This article focuses on film and it use as an educational tool within the context of a sociology classroom. The article is meant to be informative and instructional for sociology professors specifically, however it offers insight as to how film can have a great impact on students and how it can teach said student sociological subjects. Emory Burton, the author of the article, bases his statements on the research carried out by numerous sociologists. This research supports the claim that movies are effective teaching tools because they allow viewers to vicariously experience the life or hardships of characters from different times, classes, and of different circumstances. Vivre Sa Vie is a film that presents a sociological issue and it is meant to stimulate serious thought and reflection within the viewer on a real life social problem. In that sense, this article relates directly to the film, because it discusses how film has been shown to be effective in stimulating such thought. Godard's film attempts to present the reality of a social issue in an intellectual manner in order to encourage critical thought.
In this article, Dowd and Pallotta offer a sociological perspective on the movie genre of romantic comedies. Cultural ideals of romance, they say, have changed throughout time, and the changes of the 20th century can be analyzed through movies. Movies are imbedded with cultural scripts that reflect the social norms of various ages. Dowd and Pallotta aim to complete a systematic analysis of romantic comedies, and to do so, they set strict definitions for what would constitute such a movie, leaving out movies that were no longer available, movies that featured romance only as a side plot, movies that mixed genres, and more. After using their definitions to rule out all inapplicable films, they ends up 182 films that qualified, all made between 1930 and 1999. Though not individually analyzed, Sabrina was included in this group of films, thus contributing to the analysis as a whole.
Because this article takes a methodological approach, it is not very accessible for the average film scholar. It also talks about trends as a whole, leaving out the detailed scene analyses that those interested in films often enjoy. But the article does a good job of trying to examine what the medium of film might have to say about our culture, and its strength lies in its ability to offer empirical evidence of trends, such as an explosion of romantic comedies in the 1990s, as opposed to individual examples. In this way, we can look at the trends of particular decades. When Sabrina was released, in the 1950s, for example, romantic drama was more popular than romantic comedy, a reversal of what is currently true. Other subsets that are popular now, such as teen romances or romances that feature supernatural elements (like 1990's Ghost), were nearly nonexistent in the 1950s.
The study also found that cultural conditions have effectively killed many formerly popular plotlines of romance movies. Couples in different classes, for example, no longer offer a "convincing dramatic impediment." Movies that feature these aging romantic conventions," then, can only remain popular today as "relics of an earlier era." This statement serves to justify Sabrina's ongoing popularity despite its perhaps hard-to-swallow plotline. All in all, romantic films, even the current ones, do continue to reinforce some of the more conservative romantic tendencies in our culture, namely the importance of marriage and fidelity, and this has not changed since the days when Sabrina was released.
Title: MY CROWD - Or, Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob
Authors: Wasik, Bill
Source: Harper's Magazine; Mar2006, Vol. 312 Issue 1870, p56-66, 11p
Abstract: The article focuses on a study which examined the behavior of a flash mob. Flash mob, as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, is a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again. The basic hypothesis behind the Mob Project include seeing how all culture in New York was demonstrably commingled with scenesterism, the appeal of concerts and plays and readings and gallery shows.
PDF/text available
Despite the fact that it was originally printed in 1987, Rice and Love's essay still provides interesting theoretical material about computer-mediated communication (CMC) in that it seeks to dispel myths that all computer-based communication is unemotional by nature and lack of bandwidth. Among socioemotional content found, they discuss face-saving mechanisms, disinhibition, and "flaming". They created 5 hypotheses about socioemotional content to be measured in the datasets of six weeks of transcripts from the Medsig/Compuserv public computer conference in order to attempt to prove their thesis that CMC over computer networks mirrors participation in real-world communities. While this study does not differentiate variables according to gender, it was interesting to me to read their conclusions that the participants did particpate in socioemotional discourse, although there was no increase in the amount of such discourse over time. I think that if the study were moved to a non-technical forum and increased in physical time length, that the results seen might be very different and more informative.
Gefen and Ridings, both local Philadelphia scholars, begin by recapping women's and men's sociolinguistic patterns of discourse as prior discussed in the literature. They hypothesize that women, more than men, will wish to both receive support from and give support to a virtual community in which they are participating. In addition, they hypothesize that such support will influence women's assessment of the quality of that virtual community, and that women will more constantly than men rate their virtual community as having higher quality. They surveyed 39 discussion boards, which they divided into men's, women's, and mixed boards. As to be expected, women more than men were found to go to discussion boards for support. One of the interesting results they found is that the men surveyed also sought rapport and support, but did so more often in men's-only communities, presumably where an expectation of common language would be held, and did not rate them lower in quality, even though rapport-seeking can be considered as indicating inferior social status among men according to past sociolinguistic studies. When the men did seek rapport in mixed-gender groups, it did not affect their assessment of the board's quality because there was an expectation of rapport-seeking inherent in the mixed-gender environment, since women were present and rapport-seeking is a characteristic of women's speech. The authors admit that even as they tried to control for gender-bias in the chosen bulletin boards, that some of the communities were specifically support/rapport based (eg. cancer support) and that may have skewed the data towards women's speech and away from men's speech.
PDF/full text available
Winter and Huff's study focuses on a 1996 survey of a women's only online bulletin board for computer scientists called SYSTERS. Although the study is 9 years old, it still brings voice to women who were previously marginalized as gender minorities in their field of work/study. The authors discuss the issue of same-gender boards being both "havens" and "ghettos" for women online, and also provide some support for Cass Sunstein's theory that the internet allows for the consolidation of like opinions - both positive and negative, as in the case of women's forums and online sexual harassment, respectively. Based upon their work, the authors felt that the differences between the genders in online communication was equal or magnified to that present in speech.
Shade's research, although not linguistic in nature, is useful to provide a background into women's roles in constructing the Internet. She begins by reviewing research on gendered uses of various communications technologies, including the telephone, radio, and television. She discusses cyberactivism and feminism, as well as public policy determining women's access to the internet. She cites a case study of women in China and internet access implementation and concludes with a discussion of whether women are merely consumers targeted by merchants or active citizens in an online sisterhood (discussions that we have held in class as well).