Tags: culture, education, science/technology, social mvmts/social change/resistance, cultural lag, material culture, nonmaterial culture, popular culture, social change, symbolic culture, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 1993
Length: 3:32
Access: YouTube

Summary: In 1993 and 1994, AT&T released a series of commercials depicting a host of cutting edge technologies. In one commercial a man relaxes on a beach holding what appears to be a tablet computer: "Have you ever sent a fax from the beach?" comes the voiceover. "You will." This ad campaign might be useful for instructors seeking to illustrate the distinction between two aspects of any culture: material and nonmaterial. Nonmaterial culture refers to things like values, norms, and social roles, while material culture refers to the physical artifacts of a culture and typically includes the sorts of things people can touch. When a person asserts that hamburgers are a part of American culture, they are really referring to material culture. Tablets and cell phones too are manifestations of material culture. Most of the twenty or so innovative products depicted in AT&T's "You will" ad campaign have long since faded into the vast tableau of consumers' technologically augmented lives, but with the benefit of hindsight, it's possible to draw on the commercials to reflect on how technology has changed the lives of average people. To put it differently, how do changes in material culture give rise to changes in nonmaterial culture? For instance, to the extent that technological advances are driving the growth of massive open online courses (MOOCs), what kinds of changes in the nonmaterial aspects of higher education will likely follow suit? How are the norms, values, and roles usually associated with educational institutions being permanently altered? Finally, while it may seem apparent that technological changes in material culture drive changes in nonmaterial culture, is the reverse ever true? Do changes in norms, values, and roles give rise to changes in technology?

Submitted By: Steven Dashiell

Tags: education, inequality, knowledge, race/ethnicity, meritocracy, standardized testing, 21 to 60 mins
Year: 1999
Length: 60:00
Access: no online access; transcript

Summary: This PBS Frontline documentary is an excellent compliment to any classroom discussion on the sociology of education, inequality, and presumed notions of American meritocracy; specifically, the film would pair well with Mickelson and Smith's article, "Can Education Eliminate Race, Class, and Gender Inequality?" The film's website provides the following synopsis: "Just days before hundreds of thousands of high school students take the SAT--a three-hour college entrance exam that tests verbal and math skills--FRONTLINE's Secrets of the SAT examines the national obsession over the SAT and the controversy over its fairness, reliability and impact on racial diversity on campus. This report draws on the work of Nicholas Lemann and his five-year study of the SAT--The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocacy. Lemann discusses the origins of the SAT, the idea of an American meritocracy (an idea that goes back to correspondance between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams), and how the SAT today has become a ticket into America's ruling class. To discover just how important SAT scores are to a student's future, FRONTLINE looks at the booming test prep business which offers test preparation courses for students as young as 13 and 14. FRONTLINE's cameras also follow seven students who are applying to the University of California, Berkeley, the country's most selective public university, and go inside the admissions process at Berkeley where those seven students are competing with 31,000 others for 3,500 spots. Berkeley's director of admissions, Bob Laird, explains how Berkeley is shifting away from test numbers and towards a more rounded evaluation of applicants. However, since California's Proposition 209 was passed in 1996, the university cannot consider race in the admissions process. Consequently, the numbers of minority students who get into Berkeley has dropped sharply because black and Hispanic students test scores are 100-200 points lower than whites and Asians. How then can Berkeley encourage diversity on its campus without violating the law? FRONTLINE explores the debate over race sensitive admission policies in interviews with Derek Bok and William Bowen, former presidents, respectively, of Harvard and Princeton University, who conducted a 30-year study of race sensitive admission policies which shows their positive effect. FRONTLINE also interviews educators John Yoo and Abigail Thernstrom who argue for race neutral admissions. Secrets of the SAT also takes a closer look at the black-white test score gap which though large, eludes easy explanation. Psychology professor Claude Steele at Stanford University explains how his research may partly explain the disparity. His studies focused on the way good students do poorly on tests because they suffer from negative stereotypes about their abilities. And then there is the issue of what exactly does the SAT measure and, does it correlate with I.Q.? Test prep experts John Katzman, founder of Princeton Review and Jonathan Grayer, head of Kaplan Educational Centers, as well as law professor Lani Guinier, analyze and debate the reliability of standardized tests like the SAT and their predictive ability for success later in life. And Robert Sternberg, a researcher on human intelligence, argues for broadening the definition of intelligence and creating new tools to measure it. This report ends with news on which of the seven students FRONTLINE followed won admission to Berkeley. Did some of these students' low SAT scores affect Berkeley's decision to admit them or not?" The film's website provides additional resources, including a teacher's guide and information for how to purchase the film. You can also see if the film is available at your local or university library.

I would like to thank Dr. Linda Moghadam for suggesting this video.

Submitted By: Valerie Chepp

Tags: crime/law/deviance, education, gender, inequality, organizations/occupations/work, comedy, sexual harassment, workplace ethics, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2009
Length: 4:42
Access: YouTube 

Summary: This comedy skit from Madtv depicts a group of employees receiving a lesson around sexual harassment awareness. When one employee does not understand the concept of what sexual harassment entails, he articulates several commonplace statements frequently used to justify or diminish the seriousness of sexual harassment in the workplace. Such statements include notions around women not knowing "how to take a compliment" and "over-reacting" (or, as he says, "flying off the handle"). He also suggests that men are simply trying to "boost women's spirits" through compliments or that sometimes men "accidentally" touch women inappropriately. The workshop facilitator, increasingly frustrated, highlights the ways in which sexual harassment, though sometimes difficult to articulate through words (and, by extension, rules and policies), can come into sharper focus when experienced firsthand. In addition to illustrating basic concepts around what sexual harassment entails, this clip offers a nice launching pad for a discussion of what sexual harassment feels like (and why this feeling or interactional dynamic might be challenging to sufficiently codify into rules and policies).

Submitted By: J. Deluna, L. Teniente, R. Nuñez

 

Tags: children/youth, class, education, inequality, race/ethnicity, subtitles/CC, 21 to 60 mins
Year: 2010
Length: 26:54
Access: ERASE Racism 

Summary: ERASE Racism’s documentary, A Tale of Two Schools: Race and Education on Long Island, follows David and Owen, two African American teenagers during their senior year of high school. Even though the students have a lot in common, they go to very different schools. This documentary does a great job of concisely spotlighting the differences and the results of structural educational disparities. Through this film, students will see how race and class are large determining factors in how public schools are funded and what that means for the students who attend those schools. This video would pair well with a Jonathan Kozol reading or "Why Segregation Matters" by Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee. Check out ERASE Racism's website for additional resources related to the film. Note: the available subtitles are in Spanish.

Submitted By: Kendra Barber

Tags: capitalism, class, economic sociology, education, inequality, intergenerational mobility, intragenerational mobility, occupy wall street, ows, social mobility, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2011
Length: 3:09
Access: YouTube

Summary:  In this short news clip, journalist Fareed Zakaria discusses what he believes to be Occupy Wall Street's core criticism. Noting that the United States has long had greater levels of inequality than many other nations, he argues that inequality can't be the sole catalyst for the protests. Instead, he thinks the movement was born from the sinking realization that it is increasingly difficult to move up the social mobility ladder and that Americans generally put up with inequality because they believe they can change their own class status. Zakaria points to a Time magazine article written by Rana Foroohar, which explores empirical evidence about social mobility in the United States. In terms of intragenerational mobility, Foroohar notes that if you were born in 1970 in the bottom 20% of our socioeconomic spectrum, you have a 17% chance of making it into the upper 40% of the spectrum. Turning to intergenerational mobility, nearly half of men whose fathers were in the bottom 20% of the socioeconomic spectrum, remained in the bottom 20%. In comparison to Denmark and Sweden, only a quarter of men remained in the bottom 20% of the spectrum, leading to the uncomfortable conclusion that the American dream is really only alive and well in Europe. The antidote to this crisis, as Zakaria argues, is improved education, and he tackles the argument in greater detail in a special he hosts called Fixing Education. The clip works nicely as an introduction to the topic of social mobility, but also as a vivid example of how empirical observation can powerfully expose the myths, which buttress American exceptionalism and ultimately perpetuate American inequality. It also dovetails nicely with Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz's new book, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Society Endangers Our Future, where he argues that the Horatio Alger rags-to riches story is no longer a reality for Americans.

Submitted By: Lester Andrist

Tags: children/youth, education, media, science/technology, social problems, subtitles/CC, 61+ mins
Year: 2009
Length: 90:00
Access: Frontline

Summary: This PBS special challenges the advertising image of technology as always "progress" or a "solution" to contemporary problems. Instead, this series of short topics highlights how technology has actually created a whole host of its own social problems related to digital over-saturation. This video is paired well with Kenneth Gergen's "The Saturated Self," or other readings that deal with how technology has changed our daily lives in very powerful ways. It can also be used to encourage students to disconnect when reading or writing for classes in that the video presents research that indicates that multitasking makes us dumber. I have found that students have strong (often defensive) reactions to this video, so I also make time for classroom discussion, or I assign a reaction paper.
 
Submitted By: Michelle Smirnova

Tags: economic sociology, education, gender, inequality, methodology/statistics, violence, data visualization, stratification, 06 to 10 mins
Year: 2011
Length: 6:36
Access: YouTube

Summary: This clip utilizes data visualization techniques to present data from the Women's Economic Opportunity Index, a measure constructed (and 150-page report published) by the Economist Intelligence Unit, an in-house research unit for The Economist. Detailed storyboards present data on women's economic status from 113 countries across the globe, including information on education, equal pay for equal work, the relationship between gender violence and earnings, paid maternity leave, and the discrepancies between legislation and enforcement around laws aimed at promoting women's economic opportunities. Viewers might be especially surprised to learn that, of the 113 countries analyzed, the United States lags behind is Western counterparts on many measures, and is currently the only country out of the 113 that does not offer some kind of mandatory paid maternity leave for women. While this concise 6-minute clip would be great to show in a class on gender and global economics, inequality, education, and/or violence against women, the density and pace of the information presented also makes this clip ideal to incorporate in a take-home assignment, where students can have time to re-watch the presentation and process the information. For another clip on The Sociological Cinema that uses data visualization techniques, click here.

Submitted By: Lindsey Baker

Tags:  education, government/the state, historical sociology, knowledge, nationalism, political economy, war/military, activism, empire, howard zinn, imperialism, sociological imagination, subtitles/CC, 06 to 10 mins
Year: 2008
Length: 8:35
Access: YouTube

Summary: This video portrays Howard Zinn's essay "Empire or Humanity?: What the classroom didn’t teach me about the American empire" as narrated by the actor Viggo Mortensen (original essay and teaching materials posted here). It traces Zinn's own development of his sociological imagination, his miseducation in public schools, and his critique of US foreign policy. This video is good for introducing the concept of the sociological imagination, the connecting of private troubles to public issues (CW Mills), and thinking critically about issues of power, empire, and imperialism. It may be useful during an introductory lecture in lower level sociology classes (particularly Intro to Sociology, Social Problems, or Contemporary Theory). It can be used as an ice-breaker for beginning to talk about the sociological imagination as a way of seeing by looking for patterns, thinking critically, and connecting one's "private troubles" to "public issues."

Submitted By: Dave Paul Strohecker (@dpsFTW)

Tags:  commodification, consumption/consumerism, corporations, education, marketing/brands, advertising, college students, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2011
Length: 5:41
Access: NYTimes.com

Summary: This NYT video starts by showing us UNC's inaugural party for incoming freshmen at Target (an American big-box store) where "campus ambassadors" promote corporate brands to their fellow students. At another 50 campuses, American Eagle student representatives help freshmen move into their dorms on their first ever day at college, an iconic and memorable moment to link to corporate branding. As one marketing exec says, "its all about marketing through students as opposed to marketing to students." But what does this mean for university education today? The university, meant to represent intellectual integrity through the pursuit of truth and dissemination of knowledge, is becoming increasingly compromised as budgetary cuts encourage greater reliance on the private sector. The students themselves benefit by gaining work experience, compensation in money and products, and networking (e.g. meeting marketing executives), but are they being manipulated by corporations in the process? Student "ambassadors" in the video report that "when you know companies are not there just to get your money, they're actually willing to help you as an individual in whatever way possible, it makes you respect them a lot more," and that it "feels like what you're doing actually matters." Are these corporations really "willing to help in any way possible" or will they do this only insofar as they have something to gain? A UNC representative notes that they have little control over the commercialization of their campus, and a student advocate for social justice notes that this is "commercialization and materialism at its finest." The video reflects a growing body of research (e.g. The Corporate Campus) documenting the rise of commercialization on college campuses, which offers many excellent readings that can be paired with it. Viewers may be encouraged to reflect on the role of corporations and corporate advertising in society today. How have corporations drawn upon social relationships of trust and legitimacy to further their agenda? How might a Marxian perspective help us understand these processes and what is at stake? Should corporate advertising be banned in certain spaces?

Submitted By: Paul Dean