Tags: children/youth, inequality, knowledge, methodolgy/statistics, prejudice/discrimination, psychology/social psychology, race/ethnicity, social construction, essentialism, experiment, racial socializaiton, internalized racism, stereotypes, white bias, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2010 Length: 5:15 Access: YouTube Summary: This clip from Anderson Cooper 360 shows an experiment where a child is given a line-up of children with light to dark skin and is asked to point to the bad child, good child, nice child, and so on. The child, who associates positive characteristics with the lighter skinned children and negative characteristics with the darker skinned children, is asked why he responds that way. He simply states that it is "because they are white" or "they are black." Cooper's guests comment on the experiment, including discussing how the child has developed these racial biases (e.g. his exposure to racial minorities in his neighborhood and school) and the importance of talking to children about race. Students can be encouraged to think about how children internalize conceptions of race, where these conceptions come from and how this may lead to the development of stereotypes and racial inequality. Submitted By: Paul Dean
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Tags: community, methodology/statistics, rural/urban, community studies, digital storytelling, resource-dependent communities, rural sociology Year: 2011 Length: n/a Access: National Film Board of Canada Summary: "Welcome to Pine Point" has all the elements of a classic sociological community study: It is set in a single-industry town. It lets us peek into the lives of four archetypical characters. And, perhaps most importantly, it is set in a real live place that no longer exists. Built in the 1960s and closed down and razed a little over twenty years later, Pine Point, like Middletown and Cornerville before it (see Robert and Helen Lynd's "Middletown" and "Middletown in Transition" and William Foote Whyte's "Street Corner Society"), is no longer locatable on a map, but lives in the memories and yellowed round-cornered photos of its residents. This interactive website, complete with moving images, text, and interactive features, would be an ideal resource for students to engage in an out-of-class and/or group assignment, and would work well in a rural sociology or sociological methods class. Submitted By: Audrey Sprenger Tags: community, methodology/statistics, rural/urban, appalachia, ethnography, poverty, rural sociology, 21 to 60 mins Year: 2000 Length: 58:00 Access: no online access, PBS trailer Summary: "Stranger With A Camera" lays bare the literal and figurative differences between being a sociologist versus being a sociological subject, as well as who counts as an "insider" versus an "outsider" in a small community. Set in the mountains of Central Appalachia, an iconic field site and setting for many twentieth century social scientists and documentary-makers, it tells the story of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Conner and how in the summer of 1967, Hobart Ison, a local landlord, angry about O'Conner's presence on his property, (as well as media representations of Appalachia in general), shot and killed O'Conner. Produced with great methodological insight and raw sensitivity by Director Elizabeth Barret and Editor Lucy Massie Phenix, two women with close relationships to the film's setting, (Barret was born, raised and still lives in Central Appalachia, Phenix is from Kentucky), "Stranger" brings into focus then blurs again many of the gray areas which emerge not only with regards to questions about what is right and what is wrong with the practice of social science, but also the everyday ways members of a community come together and interact with one another, particularly when there is a stranger with a camera around. When Ison's violent act finally came to trial it was, in many ways, excused by his neighbors. Though it is difficult to tell whether their support was an act of local solidarity since many of them, (including the coal miner O'Conner was trying to get a photograph of when he was instantly killed by Ison's deadly shot), were not only Ison's confreres and kin, but also, his tenants. Still, in the end there truly is a difference, "Stranger" teaches us, between living in a place versus simply passing through, even when we care about or even love it so much we want to document it -- like O'Conner (and, now, Barret and Phenix) did Ison's home town. Submitted By: Audrey Sprenger Tags: class, discourse/language, inequality, methodology/statistics, culture, ethnography, netnography, social stratification, working class, subtitles/CC, 61+ mins Year: 2011 Length: 80:00 Access: Facebook Summary: Andrew Filippone Jr.'sThe Status Films is a four-part documentary series culled from thousands of public Facebook status updates. The film draws on the found-language from Facebook status messages to conjure up the sound and feeling of America's culturally impoverished. Filippone describes this exercise in ethnography via social media as "pleas, laments, hallelujahs, and indictments...echoes of familiar voices from a distant working-class world." All four parts of The Status Films are viewable online, in full, via Facebook. (Filippone cites Simon J. Charlesworth's "A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience" as a key text influencing his project.) The film would work nicely in a methods class as an example of an innovative means of obtaining empirical data for what could be described as a netnography. Filippone describes his method as entering four separate, culturally-resonant queries into Facebook's internal search engine. Aided by screen capture software, he was able to code for themes, select the most relevant messages, and eventually reorder those messages for use in the documentary. Using the film, instructors might be able to engage students in useful discussion about the strengths and limitations of this approach for sociological work. Submitted By: Andrew Filippone Jr. Tags: discourse/language, globalization, methodology/statistics, ethnography, principle of linguistic relativity, sapir-whorf hypothesis, sociological pedagogy, whorfianism, 06 to 10 mins Year: 2010 Length: 9:07 Access: Vimeo Summary: [Note: If you do not use headphones to listen to this you may miss the opening narration spoken over the opening credits by literary critic and novelist Amitava Kumar and composer and musician David Amram.] I'm Happy To Be Here is a short ethnographic film about the global presence and rhetorical power of the English language. The video was shot entirely on point and shoot cameras and produced from start to finish in the field on a borrowed lap top computer in Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Mauritius, South Africa, Ghana and Brazil during the winter and spring of 2010 while I was working as Faculty for the University of Virginia's Semester At Sea Program. Co-produced by one of my students at the time, Adam Friendshuh, (of the University of Minnesota), it is the pilot for an on-going film project I am working on with students who take any of courses I teach, which are set outside of a traditional university classroom, (i.e., see some of my Travel or place-based courses). Called, I'm Happy To Be Here, students participating in this project are assigned two tasks to complete over the duration of the semester: First, to learn how to say the phrase I'm happy to be here in any language they encounter that is different than the language they speak at home or at school or work. And then second, to document themselves actually learning and using this phrase on digital video tape. Submitted By: Audrey Sprenger Tags: methodology/statistics, digital media, documentary research methods, ethnography, networks, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2011 Length: 3:05 Access: YouTube Summary: This video clip tells the story of a curious Brooklynite who finds an undeveloped roll of film in the snow. After developing the film and in an effort to find its owners, the guy creates this YouTube video, narrating his own story about finding the film, but also speculating about the story behind the film's photographed subjects. This clip would be useful in a methods course, as it depicts the ways in which we often stumble—quite literally—upon our research questions. The video’s storyline is framed as a puzzle to be solved, with “hints” documented in the social landscape (e.g., based on the photographs, the narrator hypothesizes who the people are, where and when they traveled in New York). The video would work particularly well in an ethnographic or qualitative methods course, where instructors can raise interesting questions about the role of the researcher (and how this particular investigator documents himself as an integral part of the research project), as well as questions around the methodological significance of found objects and the information they can tell us about the people who left them behind. Instructors might also lead a discussion around the intersection of digital technology and social scientific methodology, and the way technology can facilitate (and create) social networks. Finally, in the comments below the video, someone suggests the clip is fake, which can invite a conversation around how ethnographers determine whether to believe their sources, and whether "untrue" data is still valuable. For example, what might a fake YouTube video about a lost roll of film and a mission to find its owners reveal about contemporary life in modern society? I would like to thank Audrey Sprenger for suggesting this clip. Submitted By: Valerie Chepp What if the world were a village of 100 people? Tags: community, demography/population, globalization, inequality, methodology/statistics, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2010 Length: 3:15 Access: YouTube Summary: Updated for 2010, this short clip paints a portrait of the earth based on if the world were comprised of a 100-person community. Given that large numbers can be difficult to put into perspective (and thus important information about the world runs the risk of becoming meaningless or unremarkable), this video illustrates for students how the global community fares on such indicators as hunger, religious affiliation, literacy, wealth, education, government expenditures, among many others. The clip is not only useful for helping students understand global inequality and differences, but it also reminds students of the enormity of their own social privilege relative to the majority of the world. Submitted By: Valerie Chepp Tags: demography/population, globalization, health/medicine, inequality, methodology/statistics, political economy, data visualization, global development, income, life expectancy, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2010 Length: 4:48 Access: YouTube Summary: This clip plots the health and wealth of 200 countries over 200 years. Animating data in real space, Hans Rosling explains how global health and wealth trends have changed since 1810. Despite persistent and extreme inequalities (both across countries and within countries), Rosling's data point to a closing gap between Western and non-Western countries, fostering a "converging world" perspective. He projects that, in the future, everyone can "make it" to the healthy and wealthy plots on the graph. This clip might be useful in a statistics, demography, globalization, or health/medical sociology class, as it helps students (particularly the novice statistician) to visualize data trends and illustrates for students the very cool things that can be done with statistical data. Instructors of medical sociology, health, and inequality might also facilitate a discussion about social factors that might inhibit or foster Rosling's optimistic portrait of the future. This clip might work well with another Hans Rosling's clip, in which he uses data visualization to illustrate global changes since the 1960s related to fertility, life expectancy, child survival and poverty by nation (and region). Submitted By: Valerie Chepp |
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