Category: sociology
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Workers of the World Unite! (on Sunday… in Church?)
I’m adding this sentence from a paper to my list of memorable student quotes, The religious affiliations of the United States as a whole are that 77% of people are Christian (which includes Catholics, Baptists, Protestants, Methodists, Lutherans, Christians, Proletarians, Episcopalians, Mormons, and others), 1% are Jewish, 1% are Muslim, 1% are Buddhist, less than…
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economic downturn and social stratification hit close to home
When we moved into our house almost 9 months ago, it didn’t take me too long to meet the neighbors. To the west live a tile layer (the husband) and a financial secretary at a construction company (the wife). To the east live a granite countertop installer (the husband) and a school counselor (the wife).…
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Tampa in the News
I’ve found since I started teaching Sociology that being up-to-date on local news can be useful (though it is less useful at my new school where many of the students are from other cities). This leads me to read the local paper, which is often relatively quotidian – thefts, car accidents, political debates, etc. Occasionally,…
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I miss all the “fun”…
I’m here prepping a lecture on racial/ethnic stratification for my class on social stratification when I read about a case of racial profiling in Tampa in my textbook. Apparently Reginald Pitts, a human resources manager for GAF Materials Corporation, was harassed and accused of trying to forge a check at a Wal-Mart. Pitts had phoned…
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the current zeitgeist – “Zeitgeist, The Movie”
A student of mine recently asked me my opinion on a movie making the circuits online called “Zeitgeist, The Movie”. He was smart enough to recognize that most of it is conspiracy theory (the movie mostly focuses on 9/11 conspiracies, which are crap, and banking conspiracies, which are also crap), but was interested in the…
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an early start to our holiday break
A couple of weeks ago now, some of our friends at UT (both biologists) invited us to go on a field trip they were offering to students as extra credit. The field trip was to the Manatee Viewing Center funded by TECO (that’s Tampa Electric). It’s kind of a weird place. There is a massive…
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conference entertainment
I spent the past weekend participating in an academic conference I regularly attend (Society for the Scientific Study of Religion). I have a number of friends and colleagues who attend and we had a good time together. But I have to tell about one session at the conference. The conference organizer – who did a…
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an intriguing race issue
I was discussing race in my Introduction to Sociology classes this week and talked about how race continues to be an issue in the U.S. for a lot of reasons (e.g., income, healthcare, quality of life, racism, etc.). To illustrate that racial tensions have not disappeared, I linked to this NYTimes article about a principal…
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Sociology Inaction
I don’t blog enough about what I do and the insights it provides on the world around me. A story developing here in Tampa caught my eye and I have to say something about it as a Sociologist. Don Swartout, a 59 year-old single father and recent widower, was recently arrested for leaving his 7…
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Portland trip
We spent the weekend in Portland, OR, attending a conference called: Challenging Assumptions: Religious Faith, Genetic Science, and Human Dignity. It was an intriguing conference. There were probably 50 to 75 people who attended at some point. This was both nice and awkward. It was nice because we couldn’t help but get a chance to…