Tags: capitalism, class, globalization, historical sociology, inequality, methodology/statistics, political/economy, absolute poverty, antônio conselheiro, charity, colonialism, comparative historical analysis, industrial revolution, poorhouse, relative poverty, social history, welfare state, workhouse, 21 to 60 mins Year: 2013 Length: 58:05 Access: YouTube Summary: This exquisitely animated documentary tells a sweeping social history of world poverty. You, the viewer, are the protagonist in this film floating through the meandering jet stream of world history. "If we want to make poverty history," the narrator explains, "then first, we need to understand the history of poverty." ● The documentary appropriately begins in prehistory (2:35), and in a more or less linear fashion, moves through humanity's early large scale civilizations, including ancient Egypt (4:40) and ancient Greece (5:40). Zipping forward to the Middle Ages, the story unfolds again in Cairo (8:20), and then lingers in Paris of the same period (10:50). The history of colonialism is woven into the story with a look at the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire (14:20), the Portuguese conquest of West Africa (16:20 and 34:40), and British colonial rule in India (36:00). Poverty in a neocolonial context is later examined in Ghana (38:50 and 43:55), and China makes appearances as the site of both model relief efforts and tragic famine (18:30 and 43:20). At the 20:30 mark the story returns to Western Europe in order to consider the impact of the Industrial Revolution on poverty, and then moves toward a conclusion which contemplates the changes wrought by globalization. ● While this 58-minute film understandably fails to deliver a truly exhaustive account of the the world-historical processes associated with poverty, the film would be an excellent tool for illustrating comparative historical analysis in sociology. Systematic comparison is of course central to comparative historical work, and this film succeeds in illustrating the importance of comparison by briefly drawing on eighteenth century China as a rare instance where prosperity for some didn't necessarily come at the cost of desperate poverty for others. What does the film's analysis of poverty gain by including this "negative" case in the story? One answer is that the case of China complicates the viewer's understanding of poverty by exposing its causes as far less determined and far more contingent. Submitted By: Lester Andrist
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Tags: capitalism, class, economic sociology, inequality, marx/marxism, organizations/occupations/work, political economy, contingent work, cooperatives, flexible labor, temp work, 21 to 60 mins Year: 2012 Length: 25:24 Access: YouTube Summary: Contingent workers include part-time work, independent contractors, self-employed, agency temps, and on-call workers. In this segment of MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes, Hayes discusses contingent work with his four guests from academia and worker advocate groups. After a brief introduction, the video focuses on contingent labor in the economy today (2:16-10:59) and moves to a more critical conversation of possible alternative worker organizations (11:00-25:24). It notes that contingent workers comprise 30% of the American workforce, which has increased dramatically in the last 10-20 years. It includes both low-skilled labor (e.g. janitors) and high-skilled labor (professors, computer engineers), who usually do not receive overtime pay, unemployment benefits, health care, etc. While some workers might prefer this relationship, it is mostly capitalists that benefit from this arrangement and the guests discuss the role of power in shaping contingent labor. They argue that business owners strive to maintain a flexible workforce, avoid providing benefits, and workers have much less bargaining power (through unions) today and have little control over this relationship. In the second portion of the segment, the guests discuss the desirability of this model and possible alternatives, especially worker cooperatives. The guests differ on if they see an inherent tension between employers and contingent labor, and viewers may reflect on how they believe work should be organized. If you prefer alternative arrangements, how would we get there? How does contingent labor fit into Marx's theory of capitalism and worker resistance? Submitted By: Paul Dean W.E.B Du Bois is appointed Honorary Emeritus Professor of Sociology Tags: du bois, methodology/statistics, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, theory, africana studies, public sociology, 21 to 60 mins Year: 2012 Length: 36:51 Access: YouTube Summary: On February 17th, 2012 three intellectual panels convened at the University of Pennsylvania in conjunction with the posthumous appointment of Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois as Honorary Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies. The video features a wide array of remarks and reflections from a number of intellectuals, including Tukufu Zuberi, Lawrence D. Bobo, Mary Patillo, Anthony Monteiro, Howard Winant, and Elijah Anderson. Excerpts from the video can be readily used to spur discussions about particular aspects of Du Bois' scholarship. The video begins with sociologist Tukufu Zuberi (1:40 to 4:10) outlining many of Du Bois' early accomplishments, including the fact that in 1895 he became the first African American to receive a PhD in history from Harvard University. Highlighting Du Bois' methodological contributions, sociologist Aldon Morris (4:45 to 6:00) discusses Du Bois' advancement of empirical methodologies, and later in the video Zuberi (10:00 to 11:10) notes that Du Bois arrived at a number of his remarkable insights in Black Reconstruction of Democracy in America, despite being barred from primary source materials due racial segregation. Underscoring the enduring significance of Du Bois' work, sociologist Howard Winant (13:40 to 15:10) notes the fact that Du Bois reclaimed the narrative that African Americans were central in the movement to achieve an advanced democracy, and Winant explains that Du Bois' work powerfully argues that Blacks were also centrally involved in their own emancipation. At the 11:10 mark, Zuberi argues for the significance of Du Bois' work in the face of persistent racism within the academy. He notes that despite the fact that Du Bois' work foreshadowed a number of celebrated sociological works from authors like Immanuel Wallerstein, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Theda Skocpol, Du Bois is not cited by these authors. Finally, a number of panelists passionately argue that Du Bois was one of the first truly public intellectuals. For instance, Stephanie Y. Evans (6:00 to 6:50) likens Du Bois to a conductor, facilitating communication and exchange between intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike. At the 6:50 mark, Mary Patillo similarly discusses the way Du Bois' concepts have permeated outside the academy, and how his work has contributed to black studies movements that seek to make connections between campus and off-campus struggles. Submitted By: Tukufu Zuberi Tags: crime/law/deviance, race/ethnicity, rural/urban, drug war, incarceration, poverty, prisons, school-to-prison pipeline, the wire, 21 to 60 mins Year: 2012 Length: 24:11 Access: Al Jazeera Summary: This short news documentary examines the relationships between race, poverty, incarceration, crime, and the war on drugs. It focuses on Baltimore, and its very high crime rates, showing how poor residents get attracted to crime and the drug business as a means of economic survival. With the war on drugs and its harsh prison sentences, many poor people are getting put behind bars. But despite harsh prison sentences and incarceration, these individuals continue to be drawn into selling drugs. Ed Burns, one of the writers behind The Wire, says "I don't know how much progress is being made because we're not dealing with the root causes." For example, jobs have been leaving Baltimore (and other US cities) since the late 1960s as a result of suburbanization and deindustrialization. Donnie Andrews (the real-life inspiration for Omar, a popular character from The Wire) notes that when people come out of prison, they are not able to find affordable housing, jobs, or health care, so people are likely to end up back in crime to survive. But rather than addressing the causes, since Nixon started the war on drugs in the early 1970s, our means of addressing the problem is through punishment and incarceration. This has caused an explosion in the US prison population, and the US now incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. This issue of drugs and incarceration also has a significant racial dimension. Despite the fact that black people are only slightly more likely to be involved in drugs than white people, they are seven times more likely to be incarcerated for drugs. The narrator notes that "if current incarceration rates remain unchanged, 1 in 3 black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime." In the video, Ed Burns adds that it is not really a war on drugs, but a war on black people (which has also now spread to a war on poor whites) that was started to take away energy from the Civil Rights movement. Viewers may be encouraged to reflect on what is the objective in the war on drugs? To what degree is it successful? What kind of policies would help rehabilitate perpetrators and help them to avoid returning to prison? For a shorter 2008 news clip (6:40) that more narrowly focuses on drug use in Baltimore, see here. Submitted By: Paul Dean 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 Race 2012 Tags: demography/population, immigration/citizenship, politics/election/voting, race/ethnicity, bifurcated racial hierarchy, post-racial America, white privilege, subtitles/CC, 21 to 60 mins Year: 2012 Length: 56:16 Access: YouTube Summary: This PBS documentary uses a political frame to discuss race and politics in America, taking advantage of the political significance of the election of President Barack Obama to set the background for a discussion on the history and politics of race in the United States. Race 2012 uses a nice blend of known academic scholars in political science and sociology, authors, activists, and political figures to provide a narrative on race in America today. The film provides perspectives on questions such as: 1) How do we define a racist or racism? 2) What does a changing minority demographic and a decreasing white demographic mean for America? 3) How do political parties tailor their political platform around an implicit racial narrative? and 4) How are non-Black minorities racialized and positioned within a bifurcated white/black racial hierarchy? Other important themes include contrasting early 20th century discourses around government assistance, which were framed as “nation building” policies and largely benefited whites, with current discourses around government assistance (or “welfare”) which are framed as “handouts” and are believed to largely benefit minorities, despite many whites also receiving these entitlements. The relevance of race in the construction of both a Republican and Democratic party identity is discussed in light of the changing racial demographic in America and persistent explicit and implicit anti-minority sentiments. This documentary would be a nice addition to broad discussions of race in the classroom as it provides both a historical and contemporary perspective on race. It also illustrates the ways that seemingly “race neutral” policies get coded with racialized meanings, and how these racial codes benefit and stigmatize racial groups differently. The documentary can also be useful for more specific discussions on race, demographic shifts, and political narratives, and the implications of these shifting demographics on the future of U.S. electoral politics. Submitted By: Shanna Brewton-Tiayon, Doctoral Student, University of Maryland Tags: capitalism, class, corporations, inequality, economic sociology, organizations/occupations/work, 21 to 60 mins Year: 2007 Length: 24:15 Access: PBS Summary: Although The American Dream says that hard work will lead to wealth and success, it doesn't seem to apply to most of Americans. Indeed, the smallest economic returns go to those generally laboring the hardest of all: the working poor. Billionaire Thomas Peterffy argues in his anti-Obama ad that America's rich will lose motivation to work if they are required to pay more taxes. But while preaching the value of hard work, he fails to note that the rich have virtually monopolized income gains in recent years. Reflecting on the unequal opportunity for financial security that the class structure presents, the late Beth Shulman, in her 2005 book, The Betrayal of Work, was one of the first to examine the diminishing well-being of the working poor. The above clip features Shulman's interview on PBS's NOW, and at about the 12:20 mark, she observes that while worker productivity has grown significantly, higher incomes have not trickled down to those in the bottom reaches of the American class structure. Indeed, she notes in this 2007 interview that "The top 1% is garnering 80% of income gains" (Note that today the top 1% is garnering over 90% of income gains, according to Emmanuel Saenz). With this being said, how is it possible for most American workers, and particularly the poor, to sustain their dream of a better life when their incomes remain so low and stagnant that they continue to struggle just to get by? (Originally posted on SoUnequal). Submitted By: Tara McQuay Tags: children/youth, gender, inequality, sex/sexuality, dating, hook-up, intimacy, intimate relationships, romance, youth culture, 21 to 60 mins Year: 2011 Length: 30:00 Access: no online access (YouTube preview) Summary: In this lecture, Dr. Paula England explores the hookup culture in college campuses and describes gendered differences in this "new social form of relationship". As the Media Education Foundation notes, "England mobilizes a wealth of data to begin to chart whether the hookup phenomenon represents some kind of fundamental change, or whether we’re simply seeing age-old gender patterns dressed up in new social forms." Drawing upon qualitative research with heterosexual Stanford undergraduate students and online surveys study with 18 private and public universities, her findings show that hooking up is a new social form where sexual activity precedes – rather than follows – dates or other expressions of relational intent. She also documents gender differences and inequalities in traditional dating and courtship practices. For example, women who initiate and have frequent hook-ups are perceived as "sluts"; pleasure is organized around men in that women are expected to give oral sex to their hookup partners, and report lower levels of orgasm. When used in class, students may be given pre-film questions and after viewing the lecture, use post-viewing questions provided by the study guide from the Media Education Foundation. Viewers may consider whether dating is replaced by hooking-up in contemporary youth culture and if women can be empowered by this new social form of relationship. Submitted By: Nihal Celik Tags: children/youth, emotion/desire, gender, violence, femininity, masculinity, socialization, subtitles/CC, 21 to 60 mins Year: 1998 Length: 23:24 Access: Films On Demand Summary: In this archived episode of ABC News 20/20, John Stossel investigates why girls and boys express their feelings differently. Drawing from an interview with Dr. William Pollack of the Harvard Medical School and author of Real Boys, and researchers from Emory University and the University of Connecticut, Stossel encounters what was still a fairly radical idea in 1998: parents, peers, and "society" encourage girls to express their feelings but stigmatize boys for doing the same. As Pollack explains, the consequence of this is that girls tend to feel more comfortable with their emotions and are able relieve their stress and sadness by talking about their emotions. Boys, in contrast, are unable to express their feelings and often act out with violence against others. Despite the expert testimony and research on the subject, Stossel and his colleagues seem reluctant to give up the idea that boys are biologically determined to hide emotion, and in the clip's conclusion, he expresses the evolutionary fantasy that men are biologically predisposed to hide emotions because they had to "stand in the woods with a spear [and] be quiet." The clip works well as a means of discussing the powerful influence of socialization to a topic rife with biological determinism. Before I show the clip in my class I have students write down the number of times they have cried in the last 6 months, and I ask them to make a note of how many times they cried in front of others. Then, once the clip is finished, I ask them to compare their answers to the ones given by the children in the clip and to reflect on their own socialization. Submitted By: Nihal Celik Tags: crime/law/deviance, psychology/social psychology, broken windows theory, labeling theory, research ethics, social experiment, 21 to 60 mins Year: 1992 Length: 29:00 Access: YouTube Summary: In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo set out to discover whether good people can do evil things if placed within particular social contexts. To examine this, he and his colleagues transformed the basement of Stanford University's Psychology Department into a makeshift prison, recruiting local college students to play the roles of prison guards and prisoners. This social experiment would later become known for its controversial nature, testing the ethical boundaries of social scientific research on human subjects. These clips are from the 1992 documentary film, Quiet Rage, which features original footage of the experiment along with follow-up interviews with research subjects (full documentary available online here). The documentary is excellent for teaching concepts central to the field of deviance and social control, including broken windows theory and labeling theory, as well as other core sociological concepts such as norms, roles, social expectations, and research ethics. This documentary was written by Zimbardo and directed and produced by Ken Musen. The Stanford Prison Experiment website features additional information and resources. I would like to thank Audrey Sprenger for suggesting this clip. Submitted By: Valerie Chepp |
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