Toward A Sociology Of The Trace

Questions national identity by investigating the creation of memory and meaning.

The sociology of knowledge is an area of social scientific investigation with major emphasis on the relations between social life and intellectual activity. It is now an area central to most graduate and undergraduate courses in sociology. The present collection of readings explains the origins, systematic development, present state and possible future direction of the discipline. The major statements in the field were developed early in the twentieth century by Durkheim, Scheler and Mannheim, but the sociology of knowledge continues to engage the theoretical and empirical interests of contemporary sociologists who desire to penetrate the surface level of social existence. This book, with its carefully selected contributions and an introduction which relates the selections to the developmental pattern of the discipline, provides guidance and insight for the reader concerned with the topical issues raised by sociologists of knowledge.

This open access book focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”. It associates these concepts with hotly debated topics such as surveillance capitalism and knowledge society. The editors and authors discuss the concept footprints and traces as unintended by-products of other (differently focused and oriented) actions that remain empirically imprinted in virtual and real spaces. The volume therefore opens new scenarios for social theory and applied social research in asking what the stakes, risks and potential of this approach are. It systematically raises and addresses these questions within a consistent framework, bringing together a heterogeneous group of international social scientists. Given the multifaceted objectives involved in exploring footprints and traces, the volume discusses heuristic aspects and ethical dimensions, scientific analyses and political considerations, empirical perspectives and theoretical foundations. At the same time, it brings together perspectives from cultural analysis and social theory, communication and Internet studies, big-data informed research and computational social science. This innovative volume is of interest to a broad interdisciplinary readership: sociologists, communication researchers, Internet scholars, anthropologists, cognitive and behavioral scientists, historians, and epistemologists, among others.

A “compelling study” of how the idea of white supremacy persists long after the Civil Rights Act—“as thoughtful as it is fierce” (David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History). We are in the fray of another signature moment in the long history of the United States as a project of anti Black and racial–colonial violence. Long before November 2016, white nationalism, white terrorism, and white fascist statecraft proliferated. Thinking across a variety of archival, testimonial, visual, and activist texts—from Freedmen’s Bureau documents and the “Join LAPD” hiring campaign to Barry Goldwater’s hidden tattoo and the Pelican Bay prison strike—Dylan Rodríguez counter-narrates the long “post–civil rights” half-century as a period of White Reconstruction, in which the struggle to reassemble the ascendancy of White Being permeates the political and institutional logics of diversity, inclusion, formal equality, and “multiculturalist white supremacy.” Throughout White Reconstruction, Rodríguez considers how the creative, imaginative, speculative collective labor of abolitionist praxis can displace and potentially destroy the ascendancy of White Being and Civilization in order to create possibilities for insurgent thriving.

Who (and what) are you bearing witness to (and for) through your research? When you witness, what claims are you making about who and what matters? What does your research forget, and does it do it on purpose?This book reconceptualizes qualitative research as an in-relations process, one that is centered on, fully concerned with, and lifts up those who have been and continue to be dispossessed, harmed, dehumanized, and erased because of white supremacy, settler colonialism, or other hegemonic world views.It prompts scholars to make connections between themselves as “researchers” and affect, ancestors, community, family and kinship, space and place, and the more than human beings with whom they are always already in community.What are the modes and ways of knowing through which we approach our research? How can the practice of research bring us closer to the peoples, places, more than human beings, histories, presents, and futures in which we are embedded and connected to? If we are the instruments of our research, then how must we be attentive to all of the affects and relations that make us who we are and what will become? These questions animate Weaving an Otherwise, providing a wellspring from which we think about our interconnections to the past, present, and future possibilities of research.After an opening chapter by the editors that explores the consequences and liberating opportunities of rejecting dominant qualitative methodologies that erase the voices of the subordinated and disdained, the contributors of nine chapters explore and enact approaches that uncover hidden connections and reveal unconscious value systems.

How is it that recipients of white privilege deny the role they play in reproducing racial inequality? Racing for Innocence addresses this question by examining the backlash against affirmative action in the late 1980s and early 1990s—just as courts, universities, and other institutions began to end affirmative action programs. This book recounts the stories of elite legal professionals at a large corporation with a federally mandated affirmative action program, as well as the cultural narratives about race, gender, and power in the news media and Hollywood films. Though most white men denied accountability for any racism in the workplace, they recounted ways in which they resisted—whether wittingly or not— incorporating people of color or white women into their workplace lives. Drawing on three different approaches—ethnography, narrative analysis, and fiction—to conceptualize the complexities and ambiguities of race and gender in contemporary America, this book makes an innovative pedagogical tool.

"Located within the critical conversation about what it might mean to 'queer' research methods that has developed over the past decade in conference panels, workshops, edited volumes, and journal symposia, Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology presents an array of experiences, insights, and approaches that show the power of queer investigations of the social world and of the disciplinary conventions of sociology. Incorporating the experiences of sociologists who utilize a range of interpretative and statistical methods, this volume offers methodological advice and practical strategies for getting queer research off the ground and for building a collaborative community within this emerging subfield"--Provided by publisher.

Isabel Allende--"la Famosa" to her fellow Chileans--is the world's most widely read Spanish language author. Her career coincides with the emergence of multiculturalism and global feminism, and her powerfully honest, revelatory works touch the pulse points of humankind. Her bravura study of the interwoven roles of women in family history opens the minds of outsiders to the sufferings of women and their children during years of social and political nightmare. This reference work provides an introduction to Allende's life as well as a guided overview of her body of work. Designed for the fan and scholar alike, this text features an alphabetized, fully-annotated listing of major terms in the Allende canon, including fictional characters, motifs, historical events and themes. A comprehensive index is included.