The Global Sociology Blog

Via Indigo Willing over on Twitter, For those of you who teach race and ethnicity, this article is a must-read and bookmark on representations and casting of Asians in movies and television throughout the 20th century until now. “Yellowface, at its core, is not only the practice of applying prostheses or paint to simulate a [...]

Camille Peugny‘s Le Déclassement stands in the tradition of sociology of social stratification and social mobility. The book is composed of Peugny’s study on this topic, not just as a feeling of uncertainty and insecurity towards the future but as a socioeconomic reality that is both objectively measurable and subjectively experienced. What the déclassement (I [...]

In this great post, Tony Karon channels David Held‘s analysis of globalization as multipolar phenomenon. Karon starts by enunciating what makes this World Cup actually quite interesting: “Les Bleus were trounced by Uruguay and South Africa, and plunged into a national crisis that required presidential intervention by their own implosion. Uruguay, refusing to accept the [...]

A while back, I posted on John Robb’s distinction between failed states and hollow states. A reminder: “A failed state is a complete breakdown in the delivery of political goods (security, law, health, education, infrastructure, etc.), the dissolution of most arms of the government (often what’s left is in absentia), and widespread chaos.  Think Somalia. [...]

Denis Colombi is right to recommend this column by Marwan Mohammed and Laurent Mucchielli. As they state, it didn’t take long for some French right-wing philosopher (and yes, we have a few of them, each one more pathetic and intellectually bankrupt than the next) to blame the poor performance of the French team at the [...]

Via The Grumpy Sociologist, the Commonwealth Fund has yet another comparative study showing that the US health care system is more costly and less effective than that of other high income countries (heck, France was not even in the set of compared countries this time). How many studies will it ever take to get significant [...]

So there was this relatively uninteresting tiff between Terry Eagleton (football is the crack cocaine of the masses!) and Dave Zirin (but football is fun… which is, by the way, why it works as presumably crack cocaine of the masses, if it weren’t fun, no one would care). Anyhoo, I have just finished reading Gabriel [...]

It is of course obvious to say that football games involve quite a bit of performance, the most obvious example being “diving” (which, in order to be successful, has to be accomplished while walking a fine line between convincing performance and overacting, which can draw negative sanctions) or something like this: But this is a [...]

Stieg Larsson‘s Millenium Trilogy should be required reading in any sociology of gender course because it is a strong demonstration of the way patriarchy works at all levels of society: individual, interactive, institutional, structural and cultural. The whole trilogy is a fictional demonstration of what happens to women who don’t know their place and won’t [...]

Even before the World Cup started, FIFA drew quite a bit of criticism for this decision: “Aids groups in South Africa have accused Fifa of banning the distribution of condoms at World Cup stadiums and other venues. The Aids Consortium and other groups also criticised a block on the distribution of safe sex information at [...]

Via Myca over at Alas, A Blog: Girls suck at video games / Les filles sont nulles aux jeux vidéo from Stéphanie Mercier on Vimeo.

From their new album, Future Breeds, JFK’s LSD:

Via Fixr, Click the image to enlarge Source: FixR

First, to put us all in the mood for this, here is Acoustic Alchemy, The Beautiful game: As the first games of the World Cup are being played, a lot has already been written about the social aspects of the competition itself that illustrate the fact that there is more to sport events than sport [...]

Via Visual Economics: “The world”, really? Or do you mean American + Europeans and everyone else who’s affluent enough to even have online access and leisure time to socially connect? Sheesh, one would think there is no such thing as the global digital divide as well as within societies inequalities as well. File that as [...]