Sociology Midterm

Consequential bias in sociology

-Biernacki-Evans affair -UCSD - 1 professor replicated studies and found that the results were because of the method it used. -Method is a ritual (with 3 stages): disintegrate from your everyday life, Rearranging symbols to reveal new truths/make sense of something in a different way, Reintegrate into the world. This creates findings through the method by interpreting numbers. -Professor 1 contacts professor 2 and their interactions become hostile because questioning someone's work at this level threatens their reputation. -Stakes are very high -Professor 2 contacts Dean who threatens to fire professor 1 -Professor 1 was sued but fights it and his book is eventually published. -People said he was just wrong and didn't get it. -Is it ethical to keep using an approach you know isn't valid? -Nested ethical standards. Doesn't violate any pragmatic rules. Got pushed into organizational view.

Andrew Abbott

-Boundaries exist without there bing any entities for those boundaries to be foundation of. -boundaries of things and not people. -people define themselves against the idea of other people. -not rooted in actual people. -To borrow Tilly's terminology, one cluster can define themselves against the side of another cluster, regardless of whether another cluster actually exists

Cyril Burt (1883-1971)

-British psychologist who studied the heritability of intelligence. -twin studies separated at birth--.7 correlation -intelligence is inherited -discovered that he falsified data after his death -criticized himself with a fake name and then crushed his critics -never sent it out to peer review because he was the editor. -future research shows he got the right answer (.7 correlation). -Cyril Burt made up his finding, but he got the right answer. Was he right? No, he violated core tenets of the scientific method and was unethical. Science is about the method and not always the content.

Andreas Wimmer

-Dominant version we will use -Social boundaries refer to when ways of seeing the world correspond to ways of acting in the world -ways of seeing the world is a collective representation and ways of acting in the world are making those things a reality. -create means of exclusion of other people. -Boundary displays both a categorical and social or behavioral dimension. -Categorical dimensions refer to acts of social classification and collective representation which divide social groups into "us" and "them" and the actions people take to maintain them. -social or behavioral dimensions refer to everyday networks of relationships that result from individual acts of connecting and distancing--this includes scripts of action.

Gouldner's assault on Humphrey and cover research

-Example of disputed communal ethics in an era of informed consent. -Enthographers divided on whether covert research was ethical. (Observing people without letting them know that you are observing them). -Humphrey was a graduate student in sociology. -Gouldner was a professor/scholar. -Humphrey observed men at a public restroom for his graduate work to see if they were having casual sex -Humphrey wrote down their license plate numbers and tracked them down a year later to ask them about family values. -He did not inform anybody. -Gouldner criticized this and was worried it would make the university look bad. -Gouldner accused of beating Humphrey. -ethical situation escalating to the point where people cannot really control themselves.

Why are professors so liberal? (cont.)

-Ideological concentrations -certain people with political identities may aggregate in certain professions. -occupational reputation-based political self selection. College students who view themselves as "liberal" view academia as a good fit for them while students who identify as "conservative" view other pathways as a good fit for them (such as think tanks) -Additional self selection based on perception of political and intellectual fit with the content of different disciplines. -Links to outside audiences and organizations. Intellectual movements require resources--funding for research, jobs for graduates, legitimacy. Disciplines linking to social welfare, educational, and cultural institutions tend to be places where more liberal movements can grow. Considering outside organizations.

Tuskegee Study

-Illustrates a paradigmatic shift in what we consider to be ethical. -an unethical study about syphilis in which subjects were denied treatment so that the effects of the disease could be studied. -in 1932, the Public Health Service, working with Tuskegee institute began a natural experiment on 600 black men (399 have syphilis, 201 did not). -Researchers did not inform the participants what the study was or the risks of participating (no informed consent). -the point of the study, which the participants did not know, was to see what would happen if they did not treat syphilis. -The patients thought they were being treated (ethical because it helped more than it hurt??) -Preys on vulnerable and justified it on cost benefit analysis.

Panopticon

-Jeremy Bentham was searching for a new way to demonstrate the effectiveness of utilitarianism. It was based on the ideas that people could be reformed through self discipline rather than corporal punishment. -"the play of light"--asymmetrical relationship of who knows and who doesn't know and who gets to see and who doesn't. If you think you're always being observed you'll start regulating yourself out of fear of punishment. -A method of behavioral modification -moved from external force to internal one

Blackness revisited

-Not an individual trait--it is a sign which is a social construction that people make together. Shared way through which people understand themselves and others. Has substance and consequences. -Developed "relationally" between histories of domination an residence (according to Simone Brown) blackness and whiteness (according to Frantz Fanon) One has meaning in relation to the other.

Self reflection exercise

-Parties can intervene with what you do after capturing and analyzing your data. -Very good at making predictions -emotional state can be captured and predicted -There is a market for your attention

Ethics and selling information

-Parties intervene in what you do. Algorithms study you and direct what you do. -The discovery of data surplus--they can turn "exhaust" from user behavior into profit. -monitors what do you in the real world, not just on the internet. -Render your daily life with a crazy amount of precision. -Heart rate, temperature, mood based on our voice. -Our emotional state is captured and predicted. what happens when a company sells information about you to overs? Ethics (nested) involved: -laws of ethics as informed consent -benefits should outweigh harm -communal ethics of both the data scientists and the users also exist. -There is not a strong legal regime for technology in the same way that there is for academic work because it is so hard to keep up with what has happened. -There is a power relationship -Competing ethical sphere, each with their own nested relations. Different organizational and communal ethics: Big tech, government, users. Who decides for others? largely big tech deciding for users and government. How do they decide? We usually don't know. Who knows what? They know everything, we know nothing. Asymmetric power relationship. Are there systems of interrogation or accountability? At the governmental level, organizational level, and the public? Surveillance occurs in this power relationship. Who gets to decide what is ethical? In terms of power.

Charles Tilly

-Social boundaries are any "contiguous zones" between clusters of people that exhibit "shared representations of those zones" Each clusters mutual acknowledgement of that zone-their differences- is a requisite for producing social boundaries. -what distinguishes groups is that they view themselves as different from others.

Fredrik Barth

-anthropologist -Ethnicity is a person's sense of belonging to a group that is defined against other groups -says human difference occurs as the result of a social process. -ethnicity is not primordial, it results from social processes. -ethnic groups not rooted in biology and they change over time. -ethnic groups are changing constellations of peopled measured by behavioral differences. -Ethnic groups are nor immutable units.

Group formation: "groupness"

-communality: how categories create a sense of similarity -connectedness: relational ties that link people together. -groupness=community + connectedness. This shares an affinity with Andrea Wimmer's conception of social boundaries.

Problems with surveys

-conceptual problems- -organizational problems -participation problems

The knowledge-politics problem

-every single professor can be understood as confronting a practical problem: how do you manage your personal political commitments when doing your job (no right answer). Professors tended to employ 1 of 4 strategies.

Jeremy Bentham

-late 18th century English moral and political philosopher -significant for the development of (medical) utilitarianism. -He claimed that pain and pleasure were the sole grounds for ethics and jurisprudence and that people should take actions that result in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. -He wanted to make utilitarianism the standard in moral philosophy and ethics. -He designed the panopticon -we should no longer punish people by hurting their bodies but by engineering institutions to encourage self discipline.

limitations of survey research

-self reported information: they depend on what people are willing to tell you and how they interpret your question. People lie (we has 102% reposes rate for our survey). -Does not tell us what people did in the past or will do in the future. People often say they would do one thing in a situation and then do something different when they encounter the situation. -Collects small bits of information. Even if those small bits add up across a survey overtime, a single question is limited in what type of information it can capture. Has to be this way though, otherwise you cannot code it.

Forms of power on the plantation

-soverign and disciplinary power existed simultaneously -racializing surveillance technologies such as the lantern. -The "mammy" as a social control mechanism. Racial etiquette and relations to power. A way of ensuring that "backs stay in their designated, subordinate in white controlled public and private spheres" pg 57. Social control mechanism through coercion. Black enslaved women meant to do domestic work but they were dominated through sovereign and disciplinary power. Hypervisibile and always there but also not noticeable and as unthreatening as possible. The mammy becomes the model for understanding black womanhood and if they don't fit that they should be punished. -Blackness has histories of domination--process of turning black bodies into commodities, construction of social identities and structures such as the mammy, and this limits possibilities of who people can be. Becomes the standard and the expectation. histories of resistance--people try to gain freedom, cultural identity is not singular or static-it's diverse and changing, but there is a coercive force trying to make people singular. A lot of disruption, discontinuity, and then transformations. There is not just one way to be black anywhere at anytime. There is a coercive fore that tries to make people singular. Makes things seem singular when they are not. Blackness always in turmoil in a racialized world.

The myth of value free sociology

-to be value free is a myth/not possible -value-judgement on what is good/bad -who should make judgements and when and on what and on what grounds should people trust you? -Is to be objective to be value free?

Think tanks

-weird mix of media, academia, marketing, and politics. -important in the conservative movement because they are one of the ways in which there is this 3 pronged approach, 1 to affect policy, 1 to affect who is elected that can get that policy enacted, 1 that affects the conception of what is good for the economy. Create the policy used to create some kind of conservative change in the country.

7 ways to think about theory (Gabriel Abend)

1. General proposition, or logically connected system of general propositions, which is establishes a relationship between 2 or more variables. 2. An explanation of social phenomenon 3. To say something about empirical phenomena in the social world. 4. The collected works of sophisticated and often complicated thinkers such as Max Weber. 5. An overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. 6. A normative or political account. 7. Discussion over basic debates of social reality or disciplinary practices.

developing a survey

1. pre-study-explore your topic by drawing on existing work and "social data" 2. conceptualization-develop and analytic definition of your topic. 3. measurement-operationalize your topic into measurable units. 4. questionnaire development-draft questions to capture information related to each subcomponent of your topic. 5. pretesting of questionnaire 6. sampling 7. interviewing 8. data processing and analysis 9. write up

Methods: what sociologists do

A lot of sociologists work with surveys and data sets (casual statistical analysis), highly quantitate approach to research. historical analysis--deals with documents and interpreting them qualitative interviews--semi-structured. you have a list of thinks you want to talk about, but let it flow freely. ethnography--participant observation, typically for long periods of time. Audit studies--Say you want to understand discrimination in employment practices. One of the things you are going to do is submit resumes to the same employer with one subtle difference (eg man vs woman eg black vs white). People don't always do what they say they are going to do and this is a good way to study them.

racism

"as Ruth Gilmore explains, 'the state sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of a group differentiated vulnerability to premature death'" pg 43. Racism in terms of dark matters= a slow death (on the salve ship, in prison).

dark matter

"names the surveillance of blackness as often unperceived within the study of surveillance, all the while blackness being the non-namable matter that matters the radicalized disciplinary society" People haven't even noticed the significance that it plays. Foundational to our society. By giving it a name, we can see its presence.

racializing surveillance

"technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, politics, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a power to define what is in or out of place" pg 16. "Signals those moments when enactments or surveillance verify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines, and where the outcome is often discriminatory of those who are negatively racialized by such surveillance" pg 16. Reinforces distinctions based on social inequality. Defines the reality other people must live within. Defines what is permissible and what isn't.

The Nuremberg trial

-After WWII, the Allied forces (which included the US) held a series of military tribunals to try. -Nazis for violations of International law in Nuremberg, Germany. -Justified through medical utilitariansims. -Cruel scientific research -We could no longer justify this cruel treatment. -Now it was a requirement that subjects needed informed written consent. -Offered pragmatic changes in ethics and established informed written consent. -radical change.

How does colonialism affect people?

A question studied by Frantz Fanon. In terms of hegemonic power--not power necessarily maintained through force (may have been installed through force). It's a type of barrier through which people self discipline and perpetuate it themselves. -Blackness and whiteness come to have broader social significance. In the colonial setting, whiteness represents humanity and civilization den to be French (in Fanon's setting). Blackness is to be colonized and subhuman. Fanon starts to transform himself and becomes a little more human by the colonizers standards. Fanon realized that there were still limits, not matter what he did (the limit of blackness). Colonialism destroyed people's ways of life and they way they understood themselves and their dignity and forced them into a situation where they didn't, and then it tells them you can be more human if you be like us--becomes the goal. Fanon says people develop a racial destiny--not just those who are colonized and black but also those who were colonizers and white. everyone us trapped and everyone is affected. To be born black, your destiny is to become human (a destiny you can't fulfill). To be born white, your destiny is merely to accept another people's limits. Fanon argues that this is all wrong and this is the problem. But, when you live in a racialized society, you're not able to achieve it. Fanon thinks to transcend these racial destinies, the colonized need to deal with self hatred and need to come to terms with existing in a society that tells them they are not human. While colonizers need to stop imposing their standards on other people.

What do academic disciplines do?

Abbott -Disciplines provide academics with general conception of what is academic life--what it looks like and their place within it. Demarcated by department at the university level. -Prevent knowledge from becoming too abstract or overwhelming. They define what is permissible to know and not permissible to know and thereby limit what people must read and know. Knowledge is so vast that you can't know it all. If you tried, it would be debilitating. Carve our what knowledge you are expected to know--which shifts, and changes, and is challenged. -The provide common sets of research practices that unify groups with diverse substantive interests. -Can defend your reputation. Sometimes better than others.

From Dusk to Dawn

Another book by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1940 where he talks about dirty water, waste, and disease in Philadelphia which was blamed on the 7th ward and black people. He revealed Negro groups as a symptom, and not a cause; as a striving, palpitating grow and not an inert. sick body of crime; as a long historical development and not a transient occurrence. This was a long historic development. This defied convention, this was an inconvenient truth. Philidelphia existed as it did because that was how the people made it. The real problem was that Negros were not healed, trained, or guided.

Neil Gross Why are Professors Liberal

Background: -Data analysis used for this research project (8 different ones, large ecology of information) draws on the best data at the time. -More people go to college -Professors make up 1% of the labor force and only half are employed full time/have a stable job. -there are more liberals/democrats in academia. -Liberal bias most prevalent in elite PHD granting institutions. -there are political clusters throughout different disciplines. Standard explanations: -Academics' position in the call structure (academics have high cultural capital and low economic capital) -The effects of advanced education (higher education discriminated against conservatives or education makes people more liberal) -value differences (Liberal value education more than conservatives) -Cognitive and personality differences (liberals have higher cognitive abilities than conservatives). There is NOT enough of an effect on these to explains. Occupational reputation based political self selection: -college students who view themselves as "liberal" view academics as a good fit for them while students who identify as "conservative" view other pathways as a food fit for them (such as think tanks). Links to outside audiences and organizations: -intellectual movements require resources--functioning for research, jobs for graduates, legitimacy. Disciplines linking to social welfare, educational, and cultural institutions tend to be places where more liberal intellectual movements can grow.

How did Du Bois go about his study?

Employed the most rigorous scientific methods of his time to study the 7th ward and why it was the way it was. He wanted to identify aspects of inequality and explain why it was that way. He wanted to explain the problems and he had a different set of assumptions. He viewed black people as sufferers, not as a virus. People suffered because they lived on the darker side of the color line. "the negro problem". He denied that there was a negro problem and that white residents living in Philadelphia contributed to the misfortunes of the 7th ward. Du Bois questioned what was taken for granted. He asks about how whites contributed to the negro problem in the 7th ward.

Frantz Fanon

French Martinique -former French slave colony -agricultural (former sugar plantation) -in the West Indies Frantz Fanon was born in French Martinique. He was very intelligent. At 1 point, he move to France to pursue education. Becam professional intellectual and practicing psychologist. Wanted to know how colonialism affected people (both colonies and colonizer). Racialized social boundaries and emotional trauma of colonialism. Wrote Black Skin, White Mask (1952) which talked about radicalized social boundaries and emotional trauma of colonialism (self-hatred) and racial destinies.

medical utilitarianism

From teams: Utilitarianism is the idea that actions are good/ethical as long as they benefit the majority of people, even if those actions do harm. Medical utilitarianism is demonstrated by the Tuskegee Experiments in my notes. Under the ethical standards of medical utilitarianism of the time, it was ethical to deceive and harm black male subjects with syphilis because researchers believed the outcome of the study would help future treatments - ie harm is outweighed by benefits. I also have a bit about the Nuremberg Trials as a paradigmatic shift. When the world saw all the horrific experiments Nazi doctors carried out in the name of medical utilitarianism, we developed new ethical standards that emphasized informed consent of participants.

With regard to the Panopticon, Simone Brown asks:

How must we grapple with the panopticon with the knowledge that somewhere within history of its formation are 18 "young negresses" held "under the hatches? If Bentham's panopticon depended on an exercise of power where the inspector sees everything while remaining unseen, how might the view from "under the hatches" be another site from which to conceptualize they operations of power? pg 32. How do we understand power from below? -the practices of slavery predates the panopticon. -Modernity and disciplinary power. -Forms of power on the slave ship. -Soverign and disciplinary power existed simultaneously pg 42. Lots of systems for accounting for people, but always implemented in violent ways. -Shatters a transition towards disciplinary power. -Challenges approach at transition towards disciplinary power.

disciplinary studies in the US

Humanities--history, English, philosophy, language Social sciences--sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, Econ. Data science--emerging field natural science--biology, chemistry, physics

The cause of issues in the 7th ward

It is not a difference of opinion, it is a social condition that produce the cries and counter cries. Color line that determines what happens to you and racial segregated. Du Bois wanted to destroy the color line and destroy racial segregation to do it. What this illustrates about sociology: -Emphasis on the collective, not individuals. The problems of people in the 7th ward isn't just about people making bad choices. It is not the property of an individual, it is was it produced and shared. -Based on empirical evidence. Not just what he wanted to be true. He tested it. He went out and observed people in their conditions and interviewed the. -Challenges conventional understanding. -Presents surprising or inconvenient truths.

Social science

KKB -The aim is inference--to generalize beyond what is directly observable. -The methods are made public--transparent data and metadata when possible. -The findings are uncertain-all scientific findings contain a degree of uncertainty. Scientists don't produce a definitive account of anything. -the content is the method--"good" research is defined by how the project was conducted and not whether people like the findings.

Is there more than one way to do science?

Karin Knorr Cetina studied this in Epistemic Cultures (1999). Long term ethnographic observations. Look at the way they plan labs, the things they used, how they do their experiments, and how they present their data to colleagues. They were very different. Theory are trying to prove different kinds of knowledge. The way you observe things can affect your results. In high energy physics, you can't directly observe vs biologists that are directly observing. Scientists do their research in different ways and there is a disunity in science. This conclusion was based on biologists and high energy physicists. There are different ways to envision science and different ways to do science. There is no unity in science. There are different sciences out there, different communities, different institutions that organize scientific lives and work. If there are different ways to envision science, and different ways to do science, there is no unity in science because there is no one science. We have to acknowledge the diversity of science.

academic disciplines

Max Weber. organize science. refers to: 1. the community of scholars who focus on a particular area of study. Sociology vs poli sci etc. 2. The disciplines or learned manner through which they study their designated area of study. How do they ask questions? How to they collect information? How do they present knowledge to the world? All this in an attempt to organize an imperical reality.

Blackness

Not a trait attributed to individuals or a race category, it is a way of thinking about people in groups and relationships in society (the contested one). "signal blackness as a sign, one that carries with it particular histories of resistance and domination" pg 8. A way of thinking about people in groups

Why do you need a diverse scientific community?

People with similar backgrounds/life experiences make similar assumptions and have similar perspectives. They divide the earth in similar ways. Diversity offers more perspective, they can see the same thing in different ways. They can challenge each other and transform ideas and what is taken for granted by another group. A more diverse community helps to have knowledge reflecting a plurality. More diversity leads to more innovation and success. You can't be value free. Objectivity is not being dispassionate. Objectivity it having strong systems in place and bringing a diverse group of scholars that bring in different assumptions to challenge each other. Diversity brings a higher degree of objectivity. Knowledge is not reducible to one group of people or one world view. Diversity isn't just an issue of social justice, it is an issue of quality.

Susan P. Wharton

Philanthropist, social/progressive reformer, wealthy philanthropist. Came from a very wealthy and influential family. Concerned herself with the social uplift of poor and disadvantaged. Wanted to develop a better understanding of life in the 7th ward. She identified things that she saw as problems related to education, unemployment, and the status of families. She thought that the first step would be to do a major of study of them. Approached people at UPenn to study these things because she could not do it on her own. Commissioned the study by W. E. B Du Bois.

Charles C. Harrison and Samuel McCune Lindsey

Provost at UPenn and professor of sociology, respectively, that helped commission the study by W. E. B. Du Bois. They did not want one of Wharton's feminists to do the work, they wanted a black man. They justified this by saying the work was dangerous and that "deplorable findings would have more credibility if they were produced by a black man" They considered the black population and the 7th ward as a virus that needed to be quarantined and stunted before it infected the rest of the city and thought that they already knew the problems and causes in society (black people). They hired Du Bois to prove themselves right, and Du Bois knew this. The never let Du Bois be a part of the U Penn community. They pathogenized blacks and thought they needed to be contained to avoid infecting the rest of the city. They wanted to stop this virus from infecting the rest of the city. They wanted a study to scientifically support segregation.

Karl Popper Critical Rationalism

Says everyone must be skeptical. The scientist's skeptical attitude is what defines science.--Their constant attempt to interrogate the world and investigate things that they think they know to demonstrate if they are true or not. Attitude drives people to use methods in a particular way. The aim of science is to refute existing knowledge and demonstrate its fallibility through empirical investigation (prove something does not work). The aim isn't to prove that something works, it is to prove that it doesn't (the opposite of Kant). Not to produce positive knowledge, but to take our existing understandings and knock them down, try to prove them wrong, try to see where they break. The basis of truth in science is corroboration because knowledge that has not been falsified despite valid attempts (!!!) to do so is better than knowledge that has not been tested or gone through attempts of refutation. If you can't prove that something is wrong, then after enough attempts that used rigor of method, you can be somewhat assured that that understanding is better than others that haven't been tested. To the best of our knowledge, this is true, BUT we don't expect it to always be true. In logical positivism, you see that something works, but you don't know why it works. You don't have any way to be confident in the mechanisms or processes through which things happen. No way to verify how something happens. Just because something works, it does not mean you are actually right. You might not be reflecting on what is actually happening. Karl Popper wants scientists to see when things don't work, and specifically identify when it doesn't. Go beyond what you get from logical positivism. For science to be valid, it has to be falsifiable.

modernity

Simone brown thinks of this in a similar way as Frantz Fanon. Modernity is almost an act of anminstration this can be thought of through the records, files, time sheets, and identify documents that together form a biography of the "modern subject" (implies power relationship--power is not something we possess, it is a relationship between people in a higher position and a subordinate position to be a subject of.) pg 5. People are turned into subjects through quantification and defining them through documents. Tied to rendering of who we are by documents left behind (data exhaust)

Stimulus response model

Stimulus 1 (reality) + stimulus 2 (question)= Response Stimulus 2 (question) must be the same for all respondent so that if responses are different they can only differ because stimulus 1 (the realties they communicate) differ.

What does the Book of Negros and Birch certificates have in common?

The book of Negros is an 18th century ledger that lists 3000 self emancipation ex slaves who embarked mainly on British ships during the British evacuation of New York in 1783 after the American revolution. A key argument here is that the book of negroes, and its accompanying breeder documents, is the first government issues document for state regulated migration between the United States and Canada that explicitly linked corporeal markers to the right to travel. The document also serves as an important record for pre confederation black arrivals in Canada, and as much as it "ruptures the homogeneity of nation space by assessing blackness in/and "Canada" as it historicizes the links between migration and surveillance in the nation. Birch certificates are de facto passports. they serves as status documents that identified the holder and confirmed the holder's rights to cross an international border. They were also serves as certification of the holder's freedom. Birch certificates would become breeder documents for the book of negroes. these early passports were a guarantee that the legitimate holder has resided voluntarily with the British before November 30th, 1782, the date of the signing of the provisions peace treaty, as only those who had resided within British lines for 12 months or longer were deemed eligible for embarkation on British ships out of the US. pg 74-75

Strong objectivity

The equivalent of scientific consensus. When a lot of different researchers are doing different types of work on different sets of data with different methods making different assumptions and they all start finding the same things. Quality work. People can criticize/challenge you, regardless of who you are. In order to achieve strong objectivity, the social character of the community of inquiry has to be open and democratic. Your position in academia, your prestige you may have, shouldn't be the reason people think that you are right. It should be based on the quality of the content they produce. Institutions should be able to challenge your findings.

Kant Logical positivism

The method of induction defines science--that you can go out and observe things in the world, you can see if they work, you can do it in a systematic matter, and you can develop knowledge of how things happen in the world. Positive reliable knowledge is the aim of science.--Knowledge that works so when you go to do something you can be reasonably assured that it is going to happen just as you anticipate. You build you knowledge up from the group and you develop understandings that you can count on. The basis of trust in science: knowledge is verified through empirical investigation. In other words, it has been demonstrated to work. If you can see that something continues to work, you have a positive knowledge of it--it is reliable. If you want to know if you can trust science, you need to see if it works.

Harding and Longino The Consensual view of Science

The social character of science through which communities of scholars investigate the world through institutions that provide both systems of interrogation and accountability. It is often said that science corrects itself, what that means is that scientists correct each other. They interrogate each others work and hold each other accountable. This is what defines science. If you want to produce science, you have to do so in a setting in which scientific knowledge is produced. There are specific institutions where you do science which has developed procedures of accountability and interrogation such as peer review, before your findings can be considered valid. Other scientists have to try to prove that you're wrong and then you have to revise it. If someone is wrong, there has to be a system of accountability. If you are unethical or you lie, there have to be consequences. You have to have those systems of accountability which exists in institutions that produce knowledge. The aim is produce reliable knowledge (when knowledge is understood as scientific consensus, not does it work). Not the same as logical positivism which wants to produce reliable knowledge by showing that things work. Reliable knowledge here entails scientific consensus--overwhelming support, not just across one scientists' work, but across a community of scientists, not just one specialty, but many different specialties. It is very hard to establish scientific consensus. Dependent on decades of research. Not about individuals, it is about communities. The basis of trust in science is "strong objectivity". It is not just that it works, or that you haven't proven it wrong yet.

Who decides what sociological research is "good"?

The sociology discipline. Editors and peer reviewers are gate keepers and set the standard. Disciplines decides what is good and what is not.

What does it mean to violate ethics?

To violate ethical standards is to violate the scientific method. Not just a matter of good vs bad behavior.

Critical Pedagogy

Try to convince students of a certain approach to politics. Not pretending to be balanced or fair. You are advocating for something. You are not grading students on whether they agree with you, but telling them how they should think about things.

Richard Feynman

United States physicist who won a Nobel prize. He gave a commencement speech at Cal tech where he defined what science is. He called social sciences pseudoscience and "cargo cult science" because they had no method.

The Philadelphia Negro

W.E.B. Dubois wrote this book addressing the issues of the black community. Considered by many today to be one of the 1st major works of American sociology. It was one of the first written works to combine ethnographic, historical, and survey research. Study commissioned by Susan P. Wharton in conjunction with U Penn. Published in 1899, only 30 years after slavery was ended. Ignored for a long time because of racism. Trying to make sense of a world that was rapidly changing.

organizational ethics

Where ethics are informed at an institutional levels such as at UVA.

Stefan Timmerman

Wrote Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR in 1999. 1-3% of CPR conducted outside of the hospital saves lives. We medicalize death. We don't think of it as natural. We think of it as something that can be prevented. CPR allows us to interpret death differently. CPR comforts us..."We did all we could" and CPR does not allow death to have any dignity in the US. People try to control it. Your family doesn't get to be with you when you die, but they have the idea that we did everything we could. CPR is a death ritual for those left behind. What this illustrates about sociology: -Emphasis on the collective, not individuals. It's not about any one person dying, it is about what people do in the circumstance. Who is involved and why? What institution are they involved in? -Based on empirical evidence. -Challenges conventional understanding. -Presents surprising or inconvenient truths. CPR gives us a way to cope with death.

science

a mode of inquiry and a means to investigate the world. It is more about method than the actual subject. It is an analytical attempt to order an impeccable reality. Science is only 1 mode of inquiry (others could be art, religion, experience, etc.)

Science and discipline according to Max Weber

an analytical attempt to order an empirical reality and discipline (when applied to science) refers to both practices and mindsets through which people produce knowledge and to the way that scholars are organized within academia. Science is defined by they types of questions that people as and the way that they pursue those answers. Disciplines are the ways in which we organize our lives around those pursuits. Discipline is a way of regulating social relations in order to lessen individual action and to increase uniform, rational action. There are rules and boundaries in a discipline. It exists in the form of social organizations (eg military). Balance coherence and diversity. Disciplines exist in forms of structural organization (The military, the state, or economic formations) and it is accomplished when people develop routine practices and understanding. Status group express a common sense of duty and consciousness and have a similar set of skills. Disciplines fundamentally makes you who you are and reduced individual differences. The notion of "discipline" refers to both practices and mindsets through which people produce knowledge and the way that scholars are organized within Academica. Goldstein (physicist) says that science and the scientific method is simply whatever scientists do, not up to any 1 individual to determine what is good, you need a community.In order to do science, you have to start with basic assumptions.

Describe the "groups" that reside of each side of the boundary.

blacks and whites who was in place and who was out of place separating "the racial other"

How is branding a form of surveillance technology?

branding is a physical symbol of the hierarchal relationship between slave and slaver owner. A brand became a way of identifying slaves in a way that wasn't human. It wasn't about their personality or even their genetic features, but rather a feature that was added to them by a slave owner. This was a marking and an identification to find a slave that had runaway, as well as a means of preventing the slave to live a normal life if they do get away. The brand marks that they were a slave and therefore subhuman. pg 91 the tracking of blackness as property informs the contemporary surveillance of the racial body by now questioning how the intimate relation between branding and the black body—our biometric past—can allow us to think critically about our biometric present. Biometric information technology, or biometrics, in its simplest form, is a means of body measurement that is put to use to allow the body, or parts and pieces and performances of the human body, to function as identification. In order to understand the meanings of brand- ing as historically situated, in this chapter I explore some early applications of this biometric information technology and question its role in the racial framing of blackness as property. What I am suggesting here is that brand- ing in the transatlantic slave trade was a biometric technology, as it was a measure of slavery's making, marking, and marketing of the black subject as commodity. I look at the uses of branding as a form of racializing surveillance: as both corporeal punishment in plantation societies and in urban domestic settings of slave ownership, and for identification purposes. I do this through a reading of Frantz Fanon's observations on epi- dermalization, that being the "epidermal racial schema" that sees the black body fashioned as "an object among other objects."3

Concepts and assumptions

concepts help define what assumptions will be eg problems of scarcity vs abundance. Scarcity leads to disparities. Grounding assumption in sociology. Lack of things matter to people and broader social arrangements and what they can do. We can also assuming that too much produces problems--a whole new set of problems we missed. We don't have a theory about this concept. We have to develop a theory or we can't to it in a disciplinary context. Crisis of public knowledge--crisis of agreeing on what is true vs false (problem is that people have too much information). You don't know what to trust. The public is becoming more and more fragmented into niche communities that acquire info in different ways. People's trust in academia and journals and government declining.

"colonization" for our purposes

consider: -how social boundaries help constitute blackness. -how social exclusion is a routined form of social control. -how while differing is asymmetric but everyone is trapped in the system. -ask yourself, what would it mean to liberate (or emancipate) ourselves from radial destinies?

What information can you get out of survey research?

descriptive information, basic biographical information, opinions, attitudes, values, dispositions, self reported accounts of behavior and experience, relationships, memberships.

social boundaries

eg the Salem with trials as boundary work to strengthen social bonds in a community by turning insiders into outsiders. -Kai Eriksons Wayward Puritan (1966) strengthened cohesion of the community against a threat. -the community no longer had a strong external threat so they created an internal threat to increase solidarity and cohesion. -Made insiders into outsiders to strengthen cohesion of people that remain.

W. E. B. Du Bois

fought for African American rights. Helped to found Niagra Movement in 1905 to fight for and establish equal rights. This movement later led to the establishment of the NAACP. Excluded for a long time because of racisms and white supremacy

White Man's Burden

idea that white people had a duty to spread their religion and culture to those less civilized. Wharton took a benevolent position towards blacks and thought she should take care of them as if they were children. This idea presents white slave holders/colonizers as moral and Wharton uses this same logic although she is not directly involved in acts of colonialism or slavery.

cargo cults

imitate but aren't the things they aspire to be.

gaze

interpreting others through an ideology steeped in power relations. Expectations people have of those subordinate to them. Not neutral it is an act of power and exists because of power relations.

communal ethics

local from of ethics. Eg communication with other sociologists at different institutions.

pragmatic ethics

over encompassing everything we do. The general sense of that ethics is. Largely enshrined in law. Changes overtime. Usually federal law. Sets the standard and outlines what is wrong and what is right.

surveillance

oversight pg 18. Implies heirarchal relations between those in superior positions who have the power to observe and record those in subordinate positions. Big tech is surveilling us users with a power relation. The elites get to surveil us and it is very difficult foe us to surveil them.

What does Simone Browne mean by black luminosity?

pg 76 Black people in NYC were expected to be constantly illuminated. lantern laws made it so that unattended slaved had to be illuminated and seen and surveilled at all hours of the day. "lantern as a prothesis made mandatory after dark" pg 67: I use the term "black luminosity" to refer to a form of boundary maintenance occurring at the site of the black body, whether by candlelight, flaming torch, or the camera flashbulb that documents the ritualized terror of a lynch mob, as Ralph Ellison described. Think back here to my discus- sion of "the flashlight treatment" in chapter 1, where after a beating one could read the brand of a prison guard's flashlight on the body of a prisoner, and also Rudi Williams in Caryl Phillips's "The Cargo Rap," who described the use of artificial lighting in solitary confinement as being like having a desk lamp shining in one's face for twenty-four hours a day. Black luminosity, then, is an exercise of panoptic power that belongs to, using the words of Michel Foucault, "the realm of the sun, of never ending light; it is the non-material illumination that falls equally on all those on whom it is exer- cised."11 Perhaps, however, this is a light that shines more brightly on some than on others. Here boundary maintenance is intricately tied to knowing the black body, subjecting some to a high visibility, as Ellison put it, by way of technologies of seeing that sought to render the subject outside of the category of the human, un-visible.

What do professors tend to do?

political transparency which may reinforce the clustering within sociology. If your student views themselves as liberal and the professor says they are liberal, they may be able to see themselves being a professor whereas a conservative student would think it isn't for them. Economists are more likely to engage in critical pedagogy and try to tel their students the way that the world works and how they should view it. Present theories as the way to see the world.

ethics

principles or codes of conduct shared among groups of people. Academics work within broader culture ethics that is institutionalized and overseen by other institutions such as the federal government. Produce ethics in their department and within their discipline and subspecialties. essential to sociology as a discipline and essential to the disciplining process. -institutional ethics -departmental ethics -discipline ethics. Nested.

political transparency

professor tells students what their own personal political commitments are, but doesn't try to convince them of anything.

accidental neutrality

professors do not take on politics because they teach things that they don't view to be political.

academia (or academe)

refers collectively to scholars who work in Universities and who produce expert knowledge about the world. An institution where people produce expert knowledge. Part of the scientific community. For teaching and for research.

How does the white gaze factor into the produced or maintenance of social boundaries in colonial New York or in the early republic?

technologies of seeing that are racializing in their applica- tion and effects, from a candle flame to the white gaze, were employed in an attempt to identify who was in place with permission and who was out of place with censure. a cumulative white gaze that functioned as a totalizing sur- veillance. Under these conditions of terror and the violent regulation of blackness by way of surveillance, the inequities between those who were watched over and those who did the watching are revealed. The violence of this cumulative gaze continues in the postslavery era. I am reminded here of what Donna Haraway calls the "conquering gaze from nowhere," a gaze that is always unmarked, and therefore already markedly white and male, and one that claims a power to "represent while escaping representation."86 I am also reminded here of Frantz Fanon's moment of awareness of a "racial epidermal schema" on that train in France and "battered by tom-toms" and "slave-ships" and "dis- sected under white eyes, the only real eyes," when he says, "I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed and made myself an object."87 What this visual representation of the slave ship points to is the primacy given in these abolitionist texts to white gazes and vantage points to the trauma of slavery, where the tiny black figures are made to seem androgynous, interchangeable, and replicable. This is the "god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere," and, as Haraway warns, "this eye f*** the world." Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New York- ers took place right under the surveillant gazes of the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes interracial and cross-class commerce and socializing, black performative practices of drumming, dancing, and chanting persisted. Just as Frantz Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth that "the dance circle is a permissive circle," in that it "protects and it empowers," in New York City performative practices engaged in by black people empowered. it is the moment of contact with the white gaze—a moment where, as Fanon describes, "all this whiteness burns me to a cinder"29—that produces these moments of fracture for the racial Other, indeed making and marking one as racial Other, experiencing its "being for others."30 This is not to say that by being object to the white gaze one is interpellated into a completely passive, negated object, exist- ing only as objection. Instead, Fanon offers us an insightful correction to theorizing moments of contact with the white gaze, where instead the racial subject's humanness is already established, and identities are realized and constructed by the self; where "black consciousness does not claim to be a loss. It is. It merges with itself."31 It is the making of the black body as out of place, an attempt to deny its capacity for humanness, which makes for the productive power of epidermalization. So this making of blackness as out of place must be read as also productive of a rejection of lived objectivity, as being out of place.32 Think here of ex-slave Sam's facetiness, as told in chap- ter 2, and the remarkable way in which he turned up the white of his eyes, escaped, and made his own way, as if to say, "I'll show them! They can't say I didn't warn them."33

social control

the disciplining (making them more alike) of people into institutional subjects through coercion. Discipling isn't always good or bad but it can lead to outcomes we like and ones we don't like. The process of discipline defines what is possible in a society/ a social group. This happens within social institutions. Broader pattern waves in which we related to one another.

sousveillance

the inverse of surveillance. people in subordinate positions observe and record those in superior positions. eg people recording police on their phones.

technology

things that we develop that allow us to extend our capacities for action and coordination whether material (such as lantern) or conceptual (such as a form of organization like how enslaved people were held captive on slave ships) -ways of providing oversight -racialized technology (eg create a boundary between blacks and others). -general thing. -oversight that can be racialized.

dark sousveillance

to "render one's self out of sight and strategies used in flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of under sight...I plot dark surveillance as an imaginative place from which to mobilize and critique of radicalizing surveillance, a critique that takes form in anti-surveillance, anti-sousveillance, and other freedom practices" pg 21-22 "extending Steve Mann's concept of sousvellience, which he describes as a way of 'enhancing the ability of people to access and collect data about their surveillance and to neutralize surveillance.' I use the term 'dark sousveillance' as a way to situate the tactics employed to render one's self out of sight and strategies used in the fight to freedom from slavery as necessary ones of under sight" pg 21. A way of escaping the racial gaze and not be seen. Ability to choose when it comes to racializing systems. Simone Brown uses art as a way to use dark sousveillance as a site of critique for freedom. Finding a space (dark sousveillance) outside to find a site of resistance often found through art. We can think about this in terms racialized technology. A tactic employed to render oneself out of sight and strategies used in the fight to freedom as necessary with under sight. The ability to choose when it comes to racilizing systems.

What makes survey research useful?

versatility--you can investigate a lot of different topics at the same time or over time. Very efficient. efficiency--you can develop and administer a survey in relatively less time than historical or ethnographic methods. Responses can be numerically coded which allows for relatively easier data reduction. generalizability--you can make population level 1 claims with a representative same of that population and you can compare populations or a population over time. For our purposes, it requires limited contact--we want to get to know more about our class given the constraints placed upon us by the COVID 19 pandemic.

cultivated neutrality

when professors are fully aware of their assumptions/ what they are teaching and they don't want to influence their students. Create a space where every student gets a challenge. Trying to engage students across the political spectrum. What Ian tried to use in the past.

Survey research

you ask a lot of people the same questions and analyze the results. You're creating a data set that should be able to be quantified (coded as a number). Valid at creating knowledge via the stimulus response model.

Some components of science

you can't do all 3 at once but there are some components that have all 3. -oriented towards imperialism -observation -interrogation -analysis -Use data and challenge one another.