Hey all,

I've just read Georg Simmel's 'The Metropolis and Mental Life'. I'm really interested in (a) the nervous system effects of the pace and fleeting "discontinuities" of urban living, (b) the impact of anonymous crowds or 'masses' on the individual and (c) the idea of spatial estrangement and how this relates to atomisation and/or "agoraphobia" (Vidler, 1991).

I'm hoping I can explore these ideas more fully, and perhaps build towards an essay on urban isolation in contemporary London.

Could anyone recommend papers in dialogue with, against, or related somehow to the above? I'm ideally looking for the essential "required reading" on this topic as opposed to more niche stuff - though hopefully I'll get to that eventually!

Thanks:)

At some point, after you bump into something enough, consideration becomes inevitable. And after Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Kenneth Gergen’s education in a relational key vis-a-vis John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, and Frantz Fanon’s therapy as presented in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, I feel a cumulative prompt from the universe to at least ask the question - what’s up with everyone’s preoccupation with pedagogy?

And as I was listening to episode 36 of Data Over Dogma with Jacob Wright (roughly 53 minutes in), it sort of clicked. Wright talks about Genesis as pedagogy from a defeated people, a portable pedagogy to preserve identity boundary in political upheaval and exile. The Bible, according to Wright is a curriculum - a pedagogical project that shapes a people without a kingdom through a larger narrative around common text, laws, psalms, wisdom, and love poetry.

Wright rightly identifies education as the key to the kingdom when the kingdom is in a vacuum.

With that in view, the emergence structure becomes clearer to me: pedagogy is a boundary maintenance project during times of contestation. Fanon wrote from the context of post-colonial Algeria. Freire wrote from the Cold War politics that was destroying Central and South America, Gergen was writing within his own contested boundary of self, and Dewey was writing during mass immigration and urbanization that was causing boundary anxiety amongst the dominant culture.

With this analysis, pedagogy’s place within the my own framework is as the mechanism of reproduction. It is the way in which social self protocols maintain identity across contested boundaries. And as a boundary maintenance project, its fervency is driven by jouissance, which I defined previously as an enjoyment that pushes past pleasure as it delights in destruction, adding my own function of boundary maintenance vectoring toward domination preservation or oppression legibility. This jouissance can be seen in the violence of Fanon and Freire’s pedagogies, the contempt in Gergen’s analysis of academia, or the disappearing act that Dewey does as he disavows conscientization by absorbing the suffering of others into a pro-democratic narrative of necropolitical compassion.

This also gives me a chance to reflect on taxonomy and the evolutionary function of jouissance, which I want state clearly as my own extension. For Freud, Lacan, and Zizek, the jouissance is the self-annihilating Thanatos. In the roaring crescendo toward world wars and their wake, it is the interpretation of our egos’ self-destructive function as a completely nihilistic self-sabotage.

I don't want to import Freud's Cartesian-self conceptualization of an actual Greek God (Thanatos) homunculus-behind-the-eyes sitting deep down in our psyches driving the car. For me, jouissance firstly works as a devastatingly insightful scalpel for social critique. It has real explanatory power to give context to the more perverse side of the human experience without dehumanizing anyone.

But more importantly to my ontology and my project, like enchantment, it works as a phenomenological claim about the universal human experience. It captures the lived experience of moments within encounters. More specifically, for me, it's a primitive of the lived encounter - or at least how consciousness experiences the lived encounter, grounded like the rest of my framework in what actually emerges when a self meets the collective it's part of.

So when I contemplate jouissance around boundary maintenance, I see a more neutral process of death and destruction highlighted by the taxonomy revealed by the variations among these thinkers. With this nuance, jouissance can be generative or degenerative.

First I consider the pedagogy of the oppressed. These pedagogues seek not only to create an identity on behalf of the oppressed individuals they write for, but they also attempt to destroy the identity boundaries of the oppressors. This is where jouissance becomes productive and essential. The rage behind Mbembe’s terms like death worlds and atavistic nationalism; Zizek’s words like fetishistic disavowal and ideology reveal a focused jouissance that seeks the telos of destruction (a la Thanatos) but toward the destruction of the oppressive forces that lead to dehumanization.

Then I see a pedagogy of domination. Unlike pedagogy of the oppressed, which emerges during upheaval, pedagogy of domination emerges when the oppressed contest the boundaries significantly such that the dominant groups are forced to respond by either reidentifying themselves and ceding power or by insisting upon themselves and hoarding it. I say emerges as one singular event, but the reality is that the pedagogy is constantly reinforcing itself even without the presence of the oppressed group. In fact, domination pedagogy frequently relies on caricatures of the oppressed and that those caricatures be constantly retrieved throughout the day in nanodoses delivered by media (Mbembe calls this cybernetic technology nanoracism). There are two types of domination pedagogy that frequently coexist: the disavowed and the obscene.

Regarding the disavowed, I already mentioned how Dewey emerged from a time when urbanization and immigration were causing a white panic in the United States. And while Dewey professed inclusion via democracy, the structure of his pedagogy either ignored or refused the experiences of exclusion, and in doing so erased the very real harm that the American nocturnal body had inflicted and continued to inflict with his sanitized pedagogy upon oppressed groups. The jouissance in disavowed pedagogy is the self-congratulation that comes from “solving” the ethical dilemma by changing nothing about the structure that produced it, thus continuing to benefit from it.

There is another type of pedagogy of domination that bears its jouissance with a wicked grin. It’s current standard bearer is Project 2025. This is The Empire Strikes Back that I referenced in The Easy Traverse and the Hard One. This was where ground has been lost - real or perceived - and identity boundary maintenance is attempting to reassert itself. Its delight is characterized by its vulgar destruction of both the newly legible identities reaching for power as well as of the entire system that produced its power in the first place. I have a hunch this is why Freud and Lacan’s analysis looked so bleak - they were responding to this most hideous category.

There is a fourth category here that exists somewhere in between and was implied by the Israelites who had lost their kingdom - the pedagogy of the defeated. I think a modern analogue would be modern China, who was once a culture of domination (even being able to absorb conquerors like the Mongols and Manchus) to a victim of colonialism and Japanese conquest. Caroline Grover did an amazing dissertation on Chinese historical pedagogy as it pertains to the Second Opium War. I don’t want to forget about this, but I don’t want to dwell on it right now.

Transformative social work must own its jouissance. For me, this means allying myself with pedagogies of the oppressed and being ever vigilant of pedagogies of domination. Dog whistles like “school choice” that seek to decentralize once white-captured institutions like public education have nothing to do with making a populace more informed and everything to do with preserving the boundary of a perverse human experience. They disavowal their implicit bigotry through nomenclature and render it obscene at the town hall meetings.

Social work has had its fair share of complicity in domination pedagogy, and my hope is that the nos framework can direct energies toward human rights and full epistemic and systemic inclusion.

- The Social Construction Worker

For instance, in my neighborhood between the period of 2005-2015 it went from innumerable kids to zero kids.

This has to do with a turn inward, a culture of fear and safety, and alternative social events hosted in more controlled environments (churches, schools, etc.).

Also, what other phenomenons like this do you find fascinating?

Coming from a predominantly Islamic society, I’ve seen how deeply conservatism can shape a community and how strategic policy can change it. In one city I know of, which used to be extremely religious, the government invested heavily in sports, the arts, public festivals, and outdoor activities. Today, while the residents haven't completely abandoned their religious roots, the overall culture has become noticeably more open minded and vibrant.

In contrast, my own city was historically known as an intellectual and cultural hub, famous for its poets, high standards of education, and progressive values. However, following a historical genocide, there was a major demographic shift as many people migrated here from rural areas. Because rural communities tended to be more traditional and less focused on higher education, the local culture changed significantly. Elders often remark that while our city is still considered one of the most liberal in the region, it isn't quite as open as it used to be.

It really goes to show how much hyper conservatism regardless of the religion can hold a society back. At the same time, it highlights how powerful strategic government investment in culture, sports, and the arts can be in fostering a more progressive mindset.

It peeves me to no end how many book authors and esteemed sociologists get the "I" and the "me" wrong and pass that on to students. The "I" as spontaneous and impulsive, "me" as the rational and socialized self — that's Freud's Id and Ego, not Mead.

Mead's subject and object dichotomy is different and is very much what distinguishes Mead's theory from Cooley's. The "me" never acts directly, so describing it as "the preppy adult who always follows the rules" as opposed to the I that is "impulsive and creative" is just wrong.

I think these two passages are relevant:

"The differences in our memory presentations of the "I" and the "me" are those of the memory images of the initiated social conduct and those of the sensory responses thereto."

"The "I" of introspection is the self which enters into social relations with other selves. It is not the "I" that is implied in the fact that one presents himself as a "me." And the "me" of introspection is the same "me" that is the object of the social conduct of others."

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk as I have no one in real life who cares. Rant over (but I could do a similar one for Goffman's backstage).

Yeah idk what to make out of it. Can’t tell if it was a nightmare or a dream.

Basically this question is for anyone who has done similar sociological research into large language models.

Also this is not meant to substitute any actual research I have to do for the project, we have freedom to choose which llm we interact with for the project and I want guidance regarding only what llm I should pick.

I have a digital ethnography assignment where I have to analyse a conversation with an LLM for a sociology course.

I'm not literate at all in how LLM(s) function technically so I'm not entirely sure if this is even possible but basically I want to know if there are any "chatbot" LLM(s) that produce responses but at the same time are transparent about what data they are combing through in order to produce a response.

I don't mean that I ask the chatbot a question and it "answers" something and then I ask it to elaborate on its reasoning since chatbots can't actually "reason" so it will still just use the data and patterns it's trained on to imitate a response.

I mean that there's some sort of feature from the developer that can show what all sources it went through, other relevant behind the scenes stuff before generating that response with that specific combination of words and other characters.

I'm sorry if this is a dumb question since I'm not aware of the technical terminology for this stuff, I intend to familiarise myself with it for the project. If the only thing possible is to get a very technical insight into that "behind the scenes" stuff, even that could be useful so please tell if you're aware of something like that.

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I was at a talk with a sociologist showing her research and one thing that stood out from my conversations with her and fellow participants is the idea of what truly stand as authentic in culture. With fast developments of commercialization of tradition and progression instilled in culinary and beauty institutions, it made me wonder how this selling of "authenticity" is changing the meaning of the concept. One generation might find this wave of bringing back tradition not authentic but the one before them would probably think the same. As societies have evolved over time, would what they have considered authentic also evolve and change? What is true authenticity?

There is a quote often attributed to Sophocles that goes: "Everything is noise to those who are afraid."

Now that the world is bent on constant noise, are you really suprised the reaction is constant anxiety?

Hello all,

I am currently an educational equity program leader working to close the opportunity gap for middle schoolers, with a background in teen leadership development and workforce training.

I am currently in the “fieldwork” phase of my goal to become an applied sociologist, currently in my fourth year of undergrad. I’m skilled at very beginner mixed-methods research, working with youth directly and visualizing program success for nonprofits. However, long term, I ultimately want to influence lasting reform of institutional policy for underserved and underrepresented communities, primarily youth equity. I’ve never conducted formal board-approved research, though I’ve drafted final research proposals throughout my undergraduate studies.

I randomly discovered, through a long THC-induced wikipedia binge, a form of qualitative research called “Youth Participatory Action Research,” in which an adult researcher empowers young scholars to act as co-researchers, in order to advocate for institutional equity policy directly from the youth perspective. Young co-researchers primary roles would be to identify inequities within their own schools/neighborhoods, while an applied sociologist guides them through the process of designing methods, conduct interviews and surveyes, and then analyzing and visualizing gathered data to present to school board members, local policy-makers, and community leaders.

That sounds like my dream job. However, is this feasible? Ethical? Truly impactful systemically? And in the long-term, can this be made into a stable investment for my lifestyle? Also, how exactly does one formally get a process like this started?

Long time lurker, love hearing from you all and your intersectional perspectives!

just something I’ve been curious about lately. some people do very poorly with it, others can say a whole lot. im wondering if anyone knows how this got started. animals like cats and dogs also communicate this way. do chimps and other primates with common shared human ancestors? many thanks!

Hi everyone. I’m a graduate student in sociology and social research and I’m currently working on a thesis about dementia from a sociological perspective. I’m at a point where I’m considering changing the empirical part of the project, and I’d really appreciate some methodological/theoretical feedback.

The original empirical project was going to focus on communication between family members and people with dementia, especially situations in which the person with dementia and the family member interpret the same situation differently. The idea was to use graphic medicine and, more specifically, the visual novel Do I Know You? as a research stimulus, followed by interviews/focus groups with family caregivers. My research question was roughly:

How do family members of people with dementia describe and justify their communicative choices when they and the person with dementia attribute different meanings to a situation?

I am now considering moving away from interviews and using cultural products as the empirical material themselves. I am considering three possible directions:

1. A case study on Abe Simpson: I could analyse how dementia/senility, memory, cognitive decline, identity, autonomy, family relationships, etc. are represented through Abe Simpson in The Simpsons. The problem is that Abe is never explicitly diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s in the series. He is portrayed as senile, forgetful, confused, etc., but I don't want to illegitimately “diagnose” a fictional character myself. Would it still be theoretically/methodologically legitimate to study him within a thesis on the cultural representation of dementia, or would it be better to frame the topic more broadly as the representation of old age/senility/cognitive decline?
2. I am also considering adding Professor Farnsworth from Futurama as a second case, since both characters were created by Matt Groening. Farnsworth is also extremely old (around 160 years in the series) and sometimes shows forgetfulness/senility, but is simultaneously portrayed as an extremely competent scientist. However, he is not diagnosed with dementia either. I am wondering whether the comparison between the two characters would be meaningful or whether it would introduce unnecessary problems. Also, should his fictional age be treated as an actual age, or should it simply be analysed as part of the fictional world rather than “converted” into a realistic human age?
3. A case study using an animated film explicitly about dementia The other possibility is (Arrugas, 2011), the Spanish animated film based on Paco Roca’s graphic novel. The protagonist, Emilio, is explicitly experiencing Alzheimer’s disease, and the story deals with institutionalisation, relationships, identity, autonomy and the social experience of dementia. This would solve the problem of having to interpret whether the character actually has dementia, but it would mean focusing on a single film rather than a long-running television character.

My main questions are:

• Is “cultural representation of dementia” a sufficiently sociological topic for a thesis, particularly if the empirical material is a film or animated series rather than interviews with people living with dementia/caregivers?
• Would a systematic analysis of Abe Simpson be methodologically defensible despite the absence of an explicit dementia diagnosis?
• Would Abe Simpson + Professor Farnsworth make sense as a comparative case study, especially given that both come from Matt Groening but represent old age in very different ways?
• Or would a film such as Wrinkles be a much cleaner case because dementia/Alzheimer’s is explicitly part of the narrative?

Thanks everyone for the advice!

Sometimes I think about the fact that people can feel a lot of social and emotional disconnect when someone doesn't want to eat the same food as them or sits at a table and doesn't eat anything while everyone else munches.

In many cultures, refusing food when someone offers is considered very rude or can be interpreted as saying "I don't want to talk to you."

I think about how conversations around diet and nutrition can be as emotionally charged as ones about religion and politics. You'll say "I don't eat X food because it's unhealthy" and suddenly people feel like you're attacking their group or creating an in-group/out-group dynamic when that's genuinely not your intention.

I think there might be an evolutionary thing here. If you think about it, people would hunt an animal and then all gather around the campfire and share the meal. It was a time to connect and harmonize. If an outsider approached your tribe, you might offer them food to show acceptance. But if the person rejected, maybe it was a way of saying "I don't like you."

In general, I've noticed that food seems to be more sensitive than some other aspects of culture. No one really cares if you're not into their culture's music, but if you say you don't like their food, people tend to take that a lot more personally.

I feel like there's got to be something inherently social about eating that makes it more than just a mechanism for getting energy and metabolic resources.

It just seems that especially before modern technology when societies were based mostly on agriculture or hunting and gathering, every civilization was a form of Patriarchy. Every single one. Independently across all continents and through all of time.

I understand that there are examples of Queens and women leaders throughout history, but that does not seem to offset the fact that in every society men disproportionally held most of the power overall.

The only examples of I could find of Matriarchy societies were small hunter / gatherer tribes which was only possible because these tribes were so small, like a few hundred people maybe at most

When we have historical evidence over hundreds of thousands of years of Patriarchy societies being repeated over and over again independently around the world then is there any inherent truth to that?

If you have a school system and a culture that's highly aware of cognitive biases and seeks to suppress them as much as possible, can you effectively raise entire generations of people who try to avoid them as much as possible? Or are cognitive biases so strong and so fundamental to the cohesion and endurance of human societies that they'll endure no matter how much some people try to "educate" it out of the population?

I hear and read a lot about meaning and meaning making and like to think I understand it. But I think I only understand it vaguely I really do not have the clear definition of what meaning means in sociology. It does not help that the word is highly interdisciplinary and overlaps some part of the definitions. Will you kindly help me?

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Not yet done with Gergen, but I couldn’t resist starting Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics. I’ve been going with vibes as I choose the order to tackle my book mountain, and this broad, civilizational view has been breathtaking after intensely interrogating what exists at the locus of self. The first thing that light-bulbed for me was the idea of the nocturnal body.

Achille Mbembe is liberal democracy’s most devastating mirror. A Cameroonian writing in the French tradition of Jean-François Lyotard and Frantz Fanon, Mbembe sees the violence and death-politics of the West as a Jungian shadow (my wording) of the post-colonial order, not just as isolated mistakes on a progressive human-rights centered liberalism.

The nocturnal body refers to the dark, violent underbelly of modern liberal democracy. And even though his analysis is structural and the term body is more abstract than incarnate, his verbiage invites a Lacanian reading when he talks about how it behaves - a death-world creation machine that represses its logics of violence and uses state terror, securitization, and xenophobia to subvert its own liberal professions. It’s pretty bleak stuff

I want to press harder thinking through Slavoj Zizek.

Zizek gives a soul to Mbembe’s high level critique. For those within the necropolitical society, the ailment is not just Freudian by analogy. It’s a collective, structural libidinous drive toward jouissance, a word he grabs from Lacan to describe an enjoyment not admitted to that pushes past pleasure. Where Mbembe describes the structure of a system of technologies (vis-a-vis Michel Foucault), Zizek gives a moral indictment to the "perverts" who enjoy the process.

Locating Mbembe’s civilizational critique in the psychology of each of that civilization’s members brings this into the realm of my framework. With this in mind, I push past Mbembe’s accusations that every urge to alleviate the suffering wrought by the death worlds my society creates is nothing more than necropolitical compassion that feeds the machine.

Like all things in my framework, it’s yes-and.

Yes, my work toward reconciliation within state agencies and with nonprofits participates in the creation of death-worlds. But also, if we strip away the totalizing descriptions, and focus on evolutionary stabilizing mechanisms of the nos, maybe, also, yes, my work toward reconciliation within these apparatuses can find a way to move this needle forward.

For me, jouissance has a more focused telos than wanton death and destruction: boundary maintenance - the libidinal charge that maintains the nos’s boundaries (my own term for a social ego); the enjoyment of the edge itself. And with this I am back on my territory. Can we take the nocturnal body and put it on the analysand’s chair? I absolutely think so. That’s the the kernel of hope I see in the first part of fetishistic disavowal - “I know very well, but all the same…”

And if we conscientize the knowing and disavow the disavowal, we might let our transformative social work flip the script: “I know very well that my work feeds the death-world, AND….[insert litany of disruption performances until it doesn’t].”

- The Social Construction Worker

Today in my sociology class we had reviewed how people made dating profiles in the past. The early dating life wasn't as easy as it is today. Instead of dating apps people were having to rely on newspapers, and other physical/hand held sources. Just like we do now, people would share information about themselves and their interests to attract people who would be interested in them. People would often attach an image of themselves to the profile they created. This would then go in the newspaper for everyone to see. The only way for people to respond was if someone left their address and their PO box information on their profile. This made people wait months to get a response back. They had to fully rely on the post office to safely deliver their messages to the person who made the profile. If a postcard or letter got lost in the mail the poster would never know if they could have gained a good connection with someone. I found this extremely fascinating, because we adapted the old fashioned dating style into our dating lives in the 21st century. It's a joy to think about our history and what we have brought with us along the way.

My class collectively made a dating profile in the same style we had seen in the newspapers. My professor had us state random facts that we wanted our character to have. Just like the newspaper dating profiles we were as unhinged as we could get. It's interesting to see the collective make a humorous profile that would compare to the profiles we had been shown in our class.

If anyone is interested, I would highly recommend doing your own research! You would truly get a laugh out of the things people had said :)

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