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Articles 91 - 103 of 103

Full-Text Articles in Sociology of Culture

Soldiers Of Science--Agents Of Culture: American Archaeologists In The Office Of Strategic Services (Oss), Despina Lalaki Jan 2013

Soldiers Of Science--Agents Of Culture: American Archaeologists In The Office Of Strategic Services (Oss), Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

"Scientificity" and appeals to political independence are invaluable tools when institutions such as the American School of Classical Studies at Athens attempt to maintain professional autonomy. Nonetheless, the cooperation of scientists and scholars with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), among them archaeologists affiliated with the American School, suggests a constitutive affinity between political and cultural leadership. This relationship is here mapped in historical terms, while, at the same time, sociological categorizations of knowledge and its employment are used in order to situate archaeologists in their broader social and political context and to evaluate their work not merely as agents …


On The Social Construction Of Hellenism Cold War Narratives Of Modernity, Development And Democracy For Greece, Despina Lalaki Dec 2012

On The Social Construction Of Hellenism Cold War Narratives Of Modernity, Development And Democracy For Greece, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

Hellenism is one of those overarching, ever-changing narratives always subject to historical circumstances, intellectual fashions and political needs. Conversely, it is fraught with meaning and conditioning powers, enabling and constraining imagination and practical life. In this essay I tease out the hold that the idea of Hellas has had on post-war Greece and I explore the ways in which the American anti-communist rhetoric and discussions about political and economic stabilization appropriated and rearticulated Hellenism. Central to this history of transformations are the archaeologists; the archaeologists as intellectuals, as producers of culture who, while stepping in and out of their disciplinary …


Naturalization Ceremonies And The Role Of Immigrants In The American Nation, Sofya Aptekar Nov 2012

Naturalization Ceremonies And The Role Of Immigrants In The American Nation, Sofya Aptekar

Publications and Research

Although immigration is an essential element in the American national story, it presents difficulties for constructing national membership and national identity in terms of shared intrinsic values. In this article, I analyze speeches made at naturalization ceremonies during two time periods (1950 – 1970 and 2003 – present) to examine the evolving roles of immigrants, as articulated to immigrants themselves. Naturalization ceremonies are a unique research site because the usually implied nationalist content is made explicit to brand new members of the nation. I find a shift in the framing from immigrants as potential liabilities and weak links in the …


Advancing The Human Right To Housing In Post-Katrina New Orleans: Discursive Opportunity Structures In Housing And Community Development, Leigh Graham Jan 2012

Advancing The Human Right To Housing In Post-Katrina New Orleans: Discursive Opportunity Structures In Housing And Community Development, Leigh Graham

Publications and Research

In post-Katrina New Orleans, housing and community development (HCD) advocates clashed over the future of public housing. This case study examines the evolution of and limits to a human right to housing frame introduced by one nongovernmental organization (NGO). Ferree’s concept of the discursive opportunity structure and Bourdieu’s social field ground this NGO’s failure to advance a radical economic human rights frame, given its choice of a political inside strategy that opened up for HCD NGOs after Hurricane Katrina. Strategic and ideological differences within the field limited the efficacy of this rights-based frame, which was seen as politically radical and …


Director's Letter, Sarah Chinn Apr 2008

Director's Letter, Sarah Chinn

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

It was hard not to be inspired, moved, and thrilled by Douglas Crimp's remarkable Kessler Lecture on November 2nd. Combining personal history, art criticism, political analysis, and trenchant commentary on the intersections between them, Douglas gave us a guided tour of the long-abandoned, much-used piers of lower Manhattan.


Some Thoughts On China's Sexual Revolution: Sexuality And Social Change In Contemporary China, Sun Zhongxin Jan 2007

Some Thoughts On China's Sexual Revolution: Sexuality And Social Change In Contemporary China, Sun Zhongxin

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The last two years saw several changes in the public discourse around sex and sexuality in China. So what are some of the most controversial sex-related topics to be raised in China recently?


Revisiting Queer Latinidad: A Clags Seminar Course Review, Anel Méndez Velázquez, Ileana Jiménez Oct 2006

Revisiting Queer Latinidad: A Clags Seminar Course Review, Anel Méndez Velázquez, Ileana Jiménez

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Anel: The construction of a latinà-queer "we" is very problematic. The construction of a "queer we" and a "latinà we" separately—and any attempt to add them up in a "queer-latinà we"—privileges and universalizes particular imagined identities at the expense and exclusion of specific cultural and personal practices and ways of being.


Rehabilitating The Importance Of The Non-Cognitive: An Interview With MichèLe Lamont, Despina Lalaki Jan 2005

Rehabilitating The Importance Of The Non-Cognitive: An Interview With MichèLe Lamont, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

In spring of 2006, Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology and African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, was invited to give a lecture for the New Sociological Imagination Lecture Series, organized by the New School for Social Research. This lecture concerned her book Cream Rising: How Peer Review Finds and Defines Excellence in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, which is to be published by Harvard University Press in 2008. Drawing on 81 interviews with panelists serving on five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions in the social sciences and the humanities, the book analyzes (1) the meaning panelists give to academic excellence—including …


An Interview With Sandra Harding, Stephanie Urso Spina, Mike Roberts, Patricia Ticento Clough Jan 2002

An Interview With Sandra Harding, Stephanie Urso Spina, Mike Roberts, Patricia Ticento Clough

Publications and Research

Harding’s position has been critiqued as more postmodern than feminist, as viable without nasty entanglements in feminism, as too concerned with established Eurocentric, scientific discourses, and as appealing to foundational innocence by her concern with realism. But what seems to drive Harding’s choices more than anything is a conscious attempt to be effective in intervening in existing systems of power, whether empiricist and postmodern. By taking this position, Harding undertakes a difficult task. Its difficulty, however, is compensated for by the conversations she generates. As a voice not restricted to one intellectual school, Harding demands attention from many with opposing …


Without Closets, Without Shame: Conference Commemorates Latino/A Autobiography And Testimony, Oscar Montero, Elena Martínez, Ramón Rivera-Servera Jul 1999

Without Closets, Without Shame: Conference Commemorates Latino/A Autobiography And Testimony, Oscar Montero, Elena Martínez, Ramón Rivera-Servera

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Crossing Borders '99, the second CLAGS conference focusing on Latino/a queers, opened Thursday evening, March 11, with a Cabaret Night hosted by the "Songbird of Cuba," Carmelita Tropicana. The evening, subtitled "Sin closet/sin verguenza" ("Without Closets/Without Shame") featured, among others, Deyanira Bautista's Afro-Caribbean Drums, dancer Arthur Aviles with his nude flying body, and the sultry, seductive, Mexican drag chanteuse, Tito Vasconcelos.


Building “A Home Of Our Own:” The Construction Of The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Polly Thistlethwaite Jan 1998

Building “A Home Of Our Own:” The Construction Of The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

This article traces the founding of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the context of radical archiving and lesbian institution building. It includes an outline of problems presented by "extra-legal" or outlaw material in archival settings. Discussion of the New York Public Library's Becoming Visible exhibit reflects the 1990s growth of mainstream institutional interest in gay, lesbian, and transgender archives, and the complications this interest presents.


Demythifying Multicultural Education: Social Semiotics As A Tool Of Critical Pedagogy, Stephanie Urso Spina Jan 1997

Demythifying Multicultural Education: Social Semiotics As A Tool Of Critical Pedagogy, Stephanie Urso Spina

Publications and Research

This article discusses the assumptions and curricular implications of a social semiotic approach to education. Semiotics refers to the meaning we make with language as well as other objects. events, and actions. Social semiotics emphasizes the social, cultural, historic, and political contexts that shape that meaning. A social semiotic approach to education can help teachers and teacher educators to deconstruct the reproduction of class, politicize the ideology of colonialism, and overcome the inequities they engender. By providing a way to challenge selectively reproduced cultural politics, social semiotics provides a way to reconstruct and democratize schools and society.


Variation Procedures In Northern Ewe Song, V. Kofi Agawu Jan 1990

Variation Procedures In Northern Ewe Song, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

The major organizational principle of Northern Ewe song is one shared by numerous African, Oriental, and European musical traditions: a small number of models (variously described as "basic shapes," "archetypes," "background structures," "basic designs," "core patterns," "deep structures") is transformed in a wide variety of ways during performance. Variation takes place on different hierarchic levels both within and between songs and includes practically all of a song's dimensions (rhythm, interval, register, contour, harmony, and so on). This principle, although widely demonstrated in the literature on African song (see, among others, Jones 1976; Kauffman 1984; Schmidt 1984; and Erlmann 1985), is …