Before I left school last fall, I graded one set of students’ papers in my role as a graduate instructor at UC Berkeley. It was a basic paper assigned in an introductory sociology course, so I assumed that a competent, complete answer deserved an “A.” When I submitted my grades and sample papers for the… Continue reading Grade Inflation: Maybe Unfair, Probably Just
Should a book on freegans—that is to say, people who try to live for “free” in the present through appropriating capitalism’s waste, while trying to build a future in which the things people need are provided for “free” through a gift economy—be free? This is a purely academic question. My “book” on freegans—I’m going to… Continue reading Free
“Well, do you at least know how to operate a pallet jack?” I hesitate. I have eight-and-one-third years of higher education under my belt. I really should have a good answer to this question. “I’m sure I’ll pick it up quickly”, I offer optimistically. Last Tuesday was my first day at my new job—my first… Continue reading Career Changes?
Dick Walker talks like he knew Karl Marx personally. “Man, Marx just couldn’t figure out what was going on with all this finance shit. You can tell he just fucking hated it”, he tells us, as we are puzzling over our weekly assignment for his Das Kapital reading group. He offers a bit of comfort… Continue reading Reading Marx
At long last, my first peer-reviewed academic publication is available online in the journal Ethnography, at least to those with access to an academic database. I wrote this as my Junior Paper at Princeton, and I have to confess that my thinking on some of these issues has evolved and matured a bit. Still, given… Continue reading In Between Protests, I Also Do Some Sociology
Oh hai. If you haven’t heard, there’s a war on higher education going on. As nearly every social service that makes civilization, well, civilized is currently up for debate, it’s not particularly surprising that university funding hasn’t really made it on to most peoples’ radars. But in Britain, the restructuring of higher education that is… Continue reading News from the Front
The dirty secret of my budding* career in the social sciences is that talking to people kind of scares me. It’s a bit difficult to explain why: having spent three years Mohawk-ed in one of the country’s more conservative institutions, I can’t say that I’m too obsessed with what people think of me. Still, though,… Continue reading Cold Calling
We are trained to look for problems. We go into the field armed with theory that tells us that development programs are inevitably ill-conceived and incompetently managed. We assume that governments and NGOs never learn the lessons of past failures and that they always ignore feedback from local communities. We know we will always have… Continue reading Anthropologist’s Worst Nightmare
There was a time, I imagine, when doing field work in developing countries was legitimately scary. Anthropologists studying remote islands or indigenous tribes might be cut off from contact with their home countries for years. Without the internet or television, their immersion in their place of study was total and non-stop, even in the worst… Continue reading Sink or Swim
At the start of June, the New York Times published a piece by Jake Halpern called “The Freegan Establishment” on a group of radicals near-and-dear to my heart. While some might be less-than-enthusiastic about being the person that comes to mind when the issue of eating trash comes up, I was quite flatterd to have… Continue reading Not (Quite) Buying It
Alex V. Barnard - Sociology 