Tags: abortion/reproduction, aging/life course, biology, bodies, gender, health/medicine, lgbtq, marriage/family, science/technology, sex/sexuality, social construction, fatherhood, motherhood, parenting, pregnancy, stigma, transgender, subtitles/CC, 06 to 10 mins Year: 2012 Length: 10:33 Access: Vimeo Summary: This video portrays the experiences and voices of various transgender parents and their families, which includes their decisions to become parents, reflections on what it means to be a parent, experiences of being a child of a transgender parent, the social stigma attached to being a transgender parent (and transgenderism in general), and experiences with various reproductive technology options. The video is excellent for illustrating the diversity of family structures and alternative gender arrangements, and would be useful in a class on sociology of the family, reproduction, gender, or sex and sexuality. People in the video highlight the hyper-gendered experience of pregnancy and parenting, thereby illustrating the social construction of these core features of the life course; this social constructivist perspective stands in contrast to common biological understandings of pregnancy and parenting. This video would pair well with Laura Mamo's Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience, as well as with GLAD's recently released book, Transgender Family Law: A Guide to Effective Advocacy, which can offer a nice framework for discussing some of the legal issues and advocacy strategies that transgender people encounter in a family law context. The video is also available with Spanish subtitles. Submitted By: Valerie Chepp Image by Kristian Dowling/Getty Images for Beatie
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Tags: children/youth, gender, marketing/brands, organizations/occupations/work, science/technology, adulthood socialization, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2012 Length: 0:52 Access: YouTube Summary: This video was published by the European Commission for a campaign designed to attract more women to a career in science. The commission said that the video had to "speak their language to get their attention" and that it was intended to be "fun, catchy" and strike a chord with young people. The original video was taken down after it received so many negative comments. This tactic, however, of flashing a few pink gimmicks in an effort to get girls interested in (or purchase products related to) traditionally masculine activities is nothing new; instructors can point to numerous examples including the marketing of video games and computer technology (both the hardware and software). This clip would be useful for illustrating to students the ways in which gender socialization, often discussed in the classroom in the context of pink and blue toys for children, carries into adulthood in very obvious ways (e.g., Dell's short-lived Della computers). However, instructors might ask students to name some less obvious ways that gender socialization in adulthood takes place. Further, instructors might take a counterposition in an effort to spark classroom discussion, for example, posing the question: What's the harm of using a little pink and slick sexuality to get women involved in science? If successful, wouldn't this be a feminist victory in that more women would move into an occupational field currently dominated by men? Submitted By: Anonymous 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: science/technology, theory, empiricism, logic, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2011 Length: 2:53 Access: YouTube Summary: This clip is titled, "A Precautionary Tale," and is part 6 from the series, Argument: A Field Guide. The clip offers an animated discussion of what is called the precautionary principle, which refers to the idea that agents (e.g., people, corporations, governments) should be cautious, even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully understood. This can be a guiding principle for ethical action, as when a government errors on the side of caution by legislating a reduction of CO2 emissions, even if a minority of scientists still refute anthropogenic climate change. Agents cannot wait for certainty because absolute certainty is logically impossible. Agents must act with some uncertainty; they must take risks, and they do this by relying on theory. So the next time someone dismisses your sociological theory as opinion and demands "facts," remind your accuser that theory isn't mere conjecture. Theory is typically a well-tested set of rules. It's based on logic. It is supported by repeated observation, and it has been used to make accurate predictions. Note that the agents described in sociological theories often wind up responding to those theories in some way, which makes repeated observation and prediction difficult in sociology. However, this is only an added layer of complexity and is not an indication that sociological theory is only as useful as the latest conspiracy "theory" posted on YouTube. Submitted By: Lester Andrist As atomspheric carbon rises, so does the earth's temperature Tags: environment, globalization, science/technology, data visualization, global climate change, global warming, sustainability, 06 to 10 mins Year: 2006 Length: 9:42 Access: no online access Summary: This clip from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth uses visual displays of scientific data to demonstrate that global temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide are higher than ever before, showing that this urgent problem is caused by human activity (start film at 13:25; end at 23:07). He documents several impacts in the real world, including receding glaciers, noting that 40% of the people on Earth receive their drinking water from glaciers and that they will face a shortage in the future. A reasonable and skeptical viewer may note that ice ages are cyclical, which is correct. But using core drills of ice, scientists are able to measure carbon dioxide levels and surface temperatures going back 650,000 years. This allows the viewer to see cycles from the past 7 ice ages. The data shows that in those 650,000 years, carbon dioxide levels never went above 300 parts per million--until recently. By visualizing the data, we can see that the CO2 level today is far above the level that it has ever been in that time frame. Gore compares the CO2 levels and temperature levels (as shown in the graphic here) and argues this scientific fact: "when there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer because it traps more heat from the sun inside." He then shows the projected level that CO2 is expected to rise to in 50 years. In short, CO2 levels are higher than ever before; when CO2 rises, temperatures rise. Therefore, the Earth's temperature will continue to rise. Because CO2 levels are outside of any natural cycle, it is human activity that has caused it, and the consequences will continue to worsen. There are also a variety of sites online that have additional data and evidence, which may be useful in discussing global climate change in the classroom (e.g. ClimateCrisis.net; EPA). Submitted By: Paul Dean Tags: biology, health/medicine, inequality, knowledge, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, science/technology, social construction, theory, fallacy of reification, racial formation, racial project, scientific racism, slave hypothesis, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2011 Length: 2:36 Access: YouTube Summary: When discussing racial inequality in my introductory sociology course I make it a point to cover Omi and Winant's notion of a racial formation as resulting from historically situated racial projects wherein "racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed" (p. 55-56). These projects take multiple forms but in at least one version, there is an attempt to collapse race—a socially constructed concept—into biology. Such projects are similar insofar as they suggest that the socially constructed distinctiveness between people of different racial categories roughly approximates a meaningful biological distinctiveness. Scientists have been centrally involved in this effort to "find" a biological basis for race. Thus in the middle of the 19th century Dr. Samuel Morton attempted to establish that on average cranial capacities of different races were measurably different. While the cranium is no longer scrutinized in this way, the search for a biological, and therefore "natural," basis for race continues. In 1988 Dr. Clarence Grim put forth what is now known as the "slave hypothesis," which is the idea that the enslaved people who survived the Middle Passage were more likely to be carriers of a gene that allowed them to retain salt. Grim argued that this ability to retain salt, while necessary for surviving the harsh conditions on slave ships, is now proving to be the leading cause for higher rates of hypertension among African Americans. This theory has been soundly refuted but apparently still remains in many hypertension textbooks, and in 2007, the medical celebrity, Dr. Oz, promoted the idea to an audience of about 8 million people on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The clip above is from January of this year and is yet another instance of him promoting the theory. Coupled with the recent introduction of BiDil as an FDA approved treatment of heart failure for African Americans, sociologists have taken note of this slipperiest of slides down the slope of "deploying racial categories as if they were immutable in nature and society" (see Troy Duster's article in Science). The clip offers an excellent opportunity for students to discuss the persistence of this racial project, the involvement of science in this project, and how these ideological articulations might serve to provide a justification for continued inequality. Submitted By: Lester Andrist Steven Johnson explains the source of good ideas Tags: community, durkheim, knowledge, organizations/occupations/work, science/technology, theory, creativity, innovation, liquid networks, sociological perspective, steven johnson, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2010 Length: 4:07 Access: YouTube Summary: What is sociology? In broad terms, sociology is the study of society. However, this answer is often unclear or unsatisfying to an incoming class of Sociology 101 students. This clip illustrates Steven Johnson's theory of where good ideas come from, and can help explicate to students what makes the sociological perspective so unique. Instructors can begin by saying that, while most anything can be studied from a sociological perspective, some sociologists have strategically selected sites of inquiry that, at first glance, appear thoroughly individualistic in nature. This strategy is an effort to illuminate how social forces shape even the most seemingly personal of phenomena. Here, instructors can point to Émile Durkheim's study of suicide as a particularly famous disciplinary example of this (which will likely be covered later in the semester). Using a similar strategy, instructors can use the example of creativity and "good ideas" to show how social forces have a profound impact on innovation, a phenomenon that, like suicide, is often characterized as a quintessentially individual act, largely informed by psychological forces. Although some people approach creativity from a psychological viewpoint (e.g., see here), the sociological perspective can be brought into focus for students by comparing such individualistic accounts to Johnson's concept of liquid networks and his use of historical evidence to show the importance of social connectivity and collaboration for innovation. Johnson stresses the need for interconnected social spaces, organizations, and systems for the cultivation of good ideas. Johnson presents a slightly elaborated version of this argument in his TEDTalk. For other clips on The Sociological Cinema that use illustration techniques to convey theoretical arguments, click here and here. I would like to thank Open Culture and Brain Pickings for suggesting these clips. Submitted By: Valerie Chepp Tags: bodies, crime/law/deviance, discourse/language, foucault, gender, knowledge, lgbtq, religion, science/technology, sex/sexuality, social construction, theory, discipline, norms, power, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2010 Length: 3:29 Access: YouTube Summary: This short clip summarizes the main arguments of Foucault's "The History of Sexuality" in a playful song/music video format. Submitted By: Valerie Chepp |
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