Digital Commons Network^™

Toward Rigor In The Undergraduate Sociology Curriculum: Some Thoughts On Change And Innovation, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

CHANGE IS OVERDUE in undergraduate sociology. The present situation is too often dominated by classroom charlatans, textbook sophistry, and mental torpor. In a science which confronts complex intellectual puzzles and deeply problematic social issues, we bore the average student nearly to death, we chase the brightest scholars from our midst, and we reward one-dimensional rote memorizers with good grades and glowing letters of recommendation. Given this stifling state of affairs, a change toward intellectual rigor in the undergraduate curriculum would indeed be a welcome and revolutionary development.

By asking for “rigor,” I do not mean more sociology statistics courses or …

Review Of Becoming Mature: Childhood Ghosts And Spirits In Adult Life, By Valerie Malhotra Bentz., Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Bentz's work will appeal to many sociologists, including those with interests in contemporary theory, family studies, clinical sociology, and research methodologies. This useful and intellectually stimulating volume appears in the Communications and Social Order series, edited by David Maines. Peter Manning provides the foreword (pp. xiii-xvi).

Bentz builds on an impressive foundation of classical and contemporary theorists, including George Herbert Mead, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Schutz, Jiirgen Haberrnas, and Norman Denzin. Some readers will be outraged by Bentz's conscious joining of symbolic interactionist concepts with ideas from psychoanalytic traditions. But readers who admire Haberrnas' recent transformations of …

The Centennial Ethic And The Spirit Of Archivalism, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

My thinking about the possible relationships between centennials and archives was prompted first by my own work on archives and archival methodology (Hill 1989, 1990, Forthcoming) and second by the upcoming centennial of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2005. It is to the centennial of the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas, however, to which I owe the specific impetus to prepare this paper. I am very pleased, as a neighbor from Nebraska, to celebrate with you the founding of the world's very first department of sociology at the University of Kansas (Sica 1983). We are, of …

The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

An introduction to the history and radical practice of New York City's Lesbian Herstory Archives with discussion of the period-specific situation of the archive housed in, but outgrowing, private quarters.