Posts Tagged sociology

Praise for ‘The Wire’

May 6, 2008 at 3:48 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , ,

After reading a post on Savage Minds about how HBO’s The Wire might be ‘our best ethnographic text on the U.S. today’ I decided to check it out. I don’t typically watch TV let alone TV series, with the exception of a few choice shows, but I must say: The Wire is a masterpiece. It’s ability to weave such an intricate plot, be entertaining, and still accurately represent the reality of urban life and structural power is simply amazing. It’s refreshing to find a show crafted with such awareness and attention to detail (for example, the writers use a lot of contemporary slang, much of which is unique to the city of Baltimore, to enhance the shows realism).

I just started season 2 yesterday. Season 1 mostly focused on the Baltimore drug trade and black urban life (additionally, it seems that institutional bureaucracy, from the various police precincts to the catholic church is a common theme running throughout the entire show). Season 2 so far is focusing more on white urban life, in specific the lives of dock workers struggling to keep their jobs at one of the city’s deteriorating ports. To be honest, I found it hard to get into The Wire when I initially started watching it. The show is at times slow and methodical, building characters and situations in such a way as to heighten its realism. If you come from a habit of watching other more sensational shows like Nip/Tuck or CSI, it may take a few episodes to settle in – but it’s worth it. I wish I would have known about the show sooner. Coming from an anthropological perspective, it employs many of the themes common in Anthropology, such as Bourdieu’s various notions of capital and symbolic violence. The representation of structural power portrayed in many of the characters’ struggles with the various institutions within which they find themselves embedded is genuinely educational. I agree with many of the comments over @ Savage Minds that The Wire would be a nice addition to a course related to these themes (i.e. Anthropology, Sociology, etc).

It’s easy to see why many critics have claimed The Wire is the best TV series of all time. It’s a shame such a great show went under my radar for so long!

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Cultural capital, resumes, and social interaction

April 25, 2008 at 2:41 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

I’ve spent most of today hashing out a resume for a potential job offer. From a list of achievements and relevant experience I made a while back, I constructed a one page textual representation of all the recognized cultural capital I’ve acquired over the years. Resumes have always been funny to me; why can’t you just give an interested employer a list of relevant experiences, activities, etc. and call it good? Why must there be such a science to creating a resume. I mean, I spent 30 minutes today talking to a campus employee whose sole job is to critique and give advice on constructing resumes and an hour or so more making sure my resume was juuuuust right. Do employers really care if your margins are off, if you write in complete sentences, or if you don’t use action verbs? Has anyone ever been given justification on why this is so? In addition to getting advice on my resume, I was also given an interview guide. I skimmed through it while walking home from campus figuring I might learn a thing or two. I was astonished by how precise the guide was with regard to behavior during an interview. It read as if it were some esoteric text revealing the all-powerful secrets of influencing employers in order to get the job you want. But aren’t the “secrets” known by everyone, thus rendering them no longer secrets? I read somewhere a while back, maybe in a Goffman text, that when you recognize and subsequently verbalize the structure of social interaction, it breaks down. What I took this to mean was that social interaction hides behind a degree of intuition and its best to keep it that way lest you botch the whole thing. It’s difficult, however, when you study anthropology as I do (or sociology) and your “job” is to analyze and pick apart these things; it can lead to some awkward social encounters! Eventually you learn (or at least I did) to keep your opinions inside in order to preserve the interaction. You turn yourself over to intuition and “feel” rather than “think” things out. Is this what we do in interviews and other strict social interactions? Do we all recognize the structure but choose to temporarily ignore it in order to preserve the interaction? I have an interview next Thursday… wish me luck on not over-analyzing the situation! ;-)

Just some Thursday evening thoughts….

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Teachers embracing technology

April 1, 2008 at 6:34 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

In contrast with my previous post, today has actually been a refreshing day regarding pedagogy. I’ve been asked to help a sociology professor here on campus set up a blog and a netvibes universe for the students in her class. I just spent an hour or so in her office going over the various aspects of blogging and netvibes, showing her how to use them and all that jazz. I’m excited to see how her students take on creating their own blog. We did it in Digital Ethnography and it proved to be a very effective teaching tool, not to mention it gave the students an opportunity to really collaborate outside the classroom (OMG! Students work outside the classroom?!…. I know, right?). In her class, the students are split into groups and are supposed to research the various roles of women in different parts of the world (I think? She hasn’t given me a lot of detail quite yet). Does anyone have advice for her/me that might make this work a little better? She was open to my suggestion that she might want to slightly modify her approach to the class so instead of turning in assignments to her on paper, students can just post them to the blog.

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