Sui-Lee Wee reports on Reuters that Chinese artist-activist Zhu Yufu, aged 60, has been indicted on subversion charges for a poem he wrote one year a go. The poem is titled ‘It’s time’. It was published online. Here is one verse published in Reuters:
It’s time, Chinese people!
The square belongs to everyone
the feet are yours
it’s time to use your feet and take to the square to make a choice.
Continue reading The power and danger of words: Chinese artist indicted for writing a poem
Temporal time is the passing of time as measured by clocks and calendars. Social time refers to the cultural meaning that societies place on time and the social norms that shape how people imagine their relationship to time. Social time also determines how societies organise the past, present and future. (Read more.)
Werner Bergmann discusses several sociological studies that demonstrate the historical and cultural variation of social time. In the past, societies were organised around the rhythms of sun rise and sun set. Industrialisation led to a stronger emphasis on ‘the clock’ as a primary way of organising society. Cultures reformulate the demands of modern life against cultural ideas of social time. Continue reading The sociology of time: cultural variations of social time
These images come from a story titled “The Sociology of Towers”. Given my interest in visual sociology, I got excited. How can art represent sociological ideas about the constricting tutelage of social institutions and the struggle for social change? Alexandra Kleiman from Artlog has the answer:
From Babel to the Burj Khalifa, towers serve as potent sites of collective memory and symbols of cultural change. The Syrian-born American artist Diana Al-Hadid, now living and working in Brooklyn, creates primarily architectural sculptures that oscillate between rigid modernist construction and slumping ancient forms. Al-Hadid’s works evoke structures from the Roman Coliseum to The Monument to the Third International and the World Trade Center as well as more organic waterfalls and forest flora more recently.
By primarily using rough materials such as plaster, cardboard, fiberglass, wood, and aluminum foil and upending her towers, Al-Hadid subverts the authority these structures normally hold, alluding to the cultural clashes such buildings have come to represent. The artist’s intricate works are a feat of engineering in their own right.
Intriguing. I’ll be on the hunt for more sociological art. Another post on visual sociology coming up.
Credits:
All images: Diana Al-Hadid (2008) The Tower of Infinite Problems. Source: artlog.com
Sociologist Erik Olin Wright on the next step for the Occupy movement:
The occupy movement, at this point, is a protest movement that mainly has what could be called an expressive rather than a transformative strategy. That is, the main logic of its activities is the diagnosis and critique of existing institutions rather than attempts to create alternatives. This is important since the critique of the world as it is always forms the point of departure for struggles to make a new world. But eventually, such expressive activities need to be connected to a more transformative strategy if real change is to be generated… Pushing for these kinds of interstitial and symbiotic projects of institution building does not mean abandoning protests against the more macro-level injustices of inequality and corporate power, nor dropping demands for system-level redress of these injustices. The broad vision for a democratic egalitarian alternative to capitalism which promotes human flourishing should continue to anchor interstitial and symbiotic strategies at the more local level. For the moment, however, the prospects for substantial progressive change at the national level seem very limited. And, perhaps, in the longer term, the success of more locally-directed projects of institution building will strengthen the prospects for broader transformation by showing, on the ground, that another world is possible.
New Left Project via @WWNSoc.
New Left Project | Articles | Occupy Wall Street and Transformational Strategy
By Scott Edwards, Amnesty International USA blog:
A curious op ed appeared in The New York Times recently, titled “Internet Access is Not a Human Right.” In this piece—which I read as I do most news and media, via my computer—Vinton Cerf, a “father” of the Internet, makes an argument that despite the critical role of Information Communication Technologies (the internet) in the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, access to the Internet is not a human right.
I should note that his right to express himself so is enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR):
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to… seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
The curious bit of his piece though, isn’t the claim that Internet Access is not a human right, but rather the exceptionally narrow portrayal of human rights from a legal and philosophical perspective.
Beautifully argued: Why internet access is a basic human right
French philosopher Jacques Derrida on the fear of writing (from the 2002 documentary Derrida):
…when I don’t write, there is a very strange moment before I go to sleep… all of a sudden I’m terrified by what I’m doing. I tell myself: ‘You’re crazy to write this!’ …what can I compare it to? Imagine a child who does something horrible. Freud talks of childhood dreams where one dreams of being naked and terrified because everyone sees that they’re naked. In any case, in this half sleep I have the impression that I’ve done something criminal, disgraceful, unavowable, that I shouldn’t have done. And somebody is telling me: ‘But you’re mad to have done that’. And this is something I truly believe in my half sleep. And the implied command in this is: ‘Stop everything! Take it back! Burn your papers! What you are doing is inadmissible!’ But once I wake up, it’s over. What this means or how I interpret this is that when I’m awake, conscious, working, in a certain way I am more unconscious than in my half sleep. When I’m in that half sleep there’s a kind of vigilance that tells me the truth. First of all, it tells me that what I’m doing is very serious. But when I’m awake and working this vigilance is actually asleep. It’s not the stronger of the two. And so I do what must be done.
In this clip, Derrida speaks with no-nonsense clarity, self-reflexive insight and honesty. He shows amazing courage to admit to his insecurities as a public intellectual. The doubt that Derrida voices applies to anyone who is honest about the difficulties of writing something original for a public audience: ’I do what must be done’.
I signed this petition today: ’Eliminate the “gay panic” defence from Queensland law’. Queensland is a state in Australia which has the highest recorded rates of LGBT youth suicide as well as a high rate of LGBT hate crimes. Change.org reports that 73% of LGBT Queenslanders have experienced a form of verbal or physical assault due to their sexuality. The ‘gay panic’ law effectively institutionalises LGBT hate crimes and exonerates murder on the basis of homophobia. Campbell Newman writes on Change.org:
A loophole in Queensland law allows people accused of murder to defend themselves in court by claiming “gay panic” – that is, if someone who they think is gay “comes onto” them, the sheer panic they feel is partial justification for murder.
This law belongs in the dark ages –affirmed by the High Court in the notorious Green case in 1997, when a man responded to “gentle touching” by brutally murdering his victim.The killer’s argument was this: “Yeah, I killed the guy, but what he did to me was much worse.” Just over two years ago, a man was murdered in my church’s grounds, and his killers used this same “gay panic” defence. They were eventually acquitted of murder. I’m utterly appalled that a law that so revoltingly and openly discriminates against gay people is still tolerated in a modern society.
Video based on Nathan Yau’s new book, Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics. Wiley Technology writes of the video on Youtube:
Our world is awash in data. To mean anything, it must be presented in a way that enables us to interpret, analyze, and apply the information. One of the best ways to do that is visually.
This US AID infographic demonstrates the importance of improving women’s education, economic contribution, political power and health in developing countries through international assistance programs.
Text reads:
A woman multiplies the impact of an investment made in her future by extending benefits to the world around her, creating a better life for her family and building a strong community.
Via: US Aid.
The Other Sociologist 