Daniel Little
Christopher Browning is a noted and respected historian of the Nazi period and the Holocaust (link). His October 2022 article in the Atlantic on "the politics of legality" during Hitler's march to power is an extremely serious warning to all of us who care about our democracy in the United States (link). It is a …
Continue reading "Trump, Hitler, and the politics of legality"
Diane Vaughan's recent Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk is an important contribution to the literature on safety in complex socio-technical systems. The book is an ethnographic study of the workspaces and the men and women who manage the flow of aircraft throughout US airspace. Her ethnographic work for this study was …
Continue reading "The air traffic control system and ethno-cognition"
A view shows a building of a restaurant heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in central Kramatorsk, Donetsk region, Ukraine June 27, 2023. Head of the Donetsk Regional Military-Civil Administration Pavlo Kyrylenko via Facebook/Handout via REUTERS The tragic death of Victoria Amelina in Kramatorsk, Ukraine on June 27 in …
The third meeting of the Asian Network for the Philosophy of Social Sciences (ANPOSS) took place in Bangkok last week (link). It was a highly stimulating success. Organizers Chaiyan Rajchagool, Kanit (Mitinunwong) Sirichan, Yukti Mukdawijitra, and others put enormous effort into carrying it off, and host institutions Thammasat University and Chulalongkorn University provided excellent coordination …
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photo: Hobsbawm at work The British historian Eric Hobsbawm was a leading member of the British Communist Party-affiliated Historians' Group. This was a group of leading British historians who were members of the British Communist Party in the 1940s. In 1978 Hobsbawm wrote a historical memoir of the group recalling the important post-war decade of …
Continue reading "Eric Hobsbawm’s history of the Historians’ Group"
Aldon Morris's Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (1984) is a highly valuable treatment of the US civil rights movement of the 1950s through early 1960s. The book is a work of history and sociology, and it is deeply informed by the sociology of social movements. (It is significant that …
Continue reading "Aldon Morris on the Civil Rights movement"
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., center, the first defendant called to trial in the racial bus boycott, held a press conference on March 19, 1956 on the steps of the Montgomery County courthouse where he and 92 others are on trial. They are charged with the violation of the anti-boycott law. King's wife, Coretta …
Continue reading "How “micro” does the sociology of social movements need to go?"
Alain Touraine has been one of the most prolific sociologists in France for at least six decades. Of particular interest to me is his study of the Solidarity Movement in Poland in 1980-1981. In research reported in Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement: Poland 1980-81 Touraine (along with François Dubet, Michel Wieviorka, and Jan Strzelecki) undertook to …
Continue reading "Touraine’s method of “sociological intervention” applied to contentious politics"
image: Warsaw Ghetto Memorial 1948 (detail) An earlier post analyzed Wendy Lower's stunningly original treatment of a single photograph of a 1941 mass killing in the town of Miropol, Ukraine (link). The photograph captures the murder of a Ukrainian Jewish mother and her child by German soldiers and Ukrainian militiamen. After extensive investigation Lower was …
Image: residential segregation by race, NYC 2010 In Dissecting the Social Peter Hedström describes the analytical sociology approach in these terms: Although the term analytical sociology is not commonly used, the type of sociology designated by the term has an important history that can be traced back to the works of late nineteenth- and early …
Understanding Society 