Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Building Bigness: Reputation, Prominence, And Social Capital In Rural South India, Eleanor A. Power, Elspeth Ready

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Anthropologists have long been concerned with how reputations help people gain the support of others. Here, we study the support ties among adult residents of two Tamil villages, asking how reputational standing in each village mediates access to social support. We find that a reputation for influence has the weakest effect on support ties with others, while a reputation for generosity has the strongest. Further, a reputation for influence is not associated with greater connections to people of “high position” outside the village. Given the weak effects of a reputation for influence, we turn to a network measure of social …

Shoes @ The Krasl: Photographs, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The Krasl Art Center, in Saint Joseph, Michigan, is not only an energetic organization but also an ever evolving physical space replete with exciting sculptural experiments. My longtime Krasl favorite, Michael Dunbar’s dramatic Allegheny Drift, was the setting for the initial photograph (inset) in what became my visual explorations with the Blue Shoes (documented in The Year- Long Adventures of the Blue Shoes and Their Friends (Lincoln: Zea Books, 2016); available gratis as a PDF download from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Digital Commons: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/49/). Inspired by the recent transformations of the Krasl’s grounds, the eight plates in this portfolio …

Bad Boys And Final Girls: Fleshing Out Gender In Slasher And Horror Media, Brandon Bosch

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

When it comes to the slasher genre, typically only three types of people matter: the Slasher Villain, the Victims, and the Final Girl. Today I want to talk about how gender is often represented with these characters.

In sum, the slasher genre tends to cast more effeminate villains (as well as a few female villains driven by more stereotypical feminine concerns like family, love, and fame), punish overly sexual and feminine women, and typically spare less feminine, less sexual women. Arguably, these categories are based in part on our society's attitudes on gender and how it relates to (1) What …

Cross-National Variation In The Social Origins And Religious Consequences Of Religious Non-Affiliation, Philip Schwadel

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

I argue that the social implications of religious non-affiliation vary across cultural contexts, leading to differences across nations in both who is likely to be unaffiliated and the religious consequences of such non-affiliation. I test these propositions by examining cross-national variation in associations with non-affiliation using multilevel models and cross-sectional survey data from almost 70,000 respondents in 52 nations. The results indicate that: 1) both individual characteristics (gender, age, and marital status) and nation-level attributes (GDP, communism, and regulation of religion) strongly predict religious non-affiliation; 2) differences in non-affiliation by individual-level attributes—women vs. men, old vs. young, and married vs. …

Why Sociology Needs Science Fiction, Daniel Hirschman, Philip Schwadel, Rick Searle, Erica Deadman, Ijlal Naqvi

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Grokking Modernity by Philip Schwadel

Resistance and the Art of Words by Rick Searle

A Planet Without Gender by Erica Deadman

Beware of Geeks with Good Intentions by Ijlal Naqvi

In this issue, our contributors take up these concerns in four short essays. Philip Schwadel applies theories of communicative functions to look at sci-fi ’s potential to shape our social understandings. Ijlal Naqvi returns to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to argue that dreams of perfect social prediction will remain elusive and perhaps undesirable. Erica Deadman showcases how well LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness illustrates ideas from the sociology of gender. And …