The Global Sociology Blog

I know, I know, another post on intersex athletes and the humiliating testing they have to go through to satisfy the requirements of the athletic authorities. In the comments on a previous post, The Grumpy Sociologist pointed me to this BBC posdcast, which is a must-listen on what stigma feels like for stigmatized individuals: BBC [...]

One of the things that makes your life miserable when you are a sociologist is how much you start seeing cultural and social patterns everywhere, in movies, TV series, etc. These common narratives are basic stories that constitute the matrix of many cultural products, where only the specific details are different. Needless to say, these [...]

Future Boogie

Via Jay Livingston, I love this! Paris Blog – Stuff Parisians like by Olivier Magny – O Chateau via kwout

In Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance, David Lyon (also lead researcher at The Surveillance Project) continues to unveil the different layers of the surveillance society. In this book, he zeroes in on the technology, impetus and social consequences of various ID cards plans that many countries have implemented or are considering, mainly in the [...]

All the institutional actors who contributed to this wonderful demonstration of what stigmatization means: Caster Semenya withdraws from race in South Africa | Sport | guardian.co.uk via kwout Also, read The Grumpy Sociologist, The Grumpy Sociologist: Caster Semenya, Society’s Rigid Gender Binary & Institutionalized Sexism via kwout

Via Webilus, yet again (click on the image for a bigger version), discuss:

Via Webilus: Si la communauté de Twitter comprenait 100 personnes… via kwout

At its simplest, objectification is to treat a person as an inanimate object that one can own or dispose of as one would any object of consumer good. Feminist researchers have often pointed out the different ways in which women and girls in the world are objectified. In our societies, this objectification can take the [...]

First, via Agnese Vardanega: Appunti di sociologia: Amount of Space Required to Transport 60 People via kwout Or what Manhattan would look like if there had to be garage space for individual cars rather than the current public transportation system (via Transportation for America): Transportation For America » The invisible benefits of public transportation via [...]

Sure, debunking David Brooks’s phony sociologizing is like shooting fish in a barrel. It is a thankless task nonetheless and Jay Livingston should be recognized for undertaking it and giving everyone a little Sociology 101 lesson on the difference between individual and social explanations and how one should explain the social with the social considering [...]

Y’all need to watch this: Which is part of this: Time for School Series ~ Introduction | Wide Angle via kwout

It looks like Caster Semenya will get to keep her Gold Medal irrespective of the results of the sex test… so, what was the whole fuss about if not the “she can’t be a girl if she runs that fast so she has to be a dude” argument (if you can call it that). Anyway, [...]

I am not sure just yet what I think of this, but this is worth reading and reflecting upon: State 2.0: a new front end? | open Democracy News Analysis via kwout Go read the whole thing but I should note that this is yet another example of universalizing Northern theory that assumes a lot [...]

A few weeks ago, South African athlete Caster Semenya made the news not just because she pulverized the 800m world record but because her supposedly lack of femininity triggered an investigation to determine her gender. For all of us sociologists, this was a perfect example to the social construction of gender and its enforcement. Society [...]