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Introduction
No full textThis book is dedicated to John Urry and his path-breaking work as one of the most influential sociologists of his generation. He helped to identify the deep histories, emergent patterns, and key issues that are reshaping the contemporary world. But beyond that he also made many of us more excited about sociology as a vital field of study that could move beyond disciplinary boundaries to engage a more far-reaching social science and humanities perspective. Whether focusing on shifting economies and the consumption of place, human senses and the body, landscape and place-making, mobilities and complex systems, or recent phenomena such as offshoring and climate change, John Urry was a perpetually innovative scholar, blowing away cobwebs and putting things in a new light. He built on the best traditions of social theory while always making it relevant to the concerns of today – as well as urgently necessary for envisioning and making better futures.We have chosen to divide the book into five thematic sections. In Part I the focus is on economies and spatialities, and the contributors reflect on both ‘the spatial turn’ and ‘the cultural turn’ in social theory, and especially their impact on British sociology in the 1980s, in conversation with simultaneous developments in human geography. This section includes several colleagues from Lancaster University, and considers how Urry’s early work in social theory, regional economies, and the emergence of disorganized capitalism connects to his later work on offshoring, mobilities, critical sociology, and social futures. While many associate the work of Urry with a ‘postmodern’ perspective, contributors here offer a more complex and nuanced view of the various strands of social theory that he brought together, and the intersections of a kind of cultural approach with the material production of space. In Part II, a cohort of Urry’s co-authors and colleagues considers the contributions of his work to rethinking the relation between natures, bodies, and the senses, and the emergence of what might be called ‘the sensual turn’ in sociology and cultural geography. Here, a more phenomenological perspective comes to the fore, considering how bodies and spaces are co-constituted through ongoing practices. Sensations, gazes, affects, intensities, virtual travel, and imaginative mobilities all move to the foreground, showing how absence and presence, proximity and distance are experientially entangled. These reflections show how Urry’s perspective helped open new spatial, sensory, and temporal dimensions of empirical research and social analysis, as well as allowing for very creative modes of writing. In Part III we turn to a host of thinkers who took up Urry’s work on tourism and everyday travel to investigate both the histories and contemporary practices of travel, and the emerging topographies of tourist performance. While this work is connected both to the interest in embodiment and in mobilities, it takes the specific context of touristic encounters and day-to-day travel routines to unpack some of the more detailed encounters of the travelling body. Funnily enough, in these postcards from various places we also begin to see the academic as tourist: the travels that took John to Denmark, to Brazil, to New Zealand, and to many other places around the world, even ice-fishing in Finland. So much of our work involves both everyday travel, and more occasional distant travel, as well as a kind of mundane travel-time that is so often used for work; perhaps all this travel instils a kind of sociological reflexivity as we move between different cultural settings. In Part IV we address in wider perspective the full implications of the mobilities turn, as it has impacted on a trans-disciplinary array of questions. Contributors consider both how it emerged in various international and disciplinary contexts, and how it has impacted on a wide range of research areas, throwing disparate fields into new juxtapositions. This has been an incredibly fruitful and productive terrain, generating many new ideas and methodologies for social research, as well as new kinds of collaborations and innovative practices. And finally, in Part V the contributors take up the post-humanist themes of complex systems theory and the more speculative strains of social futures thinking and ‘affirmative critique’ in Urry’s most recent work. Here we consider what the future holds for social sciences in an era of global limits and surveillant assemblages, as we try to envision a post-carbon future that may or may not emerge out of the spatial, sensual, and mobile practices that Urry’s work has charted. We also see his biting critique of hidden wealth and the dark forces that shape global economies and proliferate dangerous systems that are beyond our control. Yet risk, disaster, and inequality remind us again of the commitment to normative social science and to bringing about social change, including by working in more applied arenas, such as John’s contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the UK Government’s Foresight programme.<br/
Power and Truth: Domestic Violence in American Media
No full textThe author delves into the world of domestic violence to understand it as an actual act and to understand the media and its relation to such a crime. The author investigates Foucault’s understanding of power and truth, as well as the feminist understand of power and truth, which is closely tied to media theory. The author aims to find common ground between the two to prove that both are imperative when attempting to understand power and truth, especially in relation to domestic violence in American media. Nancy Berns’ book, Framing the Victim: Domestic Violence Media and Social Problems was also examined. Methodology includes interviews of domestic violence victims and non-victims who had no first-hand experience with domestic violence
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Resistance: Uncovering Minor Narratives within Dominate Discourse. A Foucauldian Examination of Four Sites of Everyday Resistance
No full textPornography, domestic entreprenemship, and gay tourism. This thesis explores it all. \ud
The author did not fully explore porn until college and believes that doing so made her a strong believer in its resistive potential. This chapter relates directly to her own sexual trials and she credits her experiences to living on a "sexually open" campus. As a college educated girl, the author was beginning the theoretical struggle between motherhood and career. After watching her stay-at-home mom go through an ugly divorce, it raised questions for her about the value that society places on domestic work. Finally, the last chapter springs from the author’s own coming out narrative and the ways in which queer consumerism offers counter sexual narratives. Each chapter begins with a brief description of a localized and momentary event, and are followed by narratives
Telling Birth
No full textThis thesis is about birth from the perspective of one who does believe and see the power of birth. The author believes in the capability of women’s bodies to give birth to children and sees the process as something that is not to be overlooked, but instead as a process to be explored for its ability to transform and transport individuals outside the realm of the familiar in terms of time and sense of self. This thesis stands as the author’s exploration of the significance of the birthing experience as narrated through the stories of women passing from the world of non-mother to mother
Sistas on the Rise: How Young Mothers Re-define Their Place, Their Space, Through Literacy
No full textSistas on the Rise is a social justice organization in the South Bronx that serves young mothers. Established in 2001, Sistas evolved from an informal collective called Madres en la lucha, which focused on all social justice issues like the U.S. Navy’s occupation of Vieques, Puerto Rico, and violence against women of color. Out of this organization rose the need the build all effective social justice services for young mothers and their children, who need a space where they could lead, participate, and shape social justice initiatives. This thesis serves as an opening statement for the orientation program at Sista. As a newcomer in the leadership circle, the coordinator emphasized that young women need to know how the author felt about them. One of the primary objectives of the organization is to communicate a sense of acceptance and support for young mothers in all efforts to encourage them to join the collective of young owmen of color who have dedicated their lives to advocating for their rights. Such is the goal of a myriad of social justice organizations: rebuilding and establishing communities by serving underserved populations and empowering them to reach out to others in need
Postcolonial/Postmodern Theories and Feminist Praxis: An Examination of Nine Women's Studies Programs in the United States
No full textHave feminist studies reached a moment of identity crisis? The destabilization of a cohesive conception of feminist studies has, in part, been the result of critiques that have adopted a postcolonial or postmodern lens. These critiques have challenged the historical tendency ofhegemonic feminism to conflate Western women’s experiences of gender and goals for gender equality with a universal conception of womanhood and feminist aims. The author explores the ways that postcolonial and postmodem theories have problematized dominant feminist theorizing, focusing on the possibility of feminist\ud
solidarity or how a postcolonial feminist movement can be imagined. Methodology includes examining theories offered to describe the third intersection between postcolonialism and feminism, and linking them to Women’s Studies programs
The Power of Auto-Emotions and the End of Auto-Modernity: The Automobile, Urban Life, Mobilities, and the Future of the Car System
No full textSociety is constituted of the physical, imaginative, virtual, flowing and arrested movement of people, and this movement is facilitated by an ever-expanding list of technology, including planes, trains, buses, modems, bicycles, and cars. A sociology of mobilities is the study of society that recognizes its mobile nature and seeks to understand the movement of which it is comprised. In much of the contemporary world, and especially the United States, the automobile dominates the landscape of mobility. Modem social, economic and emotional lives revolve around these machines. The growing density of cities, increasing shortages of oil and developing threat of global warming make it clear that this massive, dominating car system is on the way out. On the other hand, car use is not in decline. Car use, rather, is expanding both spatially and quantitatively around the world. This contradiction points to the social and emotional forces that drive car use. These forces form a deep-seated social system that must be understood in order to comprehend the political issues of regulating car use and pushing towards sustainable transit.\ud
The author explores how an integrated social and material understanding of automobility can be used to develop an accurate picture of the political debate over automobility and potential changes to the car system. The current debate over congestion pricing (a system of charging for road use at peak times), urban planning and regulating car use in New York City can illuminate this question about how dearly held values and social ways are being implicated in a modal shift from automobility as we know it to a more sustainable system. This particular debate in New York City and the wider issues of social relations and politics of car use can best be understood within the larger framework and methodologies of the sociology of mobilities. Also considered are different theoretical aspects of automobility and how they fit into a wider conception of modernity
Migration, the sociology of mobility, and critical theory
Get PDFBeing one of my PhD supervisors, John’s influence on my intellectual life has been decisive in many respects. However, his work has inspired me especially in relation to three fields: immigration, the sociology of critique, and the critique of mobility. The following is a reflective account of this. First I focus on immigration in the prism of mobility. Then I turn to the sociology of critique in the framework of mobility. Finally, I revisit the link between critique and immobility, relating this to the sociology of the camp
Generation (Se)X: Essays on Citizenship in the "Intimate Public Sphere"
No full textSince the conclusion of World War II and the inception of the United Nations, countries around the world have undergone an reevaluation of the role of the child in formatting “sympathetic” legal structures; that is, in the face of overwhelming evidence that children bear the brunt of inequities caused by violence, substandard education and lack of healthcare, states have initiated policies to address the plight of this social underclass. Likewise, with the drafting of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of the Child (1959), a near-universal emphasis on protecting the innocence of the young to secure their healthy future, and therefore the healthy future of a state, has continually escalated. Methodology includes a literature review on The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essayson Sex and Citizenship by Lauren Berlant
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