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Category Archives: Sociology

Why Punish?

Thursday, December 8, 2011

The final reading of the semester for my first year students is an extract from Peter Moskos’s In Defence of Flogging. I’ve previously discussed the book here, but the basic argument is–more or less–prisons are ineffective at best and gross human rights violations at worse, thus they should not be used in the case of [...]

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Competence

Monday, November 7, 2011

For the past couple of days, I’ve been working on a chapter for an edited collection on relational sociology. Predictably, my contribution deals with non-humans. I commented earlier on the strange dogmatic humanism of critical realism. This dogmatic humanism is shared by the relational sociologists. This recourse to a metaphysical humanism usually occurs in the [...]

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A Serious Question

Friday, July 15, 2011

Why do critical realists insist on asserting a dogmatic humanism? Consider Margaret Archer in her “Preface” to Pierpaolo Donati’s Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences: “First and last, relational sociologists and critical realists care deeply about the human capacity for fulfillment and the human liability to multifarious forms of suffering. As it [...]

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In Defense of Flogging

Monday, June 27, 2011

Peter Moskos’s In Defense of Flogging presents a simple and radical argument: the penitentiary system, especially in the United States, is more or less a crime against humanity: not only does it fail to meet its stated objectives, but it is also exceptionally cruel forcing inmates to be subjected to beatings, rapes, overcrowding, no health [...]

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Ranking Sociology?

Friday, October 22, 2010

I haven’t written about sociology in quite some time–for whatever reason, sociologists talking about sociology is even more boring than philosophers talking about philosophy or theologians talking about theology. Perhaps it is because, generally speaking, the institutional viability of the social sciences in the context of an ongoing fiscal crisis remains somewhat more secure than [...]

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Final Comment on the Diab Affair

Sunday, August 2, 2009

There has been much confusion surrounding the hiring and subsequent firing of Hassan Diab, a contract instructor (a “sessional” in the language of the university) in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, who was hired as an emergency replacement to teach half of SOCI 1002 Introduction to Sociology II. No one seems [...]

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Faculty Response to Diab Firing

Saturday, August 1, 2009

The following is a letter from the faculty members of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University regarding the firing of Hassan Diab, a contract instructor teaching introduction to sociology, by senior administration due to what appears to be pressure from B’nai Brith. *** The firing of Dr. Hassan Diab from his teaching [...]

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“Boutique”

Friday, July 31, 2009

I’ve been going through, issue-by-issue, the major sociology journals since 1975 looking at the treatment of animal related themes. Needless to say, there isn’t much. I’ll post about this research later. Here’s a great passage I came across today: I don’t normally insert graphics of quotations, but I didn’t think anyone would believe me! And, [...]

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Claude Levi-Strauss

Friday, November 28, 2008

November 28, 1908 – It would have been better had Foucault said, “Perhaps one day this century will be known as Levi-Straussian.” Claude dit

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Regarding the financial crisis

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

In 1968, Alexandre Kojeve, then one of the chief planners for the European Common Market working the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, was asked what the students in the streets of Paris should do. Kojeve’s answer was “learn Greek.” It is only in recent years through Giorgio Agamben’s work that we’ve come to understand what [...]

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