When Did Nature Become Moral?

an article by Hillary Angelo in Public Books via 3 Quarks Daily with thanks to S. Abbas Raza



When did nature become a good for cities? When did city dwellers start imagining nature to be something they were missing? Today, urbanites’ moral associations with nature are so obvious and widely shared that a recent New Yorker cartoon of a couple at the dinner table was captioned: “Is this from the community garden? It tastes sanctimonious.” For better or worse, most of us are so steeped in this view of nature that it is hard to imagine how it could be otherwise. But it once was.

Many believe that nature became an ethical force in city life—a process Justin Farrell calls the “moralization of nature” for urban inhabitants—on account of 19th-century industrial cities. The lack of access to clean air, water, sunshine, and green space in crowded, polluted urban environments—in contrast to a real nature “out there”—transformed nature from a material into a moral good. These unnatural cities, the argument goes, forced people to see nature as not just something good, but something good for you: spiritually, emotionally, even physically.

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I found this extremely interesting. H

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There was no relationship between obesity and poverty — until high-fructose corn syrup

a post by Derek Beres for the Big Think blog

A new study out of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville traces a disturbing correlation.

• Before 1990, there was no noticeable correlation between obesity and poverty.
• Within a quarter-century, impoverished regions showed a massive uptick in obesity and type 1 diabetes.
• Researchers chart the relationship between "food deserts" along with obesity levels.

In 1841, Orlando Jones patented alkali starch extraction, a process that separated corn starch from kernels in what is known as wet milling. One year later, Thomas Kingford opened the first commercial wet milling plant in the States. Corn, an agricultural product dating back at least 6,000 years to the Oaxaca region of Mexico, was a natural fit for this process given its abundance. It would take another two decades for chemists to realizes corn starch could be used as a sweetener.

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“Pour It Up, Drink It Up, Live It Up, Give It Up” Masculinity and Alcohol in Pop Music Videos

an article by Samuel Lindsay and Antonia C. Lyons (Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand) published in Men and Masculinities Volume 21 Issue 5 (December 2018)

Abstract

Music videos are popular, frequently aimed at young adult audiences, and easily accessible through online platforms. They often portray specific versions of masculinities and femininities and are increasingly linked to the alcohol industry.

This research explored how masculinity, femininity, and alcohol consumption are constructed within four mainstream popular music videos. Critical multimodal discourse analysis was employed to systematically examine dominant meanings across various modes of the videos (lyrics, sound, video, and editing).

Two major discourses were identified, namely, extreme consumption and freedom, and together these created “playboy” and “woman-as-object” subject positions. These positions are discussed with reference to hegemonic masculinity, postfeminist culture, and capitalist consumerism and considered in terms of the complex ways in which influential postfeminist and hegemonic discourses obscure the operations of power.

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Is computer gaming a craft? Prehension,* * Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. View all notes practice, and puzzle-solving in gaming labour

an article by Tom Brock and Emma Fraser (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) published in Information, Communication & Society Volume 21 Issue 9 (2018)

Abstract

This article applies sociological theories of ‘craft’ to computer gaming practices to conceptualise the relationship between play, games, and labour.

Using the example of the game Dota 2, as both a competitive esport title and a complex game based around a shared practice, this article examines the conditions under which the play of a computer game can be considered a ‘craft’. In particular, through the concept of ‘prehension’, we dissect the gameplay activity of Dota 2, identifying similarities with how the hand practices craft labour.

We identify these practices as ‘contact’, ‘apprehension’, ‘language acquisition’ and ‘reflection’. We argue that players develop these practices of the hand to make sense of the game’s rules and controls. From this perspective, it is the hand that initiates experiences of craft within computer gameplay, and we offer examples of player creativity and experimentation to evidence its labour.

The article concludes with a discussion on the need for future research to examine the quality of gaming labour in the context of esports.

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A discipline at the crossroads? Using a gender-inspired paradigm to reposition the sociology of work and employment

an article by Kate Huppatz (University of Western Sydney, Australia) and Anne Ross-Smith (Macquarie University, Australia) published in Journal of Sociology Volume 53 Issue 4 (December 2017)

Abstract

The future of work and employment sociology has been a subject of concern for a number of authors in recent years. Halford and Strangleman, among others, have suggested that work and employment sociology is on the decline, in that it has been disconnected from wider sociology and co-opted by management and business schools.

In this article we unpack the debate and look at how it relates to gender and work scholarship. In doing so, we propose that the decline thesis might be overstated.

While gender and work sociology has been implicated in the demise of labour process theory, it has also embraced change and strengthened and diversified work and employment sociology.

Nevertheless, in this article, we treat the perceived threat as an opportunity to rethink work and employment sociology. We propose a four-themed, interdisciplinary, gender-inspired research paradigm.

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Human Legacies When Robots Rule the Earth

Machines have been displacing humans on job tasks for several centuries, and for seventy years many of these machines have been controlled by computers.

an article by Robin Hanson published in MIT Technology Review

While the raw abilities of these computers have improved at an exponential rate over many orders of magnitude, the rate at which human jobs have been displaced has remained modest and relatively constant. This is reasonably because human jobs vary enormously in the computing power required to do those jobs adequately. This suggests that the rate of future job displacement may remain mild and relatively constant even if computing power continues to improve exponentially over a great many more orders of magnitude.

Even if it takes many centuries, however, eventually robots may plausibly do pretty much all the jobs that need doing. A future world dominated by robots could in principle evolve gradually from a world dominated by humans. The basic nature, divisions, and distributions of cities, nations, industries, professions, and firms need not change greatly as machines slowly displace humans on jobs. That is, machines might fit into the social slots that humans had previously occupied.

However, there could also be much larger changes in the organization of a robot society if, as seems plausible, machines are different enough from humans in their relative costs or productivity so as to make substantially different arrangements more efficient.

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Becoming a Drug Dealer: Local Interaction Orders and Criminal Careers

an article by Waverly Duck (possibly Yale University, New Haven, USA) published in Critical Sociology Volume 42 Issue 7-8 (November 2016)

Abstract

This article reports on an ethnographic study of the process by which a young man became a drug dealer in a in a small northeastern US city. Drug dealing was the principal occupation in his predominantly black neighborhood.

This process is treated as an initiation into a criminal career that involved not only the mastery of specific steps of drug dealing but also learning the expectations of the local interaction order framing the space where he lives.

Approached in this way, one young man’s story offers a window into the local interaction order of a drug-dealing space: a set of local social practices that must be routinely mastered in the area where he grew up.

The pervasiveness of drug-dealing practices in the local interaction order offers valuable insight into how and why male youth in this locale would enter the drug trade and are at considerable risk of arrest.

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The Limits of Technology: Social class, occupation and digital inclusion in the city of Sunderland, England

an article by John Clayton and Stephen J. Macdonald (University of Sunderland, UK) published in Information, Communication & Society Volume 16 Issue 6 (2013)

Abstract

Drawing upon the concept of capital and its uneven distribution, as outlined by Bourdieu, the article highlights the importance of social class, occupational status and place in understanding how individuals and communities make use of and benefit from technology in their everyday lives.

Based upon quantitative and qualitative research conducted in the city of Sunderland, England, the article addresses the extent and manner to which those in ‘socially excluded’ areas of the city engage with technology, specifically personal computers and the internet and the impact of such engagement upon quality of life and social inclusion.

The research indicates that the manner in which technology is experienced by marginalised social groups in this place, does not fit neatly with a dominant discourse of digital inclusion which emphasises technology as a means for social inclusion, particularly in the realms of civic participation, educational achievement and employment.

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Persons with Disabilities: Entitled to Beg, not to Work. The Argentine Case

an article by Eduardo Daniel Joly (Fundación Rumbos and REDI (Red por los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad), Argentina) and María Pía Venturiello (Universidad de Buenos Aires and CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), Argentina) published in Critical Sociology Volume 39 Number 3 (May 2013)

Abstract

The article analyses the structural unemployment that characterises persons with disabilities from a social, economic and political perspective.

As long as persons with disabilities continue to be defined as unable to perform productive work, they will remain condemned to poverty, begging, dependency and a life without projects to fulfill.

With reference to the history and struggles of the disability rights movement in Argentina, it focuses on understanding this struggle as a collective endeavour, aimed at establishing the right to earn a living by working, i.e. via paid productive employment.

It concludes by positing that in the long run, social inclusion can only be realised in a society that is organised so that each individual can contribute what he or she is capable of, with the necessary means put at his and her disposal; and that in return, his and her needs (as they may evolve over time) will be met.

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Appointment Time: Disability and Neoliberal Workfare Temporalities

an article by Karen Soldatic (Curtin University, Australia) published in Critical Sociology Volume 39 Number 3 (May 2013)

Abstract

My primary interest in this article is to reveal the complexity of neoliberal temporalities on the lives of disabled people forced to participate in workfare regimes to maintain access to social security measures and programming.

Through drawing upon some of the contemporary debates arising within the social study of time, this article explicates what Jessop refers to as the sovereignty of time that has emerged with the global adoption of neoliberal workfare regimes.

It is argued that the central role of temporality within the globalizing project of neoliberal workfare and the positioning of disability within these global macro-structural processes requires the sociological imagination to return to both time as a theme and time as a methodology.

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Security, respect and culture in British teenagers' discourses of knife-carrying

an article by Marek Palasinski (Based at Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UK) published in Safer Communities Volume 12 Issue 2 (2013)

Abstract

Purpose
The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of English adolescents' views on knife-carrying and offer a potential framework for challenging their implicit tolerance of the phenomenon.

Design/methodology/approach
A sample of 25 adolescents from three large English cities (London, Birmingham and Manchester) was interviewed about knife-carrying at seven youth community centers and their narratives were analyzed by drawing on the classical discourse analysis and the concept of narrative repertoires.

Findings
The adolescents constructed the social and legal consequences of knife-carrying as normal, trivial and inevitable.

Research limitations/implications
Talking to a stranger with a voice recorder about the sensitive subject of knife-carrying appeared to be problematic, which probably had an inhibitory effect despite the conversational warm-up and assured anonymity.

Practical implications
Cautioning against creating common sense associations between knife-carrying and irresponsibility or deviance, the paper emphasizes the need for the focus on the low controllability and unpredictability of the knife.

Originality/value
The paper presents scholars and outreach workers with an intimate glimpse of how personal responsibility for knife-carrying and its potential consequences could be diminished by removing the agency from the carrier and rhetorically placing it in society.

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Leviathan calling: Some notes on sociological anti-statism and its consequences

an article by Paul du Gay (Copenhagen Business School (CBS)) published in Journal of Sociology Volume 48 Number 4 (December 2012)

Abstract

A spectre has haunted many forms of ‘social’ explanation over the course of the last century – the spectre of anti-statism.

For not a few sociologists and social theorists, the state has long been regarded as the medium of enslavement, the very antithesis of what they take to be ‘civil society’. Here the state is viewed as a cold monster whose conducts (impersonalism, coercion, indifference, authority – the list is potentially endless) need to be relentlessly exposed and critiqued for their malign influence on the ‘whole human being’ and on ‘society’, which is seen as a naturally occurring phenomenon.

This article argues that this enduring opposition between state and civil society represents an unfortunate error, arising from a perverse tradition which would do away with the state. This problematic tradition was born in liberal and democratic ideas of civil society, was embodied in the romantic apotheosis of the purely and metapolitically social, was radicalised by Marxist designs for a society without a state, and culminated in Nazism and Communism.

It has survived, however, frequently ‘in mufti’, into our own times and can be found in the social sciences, inter alia, in contemporary social constructionist analyses, such as those associated with certain Foucauldian analytics of ‘government’, and in the moralising edicts of ‘cosmopolitanism’.

Against this tradition, the article sees the state as a remarkable, if fragile, achievement, whose withering away does and will continue to bring forth (predictable) monsters. Rather than the antithesis of society, the state is the major vehicle of human liberty, of social peace and security, and, paradoxically, provides sanctuary for the political critics who attack it.

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Shifting shapes of Europe: A conversation with Gerard Delanty

via Eurozine

Gerard Delanty is one of Europe’s leading figures in the field of sociology whose work encompasses a variety of theoretical themes and subjects. The first of his numerous books, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (1995) was a significant, timely and challenging contribution to the European discourse. Almantas Samalavicius asks Delanty to revisit the ideas set forward in this thought-provoking, polemical work.

And you can read the result here.

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Culturomics 2.0: …

Forecasting large-scale human behavior using global news media tone in time and space

an article by Kalev Leetaru published in First Monday Volume 16 Number 9 (September 2011)

Abstract

News is increasingly being produced and consumed online, supplanting print and broadcast to represent nearly half of the news monitored across the world today by Western intelligence agencies. Recent literature has suggested that computational analysis of large text archives can yield novel insights to the functioning of society, including predicting future economic events. Applying tone and geographic analysis to a 30–year worldwide news archive, global news tone is found to have forecast the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, including the removal of Egyptian President Mubarak, predicted the stability of Saudi Arabia (at least through May 2011), estimated Osama Bin Laden’s likely hiding place as a 200–kilometer radius in Northern Pakistan that includes Abbotabad, and offered a new look at the world’s cultural affiliations. Along the way, common assertions about the news, such as “news is becoming more negative” and “American news portrays a U.S.-centric view of the world” are found to have merit.

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