October 2014 – Ethnography.com

Dollhouses of Doom

Posted on October 31, 2014November 1, 2014 by Julie Garza-Withers

Library

Happy Halloween from ethnography.com! Nothing says Halloween like this series of photos featuring post-apocalyptic dioramas by photographer Lori Nix. My favorites are the library (of course) and the laundromat at night.

Julie Garza-Withers

Julie Garza-Withers, former award-winning community college Sociology instructor who’s currently using Sociology to organize and research for racial justice in rural northern California. She was a facilitator in the film “If These Halls Could Talk” with Director Lee Mun Wah, and has published at Working Class Studies, and elsewhere.

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As Americans Go to the Polls, Here is a Little Wisdom about Voting Cows from Max Weber

Posted on October 30, 2014November 1, 2014 by Tony Waters

As Americans get ready to vote on November 2 for all range of important stuff, it may help to ruminate a bit on Max Weber’s incisive word “Voting Cows,” Stimmvieh. As you go to the polls, please don’t be like me–

Tony Waters

Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996.

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How Working at a Community College is Like Working Retail

Posted on October 29, 2014October 27, 2015 by Julie Garza-Withers

Originally published at classism.org in October 2011

Expectations are a pain in the ass. There’s an old saying, “plant an expectation, reap a disappointment.” Yep I did it, planted and am now disappointed. I teach Sociology at a rural community college; I love teaching, but I don’t love that adjunct teachers like me are temporary, at-will employees.

Who knew that the working conditions at a community college would be the same as they were when I was a bookseller, housekeeper, caregiver, fast food worker, and waitress?…

Money Changes Everything: The Ascent of Walter White

Posted on October 28, 2014October 29, 2014 by Julie Garza-Withers

“I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it, and I was alive.” –W.W.

I had to wait until the finale of Breaking Bad but at last, Walter White admitted that he was in to the meth cooking for the money. I’ve been frustrated since season 3, by that time the whole, “I’m doing it for the family” thing seemed like a bunch of baloney, the manipulative excuse of a mediocre middle class guy in the throes of power grabbing; a chance to feel “alive” after a lifetime of playing it safe for fear of what “might happen, might not happen.”…

White-trash Beaner (to my 11-year old confused self)

Posted on October 27, 2014November 1, 2014 by Julie Garza-Withers

Grama says I’m Indian.

Mama says my dad was “A Mexican” and that if he really loved me like

“Mexican daddies do,”

he woulda found me by now.

Grama says we’re Indian, mama says ‘no.’

Sis calls me a “wetback” and a “beaner” (“mom said it all the time”)

brother teases me about getting pregnant and dropping out of high school.

Grama and mama don’t speak to each other for a year

because of the Indian/Mexican fiasco.…

Ethnography.com Reset, 2.0! Welcome Julie Garza-Withers

Posted on October 27, 2014 by Tony Waters

As promised last month, Ethnography.com is having a reset. Not only will we post more, we will have more people doing it. Most importantly, we will have Julie Garza-Withers posting and editing to her heart’s content.

As you can see from her biography (already posted), Julie comes to us via working class rural southern California. She somehow avoided the career track at Del Taco (a California fast-food joint), or a full career waitressing at a diner, before landing in Barnes and Noble in Chico, California, where she developed further her affinity for books.…

Einstein, Aristotle, and Life Without Parole

Posted on October 9, 2014October 29, 2014 by Tony Waters

Tonight there was a great discussion in class about Einstein, Aristotle, and a character I wrote about at Ethnography.com a couple of years ago, Mr. Life Without Parole (LWOP). Mr. LWOP was a 21 year-old inmate confined by California to one of its high security prisons, and from there sent into “solitary confinement.” It was there I met him. And it was there he pointed out to me that “Life could be worse,” since after all, he could be looking at death by lethal injection, rather than life without parole.…

Fatuous, Naïve, or Bold? The Wonderful World of Peer Review

Posted on October 7, 2014October 29, 2014 by Tony Waters

Fair warning from an anonymous peer reviewer of one of my academic articles…

The author is hampered by an inaccurate, naïve, and highly simplistic understanding of the basic principles…which leads him to make ludicrous statements like the following…

Yes, that’s me: inaccurate, naïve, and highly simplistic! And so forth. If you share that sentiment, do not read further.

I posted a blog about peer review for the first time in July 2008 after being pummeled in the peer review process.…