Summer 2012
Volume: 11 | Number: 3
Judging Obama
The presidency of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, is not going to be judged by its symbolic significance and healthcare reform alone. Sociologists, Ho-fung Hung, Fred Block, Alejandro Portes, Beverly J. Silver, and Richard Lachmann assess Obama's first term from the perspectives of green economy, immigration reform, foreign policy, and social movements. Read More
Marriage Goes To School
In recent years, policy efforts to alleviate poverty have focused on marriage and relationship education. Orit Avishai's, Melanie Heath's,and Jennifer Randles's research finds that efforts to address poverty via relationship skills training are misguided because this approach does not address the structural causes of poverty. Read More
The French Take Hollywood
While the United States dominates the global film market, strategies are available to non-U.S. filmmakers seeking to make their mark. Sociologist Diane Barthel-Bouchier discusses how the Oscar-winning French film, The Artist, used the strategies of solving the language problem, meeting cultural expectations, building connections with Hollywood insiders, and mounting a media charm offensive to win the 2012 Best Picture Oscar award. Read More
Killadelphia
Violent death is so commonplace in Philadelphia that it infuses the visual culture of the city with haunting imagery. Sociologist James Dickinson shows how memorial portraits, roadside shrines, sidewalk plaques, murals, billboards, and graffiti variously recall, memorialize, criticize, or comment on the epidemic of lethal violence in the City of Brotherly Love. Read More
Telling Stories about Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks has usually been portrayed as a highly principled but non-political person, not the long-time civil rights activist that she was. Sociologist Michael Schudson finds several factors that account for this, including efforts of civil rights movement participants to deflect criticism of the movement as instigated by outside agitators; participants' efforts to explain their own actions to themselves; and their efforts not to present themselves immodestly as morally superior. Read More
