I think that—somewhere nestled between “paying for another year of graduate school” and “distracting me from my dissertation”—most TAs optimistically see their function as, on some level, “helping” their students. If you asked me what that meant nine months ago, when I started teaching, I probably would have answered that my “help” would come in… Continue reading Reflections on Teaching, III: Untitled
This is a post about race. In general, I would encourage you to read someone else on this topic—consider, for example, these blogs. Candidly, I’m not sure if the problem is that white males don’t talk enough about race, or if they talk too much and don’t listen enough. Either way, I’m thinking out loud… Continue reading Reflections on Teaching II: (White) Elephant in the Room
The course I’m TA-ing this fall is required for undergraduates majoring in sociology. It is thus heinously oversubscribed. For the first three weeks of class, we circulated a sign-in sheet in lecture. Actually, we circulated several. Some students signed every single one—one person literally signed-in four times in one day and then came up to… Continue reading The Add/Drop Dance
In the “national conversation” that we’re largely not having about militarized policing, I have nothing important to contribute. For what it’s worth, I forced my undergraduate Sociological Theory class to apply different theorists’ analyses to recent events in Ferguson. I’m vaguely aware of ongoing police surveillance, disruption, and violence in communities of color, and I’m… Continue reading On the Appropriate Role for Assault Rifles in a Civil Campus Community
Recently I’ve been spending my days working frantically on my book, voraciously reading texts for my qualifying exams and—this is the best, and most exciting, part—talking animatedly about potential dissertation ideas with my colleagues. You could say that, after a two-year hiatus, I love sociology again. The only problem is that it took me getting… Continue reading Anomie Soup
“Has anyone here ever been part of a union before?” No hands go up. “Does anyone here think they’ll be in a union after they graduate?” Still no hands. “How about this: who thinks they’ll someday be on the other side of a negotiating table from a union?” Finally, hands go up, along with a… Continue reading Solidarity
The reports are just rolling in, and boy, has it been enlightening. A few weeks ago, the University of California Police Department released a report determining that the real source of problems at Berkeley on November 9th was that police weren’t allowed enough “force options”—particular, pepper spray. Shortly thereafter, a quasi-independent review board at Davis… Continue reading November 9th and the Changing Repertoires of Activism
On June 12th, Berkeley’s City Council will vote on a “sit-lie” ordinance intended to prevent un-housed, homeless, and otherwise indigent people from sitting on city sidewalks during the day. This is a terrible idea. The ordinance would turn what is at worst a minor inconvenience for those of us with a low tolerance for disorder… Continue reading Quick Hits on Berkeley Sit/Lie
After a fall spent trying to make some social change, this spring I’ve withdrawn into my more comfortable habitus: reading about social change. I’ve been particularly drawn to stories about the Civil Rights movement, perhaps because I’ve been desperate to remind myself that change does in fact happen every once in a while. Most recently,… Continue reading The Long Haul
Here’s an exciting topic for a blog post: bathrooms. News of the imminent arrival of seventeen shiny new graduate students to the sociology department somehow got lost in the University of California bureaucracy, so for the first five weeks of school, none of us had keys to the departmental bathroom. As a result, we had… Continue reading Flushing Public Education
Alex V. Barnard - Sociology 