The Tattooed History Professor, Kevin Gannon, wants to ban the research paper. No! Say it is not true! Everyone knows that research papers are the only way students learn how to think in a sound reasoning fashion.

He says this is the case because some students can’t do it. They write tendentious introductions, to start with. Some of the papers his students hand in are well-done he writes, but it seems too many of the papers he grades

….begin with “since the dawn of time, man has engaged in conflict, and nowhere was this more true than in the Spanish-American War.” Some of them show wide research, and some don’t. Some of them are well written, and some are a word salad of colloquialisms and faux-scholarly terms lifted willy-nilly from thesaurus.com.

He proposes WordPress websites, oral exams, and poster sessions and other things in their place, particularly for younger students.

In part I agree with Kevin. But in part I also think that this is a cop-out to the forces at public universities which send faculty larger class sizes which mean that students will indeed write less simply because there was no one to respond to their writing.  This of course started earlier in high school. Getting students to write well is a years long process which begins during primary and secondary schooling, not when they pop full-blown into a university class in history, sociology, English, anthropology or anything else.

The only way to get students to write and reason well is to respond to them when they write those tendentious introductions—and this requires educated eyes on their papers beginning at an early age.

Educated eyes are of course expensive, and the truth of the matter is that in the United States such instruction is primarily reserved for those who will pay for it through systems of private schooling where class sizes are kept under control.  What does keeping class size under control mean at the college level?  Basically maximum 20 students per class–that’s what the private liberal arts colleges do in their writing classes.  In fact, that is what I had in my 1970s era writing classes at the University of California.

We like our stuff.   Stuff in fact is what makes the world’s capitalist markets go round. There are some well-thought out ways of describing the nature of stuff, including Karl Marx’s description of how and why “fetish commodity” is necessary to keep us consuming and buying. Then there was Torstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. But these are both boring reads—except for geeks like me who like classical social theory.

For the rest of you, there is the classical sociologist George Carlin who also had a theory of stuff, which is linked here. Just remember, if we did not demand our stuff, we wouldn’t have a need to work, and then we wouldn’t spend, and everyone else would be out of work too. Then we would not only have more stuff, but the farmers wouldn’t grow any food because they couldn’t buy stuff in exchange for the stuff they grow, and then we would all be in a real pickle. Speaking of pickles, there was Larry the Pickle in the Veggie Tales who had an excellent rap about “Stuff Mart.”

But this blog is not just about Larry the Pickle, who in some respect is a sociologist, just like sociologist George Carlin. It is about the Carlin, who updated Marx and Veblen’s writings on the nature of stuff for a modern US American audience, which is performed here. The weekend is coming, so go out and do you duty by buying more stuff, preferably on credit, so that you, everyone else, and especially the farmers can have a job to pay back all your bills. Your country and the world depends on it!

Leon Neyfakh at Slate has written a review of the controversy surrounding Alice Goffman’s new ethnography On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City which is about the African’ American community of inner city Philadelphia, and their relationship with the  police.  The essay is called “The Ethics of Ethnograpy,” and discusses the role of Institutional Research Boards, the responsibility of social scientists for replicability, the nature of scientific generalization, and the nature of ethnography.  His article is good, and a quick read for anyone interested in ethnography.

Neyfackh’s review asks question about “What is Ethnography?” and how is it related to science, journalism, and literature. Neyfakh’s review can be accessed here.

Alex Golub at Savage Minds has also contributed a thoughtful analysis of how journalists like Neyfakh evaluate ethnography, which can be accessed here.As he points out, the techniques of journalism and ethnography may use similar techniques particularly when it comes to interviewing, but the overall project is fundamentally different.  Journalists are about the facts and “fact checking,” while ethnographers look for underlying principles, and that big word of social science, “generalizability.”

On the Run is now definitely on my summer reading list. So is a book cited in the article about the role of Institutional Review Boards in the vetting of social science research, Ethical Imperialism, Institutional Research Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009, by Zachary Schrag.

I get much of my sociological imagination from novels, and I just finished one. It was We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo. The story starts in the shantytowns of Paradise and Budapest in modern day Zimbabwe. The main protagonist is Darling, a then ten year old girl who develops intense relationships with five other children who together play “bin Laden,” steal guavas, and cope with daily life in the chaos of the shantytowns.

Parts highlight what the broader world of modern Zimbabwe means for such children—whether it is a father with AIDS, politicized gangs, pregnancy of an eleven year old, South African labor migration, NGO politics, and an aunt in the incredibly wealthy and far off America.

Darling joins her aunt in America, which is what the second part of the book is about. There she is pushed into a new world where school is easy, life predictable, but also chaotic. Darling becomes friends with other immigrant children, attending school, cultivating the relationship with her aunt and her Ghanaian partner, and seeking to melt in to the new American world. Darling’s worlds can come together only through Skype, particularly after her tourist visa expires, and she becomes and illegal immigrant in the United States, unable to imagine returning except via the internet.

The story Bulawayo tells of migration is of course an old one, but nevertheless worth repeating. Migrants leave an old world behind, and become part of a new world, but often at the expense of sacrificing the warmth of the remembered home. There is a becoming of a new identity, even as there is an “unbecoming” of an older one. In the end, Darling is challenged by her childhood friends in Zimbabwe who, via the instant communication of Skype, ask her if she is still Zimbabwean or not? She thinks she is—but her friends have questions. How can someone who is not sharing the hardships sustain the identity?

We Need New Names is a bit slow at the beginning, as the reader seeks to position themselves in the shantytowns of Zimbabwe. However, it quickly becomes a memorable read for anyone interested in child migration, Zimbabwe, migrants in US cities, and youth. Or someone who simply likes a good thoughtful story.

Comparisons to another recent novel of African migration, Amerikanah, which tells the story of Nigerian elite migration are perhaps inevitable. And while the themes are similar, We Need New Names is a different story—it is the story of migration told from the perspective of children of shantytowns, and needs to be read from that perspective.

Yesterday’s New York Times featured an opinion piece on rudeness and incivility in the workplace and the high cost of mean bosses. It’s true, mean bosses suck. I’ve only had a couple, and most of my bosses during my low wage service years were pleasant overall or mostly absent, which is nice too. When I was a higher ed adjunct, my “boss” was the department chair. Technically they are not “the boss”, they are the people who have the responsibility to schedule classes and push some additional, administrative paper. And this is the problem with department chairs: they usually lack management training and leadership experience, academia is a loner gig. But this often means that department chairs run things based on personality; if they are an asshole, it’s going to be a rough few years.

I don’t work in academia anymore. But, I am job hunting and wondering what kind of boss I will have next. So, give “No Time to Be Nice” a read and wish me luck.

We brought my mother-in-law to the Baltic Sea resort town of Ahlbeck which is near the Polish border for her 90^th birthday. My mother-in-law visited the resort in one of its former heydays of the 1930s. At the time she was ten years old, and very active as a swimmer—as 90 year olds will, they wanted to visit the memories of their childhood.

Ahlbeck is on the island of Usedom, which is mostly in Germany, though a tip of the eastern part is in Poland.   Along the coast is a strip of small towns featuring villas built by the wealthy nobility and bourgeois during the nineteenth and early twentieth century—they wanted weekend houses away from the hustle and bustle of Berlin where they could hang out on sandy but cold beaches.

After World War II, the town fell into disrepair under the Communist regime of former East Germany—bourgeois villas were to be a think of the past. In 1990, though, Germany was reunified. The wealthy of the western Germany and particularly the newly reunified Berlin had a new place to invest their money, and spend their weekends while creating a new Europe. The old villas were repaired, and even some of the dreary eastern bloc-style drab apartment buildings given new facades. Seemingly all that is left of the former East German influence are the FKK beaches described in tourist brochures—no clothing allowed.

Anyway, we had dinner at Italian restaurant last night, and talked to the waiter. He was from Brazil, but noted in accented German that it was ok to be Brazilian at a Italian restaurant, he could get by with Italian, too. The toilet seats in the bathroom had pictures of the Leaning tower of Pisa, and the Statue of Liberty in New York.

The next day I went for a walk into the next Polish town, where we found a coffee shop specializing in Belgian chocolate. We had a cup of coffee, and paid with our Euros, even though Poland still uses the Zloty as a currency. We talked to the waitress in German, though it was clear from her accent she was Polish, as it is clear from my accent that I am American. We then called my daughter in Thailand on the Polish internet.

Never did though get to see evidence of the FKK beaches. Even in June, everyone I saw was bundled up against the cool breezes coming in off the sea.

Another odd thing. I did not hear English on the street all weekend. There were plenty of languages, German of course, Polish, Romance languages (Spanish and/or Italian?), but no English. There were also Thai, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants, so I assume people from those countries were there, too. This is unusual in a German tourist town—every other place seems to be over-run with English speaking tourists (and others) from around the world. But seemingly not here.

But still, even in this remote corner of eastern Germany. Germany is indeed “Mulit-Kulti.”

The Daily Beast in 2013 published a piece about “the New Mandarins” by Megan McArdle.  The New Mandarins are those people who test well, get good jobs, write the tests tor the next generation, and then give birth to the next generation that will do well, and so on.  The problem of course is that as in Ancient China, the Mandarins become more and more remote from the people who they rule, and the connection between the ruled and rulers becomes more tenuous.  Revolt is one potential threat.

McArdle cites the Big Brother society of Orwell’s 1984, but another more sociological/anthropological treatise on the same subject is Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2030.  Young was a British sociologist, who sometimes turned to fiction, or in this case, semi-fiction in his sociological analyses. In The Rise and Fall of the Meritocracy, he describes the rise of the British Mandarinate starting about 1870.  The first part of the book is as a result historical overview of how the British Civil Service emerged between 1870, and about 1958 when the book was published.  It did it by creating a civil service testing regime, in which the technocratically skilled achieved great power within the bureaucratic system.  The system in turn guaranteed comfort and security for this new “meritocratic” elite (Young is the one who coined the term “merittocracy”as a dysphemism).  The British education system reflected a strong segregation based on class in the 1950s when Young wrote, peaking at the “Oxfrd-Cambrdige” nexus where of course, everyone tested well, and therefore earned a right to that nice level of comfort and security.

The problem of course is that everyone who does not test well was not guaranteed similar levels of comfort and security.

The second part of the book is putatively fiction, though, since it describes what would happen between 1950 and 2030 which presumably for Young was the future. Young’s prediction is of course that the ruling elite, secure in the legitimacy provided by their technical superiority as reflected by the “objective” test scores. Unusually, though we have a way to check to see just how prescient Young’s predictions. The American Journal of Sociology, a self-described elite “flagship journal” in 2009 published a review of Young’s book. The review, by Barbara Celarent of Atlantis University, was unusually postmarked in 2048, so has the perspective of hindsight. The hindsight it has is of the revolts that Young predicted for 2030.

In this fashion, it provides and excellent reference point to Megan McCardle’s commentary from The Daily Beast.

Robert Harrington of the American Mathematical Society is trying t understand how young mathematician use their scholarly products.  As an an “experiment” he tried out qualitative interview methods to investigate his question.  Here is what he found out:

As a scientist, I have ideas about what scientific method is, and what evidence is. I now understand the value of the qualitative approach – hard for a scientist to say. Qualitative research opens a window to descriptive data and analysis. As our markets change, understanding who constitutes our market, and how users behave is more important than ever.

You can read the whole article here.