SOC 5/4-260 Cultural Theory Summer II

Dear Students,
Our class begins Monday. If you read this and are taking the class as 5260, begin to consider which day you would like to lead class discussion. The assignments are on the class syllabus:

http://gignatow.googlepages.com/culturaltheory

Here is the rough organization of the course:

week 1: intro and Marxist/Critical cultural theory
week 2: Marxist/neo-Marxist theory and Weberian theory of religion
week 3: neo-Weberian cultural theory and cultural anthropology
week 4: Symbolic Boundaries, Bourdieu, and the Sociology of Culture
week 5: Durkheimian and neo-Durkheimian cultural sociology, sociology of culture and cognition

Job Search Workshop

Joint TWU-UNT Sociology Job Search Workshop 1. Don’t worry about aggregate statistics on placements, the job market, etc. The academic job market is tough, it’s been tough since the late 1960s, and it will continue to be tough. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. 2. All you can do is work very hard, and anticipate going on the market up to 3 years in a row. If you don’t get any job the third time around, it’s time to try something else. Think of the process as a poker game: you can only go ‘all in’ so many times before you have to cut your losses and begin to consider non-academic jobs. This is especially the case if you are offered a post-doc, a lectureship, or some kind of adjunct position. In each case you have to be very honest with yourself, and your advisor needs to be honest with you, about whether such positions will lead to a tenure-track position down the road (if that’s what you’re after). 3. Your primary sources of information on job openings are the...

"The Concept(s) of Culture" article is pasted here

*****The formatting on this article is not great; please email me if you want the PDF file: ignatow@pacs.unt.edu****** The Concept(s) of Culture WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR. The aim of this chapter is to reflect upon the concept-or more properly the concepts-of culture in contemporary academic discourse. Trying to clarify what we mean by culture seems both imperative and impossible at a moment like the present, when the study of culture is burgeoning in virtually all fields of the human sciences. Although I glance at the varying uses of "culture" in a number of disciplines, my reflection is based above all on the extensive debates that have occurred in anthropology over the past two decades-debatesin which some have questioned the very utility of the concept.' I feel strongly that it remains as useful, indeed essential, as ever. But given the cacophony of contemporary discourse about culture, I also believe that the concept needs some reworking and clarification.s,...

Lecture Notes for Midterm 1, Sociology of the Arts and Popular Culture

Introduction The “cultural turn” in the social sciences and humanities Immediately after WWII, the human sciences took the natural sciences as their model—especially in America. Search was for “laws” of human society e.g. classical economics, Marxism Newtonian paradigm: search for cause-and-effect relationships Positivism hypothesis testing, independent and dependent variables, statistical tests This model is now mostly, but not entirely, out of fashion Generally, this search has not yielded the kinds of results once hoped for also, Marxism fails in practice civil rights, women’s rights, antiwar movements in the 60s and 70s couldn’t be understood or predicted in terms of scientific laws. More a matter of history and agency. modernization projects are seen to disappoint The contemporaneous “linguistic turn” (initiated by Noam Chomsky’s critique of B.F. Skinner) The linguistic turn in philosophy: Wi...

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