Black Hawk Hancock

More Than Just a Soundtrack: Toward a Technology of the Collective in Hardcore Punk

We study the musical genre of punk to discuss how the embodiment of music and musical practices operate as a “technology of the collective.” This furthers our understanding how music, as a cultural form, becomes a tangible resource used in the constitution of collective identity. By utilizing the subculture of hardcore punk as a vehicle for exploration, this approach helps us understand how musical practices operate at the analytical level of embodied practices. We explore how aspects of embodiment illuminate displays of involvement and group membership, as well as solidarity and community. Music becomes the conduit between identity, conventionalized expressions, and the ways people form investments to configure their social worlds.

Put a Little Color on That

Drawing on more than five years of extended fieldwork, this article explores the tropes through which dancers express and explain their participation in the Lindy Hop revival. In this reconstruction, the author extends Bourdieus notions of symbolic power, symbolic violence, and misrecognition to show how racial domination is produced and perpetuated, denigrating and erasing African American cultural identity. As a result, the discourses of the Lindy Hop revival provide a window into understanding how the dominant racial logic of American society circulates even in the most apparently innocuous of cultural practices.

The new ethnographer at work

Building on observations from ethnography at the fin de siècle (Wellin and Fine, 2001), we address how ethnographers today approach their work tasks, incorporating new technology, emphasizing embodiment, sites of struggle, and increasing public engagement. We use the lens of the sociology of work to examine how ethnography has been shaped over the past 15 years, the lifespan of Qualitative Research. How do the challenges of occupational roles, places of research, and new forms of data gathering shape our collective work?

The Problem of “Cameo Appearances” in Mixed-methods Research: Implications for Twenty-first-century Ethnography

Amid ongoing controversies in ethnography concerning representation, reproducibility, and generalizability, social scientific scholarship has increasingly taken a mixed-methods turn. While studies that blend qualitative and quantitative data promise to enhance the validity of representations of social worlds under analysis, they cannot escape contending with foundational dilemmas of scientific translation, integration, and commensurability across methodological paradigms. Recent debates have ignited a new line of inquiry about the integration of multiple methods in ethnography. In this paper, we argue that “cameo appearances”—the summoning of either qualitative or quantitative analyses in separate, purely mono-method studies—amounts to a form of methodological tokenism under the guise of methodological pluralism. We articulate sampling design, enhanced training, and curriculum development as crucial for arbitrating these debates as mixed-methods research emerges as a distinct innovation in twenty-first-century ethnography.

Rethinking contemporary social theory

Part I Paradigms Chapter One Paradigms in Sociology Chapter Two Conflict Constructionism: Elements of the Paradigm Chapter Three History of a Paradigm Part II Paradigm Change in Selected Subfields Section 1 Deep Impact: The New Paradigm Becomes Dominant Chapter Four Constructing Difference and Dominance: Race-Ethnicity and Gender Chapter Five Culture in an Era of Globalization, Jose Soltero Chapter Six Media in the Information Age: Surface Intensities and Total Symbolic Environments Chapter Seven Sociology of the Self: From Personality to Persona Section 2 Paradigms in Play Chapter Eight Political Sociology and the Analysis of Collective Action: Old and New in Harmony Chapter Nine Urban Sociology and Spatial Analysis: Paradigms in Coexistence Chapter Ten Disruptions in the Field Formerly Known as Sociology of Deviance, Greg Scott and Julian Thompson Section 3 Paradigm Limited Chapter Eleven Social Class and Socioeconomic Inequality Chapter Twelve Contemporary Theories of Family Life, Tait Runnfeldt Medina and Julie E. Artis Section 4 Paradigms Reconstituted in a Transdisciplinary Field Chapter Thirteen The Sociology of Health, Illness, and Medical Practice, Grace Budry Conclusion

Aligning sampling and case selection in quantitative-qualitative research designs: Establishing generalizability limits in mixed-method studies

Quantitative researchers increasingly draw on ethnographic research that may not be generalizable to inform and interpret results from statistical analyses; at the same time, while generalizability is not always an ethnographic research goal, the integration of quantitative data by ethnographic researchers to buttress findings on processes and mechanisms has also become common. Despite the burgeoning use of dual designs in research, there has been little empirical assessment of whether the themes, narratives, and ideal types derived from qualitative fieldwork are broadly generalizable in a manner consistent with estimates obtained from quantitative analyses. We draw on simulated and real-world data to assess the bias associated with failing to align samples across qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Our findings demonstrate that significant bias exists in mixed-methods studies when sampling is incongruent within research designs. We propose three solutions to limit bias in mixed-methods research.

Reflections on the ruins of Athens and Rome: Derrida and Simmel on temporality, life and death

The recent publication of the translation of Jacques Derrida’s Athens, Still Remains, a small volume of photographs and commentary, affords an opportunity to probe Derrida’s reflections on death and therefore on life as well. Looking at photographs and objects of everyday life, Derrida emphasizes the deferred yet certain nature of death and the way in which this deferral opens the opportunity to devote ourselves to life. His grounding of his philosophical and deconstructionist argument in contemplation of material fragments (the photographs of ruins and scenes from the recent past of Athens) invites a comparison with the writing of sociologist Georg Simmel on ruins, time and death. Both writers attempt to discover practices of survival, the techne of affirming life in the face of death. For both of them these practices are sociological as well as philosophical, individual as well as collective, and aesthetic as well as intellectual. While their reflections thematically converge, their strategies for the affirmation of life are not identical, and we contrast Derrida’s approach, rooted in a concept of being in the world and a connection to others, to Simmel’s analysis which is focused on the role of culture and the force of the human spirit. Reconstructing a conversation between Derrida and Simmel and examining their intellectual rapprochement deepen our thinking about temporality and death as we confront the question ‘How are we to live?’