The Global Sociology Blog

What? What could possibly explain this trend?

Here is an interesting data visualization from Der Spiegel, on the rise of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), the German far-right party. As you can see from the map and the post title, I don’t think the choice of brown dots as color scheme is random. It is a rather simple data visualization but it [...]

Sydney Nathans’s To Free A Family: The Journey of Mary Walker was a birthday gift. What a great reading it turned out to be. As the title indicates, the book is about Mary Walker’s struggle to get her children and her mother out of slavery after she herself had escaped it. It took her 17 [...]

I have already posted quite a bit about David Harvey‘s Rebel Cities: From The Right to the City to the Urban Revolution: the fetishism of the local and the horizontal monopoly rent and local capitalism the cities in the context of the anti-capitalist struggle And more broadly on global cities. It is somewhat of a given [...]

In chapter 4 of Rebel Cities, Harvey focuses on what he takes to be the essence of capitalism: the establishment of monopoly rent. “All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners over certain assets. Monopoly rent arises because social actors can realize an enhanced income stream over an extended time by virtue of [...]

Via Fabien Deglise – where else? – on Twitter, in French (bien sur), this visualization from Radio Canada (click on the image for a larger view): On the left are the hashtags and names / users that generated the most traffic through Twitter. The red spikes at the bottom reflect the volume correlated with specific events [...]

[This post is an extension of my book review of Paul Mason's book as well as a response to Lambert's post over at Corrente, in which he is much too kind to call me a scholar.] So, we are having of them cross-blog dialogue on Paul Mason’s book, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere – The [...]

[This review is the opening salvo of a blog-to-blog dialogue on the subject of current anti-systemic social movements between this humble blog and the Mighty Corrente building. Corrente has been following the Occupy movement pretty closely, so I expect Lambert will have plenty to say on the subject over there. I also highly recommend David [...]

Here: “That said, significant social change has never been achieved in this country through conventional politics alone. From the outset, the American system was designed to insulate the federal government from radical change. The founding fathers were revolutionaries of an ambivalent and conflicted sort. They prized stability over all else, including any pretense to an egalitarian democracy. [...]

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter‘s Games of Empire – Global Capitalism and Video Games is a very interesting and well-written book that uses the conceptual apparatus laid out by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (with a touch of Deleuze and Guattari thrown in for good measure) in Empire and Multitude and apply them to the [...]

French sociologist Alain Accardo has penned an interesting essay on the social movement that has spread all over Europe, starting in Spain with Los Indignados, Les Indignés en France, or the whole Occupy movement in the US and elsewhere. For him, analysis of the movement has either focused on the emotional aspects (hence the reference [...]

Via Alex Trillo, here: “”If all that happens is those groups continue to try to occupy public space to express outrage, this dissipates relatively quickly,” said Doug McAdam, a professor of sociology at Stanford and an expert on social movements. “Lots of movements start out as more expressions of outrage or frustration, but that does [...]

This is interesting (H/T DC Blogger over at Corrente): “A 21-year-old Occupy Wall Street demonstrator caused quite the ruckus early this morning, when he scaled a 70-foot sculpture in New York’s Zuccotti Park, refusing to come down until Mayor Michael Bloomberg resigned. Dylan Spoelstra of Canada climbed the park’s signature red sculpture around 6 a.m. [...]

Via: occupations…

The idea of riots exploding when food becomes scarce or unaffordable is not new. This is something that has been discussed before in the context of what used to be called the “IMF riots”, that is riots caused by the implementation of structural adjustment programs in developing countries (“structural adjustment” is roughly equivalent to austerity [...]