text:
- Sep 2018
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
Each person nudged into violence, they believe, hints at a community that has become broadly more hostile to refugees. For most users, the effect will be subtler, but, by playing out more widely, perhaps more consequential.
A good term to think about here is "social cohesion".
Now there's some sociology for that azz. Let's think about perception, status, group threat, etc. How could we understand this sociologically? Any ideas?
In each, they analyzed the local community by any variable that seemed relevant. Wealth. Demographics. Support for far-right politics. Newspaper sales. Number of refugees. History of hate crime. Number of protests.One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees.
Correlation or causation? Figure it out.
They've encountered racist vitriol on local pages, a jarring contrast with Altena's public spaces, where people wave warmly to refugee families.
I find it interesting that the article contrasts "public spaces" with Facebook. We talked about that in our first guided reading. We have a lot of slippage around what constitutes public.
- Dec 2017
The ability to develop these ideas across the globe is a new precedent, and with recent reports on style guides for white supremacist news outlets, we are learning more and more that words and language are deliberate choices to get disaffected people on their side. The final point I wanted to mak
I'm glad you made time for my email on this and it found its way into your project. I keep thinking that you need to first immediately save that webpage to a document because these things have a way of disappearing. Next, it is a good document to anchor your analysis in a thesis. We could talk about what a style guide is as an ontological project -- it is literally a disciplining tool to shape discourse into hegemonic ideas of acceptable ways of thinking and speaking. Then you could do a good discourse analysis of Stormfront and its style guide. The following semester your goal would be to identify a comparative document from a mainstream conservative organization and do the same kind of analysis. Your final project would be a comparative case study of the stylizing of racist rhetoric along the spectrum of conservative thought in the digital age. Or something like that. IN fact, bring these notes to our first thesis meeting next semester.
Our professor often asks us, "so what?"
I do?! LOL
The third post, In Trends, took a look at statistical trends in public
This worked well. Of course, I would have you rely more on the GSS in your thesis because of its centrality to our discipline. But the grabs of meaningful representations of attitudes about race and racism worked as a framing for your larger questions.
The next post, In Pictures, was intended to be a look at violence against black people from the foundation of America and its politics.
After looking at the posts as a single commentary this may be the weakest, mostly because it doesn't link back to your theoretical interest in how ideologies are formed. The images are moving but not related to your project in very explicit ways. I thought about what I may have done differently. A collection of images from alt-right and conservative policy think tanks comparing their visual rhetoric would be nice. Or, word clouds from speech acts by conservative politicians versus alt-right "leaders versus alt-right soldiers online would be provocative and get your thinking going.
it is not always grounded in theory,
My friends in internet studies would KILL you for saying this. LOL
It is perhaps more accurate to say that because the field is interdisciplinary and still relatively new it has not exhausted the utility of decades of social theory to explain how the internet works and for whom.
For example, when is a person's heritage identified as South African versus Dutch (the Boer colonists in South Africa during the late seventeenth century)? The modern answer seems to depend on their physical appearance: white = Dutch and black = South Africa. Despite these issues, the consumer market for genetic testing has boomed and is expected to reach $340 million by 2022.
The build up to the link between genes, geography and political taxonomies is very good. then we go to Culture essay where you introduce the political economy of selling this "technology" as neutral.
As a result, the second blog post (In pictures) looks at some of the available images online obtained through a simple keyword search, which have been used by various individuals on blogs or discussion forums as evidence either for the biological nature of racial differences or the socioeconomic disadvantages/cultural construction of race.
Initially, I wasn't sure where you were going to take this post. But it ended up making total sense in the final analysis. The image of the race explainer found online is especially poignant given our current climate. There is a recent news article going around that "exposes" the style guide of racist groups. the style guide engages how to use irony, humor and faux scientism to spread ideas about race as natural.
While I intended this post to somehow lead towards validating the scientists when interpreting genetic findings, my research veered away from the scientists and analyzed the scientific basis for claiming genetic differences between groups of people.
This is an important part of the meta-cognition process: changing our mind. I know you wanted to follow the thread on expertise. I still think it is a worthwhile subject. It is also a long and deep one. There is a big literature in sociology, even more in women's studies, and yet more in literary studies. What we went with here is the discourse of legitimate knowledges. I think it went well.
- Apr 2017
antidotezine.com antidotezine.com
The new social contract, as briefly as I can say it, is "You are on your own."
What's the new social contract? Wish I'd thought to say this in the book, just this way.
Union organizing is extremely important not because it directly impacts higher education, but it affords workers different and better choices. And when workers feel less insecure in their labor arrangements they are much less likely to take on a high risk credential.
I am not talking about a return to the union heyday. That day was pretty racist. But the union future being built? I like that jam. It's critical to managing the excesses of credentialism.
TANF (which was created during the Welfare Reform Act of 1996) lead to an expansion in for-profit colleges that don't provide the education that people need and put them into debt they can't get out of?
I wanted someone else to write this. Sara Goldrick-Rab says everyone is waiting for me to write it. Well, crap.
That's what workers are feeling, and they're feeling it at the same time that wages have stagnated, so they have less money to pay for anything, the costs of things like healthcare (which in the short term can seem a little bit more critical than education), and things like taking care of elderly parents and navigating the inevitable cost of living life. Workers are feeling that, and they are angry. And they should be angry. Because our politicians and our political system has not done a good job of protecting us against those changes.
You would think so, except for how one of the consequences of the typical American worker becoming more efficient (which we have become, mostly through developments in technology) is that employers no longer have to rely on the workers' development of skills to keep them efficient. Workers have become more expendable than they were thirty or forty years ago. If the worker is more expendable, we don't need to worry about developing their skill set. We need the technology, and we need to train the workers on how to manage that technology on the ground in real time, but we don't need to develop in our workers the capacity (for example) to develop new technology.
I am still reading and processing new literature but I think I have a lot to say about the discourse emerging around technology change and job loss. The efficiency issue isn't about labor being replaced by technology, exactly. It's how the efficiency also narrows job training in ways that makes it more profitable for firms to off-load workers than it is to train and develop them.
They say things like, "This wonderful trend is happening in the United States: we have produced more high school graduates, but because of how we have produced them—through unequal K-12 schools—fewer people are qualified to go to college. And isn't that great for us? There are people who have graduated from high school who aren't prepared for college. That's wonderful. We can enroll those people. That means we're a good economic investment for you, the potential investor."
And this is why liberals hate me a little. Its also why sociology mattered to the conversation on for-profit higher education. The issue is decoupling higher ed from k-12 absolves too many well meaning folks.
That's one of the things that I hope my work does, is shift the conversation away from everybody in these schools being predators preying on vulnerable students. The more disturbing story is the truth, which is that even when the people in these institutions think they're doing a good thing, because of the way the institutions are set up, they are still preying on people.
A lot of criticism of Lower Ed comes from my argument about this. I stand by it even though I may be in the minority of people who think that this rationalized form of economic oppression is far more interesting than the Wild Western version with good guys and bad guys.
What they say at for-profit colleges is, "We will only train you for a job, because that's what matters." When you say that, though, we have a really concrete way of measuring whether or not you are delivering on what you promised. Do you get your students that job you promised them? That's the problem that for-profit colleges have. We have a really clear way to measure if they are successful or not.
The one thing I am almost 100% certain about is what I have learned from figuring this out: the worst thing traditional higher education could do is get in an arms race with market-based credentialing orgs over job training. Even if we win, we lose. Because the market abhors quantifiable measures of education despite what rich people tell you. They hate it as evidenced by what they don't pay for it. We would undermine our unassailable taken-for-grantedness by narrowing our focus in these ways. I believe in practical arts but not in a vacuum.
I think so. The promises are lofty, no matter where you go. Traditional not-for-profit education promises all kinds of things. "We'll change your whole life! We will teach you how to be an informed, critical-thinking citizen!" Whether we always manage that depends on who you ask and what data that you like. But with for-profit colleges, the real problem is the nature of the promise that they make. It's just as lofty, but it's also more concrete.
You can't tell but this is my dissertation: how do for-profit colleges become legitimate?
So your question, Chuck, was how we know that people know what they know.
Here's what credentials do. I was basically pulling on everything I've read for a decade for this answer. LOL This is: Randall Collins, Blau and Duncan, Jerome Karabel, David Bills, David Brown, etc etc http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0276562411000060
Never ask me this question again in real time. I'm never gonna top this. Never. Won't even try. Just gonna direct you here.
This is one of the really brilliant moves that the for-profit college sector has done, the sleight of hand of saying "customer" instead of "student." We understand a "student" as someone we're all collectively responsible for. We're responsible for the health, well-being, and development of students. We think of "customers," however, as being on their own. Buyer beware. And if you make a poor decision, hey, customers have to learn.
What the consumer or market model does to higher education isn't just gut public good. It also promotes ambiguity where for-profit actors thrive.
There is no for-profit college sector without access to federal student aid money.
You'd have some schools ( the majority of small for-profits not participating in student aid programs) but you wouldn't have a SYSTEM or sub-sector.
It's another way that we haven't managed the problem well—but I won't say that accreditation is the issue. Accreditation is a really weird thing. People who bring it up don't always really know how accreditation works. When we say a school is or should not be accredited, we generally mean: is it a good school? Is it high quality? And that's a little different from what accreditation does in practice.
I recently told a Senator (that's a humblebrag btw) that ironically the one thing that the public learned from decades of cyclical information campaigns about for-profit colleges is the word "accreditation". Not what it means or how it works. Just the word. In some ways, that's worse than not knowing the word at all.
would say, "All colleges are for-profit." What makes the place where you worked, Technical College, or University of Phoenix, different from Harvard or Northwestern? TM: I hear that one all the time. I now actually tell people: "I promise you I've heard that joke. You don't have to do that one for me anymore." All schools are for-profit. I get it, I do.
Please stop telling me this "joke".
Because that shift happened, and because of our belief that the way to address the problem was to provide more market opportunities instead of more public social safety supports, it was a perfect opportunity for profiteering from the for-profit colleges.
Great interviewer questions allow succinct answers. This is as tightly as I'm ever going to say this.
"new economy"
The term puts in a lot of work. It's a nod to the bubble-cycle of the 1990s that starts the era I describe in the book (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_economy) but it is also a nod to the work being done by many organizations and movements to reimagine economic norms and the social contract (see: https://www.thenation.com/article/new-economy-movement/ )
the secretarial school
I continue to be fascinated by these. See: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0432.2012.00587.x/full
You won't find a more rabid group of alumni than those of Catherine Gibbs Secretarial Schools. It's a fascinating case study. I'm always down for reading more, if you've got it.
but you point out that for-profit colleges have been around for two hundred years
There are a few competing histories on the "oldest" for-profit (or "career" or "proprietary") school. Great agreement on them being old, though. See Kevin Kisner for a good brief history https://www.amazon.com/Main-Street-Wall-Transformatin-Profit/dp/0787985287
Thank you so much, Chuck, for welcoming me to hell.
See, I got to cuss.
printed with permission. Edited for space and readability.
When AntiDoTe asked me about transcribing, I said, "sure!" But I was thinking, "that's le cray cray". I do qual work. Transcription is WORK. This much transcription? Is a lot of work. But transcriptions help so much with spreading word, especially for folks using assistive technologies. So thank you for this.
Transcribed from the 11 March 2017 episode of This is Hell! Radio (Chicago
Let's start with how much fun this interview was. Thanks and shouts to the team at This is Hell! Radio. Huge bonus: I got to cuss on the radio.
- Oct 2016
organizationaldynamics.wordpress.com organizationaldynamics.wordpress.com
Here is an attempt to articulate those thoughts more clearly – and maybe end up with a research question and theoretical agenda.
I'm going to take this over to Classroom to ask: how would you articulate Ilten's theoretical agenda after reading this essay?
This technical dimension of bureaucracies goes to the heart of what a sharing economy does: divide up labor
We always come back to the division of labor...
Kreiss et al. ask whether "peer networks serve less as alternatives to Weber's iron cage of rationalization, than as implements of its diffusion." (Kreiss et al. 2011:256)
I've assigned some Kreiss later in the course.
This perspective becomes crucial as newer peer economy platforms move further into the service sphere, where online coordination and offline services are mediated by platforms as brokers.
A conflict theorist might ask: where's the labor in this situation???
as well as a literature on trust and reputation systems
People rarely trace this back to Durkheim but this work is in this tradition. We discussed the role of trust in social organization. One can also discuss how reputation systems are a form of capital -- a resource -- and think of them in the conflict tradition. That doesn't happen that much in the digital literature they cite here but it would be a very good sociological take. A recent AJS (major ASA sociology journal) takes on a summary of how trust plays a role in online auctions (what we often call online platforms where people buy/sell): http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/658062
The most interesting parallel to me is that these platforms are similar organizations
So this is what got me to thinking about the way the "sharing economy" relates to our conversation about Weberian bureaucracies.
- Aug 2016
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
But surely the dedication I show in the lab, and the subsequent data I collect, should speak for itself. I do not – and should not – have to parade myself online to please my employer or to stake my claim as a good researcher. Can't we save the showing off for where it's really needed, in the dreaded grant applications?
They really really really hate their job and for that I am very sorry.
These are not social media representatives or marketing executives, but scientific staff. I
I think this line tells a lot. I now wonder if the writer is employed as research staff or is in some role that 1) would require social media management 2) the author feels is beneath themselves. It wouldn't be unheard of for a scientist to take a role in a scientific staff position that isn't directly related to research and the role to require some social media engagement.
- Jul 2016
www.latimes.com www.latimes.com
Hillary knows we can work through racial divides in this country when we realize the worry black parents feel when their son leaves the house isn't so different than what a brave cop's family feels when he puts on the blue and goes to work
"Racial divides" is a euphemism for "racism", something Barack has said only nominally in his presidency. See Bonilla-Silva's "Racism Without Racists" for more on how this kind of linguistic distancing from the claims to justice in the word "racism" has become central to our current approach to race, racism and inequality. The continued false equivalency of black parents (who also have daughters, I should add) and police officers elides how one party has far more power than the other. But, again, for this audience this is likely very positive messaging. It feels progressive without requiring any sacrifice from anyone but those who are already being sacrificed. That's always a safe bet when giving a speech on a loaded topic.
It's every American who believed we could change this country for the better, so many of you who'd never been involved in politics, who picked up phones, and hit the streets, and used the internet in amazing new ways to make change happen. You are the best organizers on the planet, and I'm so proud of all the change you've made possible.
We will get old and blasè about it one day soon but Obama's 08 campaign was an amazing organizational feat. Start with Daniel Kreiss' research on social media use and political campaigns for an idea of just how impressive this all was: http://thehill.web.unc.edu/2015/03/04/qa-with-professor-daniel-kreiss-the-use-of-new-media-in-political-campaigns/
And it's got me thinking about the story I told you twelve years ago tonight, about my Kansas grandparents and the things they taught me when I was growing up. They came from the heartland; their ancestors began settling there about 200 years ago. They were Scotch-Irish mostly, farmers, teachers, ranch hands, pharmacists, oil rig workers. Hardy, small town folks
We've traveled from the immigrant narrative to white, midwestern, salt of the earth narratives. Barack's multi-racial identity has allowed him to play with authenticity from several, often competing, narratives. Here he chooses one that goes at the heart of Trump's authenticity claim: a "real" (i.e. white) America. Barack reminds us that he, too, has a legitimate claim on white America.
If you want to protect our kids and our cops from gun violence, we've got to get the vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, who agree on background checks to be just as vocal and determined as the gun lobby that blocks change through every funeral we hold.
The images of Barack at the Sandy Hook memorial are very moving. It looks like it profoundly affected him and this is about making at least three constituencies see their fates as linked: parents, police officers/unions, and gun owners. That is a very tall order.
And that's why I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as President of the United States of America.
Again, playing to the idea that critiques of Hillary are sexist for overlooking her objective qualifications for President...even when he has just conceded that there aren't any. But, it is a solid line and one heard throughout this campaign. It does some of the rhetorical work of claiming Hillary's campaign as historic for women without centering the fact that Hillary is a woman -- something that does not sit well with many voters.
who's made me a better father and a better man; who's gone on to inspire our nation as First Lady; and who somehow hasn't aged a day. I know the same can't be said for me. My girls remind me all the time. Wow, you've changed so much, daddy.
This first reference to change. 12 years ago Barack introduced himself nationally using "change" as his key rhetorical refrain. And during his first presidential campaign "change", along with "hope" and "yes we can", became symbolic lynchpins for the democratic party and Obama coalition.
Here, Obama's first reference to change isn't about enacting it but about it acting upon him. The presidency has changed him, even in these superficial ways. It's a pivot that will set a tone for this speech: less about change (the space Trump is trying to claim) and more about consistency. Of course, every challenger to the incumbent party or candidate tries to stake out ground as the change agent. But, there is something particular about Trump's change message that aims both for ahistorical memorialization for the good ol days AND massive destabalizing change in how the U.S. functions.
Hope in the face of difficulty; hope in the face of uncertainty; the audacity of hope!America, you have vindicated that hope these past eight years. And now I'm ready to pass the baton and do my part as a private citizen. This year, in this election, I'm asking you to join me – to reject cynicism, reject fear, to summon what's best in us; to elect Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States, and show the world we still believe in the promise of this great nation.Thank you for this incredible journey. Let's keep it going. God bless the United States of America.
And with that the first African American President of the United States of America passed the baton to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Time and again, you've picked me up. I hope, sometimes, I picked you up, too. Tonight, I ask you to do for Hillary Clinton what you did for me.
Barack calls on that formidable 08 organization to work for Hillary.
It's the painting I keep in my private office, a big-eyed, green owl, made by a seven year-old girl who was taken from us in Newtown, given to me by her parents so I wouldn't forget – a reminder of all the parents who have turned their grief into action.
Powerful statement. Also, Newtown's victims are much less problematic than the victims that brought the Mother of the Movement to the DNC just the night before.
We don't look to be ruled
This is in the running for the best line of the speech. It helps if you know something about the revolutionary war and the civil war. But even without that context, it's a good line for situating Trump's appeal as un-American.
But for all the tough lessons I've had to learn; for all the places I've fallen short; I've told Hillary, and I'll tell you what's picked me back up, every single timeIt's been you. The American people.
Here, the speech turns into what this kind of speech is more often tasked with doing: Barack says goodbye to the coalition he built and offers to turn it over. He moves from "yes we can" to "yes you all can", signaling that coalition is greater than the personality that has anchored it for ten years.
That's why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.
Many are going to cite one of two other really good lines in this speech as the ones that sold it. I'm going with this one. The language is probably far too high-minded for it work with the voters the democrats need to win. I don't care. It's a beautifully structured argument that aligns the fascists and communists Trump promises to save us from with Trump himself while reiterating the idea of Trump as a loser who loses. It's flawless.
in fact, they were the same values Michelle's parents, the descendants of slaves, taught their own kids living in a bungalow on the South Side of Chicago
And what he Barack added to his authenticity narratives when he married Michelle: the most common black American origin story. Claiming the immigrant narrative, working class white narrative, and the black formerly enslaved "we shall overcome" narrative all at one time -- it makes it hard for any other politician to compete.
You know, there's been a lot of talk in this campaign about what America's lost – people who tell us that our way of life is being undermined by pernicious changes and dark forces beyond our control. They tell voters there's a "real America" out there that must be restored. This isn't an idea that started with Donald Trump. It's been peddled by politicians for a long time – probably from the start of our Republic.
Barack walked right up to the line of blaming modern Republican party rhetoric for creating the conditions that created Trump. Instead, he assigns blame to the start of our Republic. But the message is the same: "this was created, ergo someone is responsible for Trump existing and it isn't us".
She's been there for us – even if we haven't always noticed
More allusions to Hillary as a person who does the hard, thankless work that keeps our government working. Stassa Edwards wrote about how the convention speeches have, so far, made visible the often invisible work that women do every day to keep routine life humming along (http://theslot.jezebel.com/last-nights-dnc-was-all-about-the-invisible-work-of-wom-1784382748). Barack seems to be calling out the same.
But she knows that's what happens when you're under a microscope for 40 years. She knows she's made mistakes, just like I have; just like we all do. That's what happens when we try. That's what happens when you're the kind of citizen Teddy Roosevelt once described – not the timid souls who criticize from the sidelines, but someone "who is actually in the arena…who strives valiantly; who errs…[but] who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement."
And this is how Barack explains the caricature. It's steeped in religious undertones of redemption and forgiveness. We all fail. Hillary has failed. But she has been redeemed and we should acknowledge that especially as her failures have come from her willingness to work hard. It's like answering the interview question, 'what's your greatness weakness?". Barack says Hillary's greatest weakness isn't that people dislike her (that's too negative for a grand vision speech) but that she just tries so hard to make a difference.
Look, Hillary's got her share of critics. She's been caricatured by the right and by some folks on the left; accused of everything you can imagine – and some things you can't.
Acknowledging Hillary's many negatives among voters. And, like Bill, he adopts the framing of Hillary not being the caricature of her. I wondered if that framing would stick and it looks like it has some fans. But, Barack does something Bill didn't do: he tries to explain the caricaturization in ways that doesn't blame a vast "right wing conspiracy" (google the clinton years, take one for the reference).
If you want more justice in the justice system, then we've all got to vote – not just for a President, but for mayors, and sheriffs, and state's attorneys, and state legislators.
Barack has called out BLM protestors many times for being too concerned with revolution and not concerned enough about the day-to-day politics of organizing. This is a message aimed at them: get involved in the system and change it at the local level. I will say that whatever one thinks of BLM or how effective they are, the President of the United States has to address their concerns in his farewell speech to the nation in one of the most critical elections in many years.
We all need to get out and vote for Democrats up and down the ticket, and then hold them accountable until they get the job done.
This was a pretty amazing tactical call during a speech genre that is all above high rhetoric. Voting down the ticket, in state and local races is a key concern for organized politics. Barack is using a pretty big pulpit to get the choir to take some very concrete steps.
this business of democracy
"business of democracy" is an interesting phrase. It could be a refutation of Trump's claim that the only business expertise that matters is private sector, rent-seeing business deals. managing the public sector and a massive military is also a business. but, it is also a critical delimitation of what the state is when we talk about it like its a business. the state is, above all, beholden to the public and a business is not.
striving students and their toiling parents as loving families
DREAMers reference.
She knows that acknowledging problems that have festered for decades isn't making race relations worse – it's creating the possibility for people of good will to join and make things better.
Oddly enough, after using the race-neutral framing of "racial divides", Obama then calls out a key premise of those who oppose it: naming something that's wrong can never be more wrong than what is being named. Naming a problem is a necessary condition of addressing it.
America has never been about what one person says he'll do for us. It's always been about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard, slow, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government.
This goes back to the inclusive "we" at the start of the speech, drawing a contrast with Trump's promises to unilaterally make all national decisions. And, reminding idealistic voters that democracy inevitably means slow, painful compromise. Not even a President can change that, he is saying.
Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago; We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that together, We, the People, can form a more perfect union. That's who we are. That's our birthright – the capacity to shape our own destiny. That's what drove patriots to choose revolution over tyranny and our GIs to liberate a continent. It's what gave women the courage to reach for the ballot, and marchers to cross a bridge in Selma, and workers to organize and fight for better wages.
This harkens back to the convention speech that shot a young Barack into the stratosphere. It is one of his favorite narratives: a linear historical march from progress to progress, never getting into the complexity of how many of these progressive wins happened at the expense of the others or were necessary because those others didn't work. But, rhetorically, straight lines are almost always best.
That is another bet that Donald Trump will lose.
Trump's entire rhetorical framing rests on a single idea: he is a winner. Barack goes after this directly. Saying Trump will lose not just a bet but another bet, suggests he loses often. And people who lose often are losers. Ergo, Trump is a loser. If refrains work for voters, this seems like a good one.
America is already great. America is already strong. And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump.
Like Michelle, Barack hammers this idea of America is already great by calling on his authenticity. Who, but an unlikely President like Barack, can authentically say America is already great?
She is fit to be the next Commander-in-Chief.
The fitness test comes up frequently, evidence of just how stunned many people are that Trump hasn't failed it in the eyes of so many voters.
And then there's Donald Trump. He's not really a plans guy. Not really a facts guy, either. He calls himself a business guy, which is true, but I have to say, I know plenty of businessmen and women who've achieved success without leaving a trail of lawsuits, and unpaid workers, and people feeling like they got cheated.
I was astonished to hear Barack address Trump by name. Michelle didn't do it. And many others have avoided it. It was entirely conceivable that the sitting president of the united states would leave that kind of direct engagement to surrogates. But, it is also true that Barack has experience roasting Trump.
You know, nothing truly prepares you for the demands of the Oval Office. Until you've sat at that desk, you don't know what it's like to manage a global crisis, or send young people to war. But Hillary's been in the room; she's been part of those decisions.
This is interesting. Hillary's never been President and Barack just said that nothing prepares you for being President. Except, he says that Hillary IS prepared. Hillary has been his surrogate at key moments in his presidency, he's arguing. As such she has absorbed the kind of first-hand experience that Trump cannot and will not have the capacity to develop. This is a speech about how much we should trust Hillary because of her key proximity to the Oval office for so long.
Now, eight years ago, Hillary and I were rivals for the Democratic nomination. We battled for a year and a half. Let me tell you, it was tough, because Hillary's tough. Every time I thought I might have that race won, Hillary just came back stronger.
This message has played well in many speeches. Many women, especially those of Hillary's generation, identify with her resilience. She has survived bad behavior from her husband, attacks on her looks, questions about her fitness, and all manner of things that feel very familiar to some women who have worked for a long time. Barack casts Hillary's badly run 08 campaign as a virtue, more evidence of her resilience (even if it is sometimes a response to self-inflicted wounds).
There are pockets of America that never recovered from factory closures; men who took pride in hard work
Again, hitting the blue collar white male voter hard in this rhetoric.
we have real anxieties
It is important to acknowledge voters' concerns but the Democrat's trick is to do so without becoming mired in them. The party who projects the most anxiety probably loses to the most novel candidate...and that's not Hillary.
The America I know is full of courage, and optimism, and ingenuity. The America I know is decent and generous.
This speech wants to offer a big story for voters. This is a positive story and one that is very different than the current story the Republican nominee has written. Its reminiscent of Reagan's "morning has come in America" narrative. That's likely not an accident. Barack has repeatedly cited Reagan as an influence.
and turn away from the rest of the world.
It would be very difficult to achieve Isolationism in a global society that has the Internet.
But what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn't particularly Republican – and it sure wasn't conservative.
This is a truly remarkable line. Last night Bill tried to de-couple the "real" Hillary from the caricature of her. Here, Barack does something similar by trying to de-couple the republican party from Trump.
We need to keep making our streets safer and our criminal justice system fairer; our homeland more secure,
Black Lives Matter is all over the subtext in these speeches. Few say it explicitly but there is almost no chance that we'd have a line from the sitting president about the unfairness of the criminal justice system were it not for BLM activists. Here, Barack links that issue to the notion of community crime. That's absolutely an allusion to "black on black crime", or one of the most popular responses to demands from BLM: if you care so much about police violence why don't blacks stop killing themselves?? It's a sign that significant parts of this speech aren't for black voters or BLM activists and sympathizers but with the white, hispanic moderate voters who empathize with grieving black mothers.
So tonight, I'm here to tell you that yes, we still have more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who hasn't yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years
Hillary's support among non college educated white men is particularly low (although not strange for a modern democratic). Barack is speaking to those voters and the many others for whom the stock market recovery has not meant greater economic security. Even with more jobs, job quality remains a big concern and workers feel that.
And through every victory and every setback, I've insisted that change is never easy, and never quick
This is a response to the Republican claim that all that "hopey changey stuff" has been all talk and no action. Barack continues to make the case that this administration's accomplishments would be impressive under any circumstances but in the shadow of the great recession, they are especially remarkable. If he can convince voters of that, Hillary as a continuation of the last eight years becomes a powerful sell.
We put policies in place to help students with loans
Do. Not. Even. Get. Me. Started.
We brought more of our troops home to their families, and delivered justice to Osama bin Laden.
This was the national security night at the convention. Almost every speaker celebrated bin Laden's execution. It is a scary thing to witness.
401(k)s recover
I don't get much into policy things here but the 401k hustle has shifted more risk from nations and corporations to individuals than any kind of stock market recovery could replace. See: Jacob Hacker's "The Great Risk Shift". But I digress. Political rhetoric is complex, yo.
How could I not be – after all we've achieved together?
The inclusive first person plural ("we") was a big part of 08 and 12 Obama's political messaging. He continues it here. Not only is this consistent messaging but it tries to make Trump's message about how he will make America great again sound immature and selfish.
But I was filled with faith; faith in America – the generous, bighearted, hopeful country that made my story – indeed, all of our stories – possible.
Not for the first time Obama situates his personal narrative in the U.S. immigration narrative. This is tricky for black Americans, of course, as many of us are descendants of enslaved people who didn't immigrate by choice but by force.
I actually drove her home to Park Ridge, Illinois… (APPLAUSE) …to meet her family and see the town where she grew up, a perfect example of post World War II middle-class America, street after street of nice houses, great schools, good parks, a big public swimming pool, and almost all white. I really liked her family. Her crusty, conservative father, her rambunctious brothers, all extolling the virtues of rooting for the Bears and the Cuba.
Bill is signaling how far Hillary came from her all white upbringing. It is a stand-in for the many white liberals in the Democratic party who envision themselves as more progressive than their parents and their upbringings. And, it is supposed to make her later work on civil rights seem all the more amazing.
The first time I saw her we were, appropriately enough, in a class on political and civil rights. She had thick blond hair, big glasses, wore no makeup, and she had a sense of strength and self- possession that I found magnetic.
Not five minutes after Bill's speech ended, almost every pundit coalesced around one narrative: this was a spouse speech! So, yes, this is a spouse's speech as evidenced by this open. It's biographical. It is designed to humanize. It is homey and romantic. Or, at least it starts that way.
But, being the Clintons, nothing is simple. This opening vignette also recasts bookish Hillary as desirable and attractive. Given Bill's well-documented sexual exploits, this is important.
When I attended a Trump rally this year, I commented on all the slogans about Hillary as sexually frigid and unattractive (https://tressiemc.com/2016/06/15/i-went-to-a-trump-rally/). Women seemed to be some of the biggest purchasers and purveyors of that message. Bill situates Hillary as not only attractive but, initially, too attractive for him to even approach. It's a specific kind of gendering that is even more specific given the Clinton's history.
And so I say to you, if you love this country, you're working hard, you're paying taxes and you're obeying the law and you'd like to become a citizen, you should choose immigration reform over somebody that wants to send you back. (APPLAUSE) If you're a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together. We want you. (APPLAUSE) If you're a young African American disillusioned and afraid, we saw in Dallas how great our police officers can be, help us build a future where nobody is afraid to walk outside, including the people that wear blue to protect our future.
And this is where Bill continued his recent-ish pattern of losing his green political thumb. This is tone deaf and insulting. Linking Muslims to terror as if they don't exist outside that context is insulting. And the idea that African Americans need to make the future safe for the police when the police are the ones with guns and exploding robots is dismissive, cruel and common. Bill has more deftness than this. He is one of the most gifted politicians in history. When he fails like this it is precisely because he knows how to thread the needle that the failure is so notable.
She sent me in this primary to West Virginia where she knew we were going to lose, to look those coal miners in the eye and say I'm down here because Hillary sent me to tell you that if you really think you can get the economy back you had 50 years ago, have at it, vote for whoever you want to. But if she wins, she is coming back for you to take you along on the ride to America's future.
I think this was supposed to sound strong. I suspect (and I have limited knowledge of this area) that what he is saying is even true. But it sounded like a threat. In a speech that tried to err on the side of optimism, threats stand out like sore thumbs.
And you should elect her because she'll never quit when the going gets tough. She'll never quit on you.
I honestly believe that had he ended this (very well delivered line; he was ratcheting up to religious cadence at this point) with a pause and "because she's never quit on me", the crowd would've gone nuts.
When I was president, I worked hard to give you more peace and shared prosperity, to give you an America where nobody is invisible or counted out. (APPLAUSE) But for this time, Hillary is uniquely qualified to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks we face.
Ok, Bill has to acknowledge their unique political history. But, I thought this reference to his presidency and the video about that preceded his speech was tacky. It was supposed to remind you how much more prosperous you were during Clinton I's administration. Ergo, you'll be as prosperous under Clinton II's administration. Even saying she is "uniquely" qualified doesn't detract from how this argument is structured.
Now, how does this square? How did this square with the things that you heard at the Republican convention? What's the difference in what I told you and what they said? How do you square it? You can't. One is real, the other is made up.
Bill frames the caricature of Hillary as diametrically opposed to the "actual" Hillary. Pundits like to say that coming out of the convention the job is to recast the candidate for voters. How do you recast one of the most recognizable, written about, debated and dynastic political figures in modern politics? Bill indicates that it can be done by rhetorically cleaving the actual Hillary from the cartoon version of Hillary. Time will tell if this rhetorical framing sticks.
(APPLAUSE) As secretary of state, she worked hard to get strong sanctions against Iran's nuclear program. And in what The Wall Street Journal no less called a half-court shot at the buzzer, she got Russia and China to support them. Her team negotiated the New START Treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons and reestablish inspections. And she got enough Republican support to get two-thirds of the Senate, the vote necessary to ratify the treaty. (APPLAUSE) She flew all night long from Cambodia to the Middle East to get a cease-fire that would avoid a full-out shooting war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza to protect the peace of the region. She backed President Obama's decision to go after Osama bin Laden.
For many of the more liberal members of the party, this recitation of Clinton's achievements as Secretary of State is excessively hawkish. Some people will argue that a female politician has to look tough. And, it is true that it isn't possible to be SoS of the U.S. and not be hawkish.
She worked for farmers, for winemakers, for small businesses and manufacturers, for upstate cities in rural areas who needed more ideas and more new investment to create good jobs, something we have to do again in small-town and rural America, in neighborhoods that have been left behind in our cities and Indian country and, yes, in coal country.
Hitting many constituencies in this graf. Someone on social media noted the strong Native American presence at the convention. It shows up again here. The reference to coal country may be a misstep given Hillary's gaf during the primary about coal jobs: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/may/10/context-hillary-clintons-comments-about-coal-jobs/
Her early years were dominated by 9/11, by working to fund the recovery, then monitoring the health and providing compensation to victims and first and second responders.
The night was heavy on 9/11 narratives.
fast forward.
Bill's creative and selective fast forwarding is an attempt to reclaim the glory of his pre-impeachment years without getting mired in the scandal that followed. I'm not sure that referencing it would be the negative some people think it would be. The current republican presidential nominee talked about his penis in a debate. Bill's scandals seem quaint these days. The absence may cause more talk than a reference would have. But, nothing's lost here.
And as you saw last night, beyond a shadow of a doubt so has Michelle Obama.
This is called bowing down. Bow. Down. https://via.hypothes.is/http://time.com/4421538/democratic-convention-michelle-obama-transcript/
In 1997, she also teamed with the House Minority Leader Tom DeLay, who maybe disliked me more than any of Newt Gingrich's crowd. They worked on a bill together to increase adoptions of children under foster care. She wanted to do it because she knew that Tom DeLay, for all of our differences, was an adoptive parent and she honored him for doing that.
Bill: Hillary will be bipartisan, even though Republicans vilify her.
When I became president with a commitment to reform health care, Hillary was a natural to head the health care task force. You all know we failed because we couldn't break a Senate filibuster.
This was a very controversial move and maybe the one that made Hillary one of the most hated public figures in modern politics. Here, Bill tries to reclaim health care -- a significant achievement under the current Dem president -- and link it to Hillary's involvement during Clinton's administration. He has to sidestep the negative politics that surrounded this at the time. An earlier HRC campaign video does the same move. It's yet to be seen if this will work. Healthcare has become popular with voters, even those who swear they hate big government. It remains to be seen if voters are willing to give Hillary credit for it.
If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people's lives are better, you know it's hard and some people think it's boring.
There is a lot said about Hillary being wonkish and, therefore, boring. Her campaign, supposedly, lacks excitement. Bill is saying that policy should be boring. Boring here becomes a virtue.
Within two days we had a house, I soon had a job.
This is the second story about buying a house in one speech.
For the next 17 years, through nursing school, Montessori, kindergarten, through T-ball, softball, soccer, volleyball and her passion for ballet, through sleepovers, summer camps, family vacations and Chelsea's own very ambitious excursions, from Halloween parties in the neighborhood, to a Viennese waltz gala in the White House, Hillary first and foremost was a mother.
You would never know that by this time they were in the political elite and likely had many resources. Instead, this is told like Bill and Hillary were your average two-parent household struggling to run kid taxi services. This is aimed at the reality of millions of middle class parents, especially women, who are primarily responsible for managing their kids' social mobility. All those activities are about making their children competitive for college and stable members of the right social class. Of course, this wasn't what the Clintons were really doing but the story is structured to obscure that fact.
And time passed. On February 27th, 1980, 15 minutes after I got home from the National Governors Conference in Washington, Hillary's water broke and off we went to the hospital. Chelsea was born just before midnight.
Everyone is noticing that this is the first time that it can be said of a Presidential candidate that her water broke. Normalizing childbirth for working women contrasts sharply with footage shown of Trump saying that pregnancy is inconvenient for employers.
And I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret.
Bill hits on a sacrifice that will feel very familiar to millions of middle class (especially white) women for whom "staying home" has been a practical option. It also puts into context later decisions both Clintons made to sell Bill's political campaigns as a "two-for-one" deal. If she had chosen his career over her own, the least Bill could do was share a job with her that she would have been smart enough to get on her own.
And she said, boy, that's a pretty house. It had 1,100 square feet, an attic, fan and no air conditioner in hot Arkansas, and a screened-in porch.
This does NOT sound like a pretty house.
I said I know most of the young Democrats our age who want to go into politics, they mean well and they speak well, but none of them is as good as you are at actually doing things to make positive changes in people's lives. (APPLAUSE) So I suggested she go home to Illinois or move to New York and look for a chance to run for office. She just laughed and said, are you out of you mind, nobody would ever vote for me.
On one hand, Bill is taking credit for being magnanimous enough to set young Hillary free. On the other hand, he is refuting the caricature of Hillary as cravenly ambitious. "she doesn't even WANT to run", he is saying. That also plays very well with many women who, research shows, are more likely to underestimate their qualifications and abilities as compared to men.
She never made fun of people with disabilities; she tried to empower them based on their abilities.
That's a hit at Trump for mocking a disabled reporter. The ad featuring video of this plays very well for Hillary.
Then she went down to south Texas where she met… (APPLAUSE) …she met one of the nicest fellows I ever met, the wonderful union leader Franklin Garcia, and he helped her register Mexican- American voters. I think some of them are still around to vote for her in 2016.
The Texas delegate mentioned this during roll call. You'll be hearing a lot more about it. Texas has a lot of electoral votes.
Hillary opened my eyes to a whole new world of public service by private citizens. In the summer of 1972, she went to Dothan, Alabama to visit one of those segregated academies that then enrolled over half-a-million white kids in the South. The only way the economics worked is if they claimed federal tax exemptions to which they were not legally entitled. She got sent to prove they weren't.
The South, especially black voters in the South, are critical in this election. This story tries to locate midwestern HiIllary in the southern imaginary. Segregated academies, by the way, were a widespread phenomenon. Whites used them to redirect public money to circumvent desegregation. Recent sociological research shows how these academies continue to track to patterns of racial school segregation in the south (http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/journals/SRE/Jan16SREFeature.pdf). And, books like Kristen Green's "Something Must Be Done About Prince Edwards County" reveals how this unfolded.
She took a summer internship interviewing workers in migrant camps for Senator Walter Mondale's subcommittee.
Bill draws out stories that connect to key constituencies. The convention has so far heavily tapped into Hispanic and immigrant narrative. This is part of that.
More to the point, by the time I met her she had already been involved in the law school's legal services project and she had been influenced by Marian Wright Edelman.
The Edelman connection comes up a lot. I would remind people that Edelman has her own piece to say on that: http://www.democracynow.org/2007/7/24/childrens_defense_funds_marian_wright_edelman
lark she went alone to Alaska and spent some time sliming fish.
Bill checks, I think, four states thought to be in play this election year. He is a consummate politician.
Don Jones. He took her downtown to Chicago to hear Dr. Martin Luther King
If you don't mention Martin Luther King once an hour at a political event a black angel doesn't get her wings in Jim Crow heaven.
We've been walking and talking and laughing together ever since.
Summing up their marriage, the one we all think we know, in the way he prefers that we know it.
you're going to keep staring at me… CLINTON: …and now I'm staring back, we at least ought to know each other's name. I'm Hillary Rodham, who are you?
It's a charming biographical story. It also indicates how much he values that one trait so many voters seem to dislike about Hillary: her assertiveness. If Bill likes it, we should love it. That seems to be the message.
a president who truly believes in the vision that our Founders put forth all those years ago that we are all created equal, each a beloved part of the great American story.
Like Corey Booker's earlier speech, Obama paid homage to the great forefathers narrative. That could be about being in Philadelphia. But it's also just a bell one has to ring in politics. I hate that bell.
That is what Barack and I think about every day as we try to guide and protect our girls through the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight, how we urge them to ignore those who question their father's citizenship or faith.
Many writers and thinkers have speculated about how the first black family has dealt with the what historian Carol Anderson calls the inevitable "white rage" backlash to Obama's election. Having served her time, Michelle seems more willing to take the criticisms head-on. This is what many of us would call "shade".
How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country.
This line does some work. On one level, it is red meat for colorblind white (and some non-white) liberals who require all black figures to be hopeful (I've discussed this more here: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/between-the-world-and-me-book-club-not-trying-to-get-into-heaven/400271/).
On another level, it is doing some inter-group communication or what Stuart Hall called encoding/decoding and what Mark Anthony Neal translates into "black code" when he talks about Hall's work through modern media cultures. Obama is signaling here that she has noted those who have directed racist, sexist, classist rhetoric at her family. She has taken note.
So, look, so don't let anyone ever tell you that this country isn't great, that somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on earth!
This is a dig at Donald's nihilism the other night. But it is also saying, hey, there is no great american past. Remember, Obama had just referenced slavery a paragraph earlier. She's making an elegant case that any allusion to the past is necessarily one that is closer to slavery. We are great now, she says, because we are at least greater than that. It is the idea that for black Americans, this country's best days are always necessarily yet to come. It's a stark contrast to the idea that America was only great when, as historian Ira Katznelson said, "affirmative action was white".
That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. (CHEERS, APPLAUSE) And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.
Here's the big graf. It does many things. In a night where the hispanic immigrant story was dominant (and will likely remain so in all organized US politics for years to come for practical reasons), Obama reminded us again why this administration has been historical. Again, I suspect we'll hear more of this as they transition into private life and take over managing that Obama legacy.
The graf also linked the historic event of a black family in the white house with the historic event of potentially electing a woman president. This graf bridges the race narrative to the gender narrative, wedding them as equally historic in a way that I think the die-hard HRC fan really, really wants from this election. If, Obama seems to be saying, Barack's election was historic for black people, Hillary's can still be historic for black people...who are also women. Whether one agrees with that assessment or not, Obama rhetorically linked the excitement of 08 to Hillary's campaign, which can sometimes feel old hat because Hillary has been in the public eye for so long.
Heroes of every color and creed who wear the uniform and risk their lives to keep passing down those blessings of liberty, police officers and the protesters in Dallas who all desperately want to keep our children safe.
I don't know if anyone on my social media feeds caught this first go-round. This is her shout-out to Black Lives Matter activists who were protesting in Dallas where several police officers were murdered. She rejects framing of BLM as anti-police, making them peers with police with a shared interest in public safety. It's the kind of framing that many visible BLM activists have been trying to make in recent weeks. It's something to see it here, albeit with a very soft touch, on such a big stage.
I want someone with the proven strength to persevere, someone who knows this job and takes it seriously, someone who understands that the issues a president faces are not black and white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters.
More hitting at Trump as a vain, small, shallow, ineffectual candidate.
No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.
More encoding/decoding. She is talking to Trump. But she is also talking to the white rage that Trump has channelled into a presidential bid. It is also an allusion to the cultural history of any marginalized group who must perform superior morality in a dominant culture. This is also one of the strongest lines in the speech. It's when I knew that it would be a bit different than some of her previous big speeches. It takes on criticisms and public discourse head on.
Kids like the little black boy who looked up at my husband, his eyes wide with hope and he wondered, is my hair like yours?
For many black people, the photograph Obama describes is one of the most impactful of this administration's entire historic eight year term. It is about identity politics, sure. It is also about representation. Those are two concepts that critical leftists and conservatives are both ripping to shreds these days. I think they're wrong to underestimate the power of representation and when they do it says that they aren't very good at what they believe in. If they were better, they'd realize that they also engage in politics of representation: invisibility.
Regardless, this sounds like an Obama team that is very aware of his legacy. And, I suspect this will be the tone and context of how they'll shape this Presidential legacy.
What I admire most about Hillary is that she never buckles under pressure.
I hear this from die-hard Hillary voters in my life a lot: she didn't quit. I suspect that concept has also tested well.
but every child who needs a champion, kids who take the long way to school to avoid the gangs, kids who wonder how they'll ever afford college, kids whose parents don't speak a word of English, but dream of a better life, kids who look to us to determine who and what they can be.
typical america land of opportunity rhetoric. Each line is crafted to hit key a constituency: college students, latinos/immigrants, DREAMers.
So in this election, we cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best. We cannot afford to be tired or frustrated or cynical. No, hear me. Between now and November, we need to do what we did eight years ago and four years ago.
She called out the Obama army to get to work for HRC.
And when she didn't win the nomination eight years ago, she didn't get angry or disillusioned.
This was shade at the minority of Sanders voters saying they would never vote for Hillary.
See, I trust Hillary to lead this country because I've seen her lifelong devotion to our nation's children, not just her own daughter, who she has raised to perfection…
This was coming since the set-up of the speech: Hillary is a good mother to us because she has been a good mother of her own child. It's a take on the president-as-nation's-father idea. I read somewhere that it works so fine.
And let me tell you, Barack and I take that same approach to our jobs as president and first lady because we know that our words and actions matter, not just to our girls, but the children across this country, kids who tell us I saw you on TV, I wrote a report on you for school.
This links her narrative to HRC's "our kids are watching Donald Trump" ad. It leads me to believe that this must test very well with potential voters. And, it suggests that Obama was in conversation with HRC camp higher-ups enough to tie her speech into that narrative.
- Feb 2016
Author Aldon Morris uses the first chapter of his book to describe the world that Du Bois was living in. In the very first sentence of The Scholar Denied, Morris immediately posits a link between the birth of American sociology and the newfound citizenship of all black people in America. In addition to pre-existing prejudices of most whites towards blacks, capitalist exploitation of both blacks and newly immigrated white Europeans in the North and the formalization of "Jim Crow" ideologies in the South fostered an atmosphere of growing racial tension in the years leading up to the twentieth century. As a host of questions arose around the issues of race and immigration, Morris explains that newly founded American sociology was called to prove itself as a science and give answers.
In chapter 1 of The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, author Aldon Morris open the chapter with a discussion of the historical context that Du Bois was born into. This context is described as two distinct racist structures developing in parallel – in the North where blacks, whites and European immigrants are being forced into conflict with each other in order to serve the labor demands of capitalists, and in the South where the even more harsh Jim Crow laws are codified to maintain the social and economic order present before emancipation. Morris asserts that these conditions led to the coining of the "Negro Problem," a phrase meant to convey the challenge of integrating newly freed slaves into American society.
I think this is Austin
- Nov 2015
The sample had graduated from college within the years 1999-2004; therefore, they are in the general age range of 30-35 years old
given what we know about higher ed trajectories, this may be hard to support. might be better and more precise to just do a table of profiles with year of graduation than to extrapolate to an age.
RQ: How does socialization of gender in the workplace contribute to the selfpresentation displayed on one's LinkedIn profile?
a very interesting question
Significant changes have occurred over the past thirty years that have allowed women more opportunities in the workplace. Working women today are starting their careers with a higher degree of education than men (Pew Research Center, 2013). Women's pay is now 84 percent as much as men, which has increased from 64 percent in 1980 (Pew Research Center, 2013). The apparent barriers for working women are now dismantled, especially in white-collar professions (Schwartz & Zimmerman, 1992). The common assumption today is that women should be allowed to enter fields such as finance, law and higher education (Townsend & Mattis, 2006).
OH there is so much better, more recent literature here on gender mobility. See:
The gender revolution uneven and stalled P England - Gender & Society, 2010
Can we finish the revolution? Gender, work-family ideals, and institutional constraint DS Pedulla, S Thébaud - American Sociological Review, 2015
Framed before we know it how gender shapes social relations CL Ridgeway - Gender & Society, 2009
Overwork and the slow convergence in the gender gap in wages Y Cha, KA Weeden - American Sociological Review, 2014
I'm pretty sure the consensus is gender convergence has stalled, especially in the professions.
"valuable" may be strong. it has certainly become pervasive?
Out of the initial 500 users that were followed, 40 agreed to an in-person interview. The sample was racially diverse but here I only present responses from the 17 individuals who identify as black or African American. Combining these three methods yields a more comprehensive view of Black Twitter – both on a micro level, encompassing the way individual users think about Black Twitter, and on a larger scale, offering a view of the formation of community within Black Twitter. Results
the triangulation is a good contribution.
Middle class blacks assert public identity in order to convince others that they are legitimate members of the middle clas
the public identity framing could be developed more fully in the theoretical approach and analysis. because one of the things about twitter is that it is (with a few exceptions) a synchronous platform with very open information flows. that means it is difficult to engage racialized public/private faces in a public-private space where the audience and community members are constantly shifting?
Finally, I will argue that as a meaningful community, Black Twitter has the capacity to cause impactful change both on- and offline.
I think this is also Meredith Clark's argument? Should engage that. I'd also push on the idea that communities are definitionally one-dimensional. Is the argument that black twitter is a universal good and social positive? what about evidence of exclusion, boundary-making, stalking, etc.? it could be that your argument considers those differently but for a more nuanced argument that should at minimum be addressed.
I will push on the idea that black twitter is "unified". Seems synonymous with "monolith", and neither are empirically testable or theoretically sound.
Trending topics
define for broader readership.
If not questioning the integral properties of human relationships, some scholars contend that technology facilitates the departure from true face-to-face interactions; suggesting that the face-to-screen-to-face interaction presents negative unforeseen consequences (Turkle 2011).
I like the idea of dealing with the space-place tension in digital+sociology.
The open did not contribute much. Better to start at para. 2.
Thus it is necessary to study the nature of software development and factors that drive the consumption in digital photography, given that both software and photography are being driven across the world by few technology giants.
Necessary why? I feel like there's an assumed argument here. Is it the case that the technology corporations that produce this software are important to social processes? to economies? to shaping access for groups to some kind of resource? have an out-sized role in cultural production?
I am amenable to your rationale but it presently is thin enough to rely on reader's interest to drive home why this study, why this question, so what, etc.
I suggest something much more explicit for the rationale. Why does it matter if we understand the algorithmic interplay between metadata, software and the physical world? To whom does it matter? Hall is a good theoretical framework but not a clear line to a rationale. As this volume aims to draw those explicit connections in an emerging subfield, each paper should consider that.
While Sontag's description of photography as 'a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power,' applies to digital photography, another aspect of power namely the control over data becomes significant.
Got it. Key. I actually think this should be an earlier and more central claim.
- Oct 2015
Though technology gives individuals the freedom to develop their own solutions, popular software products/services determines the patterns or features[10] that are being developed. Hence camera software developed by companies like Canon, Nikon, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft etc. hegemonize the industry. They are constantly working to converge the single purpose digital camera into a smart phone[11]. Therefore I would argue these global camera and software manufacturers influence the way visual cultural practices are being shaped across the world
Intriguing. Across the "world" or the western world? the global north equal to the global south, etc.?
Actually Hall's work really engages your thesis here. His work on coded/encoded language is a way into software code and inequalities.
Enabled by software, these functions converge seamlessly in digital photography transforming both the nature and the future of the form itself.
Interesting work here by Davis: http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/19997/0
Given the proliferation of networked technologies it is now possible to extend our discipline's reach even further—through web platforms, social media, and even massive online open courses (MOOCs)—into communities that have traditionally been underserved.
Except when they don't.
and the divide between f2f and computer-mediated relations is blurrier than ever before (Jurgenson 2012a; Davis 2014)
This is a serious provocation. It is mostly left unpacked in your subsequent prescriptions. Do you have any additional thoughts on the space-place conflation that digitally augmented reality presents sociology? Sociology is arguably very place-based, grounded in material geographies. Digitally augmented realities by definition challenge the centrality of place in theorizing and method, replacing it with space. It seems this really flummoxes sociologists. Is there a way forward?
DH has thus far functioned primarily as a methodological intervention, rather than a theoretical or substantive project.
This is key.
(Hargittai, 2010; Hughey and Daniels, 2013; Schradie 2011), digital culture and interaction (Boyd, 2014; Marwick, 2012; Trottier 2013, Papacharissi 2010), networked society and social movements (Castells, 2013; Rainie and Wellman, 2012; Earl and Kimport, 2011), medical sociology and the quantified self (Lupton, 2014), political sociology (Kreiss, 2014), and media sociology (Benson et al., 2012; Gillespie et al., 2014; Waisbord 2014)
Great, efficient, precise use of references here. Very happy to see Kreiss.
. To accomplish this task, I begin with a brief history of digital sociology and its related sub-fields, including the broader tradition of digital humanities, in order to lay important groundwork for the continued study of digital dynamics from sociological perspectives.
Got it. I'm on board.
If the top journals in American sociology are any indication, there is little support for the task of helping our discipline catch up to, and thus make better sense of, life in the digital age
This is a key point.
Through the use of images, colleges and universities carefully craft their digital presence to reflect a specific view of campus life and the composition of the student body. Unlike more recent digital platforms that utilize computer algorithms and software to provide real world images that reflect the users and their preferences, websites of colleges and universities rely on a human, deliberately and carefully crafting representations of structure, "what is campus about"; identity, "what will students look like"; and experience, "what students can expect" to shape perceptions and decision-making of potential students.
This is key to your argument. It should come sooner.
Another change to the digital space of a university or college which would be recommended by Critical Race Theorists involves recognition of the pervasiveness of racism. Racial stratification is "ordinary, ubiquitous, and reproduced in mundane and extraordinary customs and experience," and affecting the quality of life's choices and chances of racial groups (Brown 2003:294). The concept of the pervasiveness of racism suggests that racist hierarchical structures are an endemic component of American life which govern all political, economic, and social life, including education (DeCuir and Dixson 2004; Dixson and Rousseau 2005). Historically, race emerged as a social structure – a racialized social system that awarded privileges to Europeans, the people who became white, over non-Europeans, the people who became nonwhite (Bonilla-Silva 2010). Its existence is connected to the distribution of jobs, power, prestige, wealth (Lopez, 2003; Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller &Thomas, 1995), educational access, and opportunity.
I feel like this paragraph is a repeat of an earlier one.
CRT is not simply a critique; it offers an alternative to dominant ideologies, policies and practices
One of the volume's goals is to shape the discipline of sociology. Here is an opportunity to more explicitly engage the field. CRT here is doing what social reproduction theories that dominate soc of ed literature do not go so far as to do, i.e. offers alternatives and imply action strategies. Consider how CRT is different/similar to the dominant modes of inquiry in sociologies of education or sociologies of digital spaces.
Often, the carefully-crafted portrayals of a student population which can be found on a university website perpetuate taken-for-granted assumptions about race, providing a visual image of who is welcome to participate in these spaces of privilege and prestige and who is not.
How do you reconcile this with digital manipulation of university branding/images to "sell" a diversity story? I can see that as an important antidote for nuance and precision. At the same time these digital spaces reinforce taken-for-grantedness they seem to be trafficking in diversity currency.
Higher education as an institution must therefore be diligent as to not reinforce or increase socioeconomic and educational inequality. It is imperative that post-secondary institutions challenge the very foundation they stand on in regard to its policies and procedures, especially questioning its delivery of academic functions in digital spaces.
From the introduction I suspect this framing is coming from CRT? If so, it is important to say so. Without that grounding in theory it reads like a position paper.
educational institutions have ethical obligations which mean they cannot remain blind to the inequalities and structural changes around them. Prejudice, discrimination, and disadvantage do not begin at the university, but universities are obligated to address these issues since they conflict with the basic principles of free thought, human rights, critical dialogue and education.
We make a switch here from schooling broadly to higher education/universities specifically here. It helps if that is more explicit.
Schools do not exist as independent social institutions separate from economic, political, cultural and social contexts, accordingly they cannot be insulated from the challenges that each context provides (Carter and Welner 2013:218)
The socialization process that occurs in schools is one that is structured by the dominant group with their experiences and interests in mind which reproduces social inequality in policies, practices as well as in digital representations of a campus environment and the student experience.
Perhaps break that sentence up.
that correlates with? I would quibble with need. One needs it less the more one has etc.
As a mechanism for upward mobility, education is arguably the single most important tool an individual can acquire in order to access better socioeconomic outcomes.
Beyond inheritance, yes.
The legacy of racism is embedded in every social institution in America, including the education system which continues to tout ideologies of meritocracy and equal opportunity.
Incorporate into...?? An argument? Theory? Model of some sort? I think this links back to ambiguity about the paper's intent.
how teens make use of digital tools and media, tools that permit instant gratification and allow them to receive attention.
Is this larger argument just about youth cohorts? If not, the broader literature on celebrity/status studies would be in order. Warwick's work looks at this as a broader phenomenon of micro-celebrity.
Electronic information will continue to increase and dominate our society,
That is a claim. It may be better suited for an argument as "As electronic information continues to dominate..."
In an age where tweets and Facebook statuses are being reported as news, Internet users need to be competent and intelligent users of information to the point of becoming culture jammers who critique popular culture in an effort to challenge the status quo and resist dominant cultural practices (Carducci, 2006; Harris, 2004; Lasn, 2005; Sandlin, 2007; Sandlin & Milam, 2008). An approach to reaching this level of critical media consumption is to impart literacy skills to Internet users. Specifically, critical information literacy (Elmborg, 2006; Eisenberg et al., 2004), digital literacy (Bawden, 2008; Bawden & Robinson, 2002), and cultural competence / literacy (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Overall, 2009) would facilitate the average Internet user's ability to seek, find, and use appropriate information, which in turn would facilitate more thoughtful dialogues and learning. Literacy skills would facilitate a shift from the rote crowdsourcing of information on the Internet to substance based evaluation and usage of information.
I do not disagree with these arguments individually but I am not clear after reading this where this paper is going. If these papers have already said these things what is being argued?
an important topic not limited to any one area or group of people or any one discipline of study. The acquisition and implementation of literacy skills is a long-term and integral part of addressing the aforementioned issues.
Given this what is the role of a discipline like sociology to this task?
d new techniques.
New training, new conferences and new journals too if we are to be honest about the political economy of academic knowledge production.
This is qualitative research that focuses on the detailed trace data generated and collated by online systems, such as transaction logs, version histories, institutional records, conversation transcripts, and source code. Observation of how these various forms of data have been (re)constituted and (re)circulated within various systems can yield rich insights into the online practices, collaborations and coordinations of contemporary schooling – from virtual forms of parental 'engagement' through to the organization of pedagogic work. As Geiger & Ribes (2011, p.1) observe: "Analysis of these detailed and heterogeneous data … can provide rich qualitative insight into the interactions of users, allowing us to retroactively reconstruct specific actions at a fine level of granularity. Once decoded, sets of such documentary traces can then be assembled into rich narratives of interaction, allowing researchers to carefully follow coordination practices, information flows, situated routines, and other social and organizational phenomena across a variety of scales".
Very interesting.
There are many ways that technology in schools can be investigated in these terms – for example, through the use of decibel meters and light readers, as well as the use of audio editing software to visualize sound
Ok, so links to work in visual ethnography and sound studies.
The participatory and highly mobile nature of digital video and audio creation, for example, offers a ready means of researching the everyday places and practices of digital schooling. In particular, digital recording devices allow school-based research work to be conducted 'on the move'.
How do we reconcile this kind of method with the concerns about in-school surveillance, I wonder?
As Les Back and colleagues' recent writing has explored, the 'Live Methods' manifesto illustrates research approaches that are creative, playful and deliberately provocative (Back & Puwar 2012).
Could you provide an example of this method from the cited literature? It seems important to the goal of the piece as agenda-setting and I believe many readers will be unfamiliar.
For example, with online technologies increasingly used as a means of sharing, re-purposing and out-sourcing pedagogic content, how are digital technologies implicated in the increased division of labor and alienation of teachers from their teaching?
I might add that the analytical lens of divisions of labor is also a useful way to interrogate something else notably absent from this nascent field of research: a focus on differences among status groups within institutional contexts and across social relations. This could easily link to established theory and methods in gender/feminist studies, class studies, and critical race studies. All of which are as lacking in STS/internet research/learning science studies as schooling literature is lacking in a focus on digital.
Any account of schools and digital technologies must therefore take such issues into account – updating Bowles and Gintis' (1976) account of the relations between capital and education. Indeed, the correspondence between work and school has long been seen to extend beyond knowledge and curricula into all aspects of social relations, interactions and identity formations. One key set of issues relating to the digital school, therefore, is how these conditions and correspondences might be reinforced and/or reconfigured in an age of 'immaterial labor', 'cognitive capitalism' and 'knowledge economies'.
In contrast to the hubris-driven solutionism that pervades the 'Ed Tech' industry, a digital sociology of school offers a space to raise a number of contentions and concerns that are usually not part of mainstream conversations about schools and digital technology.
I would point out the theorizing and writing on this happening outside the disciplinary sphere, if only to point out how comparatively lacking we are as a discipline. There's Audrey Watters and then discipline-adjacent is Justin Reich's work. Additionally, there is more of this work in higher education literature. The academic capitalism research by Slaughter and Rhodes is the key citation. I would also consider Gaye Tuchman (alone and with Tressie McMillan Cottom) and Elizabeth Popp Berman. All of these deal with the political economy of technological change, neoliberalism (whatever one prefers to call it), and uses a range of theories and methods. In fact, the question could be posed why this critical higher education studies hasn't encompassed a broader critical sociology of schooling.
Yet there are many reasons to believe that digital sociology has emerged at just the right time to deliver a sharper, more pointed focus on the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of late-modern 'digital society'.
I am on the train. Let's see where it is headed.
The sociology of education (the obvious cognate field for such work) has proven to be surprisingly uninterested in technological matters and certainly lacking in technical know-how.
True enough
This is manifested, among other things, in that only 20 per cent of the respondents agree to the assertion that camera or video surveillance (CCTV) is a potential threat towards people's privacy and personal integrity. Men seem to be generally somewhat more negative towards surveillance than women.
What are the descriptive statistics? Any reason we'd expect men as opposed to women to respond differently?
In order to gain a broad perspective of how people relate to questions such as monitoring and surveillance in a digital context, traceability, what kind of information people trust online etc., five central areas, that each in their own right represents different aspects of our daily life, were identified:
Very interesting! But what does it have to do with the panopticon? It seems more like a study about networks and trust? That literature usually engages the legitimacy literature (sociology), trust and exchanges/contracts (business/econ) or interpersonal performances of trust (communication/internet studies). Obviously, this volume has a preference for sociological literatures. Is there a way to draw tighter connections between the study/data and the recent scholarship on trust/legitimacy and networks?
In Bentham's ideal prison, the "Panopticon" inmates could be imperceptibly observed by a prison guard – a condition that was presumed to generate self-discipline. In the same vein, covert modern surveillance technology disciplines individuals. Those subjected to surveillance adapt their behavior in order to conform to what they believe those monitoring their movements and actions will find acceptable or normal (cf. Brannigan and Beier 1985; Goffman 2008; Westin, 1967). The private sphere shrinks: "Electronic monitoring systems are a kind of virtual simulation of the Panopticon. All video recordings, electronic monitors, GPS signals, sound recordings create a prison environment in our daily lives by not allowing a single dark spot" (Büyük and Keskin 2012). MATERIAL AND METHODS The material has been collected within a multidisciplinary research project at Lund university, called DigiTrust – Privacy, Identity and Legitimacy in the Digital Society. The aim of this project was to further the understanding of trust ba
At the end of the literature's discussion I should be left with a question that your data and methods propose to answer. That is not clear here. According to your read of it, what does this literature (ending with the panopticon) propose as a question? More simply, "so what?"
Based in capitalist production logic, it is reasonable to argue that the purpose of surveillance and control is to generate value for money when purchasing labor. The laborer not only sells his labor but also his capacity to work during a certain, prearranged time span (Braverman 1975; Thompson 1983 ).
Digital surveillance is concomitant with the emergence of the new economy conditions, no? That seems important to the argument that surveillance has 1) intensified and 2) taken on a new character.
The methods for monitoring employee online behavior are mainly email monitoring and/or Internet monitoring and filtering.
Is this based on previous research?
The Ms. Dewey character is theatrical in her performance of search results. She tries on different personas, sometimes affecting accents to support her character (e.g. a cowboy accent in a Western gunfight scene), donning costumes (a lab coat), and wielding any number of props. Two scenes in the data set involve Ms. Dewey switching into racially coded personas that are characterized in this study as stereotypical performances of urban blackness. For these responses, Ms. Dewey switches her default style of speech, which is characterized by formal wording and professional cadences. Instead, she moves into highly stylized performances that linguistically invoke culturally black, urban vernacular accompanied by finger wagging gestures, neck rolling, and posturing: In default Dewey voice. I only have one thing to say to that. Switches to racially coded performance (i.e. finger wagging, neck rolling, posturing) "No, goldtooth, ghetto-fabulous mutha-fucker BEEP steps to this piece of [ass] BEEP, just because you pickin' some BEEP video, you gotta be out of yo' muthaf*ckin' mind to think yo' rental bling BEEP, and your big booty ass [whore] BEEP crumping to your [bullshit] BEEP track is going to turn me out, [shit] BEEP no, uh-uh, you can't [fuck] BEEP with me dawg!" Resumes default Dewey posture in a ready-to-assist stance, hands folded in front of her.
The coding of search results and search terms revealed that Ms. Dewey provides culturally relevant, rather than informationally relevant, results.
Interesting finding! And important. But what was the coding process? I did not see it in methodology section.
Though the web design of Ms. Dewey is representative of a postmodern tradition, the visual themes depicted in the interface draw heavily on modern architectural and design features
Minor question about method: what does your close reading do/not do as compared with the various proposed visual analysis methods floating around? e.g. Pauwels, Luc. "Visual sociology reframed: An analytical synthesis and discussion of visual methods in social and cultural research." Sociological Methods & Research 38, no. 4 (2010): 545-581. Then there are the versions that use visual frames of video content etc.
This articulation of interface analysis is influenced by Brock's (2009) Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), a bifurcated approach that "combines insight into the cultural biases encoded within technologies alongside insights into the technological biases encoded within the culture of the users" (Brock 2011: 2). CTDA, in turn, is influenced by critical discourse analysis (CDA) in its focus on making connections between "texts" to larger social systems of power and domination (Fairclough 2004; Van Dijk 1993; Wodak 2001). Combining these approaches, Ms. Dewey is situated as a textual object, locating the search engine as a site of power where both dominant and resistive discourses about gender, race, and technology circulate and are integral in shaping user experience with the interface and the search process.
Hey, if you can get inside of your computer, you can do whatever you want to me. – Ms. Dewey, Microsoft "Ms. Dewey" search engine
Good grief.
(see Harvey 2007, Goldberg year, Bonilla-Silva year)
Fix citations
Despite the suggestion that TripAdvisor does not represent "part of an established tradition" their analysis reveals that what makes TripAdvisor trustworthy is a combination of 'personal trust' and 'systems trust' which implicates it in the discursive traditions of the traveler's tale as well as in established methods of digital computation.
I expected a citation here. There's a really robust literature on networks and trust that should be considered.
The ultimate authority of online travel reviews lies in their ability to influence economic decisions made by both tourism producers and consumers, but this authority comes from different sources. Traveler's tales are invested with positional authority by virtue of their strategic locations, meaning their authority is derived from their positions as stories which initially connect the reader, or potential tourist, to the attraction being described in the review, and thus play a role in the initial framing of the attraction for the tourist. The strategic formation of social media based discourse is invested with informational authority, which is derived from the value social media is given as an influential source of information in the global market economy. These sources of discursive authority converge within the organizational structure of a website like TripAdvisor, which is characterized by Jeacle and Carter as a site providing potential tourists with the trusted opinions of fellow travelers and also, "an expert system…governed by calculative practices (2011:96)."
Really clear.
In this sense, it is also important to remember that these reviews also constitute a contemporary version of a much older narrative form, the traveler's tale, which is heavily implicated in the ways discursive constructions of social, cultural, gendered, racial and ethnic types of "Otherness" are formed (Said 1978, Smith 2012, MacCannell 2011).
Ah, novel link. I like this.
The emergence of Chinese maternity tourism first surfaced and largely remained in popular news articles and online blogs. Therefore any opportunity to locate the public discourse on this new case of non-citizen reproduction necessitates a systematic examination of online data. Within the context of increased attention on birthright citizenship, the reporting of Chinese maternity tourism conceived a possibility: Chinese women's reproduction could enter into the "anchor baby" discourse. The media coverage of Chinese maternity tourism invited the public to consider how they could make sense of this new case and judge to what extent the children of these mothers would be welcomed to the national polity.
There is a more nuanced conversation about the role of labor, work, race and ethnicity here. I would be interested in some engagement with ideas of the over-arching antiblackness framing of immigrants, others, work. And then some further discussion of the labor of labor. Because both seem to be at play. The anchor baby narrative is very close to the welfare mother narrative and could be said to be its variant. I am thinking about Nopper's work here: http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/tamaraknopperarticle.pdf. I am also thinking about what the labor of labor is about. It is a critique of labor as a type of work that has to either be subsidized by American [white] citizens or by more desirable upper class ethnics, right? Is that the broader argument?
By examining online comments by largely, if not exclusively non-state actors, I seek to account for how civilians serve as instrumental to the nonjuridicial policing of citizenship. In this vein, I share in the argument espoused by Evelyn Nakano Glenn's (2002) in that citizenship implicates questions of belonging by members of the community. Therefore, citizenship is not solely a legal designation as it is also a social category that denotes membership.
I like this. Clear.
While the rhetoric surrounding cases of maternity tourism are not cases of undocumented women giving birth to "anchor babies", the children of class-privileged Chinese tourists may still be constructed as such. Thus, while these cases are somewhat comparable, ultimately the cases are unequivocally distinct and raise questions concerning how race and gender-specific tropes intersect to construct or contest citizenship. Therefore, in this paper, I will investigate the "anchor baby" debate by engaging in a content analysis of online commentary responding to the recent reporting of Chinese maternity tourism. I ask: how do online commentators make sense of Chinese maternity tourism? How do online commentators contest, construct and articulate the boundaries of citizenship?
Ok, so your argument is that unlike Latina mothers, high status Chinese mothers are not included in the anchor baby characterization? Are you making a claim about race or class? Race and class? And is there something in the literature that suggests these two would be similarly constructed?
senate and the house
pretty sure those should be capitalized