Assignment

Each of you are responsible for turning in a short media assignment once during the quarter.  We will sign up for due dates on the first day of section. You are tasked with finding a news article, short video (10 min. max), cartoon, photo collection or other piece of media relevant to our readings that will help the rest of the students relate what we are reading to current events, or to help them understand the theory better in its historical context. These assignments will be due on Friday.  You should choose a media piece that helps illustrate a sociological theory from the reading due for the Monday and Wednesday lectures of the same week. I will review your assignments over the weekend and use them to help plan our discussion sections for the following week. 

After you choose your media piece, write a 1 page, type-written essay that includes the following:

• Short summary of the media item.
• Description of what sociological theory your media piece relates to, and how it relates to that theory.
• The strengths and limitations of your selected media piece for understanding the sociological theory in question.
• A description of how you suggest using this media item in section in order to help the other students better understand the sociological theory discussed in your paper.

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Marx

• Ice-breaker activity: Share Squares.
• I used the Simpsons and The Meatrix video to discuss Marx – read about how here.

The Frankfurt School, part 1

• worksheet

The Frankfurt School, part 2a: The Culture Industry

• I used Wall-E and Disneyland’s “Carousel of Progress” to explain the culture industry in section, check it out here.
• And here’s the worksheet.

The Frankfurt School 2b, Consumer Society

• See my post on how I used a sample “haul video” in section here.

Structuralism

• I used a video of a rapping toddler and a comedy sketch to help explain structuralism, read about it here.  The comedy video also applies to some of Goffman and Garfinkle.

Goffman and Garfinkle

• I used a speed dating instructional video, and a Dave Chappelle sketch (“When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong – Vernon Franklin”) to work through Goffman and Garflinkle’s ideas.  Here’s the worksheet I gave my students to fill out in groups after we watched both videos.

Poststructuralism

• See my post on using Pink Floyd to help students understand Foucault here.

Postmodernism and review

• I had this advertisement for Yas Island in Abu Dhabi playing as the students came into class and got settled.
• After we briefly discussed postmodernism and how it relates to the video above, I had the students work through this worksheet to begin to review the key ideas of the different theoretical perspectives covered in this course.

For a taste of the event, check out this clip of Dr. Henry Clark from West County Toxics Coalition, who spoke after EPA Region 9 Administrator Jared Blumenfeld.

Or, take a look at my photos! (There’s a lot of them – put your mouse over the slideshow and use the buttons that appear to advance through it at your own pace. Be in touch if you’d like copies.)

Press Advisory

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I ran across my campus mascot in the parking lot on a rainy day.

The office stapler now works! As long as you follow the appropriate steps between staples…

Grad lab computer at the computer hospital : (

Who doesn’t go crazy at a bunched greens blowout sale?!

(Hint: look for micro-penalities, separation, detailed prescription, aggregation, hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement…)

I should note a few things.  The week before we had already done an in-depth review of Sassure, focusing in particular on his concepts of the “signifier” and the “signified.”  We had used this cartoon, also submitted by a student,to distinguish between the two (I pointed out that the signifier of the Cherokee language is visible in the cartoon, but because none of us speak Cherokee, we could not understand the signified, or meaning, of that text).  We discussed how other theorists later used Sassure’s work in linguistics as the basis for a body of theory that places great emphasis on the cultural structures (rules/norms/patterns…) that shape social life. We discussed how the language you learn as a child depends on what culture (or cultures) in which you grow up. Then we reviewed how other aspects of our lives are also shaped by larger cultural “structures” over which individuals usually have little control.

After watching the video below, the students divided into small groups and worked through the Sassure section of the day’s worksheet, which tasked them with writing down sentences about the video that used key words/concepts from the reading.  They also had to find a quote from the reading that applied to the video. I got the idea for using this video from The Sociological Cinema.

As it turned out, many of the students had a hard time applying Sassure to the video. I think adding song and movement to regular speech adds a lot of layers of complexity (not present in the cartoon we used the week before) that made the clip harder to analyze.  Some of the students got a bit confused when the conversation veered towards whether the child’s babbling speech is the signifier (in which case the signified is unknown to the audience because he has not yet mastered English) or whether his entire performance is the signifier (in which case the signified could be seen as successfully conveying the act of rapping).  Another student was stumped on whether  or not the child had a specific meaning/signified he was trying, but failing, to convey. These were all good questions that some of the students were able to follow and respond to, but other students got increasingly confused as the conversation went on. If I use this clip again I’ll have to think about how to better support the discussion.

Next, we worked on Levi-Strauss’s theory of kinship rules as an example of another kind of cultural structure that shapes people’s lives and social interactions.  I showed the video below and had the students fill out the relevant section of the day’s worksheet. The video shows an actor entering into a scene unknown to him. He has been dressed up to look like an old man but otherwise has no information about his character nor  about the characters played by the other actors. The other actors have all been given a loose script to work with ahead of time.  Because the Sassure conversation took longer than I was expecting, we had less time to discuss this video, but I think analyzing it through Levi-Strauss’s work was a fairly straightforward experience for most of the students.

Notes:

• I had the video below playing as students got to class, and then showed the beginning of it again during class.
• I used this worksheet to guide the student work and class discussion.

First, we worked  through these big picture questions individually for a few minutes:

1. What is the historical context in which Marcuse wrote this book?
2. What is Marcuse’s main argument?
3. How does his argument relate to Marx?  To other Frankfurt School theorists?

After reviewing this questions as a group, we looked at this advertisement and then watched the beginning of the haul-video below (most of them had already seen the later content, which gets repetitive, as they arrived in class). After they saw the video projected onto the screen in full-screen mode, I exited full-screen and drew their attention to how many people have seen the video before (779,798!), and was pleased to hear little gasps go up around the room. : )

In small groups, I had the students use Marcuse’s ideas to analyze the video and the ad. They also found quotes in the text that related to the media pieces, and discussed to what extent Marcuse’s 1964 critique still applies today. Finally, we discussed everything as one large group.

Here’s how we worked through the concept…

First, we tackled the big questions:

1. What is the historical context in which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote?
2. Why were Horkheimer and Adorno surprised by the events of their times?
3. What is the question driving their work?
4. How do Horkheimer and Adorno answer this question?

To help the students answer these questions, I showed this video of Disneyland’s “Carousel of Progress” Act as it was shown from 1967-1973 (thanks for the suggestion Bernie Zaleha!).  This exhibit took place well after Horkheimer and Adorno published their critique, but I still found it helpful in visualizing an approximation of the historical moment in which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote.

After we answered the four questions above to our satisfaction, I showed this clip from the movie Wall-E. Each week a handful of my students are responsible for submitting media items for use in class, and I thought this one was particularly effective at illustrating a futuristic take on the culture industry.

Next, students divided into small groups to find quotes from the reading that illustrated content from both videos.  They spent 10 or 15 minutes on this task, and then we discussed their quotes together as a larger group.  Finally, we discussed whether or not Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry is still relevant today.

All in all, I had a lot of fun. And usually if I’m having a good time, there’s a decent chance my students are too. : )

This week we did a brief re-cap of Marx’s ideas on how workers misunderstand the capitalist system in which they are enmeshed.  Next week we’ll discuss how Frankfurt School scholars combine these insights with those of Freud to explain mass support for fascist and Nazi regimes during the World War I and II era.

To help my students understand Marx, I showed these two short videos and asked them to think about the following questions while they watched.

1. How can Marx be used to analyse these videos? Which Marxist concepts do you see illustrated? (hint, estrangement/alienation and commodity fetishism) 

2.  How far does Marx take us in analyzing these videos? What do you see that is NOT well explained through his work? (hint: a consumer-based solution)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEkc70ztOrc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX1iplQQJTo&feature=youtu.be

Pushing my students to think about the strengths and, importantly, the limitations of social theory’s ability to help them understand the world around them is a big part of what I do in this class. Fun stuff.

: )

• An interactive photo and oral history collage
• San Joaquin Valley environmental justice news coverage
• Slideshow of our playback theater events with Kairos Theater Ensemble
• Environmental justice syllabus collection
• A map of the San Joaquin Valley towns where we’ve taken photos and collected stories
• An expanded list of groups working toward environmental justice in the San Joaquin Valley, and links to their social media
• Suggestions for how you can volunteer

Lots of people helped make this relaunch happen, but the project is especially indebted to tech wizards Tyler LaGue (formerly of the John Muir Institute of the Environment at UC Davis), Allen Gunn and the rest of the team at Aspiration, and Grant Kinney of GMK Design. See a full list of the people and organizations involved with this project throughout its history here and here. I continue to be honored to know the environmental justice activists who have so generously shared their stories with me over the 6 years since this project began.

Read on for some of the thinking behind the changes…

Cumulative impacts: One of the concepts that environmental justice advocates regularly invoke is ‘cumulative impacts.’ People are exposed to multiple pollution sources as they go about their daily lives, not just one at a time.  However, our regulatory structure is largely inattentive to this reality, and often grants permits for new pollution sources by assessing them individually rather than assessing their contribution to the cumulative burden of pollution already felt in that area. Needless to say, poor people and people of color bear a higher cumulative burden of pollution than the rest of us.  The new Voices from the Valley website has several features intended to support this framing.

• News feed/archive: By collecting news sources about all environmental justice issues in the Valley in the same place, the news feed underscores the multiple, intersecting pollution problems in the region.  This comes across particularly well when you navigate to the archive view and look at a long list of headlines from the year. I could using a screenshot of this page in a classroom setting when teaching cumulative impacts.
• Collage: The collage features photos and first-person quotes/stories.  They can be sorted and viewed by theme (ie ‘water,’ ‘air,’ ‘pesticides’ etc), but the default view is to have all of the categories show at once.  (However, I think this feature still needs a little work to be more user friendly – suggestions welcome!).
• Map: The map provides a way to visualize where all of the communities featured in the project are in relation to eachother.  Clicking on many of the town names opens up a pop-up window with photos from the photo exhibit. In the future, I’d love to enhance this feature to include data on the various pollutants felt at each of these locations.

Multiple learning styles: The new site is designed to work with as many different learning styles as possible.  It features slideshows, interactive collages, oral history, activity and lecture ideas for the classroom, and a searchable news archive that includes articles, videos, radio, television and digital multimedia projects. (When the first version of Voices from the Valley launched 5 years ago, we also did several interactive theater shows with Kairos Theater Ensemble. See this post for a description).

Social media: Advocacy groups are increasingly using social media channels to get their message out. The new site’s list of relevant organizations in the San Joaquin Valley now includes links to their twitter and facebook channels, as well as a way for viewers to subscribe to all of their twitter channels at once. We also now have our own Voices from the Valley twitter and facebook accounts. The folks at Aspiration have been a big help in thinking through how these accounts can promote the project’s goals.  I’m having a lot of fun experimenting with how to use them to engage in public conversations and connect to like-minded organizations.

New name: ’25 Stories from the Central Valley’ was a great name, but inaccurate in a lot of ways. The original name was built around the 25 interviews I did with women environmental justice leaders in the Central Valley. The idea was that I would edit each of their interviews into stand-alone stories for the website… hence ’25 Stories.’ Only thing is, that was a much bigger project than I realized when I picked the name, and I never made it happen.  So then I decided that if the photo exhibit was made up of 25 photos, that was close enough for the name to still work. But it got tiring explaining that to people, and eventually I also wanted more flexibility in the number of photos I could include in the  exhibit. Also, when I started the project I thought it would cover the entire Central Valley, but the environmental justice movement is at its strongest in the southern half of the Central Valley (the San Joaquin Valley), and all the women I interviewed lived there or got started there. The more familiar I got with the area, the more I realized how distinct the San Joaquin Valley is from the Sacramento Valley (together they make up the Central Valley), and how the project name needed to reflect that.  ’Voices from the Valley’ got around the problems associated with the last name, and is a broader platform for growth in the future.  Talking all of this through with the folks at smartMeme was a big help!