Tags: children/youth, discourse/language, education, immigration/citizenship, multiculturalism, race/ethnicity, hidden curriculum, identity, language politics, mexican-americans, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2012 Length: 1:51 Access: YouTube Summary: This video is one of several animated short videos that make up the larger StoryCorps oral history project, an archive of over 45,000 interviews with nearly 90,000 participants from across America telling their stories. The story recounted in this video is told by Ramón "Chunky" Sanchez. As described here, Chunky "was raised in a small farming community in southern California in the 1950s. As was common practice at that time, teachers at his local elementary school Anglicized the Mexican American students' names." The anglicisation of personal names is the practice by which non-English-language personal names are either changed so that their spellings are closer to English sounds or English personal names are substituted for non-English names. This practice can be a personal choice or it can be imposed upon people by (more powerful) others, such as immigration officials or, in the case of Chunky's story, school administrators. While sociologists and others have documented the ways in which immigrant groups have strategically chosen to adopt or reject "American-sounding names," Chunky's story is one in which he and his classmates were subject to this practice without choice. Children with "Mexican-sounding" names had their names anglicized. For example, as Chunky explains, Maria became Mary and Juanita became Jane. Chunky's own name, Ramón, was changed to Raymond. Yet, Chunky recounts a time in second grade when his teachers had a difficulty renaming the new kid in class, Facundo. After watching the video, viewers might consider some of the following questions: (1) Why did teachers anglicize the names of students in Chunky's class? What messages did this renaming send to the students? (2) In Chunky's story, why is Facundo celebrated as a hero, and his non-renaming a victory? Each StoryCorps conversation is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and weekly StoryCorps segments are broadcasted on NPR’s Morning Edition. For more on Chunky Sanchez and the making of this short animation, click here. Submitted By: Anonymous
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Tags: biology, bodies, gender, marketing/brands, sex/sexuality, biological determinism, dress negotiation, gender blame, sexism, sexual objectification, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2013 Length: 0:30 Access: YouTube Summary: This commercial from Duluth Trading Company is an accurate example of the ways in which women are subtlety encouraged to participate in forms of security from men’s seemingly-natural demeanor. Indeed, through the purchase and use of a Duluth Trading Company "Longtail" t-shirt, women are promised the security from the "gawking gopher," a character that stares as the fictional female character bends to perform a task. The blame, in this case, is placed on women for not covering up, perhaps framed as a feminine task to help men sooth their "inherent" tendencies to be hypersexual. From this born-this-way perspective, men avoid responsibility for their objectification of women. This means that, among other things, men are also excluded as solutions to such an issue. Instead of discouraging men to “gawk” through a deconstruction of the relationship between masculinity and objectification, this commercial delicately—yet notably—places the male response to a women’s body as a natural reaction that can only be solved through the further policing of women’s bodies. Submitted By: Peter Rydzewski Tags: inequality, intersectionality, lgbtq, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, sex/sexuality, homophobia, racism, systems of power, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2014 Length: 2:02 Access: YouTube Summary: In a recent interview with Arsenio Hall (start 3:33; end 5:35), RuPaul provides a pithy explanation of how power, privilege, and inequality operate by similar logic structures across different social and historical contexts. After referencing football player Michael Sam's recent decision to come out as gay just prior to the NFL draft, Arsenio asks RuPaul to reflect on homophobia in the black community. RuPaul responds by reframing the discussion to take on a more systemic perspective of how power works, drawing parallels to the oppressions faced by black and queer people. Arsenio plays "devil's advocate" by evoking (though not explicitly referencing) black people's history with slavery, a history never experienced exclusively by gay people. RuPaul replies by explaining how racism, homophobia, and other systems of oppression rely on the same logic structures, in that they all revolve around "the ego needing to strengthen itself through putting someone else down. That's the similarity. And that's the same for people who have been oppressed for religion or race or sexuality." While sociologists might use slightly different vocabulary (for example, focusing less on "the ego"), sociologists draw attention to the same insight, illustrating how, as Allan Johnson argues, different forms of oppression all rely on systemic "patterns of exclusion, rejection, privilege, harassment, discrimination, and violence" (697). For the full interview between RuPaul and Arsenio, click here. Submitted By: Valerie Chepp Tags: children/youth, inequality, violence, war/military, empathy, sociological imagination, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2014 Length: 1:33 Access: YouTube Summary: This powerful PSA uses the second-a-day video format to promote empathy for people in war-torn regions. Created by Save the Children UK, the video targets UK viewers who might feel removed from the traumas of war and conflict. It begins by showing a young (white) girl blowing out the birthday candles on her birthday cake, then moves through a variety of 1-second clips of the same girl in everyday situations. While the first shots are mundane and (presumably) familiar examples, the clips increasingly reflect situations of unrest, trauma, and war—illustrating brief but emotionally-charged effects on her family, health, and psychological well-being. The final clip ends with her in a (refugee) tent staring blankly at a single candle on a more modest birthday cake. The subsequent text reads: "Just because it isn't happening here...doesn't mean it isn't happening"; and viewers are encouraged to #SaveSyriasChildren. In addition to suggesting some of the disastrous effects of war on children, it is an excellent way to introduce topics like the sociological imagination and empathy. Viewers might consider how social structures in the various contexts shape these individual outcomes. In other words, how is this individual child's biography shaped by the external social and historical forces beyond her control? How do the clips reflect the very different political structures, social conflicts, and economic opportunities that will likely shape the girl's life in very different ways? In doing so, viewers are likely to recognize the importance of empathy in understanding the experiences of groups that are different from our own. For a similar video connecting the sociological imagination to empathy, see sociologist Sam Richards' Ted Talk. Thanks to Michael Miller for suggesting this clip! Submitted By: Paul Dean Tags: emotion/desire, goffman, theory, defining the situation, harold garfinkel, impression management, norms, scripts, social interaction, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2009 Length: 2:35 Access: YouTube Summary: When teaching about Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman, I have students analyze this speed-dating video in small groups by asking them what Garfinkel and Goffman would each have to say about the interaction depicted in the video. Then, as a class, we discuss how the video provides a good example of the unstated rules of social interaction described by Garfinkel and Goffman. Both people in the video clearly come to the interaction with shared expectations for what happens on a speed-date, and they successfully manage the interaction by taking turns in conversation, flirting, and the other sorts of things meant to happen in this particular situational template. Then, we watch the video clip from Dave Chappelle, "When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong." Here, students can see the consequences of breaking social rules of interaction (Dave Chappelle’s character gets fired after a workplace outburst), and we also discuss the limitations of the structuralist paradigm. To help students with this latter task, I ask the following kinds of questions: (1) Does it seem like everyone in the group came to the meeting with shared expectations about what would happen there? (2) Does “give me some skin” mean the same thing to Dave Chappelle’s character as it does to his mentor? (3) What emotion does Goffman tell us that people usually feel after they break social rules or lose face? Does Dave Chappelle’s character appear to be feeling this emotion? What does he appear to be feeling? Why? (4) Is there value in breaking with expected rules of social interaction? These videos were originally suggested for classroom use by students as part of my larger effort to incorporate student-generated content into my courses. See more here. (Note: A version of this post originally appeared on tracyperkins.org.) Submitted By: Tracy Perkins Tags: gender, inequality, prejudice/discrimination, everyday sexism, street harassment, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2014 Length: 3:56 Access: YouTube Summary: Leah Green turns the tables on men by playing an in-your-face sexual harasser on the streets of London in this video featured in a recent article in The Guardian. In doing so, she is trying to sensitize men to how it feels to be the object of sexism by simply relating to men in the same ways many men interact with women in public space. Quoting Green in her article: "As is usual when men make inappropriate sexual remarks to me, I felt embarrassed. This time, at least, there was a slight silver lining, as it was a perfect scenario to recreate for my film, in which I tested out real sexist situations on men. I took tweets from @EverdaySexism, where women (and men) recount sexist incidents and, using hidden cameras, acted these out on unsuspecting members of the public. Since launching the film on the Guardian website on Friday it has garnered more than a million hits and nearly three thousand comments. Responses have been varied. Women have said that the film, which uses comedy to make a serious point, highlights perfectly the kind of harassment they receive on a daily basis. Many men have said that the words coming from the mouth of a woman made them realise their weight and impact. However, others felt the film was cruel, and that subjecting innocent men to sexually aggressive comments made me no better than the men who do that, thus completely undermining the feminist message. Those are the criticisms I would like to answer." (Note: This post originally appeared on SoUnequal.) Submitted By: Michael Miller Tags: discourse/language, environment, foucault, health/medicine, knowledge, science/technology, social construction, climate change, creationism, evolution, tobacco, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2012 Length: 5:12 Access: YouTube Summary: This video from The Climate Reality Project entitled "Doubt" illustrates how knowledge and power are tightly interwoven. Using two case studies—the "tobacco is good for you campaign" and the "climate change denial movement"—the clip depicts how science can be used as a mechanism of legitimation by powerful others in ways that best serves status quo interests. Michel Foucault discussed this phenomenon in his extensive work on how the discourse of science (and knowledge) is also a discourse of power. As illustrated in the video, despite the scientific evidence showing tobacco's deadly effects and climate change's dangerous outcomes, powerful interests suppressed this knowledge by introducing doubt into the discourse around tobacco use and climate change, which they backed up using a discourse of science. These powerful interests created the illusion that a scientific debate was taking place when, in reality, there wasn't. An iteration of this phenomenon recently unfolded in the media-hyped debate between Bill "the Science Guy" Nye and creationist Ken Ham. Here, the case of evolution was presented as a scientific debate, thereby suggesting that a lack of consensus surrounds the scientific evidence around evolution. This tactic of using a discourse of science to create the illusion of uncertainty around evolution was echoed by Michael Schulson in his article for The Daily Beast, in which he writes: "Ham’s argument, essentially, was that there are two kinds of science—observational, concerned-only-with-what-we-can-touch-and-see science, on which, Ham said, we all happily agree; and historical science, on which we don’t. This is bullshit, of course. We can use evidence from the present to extrapolate about the past." Yet, like the case of tobacco and climate change, by creating doubt about the earth's origins, the public's access to scientific knowledge is suppressed. This video would complement a discussion around the sociology of knowledge, science, and power, and would pair well with portions of the This American Life radio episode, "Fake Science," and with sociologist Zuleyka Zevallos's article, "The Sociology of Why People Don’t Believe Science." Viewers can be encouraged to think about: Whose interests are served in each of the fake science cases of tobacco, climate change, and evolution? What is the role of the media in perpetuating fake science? How has fake science shaped social policy? Other videos from The Climate Change Project can be found here. Submitted By: Valerie Chepp Tags: commodification, consumption/consumerism, economic sociology, food/agriculture, marx/marxism, theory, commodity fetishm, de-fetishism, local food, 00 to 05 mins, 06 to 10 mins Year: 2011 Length: 2:27; 7:46 Access: YouTube (short version) YouTube (full version) Summary: In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism is the process by which people come to see commodities in terms of their physical properties and market value, rather than being derived from the labor and labor conditions that produced it. This is important because it obscures the social relationships between people and reduces commodities to the economic exchange between buyer and seller. Value then falsely appears to be the natural part of that commodity, rather than in the labor that produced it. For example, consider the production and consumption of chicken. In a conventional exchange at the supermarket, consumers know nothing about the labor and conditions that went into producing the chicken. The purely market-based exchange obscures and hides the exploitation and typical industrial farming methods, which are shown in this Food Inc clip or this Samsara clip, making it appear that the value of the chicken comes from the product itself. Local economies, including the local food movement, are often attempts to reverse this process by re-situating economic activity within the social relations that produced it. Through local economies, such as farmers' markets and local handicrafts, consumers can interact directly with local producers and understand the labor process and labor conditions of how goods are produced. In short, it seeks to de-fetishize the commodity. This hilarious clip from Portlandia illustrates these concepts through satire. It shows the main characters ordering a chicken dish in a restaurant, where they inquire about the conditions in which it was raised. For example, they ask about the size of its roaming area, its diet, if it is local and organic, about who is raising the chicken, and if the farmer lives locally. They learn the chicken's name is Colin and are given his "papers." In the full clip, they also travel to the farm where Colin was raised, get a tour, and meet the workers who raised Colin and the other chickens. They end up staying at the farm for 5 years, but then realize the farm is run by a cult, and ultimately return to the restaurant and inquire about the salmon. For related videos, see commodity fetishism illustrated in this Macklemore music video, and de-fetishism through a promotional fair trade video or Chipotle ad. Submitted By: Paul Dean Tags: class, consumption/consumerism, marketing/brands, marx/marxism, nationalism, theory, american dream, commercial, ideology, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2014 Length: 0:30 Access: YouTube Summary: Ideologies are sets of ideas and beliefs through which people make sense of the social world. Ideologies are always related to power, with dominant ideologies reinforcing existing power relations. The American Dream is a particularly powerful ideology that reinforces class relations by perpetuating the belief that anyone who works hard can be economically sucessful (despite the overwhelming evidence of how class inequality shapes economic outcomes). This car commercial illustrates this ideology with a discussion of the excellence that has come out American garages: "The Wright brothers started in a garage, Amazon started in a garage, Hewlett Packard started in a garage ... the Ramones started in a garage. My point? You never know what kind of greatness can come out of an American garage." It suggests that anyone can do great things from humble beginnings, a fundamental element of the American Dream. The emphasis on "American" suggests that this idea is a uniquely American characteristic, even though upward mobility is more common in other developed countries. The ad goes on to show a Cadillac literally and metaphorically emerging from an American garage, thereby using notions of the American Dream to appeal to consumers' aspirations and nationalistic pride. It is not only an attempt to sell both Cadillac cars and attach those meanings to its brand, but also reinforces viewers' sense of the American Dream as reality. However, this association begs the question: Who does the American Dream apply to? In reality the American dream is not for the poor, but for the rich. Furthermore, it is not just the corporations that utilize the American Dream to market products to society; politicians and public figures often utilize images of the American society to convince people to support public policy, similar to how it is being used in this car commercial. For a scathing critique of the American dream, see this clip from George Carlin. Submitted By: Kelsey Gallaher Tags: capitalism, economic sociology, globalization, political economy, social mvmts/social change/resistance, theory, argentina, deregulation, double-movement, embeddedness, karl polanyi, laissez-faire capitalism, neoliberalism, regulation, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2004 Length: 5:30 Access: YouTube (start 3:05; end 8:35) Summary: In his famous book, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi argued that, throughout human history, economic decisions have always been embedded within society (i.e., they have been shaped and constrained by social values and relationships). However, with contemporary capitalism, the economy has become disembedded from society through laissez-faire capitalism, which is promoted by many liberal economists and capitalists, and meant to disregard social factors. While this system has created tremendous wealth, it is unable to regulate itself and is not a "natural" economic order, as its proponents claim. In actuality, if laissez-faire capitalism is left to itself, it creates so much social dislocation that it would destroy itself, and thus it inevitably sparks resistance to it. This resistance leads to movements to regulate capitalism to varying degrees, from reforms that put constraints on capitalism (e.g., the New Deal) to more radical changes to the capitalist structure (e.g., socializing the economy through a centralized state), thus re-embedding the economy within society. This excerpt from the documentary, The Take (start 3:05; end 8:35), illustrates this double-movement between efforts at regulation and de-regulation. With a focus on Argentina, it shows how systematic deregulation in the 1990s, and the problems it created, sparked massive resistance. The deregulation (which itself required state action) included selling off public assets, eliminating currency controls, and implementing a variety of business-friendly policies. Supported by the IMF, these neoliberal policies crashed the economy in 2001, resulting in massive unemployment and poverty rates exceeding 50%, which sparked spontaneous protests throughout the country. Like similar double-movements throughout the world, the resistance sought to re-regulate the economy, and re-embed the economy in society, to meet vital social needs. The rest of the documentary shows that, in this case, the social response included a movement of workers that occupied and began running factories on their own. Submitted By: Paul Dean |
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